Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Bar Metaphor Is Really Stupid

A friend of mine recently sent me this clip of White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders attempting to defend President Trump’s “Cut Cut Cut” tax plan with an elaborate bar metaphor. Let’s call it the “Allegory of the Tab”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5ifwb3SNlw

A couple days later, my dad told me he heard someone bring this up, as if it were some kind of serious argument for Trump’s plan. I can’t let this stand. The Allegory of the Tab is too reductive, too simplistic, too brain-dead to pass without a post exclusively and entirely about how dumb it is.

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Why Trump Cannot Bring Jobs Back With Tax Cuts

When I talk to President Trump’s supporters about how they anticipate the president will bring back lost manufacturing jobs, I tend to hear the same argument over and over. It goes something like this:

Trump will cut corporate tax and other taxes that primarily hit investors.
Firms and investment will return from abroad to take advantage of the low tax rates.

It is possible to demonstrate that this is false. Here’s how to do it.

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Angela Merkel is Not Fit to Lead the West

Each time there’s an international summit, I see the same articles over and over, arguing that America no longer leads the west–Germany does. It’s understandable why people make this argument–President Trump is rather uninspiring, to put it mildly, and Germany is the last of the major western powers to retain the leader it had before the 2008 financial crisis. Chancellor Merkel has been in power for nearly 12 years. In that time, the United States has had three presidents and Britain has had four prime ministers. Merkel seems to offer stability in a world that’s increasingly off its rocker. But seeming is not being–in truth, there is no western leader who has done more in the last decade to contribute to the political instability that has brought about Trump and Brexit than Angela Merkel.

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Teach for America Tricks Young People into Being Scabs

Last month, we talked about how Mike Pence ran down the schools in Indiana while he was governor, slashing state educating spending by about 11.5% (relative to GDP) and creating a massive teacher shortage as good teachers defected to neighboring states and fewer Hoosiers elected to go into education. Today I want to talk about the pivotal role programs likes Teach for America play in aiding and abetting these efforts to annihilate the public schools.

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François Fillon is a Big, Fat Mistake

France’s center-right Republican Party has chosen to nominate François Fillon for the presidency. This is a big, fat mistake. Fillon is a relic from the 2000’s–he was Former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Prime Minister from 2007 to 2012, and he calls for a slate of policies that would cut public services, increase economic disparities, and shred France’s economy. He is a massive risk not just to France but to Europe as a whole, both in the short-term and the long-term. Here’s why.

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