Jul
13
2024

Please Don't Call This Trickle-Down

Stolen from Josiah Bartlett:

Man, this really makes me wish I got up to speed on one of those AI image generators. It illustrates Mitchell Scacchi's article chronicling the latest bit of pork arriving in our state: Feds devote another $19 million to save declining Manchester bus service.

Our state's junior senator claims a bit of credit for that (click through for what the other pols have to say):

But here's Scacchi's relentless refutation:

From 2013–2022, the Manchester Transit Authority (MTA) increased spending by more than a third and rapidly expanded service offerings to try to increase ridership. It was a colossal failure, as we highlighted in April. Instead of acknowledging the failure and changing course, the federal government this week announced a massive infusion of additional resources.

Washington has committed $19.9 million to build a new city transit center (after the original closed due to a shortage of riders) in an effort to reverse the government’s previous failure to induce ridership through additional spending.

New Hampshire’s congressional delegation announced Tuesday that the money would be used “for the construction of a new transit center which will replace the city’s outdated facility and enable an expansion of transit services in the region,” according to reporting from Manchester Ink Link.

The University Near Here is getting $2.7 million "to replace diesel-powered buses with compressed natural gas buses for its Wildcat Transit service." This is for a service that (at last report) had yet to recover to pre-pandemic ridership. (And last year was forced to terminate its service to neighboring Newmarket,)

Also of note:

  • Bad news for the looters. Noah Smith says There's not that much wealth in the world. It's a tutorial on wealth vs. income, and why taxing the former is such a lousy idea. He approvingly quotes:

    Freiman is correct. The wealth of America’s billionaires was estimated at around $5.2 trillion in 2023, while federal government spending was about $6.4 trillion. Confiscating every last penny from Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and all the other billionaires wouldn’t fund the U.S. government for one year. And of course you could only do it once.

    Something to remember when folks like Joe Biden (a) confuse income and wealth; and (b) demand that the rich "pay their fair share."

  • You're out of control! Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein take on that awful NYT op-ed by Tim Wu: The First Amendment ISN'T out of control.

    Professor Wu's recent piece, “The First Amendment Is Out of Control,” was in this troubling tradition of free-speech catastrophizing. He opened the article by arguing that "[n]early any law that has to do with the movement of information can be attacked in the name of the First Amendment."

    Well, yeah. Fear of government power over the free flow of information was a big part of the reason why "Congress shall make no law."

    Indeed, that's also a big part of why the founders included "the press" in the First Amendment. And by “the press,” they didn't mean institutional journalism (although the First Amendment clearly protects that as well) — they meant the literal biggest information moving technology of the day: the printing press.

    When people like Wu gripe that the 1A is "out of control", read for the obvious implication: people are out of control.

  • A surprising bit of good news. I'm a non-fan of "national conservatism", so didn't have much to say about their recent convention. But Stephanie Slade was paying attention to this ray of sunshine: Vivek Ramaswamy Debuts 'National Libertarianism' at NatCon 4.

    "I think it's been decided, as obviously as it possibly can be, that America First is the future direction of the Republican Party," former presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy tells me.

    Given the close association of "America First" with tariffs, industrial policy, and calls to close the borders, even to legal immigration, this might not seem to augur promising things for libertarians. But Ramaswamy sees two distinct live possibilities for what the phrase should actually mean. "From where I sit," he says, "the most important debate for the country to have is the intra–Republican Party and even intra–America First debate between the national protectionist and national libertarian wings."

    During an evening keynote at the fourth National Conservative Conference in Washington, D.C., this week, Ramaswamy laid out these alternatives in some detail—and gently made the case that attendees of the nationalist event should rethink their indulgence in protectionism.

    And I really liked this bit:

    "I don't care to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state," Ramaswamy declared at NatCon. Or as he puts it during our follow-up conversation: "I think that's a mistake the left has long made, using the administrative state as a way to coddle certain groups of Americans. And I don't think we're going to beat the left by becoming the left."

    At some point in the last year Vivek said some stuff that irked me. It's possible I may need to forgive him.


Last Modified 2024-07-14 5:14 AM EST