On the subject of cooking up some new budget gimmicks to hide the actual costs of current Republican fiscal incontinence, Sen. Ron Johnson said: “We need to avoid a massive, automatic tax increase,” as the tax cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expire. A question for the senator: If it is important to avoid massive automatic tax increases, then why on Earth did you [long baroque string of expletives deleted] idiots write a massive automatic tax increase into the 2017 tax-cut bill? You remember that bill, Sen. Johnson: You voted for it. You lobbied to make it more expensive by changing pass-through rules in a way that benefited you personally and put a little extra change in the pockets of a couple of big donors, too, though I assume you’d have pushed for those changes in any case on the grounds that tax cuts are the Republicans’ version of Democrats’ spending giveaways.
And Republicans pulled some different budget shenanigans back then, apparently without thinking very hard about how they’d box them in now.
Okay, readers, a little bit of budgetary esoterica. Don’t worry—it isn’t very complicated.
When Republicans want to pass a big tax cut, they have, in the past, written the bill in such a way that the tax cut expires after a few years, with taxes in theory automatically going back to their old rates. Nobody believes that’s what they intend to happen: Fiscal yellowbellies do this in order to avoid having to account for the full, long-term cost of the tax cut and therefore feeling some heat to offset that large cost with tax increases in other areas or with real spending cuts, which Republicans—then and now—talk a good fight about while doing precious little. It’s the usual eat-dessert-first stuff. That’s Part 1.
Here’s Part 2: For the purposes of estimating their effects on the national debt, changes to spending and taxes are accounted for as departures from “current law,” meaning that the cost of a tax bill or a spending bill is calculated relative to what would be expected to happen if no legislation were passed at all. Putting in that expiration date is what put the “massive automatic tax increase” into current law. Yesterday’s cowardice is today’s pain in the budgetary butt. Sen. Johnson and other Republicans, having already sucked down the blackberry cobbler, now wish to avoid eating their spinach, and so they propose to abandon the “current law” model of calculation for a “currency policy” model—which is another way of saying they want to pretend that they didn’t write those tax-cut expirations into the law in the first place, which they did for reasons of—let’s all shout it out together!—sniveling, knee-walking political cowardice.
When it comes to evading fiscal responsibility, Republicans are a pretty cheap date: They’ll pretty much take whatever is on offer.
And that’s working out about how you’d expect.
In FY2000, the U.S. government had, on paper, a budget surplus. (It was a “primary” surplus, meaning that the fiscal story looked very different if you took unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities and similar things into account.) That was at the end of the Clinton-Gingrich years, when the mutual loathing between the Democratic administration and the Republican Congress accomplished precisely what such rivalry is intended to accomplish under our constitutional architecture: compromise that made no party happy but that ultimately served the public interest, in this case by reducing the debt/GDP ratio from 64 percent on the eve of Republicans’ historic 1994 triumph to 55 percent when George W. Bush took office—below where it had been on Clinton’s first day in office, even though the ratio had climbed during Clinton’s first years. A debt-to-GDP ratio that is going downward is, in the case of the United States and most other similar countries with advanced economies, an excellent thing. (Sometimes, rising debt/GDP goes along with good things, for example energetic public-sector investment in certain developing economies at certain times.) But it was not meant to last. Republicans began enacting tax cuts that were designed to eliminate the surplus. The surplus itself, they argued at the time, was evidence that taxes were too high.
Well.
Since the end of the Clinton years, Republicans have controlled the U.S. House of Representatives most of the time (eight out of 12 Congresses) and the Senate most of the time, too. With the beginning of the second Trump administration, Republicans now have controlled the White House more often than Democrats have, as well. (Previously, it had been an even split: two Bush terms, two Obama terms, one Trump term, one Biden term.) Debt, meanwhile, has gone from 55.14 percent of GDP at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration (Q1 2001) to 120.73 on the most recent measure (Q3 2024), having reached a peak of 132.81 in Q2 2020, during the first Trump presidency, while Republicans controlled the Senate and Democrats had a majority in the House. That’s won’t be the final peak, of course–that unusual spike and drop were driven by COVID, a statistical aberration in the steady upward slope.
Republicans have a lot of interesting theories and pseudo-theories about fiscal practices. One is the myth that tax cuts “pay for themselves.” They don’t—not normally, anyway, in an advanced economy with relatively low tax rates. There are growth effects: Many tax cuts really have produced some additional economic activity that offsets some of the cost of the tax cut—but not all of it, much less all of it and then some gravy on top, as many naïve supply-siders insist. Then there’s “starve the beast”-ism, the idea that smaller government and fiscal probity can be induced by means of tax cuts, stripping the agencies of revenue with which they might do mischief. As you might expect, that doesn’t work when the government can just keep borrowing money. There are many people who really do believe these exotic theories of fiscal engineering, but Republicans have had a quarter-century to get their fiscal act together and they have failed—again and again and again. They have failed because their exotic theories are baloney and many of them know that their exotic theories are baloney, used as cover for—once more, with feeling!—sniveling, knee-walking political cowardice.
Which is why spending never actually gets cut and debt keeps piling up. Yes, Democratic mortadella very closely resembles Republican baloney. (Not always: So-called Modern Monetary Theory, which ought to be called Modern Magical Monetary Theory, is optimized for Democratic prejudices. Baloney, but a different kind.) Right now we have a Republican trifecta, one in which leaders such as Sen. Johnson are desperately looking for ways to monkey around with the accounting system rather than actually deal with the increasingly dire fiscal situation.
Here are the real choices: 1) Cut spending; 2) raise taxes; 3) cut spending and raise taxes; 4) continue careering headlong toward fiscal crisis while idiotically waving your hands and harrumphing about “current policy” vs. “current law.” For all the vandalism undertaken by Elon Musk and his sad dork army, it is a near certainty that the debt is going to be bigger next year than it is this year, that total federal spending is going to keep going up, etc. And Musk is not really in a position to stop that: We’d still have a deficit if the federal payroll were cut to $0.00, because most of the money is spent on transfers (Social Security etc.), medical benefits, and interest on the debt, with military spending coming in at around 14 percent of the budget in 2024. Entitlements, defense, interest payments: That’s the ball game, and everything else put together adds up to approximately squat. You could cut non-defense discretionary spending to $0.00 and not balance the budget.
So Musk can’t do much about the big spending picture. Do you know who could? Sen. Ron Johnson, for one, if he weren’t busy thinking up ways to hide the fact that he and his party are driving this country even further into debt tomorrow than it is today.
Words About Words
Sports journalists are good at many things. And less good at others. A reader points out this from the New York Times:
Abe Saperstein, founder and owner of the Globetrotters, was known as a masterful promoter with a business-savvy mind built for sports entertainment. He saw the immediate potential that Chamberlain could bring to the team. Adding the dominant 7-footer was considered a financial risk to some, but Saperstein paid a substantial amount in the $50,000 range for Chamberlain to wear a Globetrotters uniform, according to Hill. The average median income of families in 1958 was $5,100.
This is bad writing across the board. There’s some Williamson-bait in there (masterful doesn’t mean skillful or masterly—it means domineering), some prepositional shenanigans (it seems the author means that Chamberlain was considered a financial risk by some, not to some, as he wrote), some padding (“a substantial amount in the $50,000 range” probably wants parenthetical commas, but substantial is superfluous in that the author is just about to explain, illiterately, that a $50,000-ish figure was big money), and the invention of something called the “average median,” which is a lot like writing “average average.” There are different kinds of averages, including means and medians. But it doesn’t make any sense to write about the “average median income” in most contexts (you could think of one if you tried) rather than just the “median income,” which is what the author is writing about here. The linked material references “the average (median) income,” and it seems the author just copied that over and deleted the parentheses. (He could have arrived at the illiteracy by some other means.) Jeepers, etc.
New York by-God Times, that is.
Trump Wants Americans to Speak English
You first, Mr. President.
Why American Newspapers Failed
Consider who has been managing the content. This essay from former Gannett honcho Joanne Lipman in the Wall Street Journal is straight-up dumb—and smug and insipid to boot.
The manosphere won. Bro podcasters top the charts. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg declares his company needs more “masculine energy.” Elon Musk shares a post saying only “high-status males” should run the country. The White House kills diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, and so do multiple companies, from Target to McDonald’s.
OK, men, so will you finally quit complaining?
In 2021, Joe Rogan famously said, “It will eventually get to straight white men are not allowed to talk. … It will be, ‘You’re not allowed to go outside.’ … I’m not joking. It really will get there, it’s that crazy.” But Rogan’s complaint is actually an old one that has exploded as a rallying cry every decade or so for more than 50 years. White guys have blamed others for their job losses, educational failures, economic problems and drug addictions.
Somebody else is always at fault. The mighty white guy, it turns out, is quite the delicate flower.
To be sure, there are lots of to be sures. As in this one:
To be clear, white guys aren’t all sexists or racists or whiners, nor do all—or even most—buy into the white-guy persecution complex. But by the 1990s, the male archetype had been forged, and he would resurface again.
Which is another way of saying: No, the facts of the case don’t really comport with my thesis, but let’s just treat this as a literary exercise. Archetypes, you know? Who needs to act like a journalist when you can pretend to be Carl Jung?
Politically, this kind of thing is almost as useless as it is as journalism. These people have spent a generation talking about white men as though they were the enemy and now are surprised when some considerable share of white men has decided to take them at their word. If you intentionally conflate “white men” with “bro podcasters” for petty rhetorical effect, you’re doing something stupid and dangerous.
Leopards Are Hungry
He Isn’t Playing
In Closing
There isn’t much to add to what’s already been said here, by Jonah Goldberg and others, about the Trump-Vance burlesque with the Ukrainian president. Let me put on my theater-critic hat for a second and remind everybody that this was a performance—a stunt taken from the reality-television playbook. That Trump is out there doing reality-show shtick should surprise no one—he is a reality-show grotesque, after all. I am tempted to write that the main takeaway is that Trump is as a performer greatly superior to Vance, whose stilted, shaky delivery betrayed his over-preparation for the role. But Vance is a fine performer, too, on the smaller scale. It’s like stage actors and movie actors–the scale of gesture and expression appropriate to the stage, when you’ve got to deliver the goods up to the cheap seats, appears silly on film, while many great cinematic actors, used to having their faces 40 feet tall in front of audiences, fade into the scenery on stage. I never knew J. D. Vance well, but I’ve done a few events with him and spent a little time with him over the years, and he certainly fooled me. Trump is Trump and always has been, but I once admired Vance and had high hopes for him as a public figure. I completely misjudged what sort of man he is. Again, I never knew him well, but I am ashamed of ever having known him at all and at occasionally having shared a venue with the ghastly little sycophant. As a Catholic, I could, I suppose, make a very long list of people I’m ashamed to belong to the same church as. And that applies to the vice president, too. But in his case, I’d go further: J. D. Vance makes me embarrassed to be a member of the same species.
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