Noah Berlatsky

“For years, Democrats have worried about the prospect of a more disciplined heir to Trump,” the New York Times declared in a profile of Florida governor Ron DeSantis last year.

DeSantis’ star has fallen since then. But the fear of a more competent Trump remains.

For the Times, as for many pundits and commenters, Trump is a dangerous figure, but his dangerousness is limited by his buffoonishness....

Earlier this month, Senator Bernie Sanders forced former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to testify about the company’s labor abuses before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Schultz was cranky about it, and when Sanders referred to him as a billionaire, he lashed out. In doing so, he neatly explained the myth of meritocracy, and showed why it is such a pernicious ideological excuse for our ugly, winner-take-all capitalist system.

“The moniker billionaire, let’s just get at that, OK?” Schultz told Sanders. “Yes I have billions of dollars. I earned it, no one gave it to me….It’s your moniker constantly. It’s unfair.”...

If a tree doesn’t fall in a forest, you can be sure lots of economists will have predicted that a tree was absolutely going to fall.

You can also be sure that, when the tree doesn’t fall, the economists will shrug and shamelessly predict that the tree is going to fall next month for sure. That tree, it is going to fall. They have models.

Where’s the recession?
We are, in theory, supposed to be in a recession right now, based on economic predictions from last year. In December 2022, CNBC confidently reported that the next recession would begin in early 2023. In October, CNN declared, “The question of a recession is no longer if, but when.”...

“If a child is on the verge of starvation, you must call CPS, not spend hundreds of millions on disproportionately unhealthy lunches, a huge percentage of which are discarded,” conservative pundit Ben Shapiro told California Congressman Ted Lieu on Twitter.

Shapiro is wrong. There’s a great deal of evidence that free school lunches reduce student hunger and improve children’s health.

Conservatives don’t necessarily care about good outcomes, though. That’s because they don’t want good outcomes. They want to police people....

This week the Biden administration moved swiftly to contain the fallout from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, reassuring depositors and other wobbling institutions.

Biden wants to head off a financial crisis, which could spark a recession and potentially harm millions of people. The government's decisive actions here are reasonable and probably necessary.

But it's hard not to notice how quickly the government moves when there’s a threat that the wealthy may lose some money, versus the much less urgent response to non-billionaires in trouble....