Pun Salad

In June 2019, around the time staffers at Vox Media unionized, Ben Domenech, the publisher of this website, jokingly tweeted from his personal Twitter account: “FYI @fdrlst first one of you tries to unionize I swear I’ll send you back to the salt mine.”

A Twitter troll named Joel Fleming, who has no connection to The Federalist, filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NRLB), claiming Ben’s tweet amounted to a violation of labor law by parent company FDRLST Media: threatening reprisal against those wishing to form a union.

President Joe Biden is proposing a multi-trillion-dollar “infrastructure” plan that actually isn’t all that focused on infrastructure — because bullsh** is the common currency of this realm — and one of the things high on his agenda is subsidizing broadband Internet connections for areas that don’t have them. By industry estimates, about 93 percent of Americans have access to a broadband connection, and those who don’t mostly live in remote and rural areas. There are many more Americans who have access to a broadband connection but choose not to pay for one. The Biden administration complains that high-speed connections are “overpriced,” based on . . . the careful thinking and analysis that one naturally associates with Joe Biden.

Lack of broadband connections is not, in reality, much of a national problem for the United States, and it is becoming less of a problem every year as Americans gravitate toward the metropolitan areas where the jobs and the capital are, along with the good broadband connections. But this kind of project presses all sorts of New Deal, TVA, rural-electrification buttons in Democrats of Joe Biden’s generation. Hence the slogan, “Broadband is the new electricity.” These are not super-imaginative people.

President Biden is introducing an infrastructure plan today costing $2 trillion. The plan is a combination of subsidies for corporations and subsidies for state and local governments. Both types of subsidies are unneeded and wasteful.

Biden wants $135 billion for highways and bridges, $111 billion for water supply, $100 billion for schools, $85 billion for transit, $25 billion for airports, $17 billion for waterways and seaports, and much else. State and local governments own these assets and can fund them with their own taxes and user fees. There is no economic reason for federal subsidies for any of these assets. Indeed, federal subsidies for state and local infrastructure creates unneeded bureaucracy and misallocates resources. Obama‐era subsidies, for example, induced California to waste billions on a boondoggle high‐speed rail project.

Even more troubling is Biden’s proposed money gusher for private‐sector infrastructure. He wants $300 billion for manufacturing, $100 billion for broadband, $100 billion for electric utilities, $174 billion for electric vehicles, $180 billion for research, and much else. Much of this spending would subsidize big corporations.

Dimly aware that the border crisis is taking a toll on its popularity, the Democratic Party has finally resolved to do something concrete: It is going to burn the dictionary.

Wands outstretched and shouting incantations, prominent Democrats have begun to curse our language. In a livestream performed last night, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attempted to change the meaning of the word “surge” in the hope that she might be able to magic away the news from the border. “They wanna say, ‘But what about the surge?’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Well, first of all, just gut check, stop. Anyone who’s using the term ‘surge’ around you consciously is trying to invoke a militaristic frame.”

Listen, if we’re going to let facts stand in the way of perfectly reasonable panicmongering, then eventually people are going to stop being needlessly afraid.