- Paul Krugman’s constructive suggestions for fixing the budget, with four key suggestions;
- While Trump’s allegiances lie with lower taxes for the rich and cuts to the social safety net for the poor;
- How MAGA is about bimbos, like Kristi Noem and Sarah Palin, who play dumb;
- Steven Pinker, in a long essay, defends Harvard against black and white thinking and “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” how some ideas are true that are nevertheless politically incorrect, how federal grants work, and how Harvard and other universities have made the world a better place.
Let’s start with something positive and productive. Instead of talking about the Republicans.
Paul Krugman,23 May 2025: What a Decent Budget Would Look Like, subtitled “Imagining a Congress that was neither cruel nor irresponsible”
OK, I was wrong. I thought House Republicans would pass their surpassingly cruel, utterly irresponsible budget in the dead of night, hoping nobody would notice. And they tried! Debate began at 1 A.M., and if you think that bizarre timing reflected real urgency, I have some $Melania coins you might want to buy.
(The title of the novel shown above alludes to this, presumably.)
Setting criticism aside, Krugman opts for constructive comments. I’ll bold the key points.
You don’t have to be a deficit fetishist, a fiscal scold — which I definitely am not — to realize that even before the Budget of Abominations America was on an unsustainable fiscal path. So what will it take to get back to a tolerable fiscal position?
… What strikes me about where we are now, however, is that we could vastly improve our fiscal position with a series of easy choices — actions that would mainly spare the middle class and only hurt people most Americans probably believe deserve to feel a bit of pain. So here are four things we could and should be doing.
First, get Americans — mainly wealthy Americans — to pay the taxes they owe. The net tax gap — taxes Americans are legally obliged to pay but don’t — is simply huge, on the order of $600 billion a year. We can never get all of that money back, but giving the IRS enough resources to crack down on wealthy tax cheats would be both fiscally and morally responsible, since letting people get away with cheating on their taxes rewards bad behavior and makes law-abiding taxpayers look and feel like chumps.
Republicans are, of course, doing the opposite: They’re starving the IRS of resources and trying to make tax evasion great again. Why, it’s almost as if cheats and grifters are their sort of people.
Second, crack down on Medicare Advantage overpayments. Currently, much of Medicare is run through insurance companies whose payments from the government are based on the health status of their clients — the sicker the people they cover, and hence the higher their likely medical bills, the more the insurance companies receive. Unfortunately, insurers game the system, finding ways to make their clients look less healthy than they really are, and thereby get overpaid.
…
Third, go after corporate tax avoidance. Much of this involves multinational firms using strategies that are shady and dishonest but legal to make profits actually earned in the United States disappear and reappear in low-tax nations like Ireland.
…
Finally, we should just get rid of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut. That tax cut wasn’t a response to any economic needs, and there’s not a shred of evidence that it did the economy any good. All it did was transfer a lot of money to corporations and the wealthy. Let’s end those giveaways.
Concluding,
I know, the usual suspects will come up with all kinds of reasons we can’t do obvious things to save money and increase revenue without hurting ordinary Americans. But politicians who aren’t even willing to do these things have no business lecturing anyone about fiscal responsibility.
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Why aren’t Republicans doing this? (Indeed, why didn’t Democrats, when they were in power? At least they weren’t making things *worse.*) We’ve seen the answer almost every day.
Washington Post, Eduardo Porter, 23 May 2025: What Trump’s ‘big beautiful’ budget reveals about MAGA, subtitled “If you’ve ever wondered whether Trump really cares for the little guy, wonder no more.”
Where do Donald Trump’s allegiances lie? The question has swirled around American politics ever since the president consolidated the MAGA coalition — a patchwork of angry, White, working-class voters wooed with promises to crush trade, revive manufacturing, bash coastal elites and halt immigration — and attached it to a Republican Party that has usually stood for the interests of corporations and the well-to-do.
The result is an improbable, bicephalous beast, its two heads facing opposite directions. One is Stephen K. Bannon, representing MAGA’s red-meat populism, wary of corporations and the elites who run them. The other is his multibillionaire techno-nemesis Elon Musk, interested above all in low taxes, less regulations, and hopefully federal contracts and other deals for the corporations he owns. On what end, we wondered, was its heart?
The answer:
Trump’s “big beautiful” budget, which sparked internecine warfare in the GOP before passing in the House on Thursday morning by one single vote, offers a solid clue as to the president’s true predilections: Bannon lost. The overpowering Republican lust for lower taxes funded by cuts to the social safety net cut through the president’s facade of being a champion for the working Joe.
But we knew that.
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That’s what MAGA wants. This piece is about who MAGA is.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 23 May 2025: Kristi Noem’s proud MAGA bimbo act builds on the legacy of Sarah Palin, subtitled “The GOP adores a woman who plays dumb to build up the man she’s serving”
In the world of MAGA, stupidity is a badge of honor for both sexes, but the heads of women need to be thoroughly empty. Book learning, in MAGA-land, is for lesbians and cat ladies. Intelligence gets in the way of the true duties of MAGA womanhood: keeping up your highly artificial appearance and, crucially, defending the man you serve with your whole heart and soul. Especially if said man, in this case Donald Trump, is himself dumber than a box of rocks. It’s so much easier to be a yes-woman for such a man if you turn your own brain off completely.
Fascinating article that goes on with examples, and a counter-example in Marilyn Monroe.
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Harvard prof Steven Pinker speaks.
NY Times, guest essay by Steven Pinker, 23 May 2025: Harvard Derangement Syndrome [gift link]
Pinker has criticized Harvard before, including about its implementation of DEI. Now he is defending it. He details the recent criticism against Harvard.
So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”
And, another warning against black and white thinking.
Call it Harvard Derangement Syndrome. As the country’s oldest, richest and most famous university, Harvard has always attracted outsize attention. In the public imagination the university is both the epitome of higher learning and a natural magnet for grievances against elites.
Psychologists have identified a symptom called “splitting,” a form of black-and-white thinking in which patients cannot conceive of a person in their lives other than as either an exalted angel or an odious evildoer. They generally treat it with dialectical behavior therapy, advising something like: Most people are a mix of strengths and flaws. Seeing them as all bad might not help in the long run. It’s uncomfortable when others disappoint us. How could you make space for the discomfort without letting it define your whole view of them?
He goes on about some of the legitimate criticisms, and his own behavior, and how some things are true that are nevertheless politically incorrect.
I’ll start with myself. During my decades at the university I’ve taught many controversial ideas, including the reality of sex differences, the heritability of intelligence and the evolutionary roots of violence (while inviting my students to disagree, as long as they provide reasons). I claim no courage: The result has been zero protests, several university honors and warm relations with every chair, dean and president.
Most of my colleagues, too, follow the data and report what their findings indicate or show, however politically incorrect. A few examples: Race has some biological reality. Marriage reduces crime. So does hot-spot policing. Racism has been in decline. Phonics is essential to reading instruction. Trigger warnings can do more harm than good. Africans were active in the slave trade. Educational attainment is partly in the genes. Cracking down on drugs has benefits, and legalizing them has harms. Markets can make people fairer and more generous. For all the headlines, day-to-day life at Harvard consists of publishing ideas without fear or favor.
And he goes on about the alleged antisemitism. And to clarify about those government grants, that Trump is canceling:
Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.
Many more points. How Harvard matters.
For all its foibles, Harvard (together with other universities) has made the world a better place, significantly so. Fifty-two faculty members have won Nobel Prizes, and more than 5,800 patents are held by Harvard. Its researchers invented baking powder, the first organ transplant, the programmable computer, the defibrillator, the syphilis test and oral rehydration therapy (a cheap treatment that has saved tens of millions of lives). They developed the theory of nuclear stability that has saved the world from Armageddon. They invented the golf tee and the catcher’s mask. Harvard spawned “Sesame Street,” The National Lampoon, “The Simpsons,” Microsoft and Facebook.
And concludes, quoting the David Deutsch book I’m only part way through.
And if you’re still skeptical that universities are worth supporting, consider these questions: Do you think that the number of children who die every year from cancer is just about right? Are you content with your current chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease? Do you feel our current understanding of which government policies are effective and which ones are wasteful is perfect? Are you happy with the way the climate is going, given our current energy technology?
In his manifesto for progress, “The Beginning of Infinity,” the physicist David Deutsch wrote, “Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.” To cripple the institutions that acquire and transmit knowledge is a tragic blunder and a crime against future generations.
And from this piece I learned that Pinker has a new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, coming out in September.
