Pun Salad

Specifically, an apocryphal graduation speech. Opening:

That's Woody Allen, as published in the New York Times on August 10, 1979. If my math is right, over 45 years ago.

I try to keep that in mind when reading the latest crop of doomsayers. We have always had them with us, most more serious than Woody. And they've had a prediction accuracy of 0.00% so far.

Also of note:

• A stinkin' C for the Guv. Cato has issued its yearly Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors. I was eager to find out whether Governor Chris Sununu would get his usual "A" grade, and … nope, a "C".

  What's going on? There's not a lot of explanation on the widget that pops up when you click on our state:

  Chris Sununu is a former business executive and past member of the New Hampshire Executive Council. With his record of spending restraint and tax cuts, Sununu received A grades on past Cato fiscal reports. He scored lower on this report, but his overall fiscal record has been excellent. Under Sununu, general fund spending increased from $1.51 billion in 2017 to $1.86 billion in 2024, representing an annual average growth of just 3 percent.

  The remainder is equally laudatory.

  Sununu has only a few months remaining in his final term, so it's a sad way to go out. To add to the insult, other New England governors outscored him: Vermont's Phil Scott, and (even) Massachusetts' Maura Healey got Bs. Connecticut's Ned Lamont and Rhode Island's Ned Lamont matched his C.

  But cheer up, Chris: Janet Mills in Maine gets a big fat F.

  Buried deep in the report is the scoring methodology. Dig away.

• My personal answer to the question: "Onward! Ever onward!" That's in response to Kevin D. Williamson's query: Where Do Never Trumpers Go From Here?

  Center-right opponents of Donald Trump are not exactly a tribe of our own—we are more of a tribe of tribes, the Five Nations of the Anti-Trump Confederacy. The confederacy’s constituent tribes, the borders between which are necessarily fuzzy and porous, are:

  1. Neocons: The broken-hearted denizens of The Bulwark substack and likeminded allies keeping alive the flame of vintage Weekly Standard–style neoconservatism.

  2. Frenchmen: Pro-lifers and other social conservatives (the New York Times columnist David French being the exemplary specimen) who could not abide a Mammon-worshiping amoral bigot such as Donald Trump even before the former game-show host attempted to stage a post-election coup d’état in 2020.

  3. Libertarians: Cato Institute-type Republicans who still secretly thrill to Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and more or less agree with Reason magazine’s positions on drug legalization.

  4. Snoots: Affluent, Economist-reading (well, Economist-subscribing) members of the urban-to-suburban professional classes who much preferred a Republican Party that prioritized their values and who dislike the fact that Fox News is now on 24/7 at the clubhouse.

  5. Lifers: The long-term committed Republican partisans who have been determined to wait out Trump and Trumpism rather than surrender to the GOP to grifters and ignoramuses, cognizant that dopey right-wing populism has had only very modest political success outside of Republican primaries.

  I am (of course) in pigeonhole #3. Although I haven't read Atlas Shrugged since I was in high school, when a girl I liked recommended it.

  Anyway, you want to read KDW's analysis even if you're not a Never-Trumper.

• Leaving out an important word. The Real Clear Politics link text for Sohrab Ahmari's Newsweek column was "Progressives Pushing for an Economy Built on Serfdom".

  Guaranteed to prick up the ears of a Hayek fanboy!

  But as it turns out, Ahmari's actual headline is "Progressives Are Pushing for an Economy Built on Migrant Serfdom". And it turns out to be, well, not really Hayekian at all:

  Something astounding transpired last week when JD Vance sat down with The New York Times. The interviewer, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, pressed the GOP veep nominee on the alleged contradiction between his desire to boost the U.S. housing supply and his commitment to a tighter border. Given that a "large proportion" of the construction workforce is here illegally, Garcia-Navarro asked, "how do you propose to build all the housing necessary in this country?"

  The organs of the asset-rich usually take more care to disguise their preference for slave-like migrant workers. Yet here was a Times podcaster giving it in unvarnished form: How could America get by without lording over a large underclass of serfs who don't speak the language and lack the power to organize or demand regulatory protection, and who can be used to put downward pressure on the wages of native workers without a college degree?

  There's plenty of stuff to disagree with in Ahmari's article. But it's indisputable that the migrant workers he feigns concern for are not "slave-like". Nor do their working conditions bear any resemblance to serfdom. And they demonstrate this by their own actions of voluntarily showing up for work day by day.

• But speaking of slave-like arrangements… Every year millions of legal citizens are forced, under the threat of fines and (even) imprisonment, to devote hours of unpaid labor to figure out how much of their earnings need to be sent to the Internal Revenue Service.

  Both candidates have looked at this situation, and … have pledged to make it worse. For example, as described by the NR editors: Trump Should Stop Promising to Make Tax Code More Complicated and Burdensome.

  Rather than building on Republicans’ solid record on tax policy from his presidency and earlier, Donald Trump seems hell-bent on undermining it.

  The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which he signed in 2017, greatly improved the tax code. One of the most significant ways it did so was by doubling the standard deduction. About 90 percent of taxpayers now take the standard deduction, saving them time and money by forgoing itemization while still reducing their tax burden.

  The law also capped the state-and-local-tax (SALT) deduction at $10,000, which raised revenue to compensate for some of the revenue lost from the economic-growth-enhancing tax cuts. The SALT deduction is effectively a federal subsidy for high-tax (read: Democratic-run) states, and eliminating it entirely would encourage even more competition between states to reduce their tax burdens than we have already seen since 2017.

  Instead, Trump wants to remove the SALT cap and introduce a variety of other complications into the tax code that he had helped streamline, in ways that would have little to no effect on the economy overall and create new hassles and distortions, all for the purpose of pandering on the campaign trail.

  Trump has said he wants to eliminate taxes on tip income and overtime pay. He frames this as helping workers in lower-wage jobs, but after considering the deductions and credits that already exist, taxpayers in almost the entire bottom half of the income distribution pay no income tax on net, and many actually make money through refundable tax credits.

  Good luck finding a non-pandering politician this year. Not at the top of the ticket, anyway.

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