That was never an emergency
Former Republican George Will doesn’t think the GOP misses him much. Still, he’s measured in how he lays blame on the GOP. He dodges Bill Maher’s question about how decades of Republican policies and planning led up to Donlad Trump, decades in which Will was a prominent conservative cheerleader.
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But Will offers a simple takedown of Trump’s stupid claim of trade deficits representing a 50-year emergency that permits him to usurp powers delegated to Congress.
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Maher, of course, brands New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani “a straight-up communist” for advocating “free grocery stores” (that aren’t free, just subsidized) and free busses that Charles Komanoff, an economist and expert on traffic modeling, tells The New York Times might improve service:
Mr. Komanoff projects that making buses free could increase ridership citywide by 23 percent, an additional 170 million trips in a year, and increase the average bus speed — currently around eight m.p.h., nearly the slowest in the country — by an average of 12 percent. Despite the loss of transit revenue, he argues, the city would benefit economically because of the time and money that riders would save. Building more dedicated bus lanes and other service upgrades could improve speed and ridership numbers further, he said.
But that violates the MIdas Cult code that everything that might be turned into gold should be. Not-for-profit is a crime against capitalism. Or in this case, people paying for their collective national security through taxes is fine. People paying collectively for public transit is suspect.
Because “that’s socialism,” Will responds with a single anecdote to predict the failure of such a free busses policy while ignoring cities around the world that have implemented it for over a decade. Remember, socialism and communism are just a four-letter epithets conservatives safely toss about in public because they have nine letters.
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