Pun Salad

But it might be only a matter of time:

(Do you have to be of a Certain Age to get the joke here? Maybe. Hint, if you need one, here.)

Also of note:

• Just one more reminder. From the NR editorialists: Democrats Caved on Shutdown.

  In the short run, this is a win for Trump, who would not be cowed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — the government is poised to reopen without any concessions. At the same time, the deal is incredibly divisive among Democrats, with progressive voices infuriated with Democratic senators for buckling. Though they had absorbed the cutting off of food stamp benefits, ultimately the prospect of holiday travel being roiled by delays and cancellations due to the shortage of air traffic controllers seems to have forced a compromise. We are glad that Republicans did not cave on expanding Obamacare, as we urged them to hold the line back in September. And we also applaud them for not using this as an opportunity to nuke the filibuster as Trump had called for, because such action would undermine America’s founding idea that major changes should be difficult to impose. In the long run, getting rid of the obstacle would prove more beneficial to left-wing radicals who have an expansive view of government.

  The flip side of this result is that Democrats will now be able to bring the issue of rising health care premiums into the midterm elections. This was an own goal by Republicans, who over the more than 15 years since the passage of Obamacare have failed to rally around an alternative and have surrendered the issue of affordability to Democrats.

  I actually think it's worse than that. The most effective route to "affordability" is market-based reforms, moving mostly to a fees-for-service model, insurance reserved for catastrophic costs. But that's a very hard sell to people easily scared by "people are gonna die" rhetoric, paired with "health care is a right" demands.

• Betteridge's Law of Headlines says what now? Phillip W. Magness poses the question at the Dispatch: Do Billionaires Really Pay No Taxes? (archive.today link)

  One of the most common economic claims of the modern era holds that the wealthy do not pay their fair share in federal taxes. Some versions of this argument go a step further, asserting that the average billionaire pays a lower federal tax rate than many working-class Americans. 

  Former President Joe Biden made both claims in his 2024 State of the Union address, and politicians such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have used it to justify sweeping proposals for a “wealth tax” on unrealized capital gains. While most legislative efforts to “soak the rich” originate on the political left, some populist Republicans in the circles around Vice President J.D. Vance have quietly warmed to the idea of a “millionaire tax,” aiming to bump the top marginal income tax rate up from 37 percent.

  Philip does an excellent job of debunking progressive "fair share" rhetoric.

• "Unserious" is a euphemism for "boneheaded". But we'll forgive Eric Boehm for being overly polite in his headline: Trump's tariff stimulus checks are an unserious idea.

  President Donald Trump's proposal to deliver huge stimulus checks to many American households is the latest bit of fiscal fantasy to emerge from the White House.

  In a post on Truth Social, Trump promised checks of $2,000 to low- and middle-income Americans, supposedly to be funded out of tariff revenue. It's not the first time Trump has floated the idea of a "tariff dividend," but the latest announcement comes as the administration grasps wildly for a solution to Americans' perceived "affordability" issues.

  After delivering the checks, the remaining tariff revenue would be used to pay down the national debt, Trump wrote in a post on Monday.

  All of this is quite unserious. Let's do the math.

  Well, it turns out the math is simple, so check it out.

• Keynes was wrong about a lot of stuff, it turns out. I have to admit that I might have said "yes" to Jeff Jacoby's question: Did World War I cause World War II?

  AT THE 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the guns fell silent. The Great War — the "war to end all wars" — was over. But peace, it turned out, was not secured by the armistice signed in a railway carriage at Compiègne. It awaited the far more contentious negotiations that would culminate in the Treaty of Versailles.

  That treaty, which was negotiated by the victorious allies — Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States — was signed on June 28, 1919. Under its terms, Germany was required to demilitarize, to surrender territory to Belgium, France, and the newly constituted Czechoslovakia and Poland, to give up its overseas colonies, and to pay the equivalent of $63 billion in reparations. It was also compelled to accept full blame for having caused the war: Article 231 of the treaty affirmed "the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the [Allies] and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies." (The allies also signed separate treaties with Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey.)

  In the years after World War II, it became conventional wisdom that the economic harshness imposed by the Treaty of Versailles — and especially the humiliation of its "war guilt" clause — helped fuel the rise of Adolf Hitler. That interpretation owes much to John Maynard Keynes's 1919 bestseller, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," which denounced the treaty as a "Carthaginian peace" that was intended to crush Germany and ended by ruining Europe.

  But later scholarship has been far less sympathetic to Keynes's view.

  Jeff makes an interesting case, and I only regret that he didn't go out of his way to blame Woodrow Wilson too.