Pun Salad

Well, this is pretty great. Maybe, as this guy Lionel says, brilliant:

There's a word for this. Brilliant. pic.twitter.com/6oG0DuVmN0

— 🇺🇸Lionel🇺🇸 (@LionelMedia) August 2, 2024

If you're too young, or too old, or you just want to see it: here's the original video.

Also of note:

• Don't get fooled again. Virginia Postrel writes on The Technocratic Temptation. She's inspired by artists' depictions of LA's Chavez Ravine (pre-Dodger Stadium) and Bunker Hill (before its transformation into a "modern commercial and cultural center").

  As sympathetic as I am to the sentiment that “it’s time to build,” I worry that many of today’s would-be builders have either forgotten or never understood the mistakes of their 20th-century predecessors. Just because you’re smart and think something is a good idea doesn’t mean it is. The great thing about market prices is that they convey information about how much people actually value things. If Walter O’Malley had had to pay Chavez Ravine property owners high enough prices to get them to voluntarily sell, the Dodgers might still be in Brooklyn.

  Click through for Ms. Postrel's husband's comments on "Robert Moses envy, or Chinese Communist Party envy, or Woodrow Wilson envy, or FDR envy".

• Arguing against my interest. I've previously commented on the absurdity of Social Security cash flows over my life:

  1. First, Uncle Stupid takes money (invisibly and pain-free if you're not paying attention) out of my paycheck.
  2. Then, since my dad died early, sent me some "survivors" benefits for a while. While the paycheck thing still went on, of course.
  3. Eventually, I hit 70, and started taking "my" money back.
  4. Only to send some of that right back to the IRS each year, because I make too much other money.

  It's a real case study in arbitrariness.

  That said, Veronique de Rugy is correct in her analysis of Donald Trump's Terrible Social Security Idea.

  It’s one thing for Trump to claim that he doesn’t want to reform Social Security and Medicare, knowing that it will have to happen anyway. He’s simply, if irresponsibly, avoiding the political cost of telling the American people the truth about what is unavoidable. But it’s a whole other thing to multiply this irresponsibility with this new proposal.

  Exempting Social Security benefits from taxation will further increase the insolvency of Social Security. Since these tax receipts also help fund the Social Security and Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust funds, the Committee for Responsible Budget calculates that the move would “advance the insolvency date of Social Security’s retirement trust fund by over one year,” and “advance the insolvency date of the Medicare HI trust fund by six years.”

  Also see Charlie Cooke: Trump's 'Plan' to Abolish Taxes on Social Security Benefits is Good Politics and Horrible Budgeting

• 

  More on toasters, sorry. But it's another stupid idea from the bearded side of the Republican ticket, which deserves the scorn David Henderson unleashes upon it: Let's Make Toasters Less Affordable.

  In a speech in Henderson [no relation], Nevada on July 30, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance stated, “We believe that a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.”

  Let’s see. With a quick on-line search, I found that the cheapest toaster and, sure enough, it’s imported, is this one for $14.66 before tax. So one million toasters would fetch $14.6 million. This means that Vance thinks one manufacturing job per year is worth at least $14.6 million per year. The reason is that to save that job for a year would mean giving up one million toasters that year and so saving a job for, say, 10 years would mean giving one million toasters a year for 10 years.

  Henderson also points out this hurts people "in Watts or Modesto" who would be in the market for a cheap toaster because they are unrich.

  The toaster paid link at your right is Amazon's "Overall Pick" for "toaster". It's $15.99, from (aieee!) China.

• Pedestrian casualties on the Road to Serfdom. Stephen Moore and Phil Kerpen note: Biden-Harris wasted $8.5 billion in taxpayer money to lose 15,000 jobs at Intel.

  Intel was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Chips Act, receiving an $8.5 billion grant announced in March, a $25 billion sweetheart tax incentive and likely the lion’s share of an $11 billion federal loan program. That’s only the opening act.

  What did we get in exchange? Intel this week announced it was laying off 15% of its workforce — 15,000 positions.

  This was "Biden-Harris", but had "bipartisan" support in the Senate. (Somewhat less, admittedly, in the House.)