Pun Salad

Another bit of wishful thinking, this one from the NR editors: Republicans Should Keep Taxes Simple.

The state and local tax deduction is, indeed, pernicious. But there's a serious push to increase or eliminate the cap. I'm sure I've said this before, but I agree with the editors: "Increasing allowances for SALT deductions for a relatively small number of mostly wealthy taxpayers in high-tax states would be appalling."

And, finally, a truth bomb from Kyle Smith, dealing with the spending side:

Um we have that debt because we keep voting for pols who spend more than we raise in taxes https://t.co/mdPw9OZVdI

— Kyle Smith (@rkylesmith) February 8, 2025

I'd have a lot more respect for Trump if he cut back on his obvious blather about "bad deals with everybody".

Also of note:

• Hey, our state made it to a Reason headline! But unfortunately not in a good way. Lenore Skenazy rips the LFOD state a new one: New Hampshire's bad parenting bill is a nightmare.

  The New Hampshire legislature is considering a parenting bill that would make it easier for the government to investigate parents for child abuse or neglect. It accomplishes this by removing the word "safety" from the legal definition of child abuse and replacing it with "physical, emotional or psychological welfare."

  That could be almost anything, of course.

  "I happen to be a tax-and-spend liberal," Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, tells Reason. "But this bill provides not one iota of additional help. It simply turns the [Division for Children, Youth and Families] into the 'well-being' police."

  I would guess the impetus for the "nightmare" bill is a "do something" response to the murder of 5-year-old Harmony Montgomery by her father. Heartbreaking, but also endlessly hyped by our local news outlets in their quest for eyeballs.

• You say that like it's bad news. The NHJournal headline worries NHIAA Could Lose Federal Funds for Allowing Males in Female Sports. (NHIAA == "New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association".)

  Federal funding for school sports in New Hampshire will be shut off if the state’s interscholastic athletic association continues to allow biological males to compete against girls on the playing field, the federal Department of Education (DOE) confirmed in a statement to NHJournal on Monday.

  That follows the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) decision to investigate alleged Title IX violations committed by the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA).

  OCR specifically singled out MIAA policy that states “students shall not be excluded from participation on a gender-specific sports team that is consistent with the student’s bona fide gender identity.”

  In the Granite State, the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association (NHIAA) is the governing body for sports competitions among all public high schools. While the organization declined to respond to repeated requests for comment, the NHIAA policy posted on its website includes similar language to the MIAA.

  My question is: Why is Uncle Stupid shelling out any money whatsoever for local school sports, whether it's New Hampshire, Massachusetts, or any other state?

  Well, I have a couple more questions: how much does NHIAA get from the federal government anyway? What percentage of their budget?

  And an observation, I'm sure I've made before: Why is it that race-segregated sports teams are racist and putatively illegal, while sex-segregated sports teams are mandated by law?

• We can hope. Jim Geraghty sees encouraging signs that Trump won’t abandon Ukraine.

  If you were an American who wanted to ensure that the war in Ukraine ended on terms favorable to Ukraine, you would want the negotiations handled by someone who not only understands the Ukrainians’ position but also feels a deep personal attachment to the consequences of the Russian invasion.

  Someone like a retired Army general whose daughter has been running relief operations in Ukraine since the start of the war.

  Considering the stakes of the war in Ukraine, it’s surprising how little attention President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, has received outside of some foreign-policy wonk circles. The talks that will shape the future of Ukraine have already begun; Trump said in his news conference last week alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “We are having very good talks, very constructive talks, on Ukraine. And we are talking to the Russians, we’re talking to the Ukrainian leadership.”

  In the past week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his team spoke with Kellogg and Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, and that they were working to arrange a visit by a U.S. delegation. (Trump’s campaign trail promise to end the war within 24 hours of taking office is a distant memory.)

  I'm glad to see any reasons for optimism.

• Apparently not a movie, as cool as that might be. Kevin D. Williamson calls Trump's trade policies Zombie Dick Gephardt.

  “We will not allow our workers and industries to be displaced by unfair import competition.” If that sounds like Donald Trump, that is because the Republican president and standard-bearer in 2025 is, in essence, a Democrat stuck in the 1980s—and indeed, the line comes from the Democrats’ 1980 platform. The Democrat Trump sounds like is Dick Gephardt, once a very considerable figure in American politics who ran for president twice before retiring to become a bigfoot lobbyist and consultant. He ended up working for DLA Piper and Goldman Sachs—who doesn’t?—but in the 1980s and 1990s, he was the face of center-left trade Luddism, the union goons’ answer to Ross Perot. When the upstart nat-pop right demanded that the GOP abandon “zombie Reaganism,” who knew that what they had in mind was zombie Gephardtism?

  Gephardt had more in common with Trump than just being a child of the 1940s: He very badly wanted to be president, and he was (I don’t write “is”; he may have become a better sort of man in his old age) a complete phony. He privately acknowledged that the U.S. trade deficits were only in a very small part driven by trade policies in our country or others. As one economist told the Washington Post at the time: “What aggravates me about Gephardt is that Dick knows better. He could give you the best anti-protectionist speech of anyone on the Hill. But he wants to be president. The Japan-bashing in his amendment is what appeals to labor, and Dick needs labor support for the Democratic nomination.”

  Hawkish rhetoric about so-called trade deficits (the term itself is misleading) also gave Reagan-era Democrats a tough-sounding talking point to deploy against Republicans who, then as now, liked to talk a mean fight about budget deficits (which, unlike “trade deficits,” are a thing) while generally making them worse by reducing taxes and doing approximately squat about spending. The “trade deficit” is a much more useful political issue than the actual deficit, because reducing the actual budget deficit means that somebody’s pocket gets lighter—either through higher taxes or lower federal spending or both—while bitching about the inscrutable Oriental with his “iron rice bowl” gives Americans a foreign enemy to blame for any economic disappointment at home while offering General Motors executives an excuse for making spectacularly crappy cars. (If you remember GM cars in the ’80s, oh, goodness: the Chevy Citation, the Buick Skylark, the aptly named Oldsmobile Omega, the ironically named Pontiac Phoenix—incompetent designs incompetently welded together by union guys drunk on the job half the time. Not a golden age for the American automobile.) You sure as hell would rather talk to the median voter about that than about why he needs higher taxes or a smaller Social Security check.

  Talk about a blast from the past. In the nearly 20 years this blog has been in operation, Gephardt hasn't been mentioned once, until now.

  As always, I strongly recommend you subscribe to the Dispatch, if only for KDW's appearances.