.Musk v. Trump

I am saying something you can read in lots of other places.  Musk's upset about One Big Beautiful Bill is that it does not do enough to fix the deficit.   Trump is counting on the Laffer Curve: Reduce taxes and the economy grows faster, increasing taxes collected.  It worked under JFK, Reagan, and Trump.  Under Reagan and Trump, overall spending increased faster than the revenues increased.  I fear that the fairly minor cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and AID will not be enough to compensate for increased spending on necessary items such as Golden Dome.  

Increased revenues are hard to predict.   A 100% income tax rate would obviously end the economy producing a reduction in revenue, likely to 0.  A 1% income tax rate would set the economy on fire (in a good way) but likely would generate less revenue than a 5% or 10% tax rate.   Anything in between is a guess.

Musk's claim that Trump has not released the Epstein Files because Trump is in them is absurd.  As many have observed, if there was anything incriminating in there,  it would have been released or leaked a couple weeks before the election.   There is no there, there.

I am disappointed in this nasty spat between two men who have given up so much to save America.

Helping the Third World

 6/5/25 Federalist:

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent a rescission package to Congress on Tuesday, requesting $9.4 billion in funding cuts for various programs. This is the first package of proposed DOGE cuts since Trump was elected on the promise to eradicate waste, fraud, abuse, and excessive government spending. According to the OMB, here’s some of the waste they found.

OMB reported that the rescission bill would cut “$67,000 for testing insect powder nutrition on children in Madagascar.” Details listed for a USAID grant first awarded in 2023 dedicated funds to testing a porridge made from “dried cricket powder.”

The bill would nix $33,000 in funding for the United Nations program “Being LGBTQI+ in the Caribbean,” as well as $643,000 for a similar program in the Western Balkans and $567,000 for one in Uganda. It also proposes a $5 million cut in funding for the Minority Serving Institute, which awards National Nuclear Security Administration grants to “Minority-Serving Institutions,” and would nix $595,400 for “training women in gender equity.”

The bill would also prevent $500,000 from going to an electric bus program in Rwanda. USAID approved a grant to “scal[e] up clean, green, public transportation in Rwanda” in 2023. The package would cut $6 million in funding for “net zero cities” in Mexico, $2.1 million for “climate resilience in Southeast Asia, Latin America, & East Africa,” and $5 million for “green transportation and logistics” in Eurasia.

The package would remove $4 million in funding for “legume systems research” — which was apparently not intended for increased agricultural productivity in the U.S., but for improving bean production in Guatemala and Honduras. The bill also includes a $3 million cut to funding for a Sesame Street program for children in the Middle East. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, once quipped, “USAID asked, ‘Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?’ and ended up in Iraq.”...

The OMB’s suggested cuts would save taxpayers $833,000 in funding that would have gone to “transgender people, sex workers and their clients, and sexual networks” in Nepal, while slashing $5.1 million allocated for “resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans gender, intersex, and queer global movements.”  

If DOGE were impoverishing the Third World, I might have some sympathy for concerns about this.   Some of this is really just subsidies to make LGBTWTF groups in America happy.

SNAP Fraud

 Federalist article about why states have no incentive to seek out SNAP fraud:

President Donald J. Trump’s Department of Justice uprooted hidden millions May 29, charging an employee at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and five New York residents with defrauding the federal government of “$66 million in unauthorized transactions under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (‘SNAP’) — colloquially known as food stamps.”

“Yesterday was, if not the largest, one of [the] largest stings,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, my former boss at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, of the bust, “At [the] USDA, we are hyper-focused . . . on rooting out that waste, fraud and abuse.”

While $66 million may sound extensive, the fraud scheme lasted about five years, which averages to about $13.2 million a year. That’s only 0.2 percent of New York’s $6.5 billion in SNAP spending last year....

States administer the program and essentially bill the federal government for SNAP subsidies paid out. States split a modest administrative fee 50-50 with the federal government.

This arrangement means there is little incentive for a state to combat fraud because the federal government automatically covers any extra spending. Even fraudsters spend their ill-gotten gains somewhere — most likely in the state where they are operating. Who cares if there is a little fraud? Of course, the U.S. taxpayer does.

Previous academic studies have noted a disconnect in the amount of SNAP subsidies reported by states as paid out and the amount of SNAP subsidies claimed by people receiving them on U.S. Census surveys. One study found that about 35 percent of SNAP beneficiaries will not report receiving benefits out of the approximately 3.5 million households annually who receive the American Community Survey (ACS), while 50 percent of those receiving food welfare fail to report this in response to the 60,000 Current Population Surveys sent out every month.

This underreporting matters for policymakers because SNAP subsidies, as well as other federal, state, and local welfare for the poor, only show a reduction in poverty rates if the income is reported to Census.

Unanimous Supreme Court Decision

 SMITH & WESSON BRANDS, INC., ET AL. v. ESTADOS UNIDOS MEXICANOS 

Yes, even the leftist justices agreed: Mexico cannot sue American gun makers because some guns are unlawfully trafficked into Mexico.  The decision was written by Justice Kagan, appointed by Obama.  One encouraging quote:

As noted above, Mexico here focuses on the manufacturers’ production of “military tyle” assault weapons, among which it includes AR–15 rifles, AK–47 rifles, and .50 caliber sniper rifles.  See supra, at 6; App. to Pet. for Cert. 121a. But those products are both widely legal and bought by many ordinary consumers. (The AR–15 is the most popular rifle in the country.  See T. Gross, How the AR–15 Became the Bestselling Rifle in the U. S., NPR (Apr. 20, 2023.)  The manufacturers cannot be charged with assisting in criminal acts just because Mexican cartel members like those guns too. The same is true of firearms with Spanish-language names or graphics alluding to Mexican history.  See supra, at 6. Those guns may be “coveted by the cartels,” as Mexico alleges; but they also may appeal, as the manufacturers rejoin, to “millions of law-abiding Hispanic Americans.” Tr. of Oral Arg 80; Reply Brief 20. That leaves only the allegation that the manufacturers have not attempted to make guns with nondefaceable serial numbers.  See supra, at 6. But the failure to improve gun design in that way (which federal law does not require) cannot in the end show that the manufacturers have “join[ed] both mind and hand” with lawbreakers in the way needed to aid and abet.  Direct Sales, 319 U. S., at 713.

It Is Going to Be A Clear Night

At 10:00 68 degrees, above average transparency,  average seeing (atmospheric turbulence), wind 4 mph.  I am going to try and photograph M13 tonight.  It is about 20 arc-minutes in diameter, about 2/3 of the Moon so prime focus should be effective. 

How Many Chances Does a Community Get?

 

Hammon, Tex. (1967)

02/08/1967: Police charged an 18-year-old with the murder of his father, his younger brother, and a friend of the brother.  The suspect pleaded guilty to armed robbery the previous year.  The outpouring of community support led to probation, only.  A trial for the murder of a highway patrolman in 1964, shot to death during a high-speed car chase, ended in acquittal.  This previous history had included being “declared a juvenile delinquent in 1961 after being arrested for assault, burglary and fraudulent solicitation of Red Cross funds.”

Category: family

Suicide: no

Cause: unknown

Weapon: shotgun, blunt object, knife[1]

---

[1] "Boy To Face Triple Murder Count," [Oklahoma City, Okla.] Daily Oklahoman, Feb. 09, 1967,·1, 2.

He was sentenced to death.  He briefly escaped prison in 1985.  Thanks to the reader who researched this.

A Discussion of AI Hallucinations

Over at Instapundit caused this comment:

"I help a local church manage some oil and gas leases they've been bequested over the years.

"It's mostly fractions of a lot of small wells that have been going for decades. A pain to keep up with.
"Last year, I started feeding all the well-operator statements into ChatGPT and having it generate reports off of them.

"It does a great job accurately pulling the information from different companies with different reports in different formats, and putting them all together into one overall accurate report.

"Frustratingly, it sometimes changes the names of the wells from the name the operators use, to names of random Biblical characters."