Pun Salad

Jeff Jacoby wonders: Why won't zombie bad ideas stay buried?.

I mentioned Jeff Maurer's screed about populism yesterday; as a side effect of that, I looked up my past posts on my own "favorite" zombie trope: complaints about greedy multinational corporations "shipping good American jobs overseas". Thanks (usually) to plutocratic "tax breaks".

Back in 2010, I noted it was resurrected as a campaign theme by the Obama Administration. (Obama had previously promised to do something about it back in 2007, but I guess it slipped his mind.) John Kerry tried it out in 2004, running against Dubya. And Bill Clinton in 1992 running against Dubya's dad.

(And Ross Perot in 1992, too. Although most of his targets were sneaky job-stealing Mexicans, so not exactly "overseas".)

In 2012, I noted that (oops) apparently Obama had failed to stop the job shipments overseas, because he promised to do something about that in his campaign against Mitt Romney.

Just last year, Democrat CongressCritters Emilia Sykes (OH-13), Bill Pascrell, Jr. (NJ-09) and Chris Deluzio (PA-17) introduced a bill to (finally!) "close tax loopholes that reward companies shipping jobs overseas." (Their short press release contains six occurrences of the phrase.)

It even recently crossed the aisle, as zombies do. Just last month, Fox News headlined: Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas. That's GOP Senator Bernie Moreno:

"While college grads in America struggle to find work, globalist politicians and C-Suite executives have spent decades shipping good-paying jobs overseas in pursuit of slave wages and immense profits—those days are over," Moreno told Fox News Digital in a statement.

It's really a zombie concept: politicians have promised to slay it for decades, but it's still around.

Here's why: those pols find it more appealing as a campaign issue than as a guide to effective legislation or policy.

Also of note:

• Speaking of the walking dead… James Freeman describes resurrection efforts: Democrats Demand Return of Bidenomics. (WSJ gifted link)

  Most Americans probably remember the years after 2020 as a time of wildly expensive governance and maddeningly ill-considered Covid overreactions that lasted long after the pandemic and will haunt our children with massive federal debt and reduced educational aptitude. But Senate Democrats look back on that period as the good old days. In fact they recall the recklessness of those years with such fondness that they’ve shut down much of the government and vowed not to reopen without an agreement to continue one of the most destructive policies of that disastrous era.

  In the Journal this week Ge Bai writes about the two inflation-inducing Biden spending blowouts that enabled this policy of subsidizing ObamaCare insurance plans for people who are nowhere close to being poor:

  In March 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the American Rescue Plan temporarily extended premium subsidy eligibility to those with incomes above 400% of the federal poverty level, allowing people at any income level to receive subsidies originally intended for those with modest means. In August 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act extended those subsidies through December 2025.

  Note that "subsidies" go to many people who are also taxpayers. So, essentially, they're (1) sending cash to Uncle Stupid, who (2) skims some off the top, and (3) sends it back to them, while (4) claiming to be doing them a favor. It's the venerable trickle-down D.C. Shuffle. And it's designed to turn its dependents into reliable Democrat voters.

• Watch what they do, not so much what they say. Christian Britschgi reports Democrats shut down the government to obscure Obamacare's failures.

  Milton Friedman liked to quip that there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.

  We're seeing more evidence for this adage as the government shut downs following Democrats' refusal to vote for a spending bill that did not include an extension of "temporary" Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, subsidies passed during the pandemic.

  Those enhanced subsidies were passed as a temporary measure as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act in March 2021, and then extended through the end of 2025 by the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

  Obamacare always provided subsidies for individuals to purchase insurance plans on ACA marketplaces set up by the law. The 2021 Act passed enhanced subsidies eliminated the income eligibility caps for those subsidies and also made them more generous for current recipients.

  Making these subsidies permanent would not be cheap. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would cost $340 billion a year.

  Need I point out: that's money the government doesn't actually have. Which brings us to…

• Hoping that Betteridge's Law doesn't apply. Veronique de Rugy wonders if Government Shutdowns and Pandemic-Level Spending: The New Normal?

  The federal government just accumulated an additional $2 trillion in debt over the last 12 months. That's the kind of debt surge America usually racks up in wartime or during major national emergencies. But today, as Republicans and Democrats engage in another budget-driven shutdown drama, we are not at war. There is no pandemic. The economy is humming. And another shutdown is happening. Yet it will solve nothing about the fact that the political class is burning through money at a pace that would make Franklin Roosevelt's war cabinet blush.

  The Daily Treasury Statement shows total federal debt rising from $35.5 trillion last September to $37.5 trillion this week. In peacetime, with unemployment low and the stock market booming, that's breathtakingly reckless. Yet in Washington, winning at politics matters more than confronting the cause of the problem: relentless overspending, and especially the explosion of entitlement programs.

  Republicans, despite their fiscal-hawk branding, have presided over much of this surge. They boast $206 billion in Department of Government Efficiency "savings" and $213 billion in tariff receipts — rounding errors when compared with the debt. As the Tax Foundation's Alex Durante and Garrett Watson point out, tariff revenue does almost nothing to change the country's fiscal trajectory.

  Which (in turn) brings us to…

• A likely scenario? Philip Klein detects A Catastrophic Sign That Republicans May Cave and Expand Obamacare. (archive.today link)

  Somewhere, Barack Obama and Joe Biden must be laughing. This morning brings a worrisome report by our own Audrey Fahlberg, from an interview with Senator Ron Johnson, on his efforts to prevent Republicans from caving in to Democratic demands to expand Obamacare:

  “Hopefully we can convince the president and others we can’t do that,” Johnson said, with a hint of resignation about how this will end. “I know people like me are vastly outnumbered here.”

  As a reminder, the raft of regulations created by the national health-care law led premiums to skyrocket. Rather than address the underlying flaws with Obamacare that triggered this problem, Democrats chose to throw tens of billions more dollars at the problem. Two times during the Biden administration, Democrats voted to expand subsidies for the purchase of insurance. But those enhancements were supposed to be temporary and are slated to expire at the end of this year. That should be the end of them. Unfortunately, there are some Republicans who are afraid to be called scary names by Democrats during an election year, and they may succeed in convincing leadership to go along with extending the program. This would be catastrophic.

  I assume my (all-Democrat) Congressional delegation is also chuckling. When they're not pretending to be outraged.