Thursday roundup

 One of my gigs in life is covering local government for a media company that owns four radio stations and a news website. I never ceased to be amazed, when attending redevelopment commission, city and county council meetings is the number of projects that depend on federal grants to get done. I can maybe understand it in situations involving an interstate highway, but for the most part, the question looms in my mind, how did this arrangement come to be where so many local dollars get shipped to Washington and run through its bureaucracy in order to get dispensed, after an application process that allows that layer of government to bask in its power to decide fates, back here?

This question arises in a particularly egregious form - getting to the basic matter of government keeping its hands off people's money in the first place - in the case of an aspect of the recently passed, obscenely bloated, COVID relief package. Robert Verbruggen at National Review has the details:

The [particular amendment in question] doles out $350 billion to state and local governments, nearly $200 billion of it to states. (There’s also, separately, money for schools and public transportation.) But states haven’t seen their revenues decline anywhere near that much, and some states aren’t hurting at all. So for many governments this is just a big windfall to spend.

But not so fast! The Democrats who passed the bill don’t want the free money to go to something icky, and they especially don’t want it to go to something really icky like tax cuts. So they put restrictions on how the money can be spent, including this language:

A State or territory shall not use the funds provided under this section or transferred pursuant to section 603(c)(4) to either directly or indirectly offset a reduction in the net tax revenue of such State or territory resulting from a change in law, regulation, or administrative interpretation during the covered period that reduces any tax (by providing for a reduction in a rate, a rebate, a deduction, a credit, or otherwise) or delays the imposition of any tax or tax increase.

As Walczak notes, not only does this bar states from explicitly and directly using the money to cut taxes, but it makes it pretty tricky for them to cut taxes at all between now and 2024. It will still be okay for a state to cut a tax if the change is fully offset by a spending cut or other revenue increase, because in that case the state can show it financed the tax cut without the new money. But the situations get complicated from there.

For example, states are allowed to use the money to pay public-health officers who deal with the pandemic. But many of these folks would have been employed even without the federal cash, and money is fungible — which is to say, this frees up money for use elsewhere in the budget. If a state sees that resulting budget surplus and decides a tax cut is the appropriate response, that would appear to be prohibited, because the federal money “indirectly” financed the tax cut. 

It's a pretty wonky deep dive, but Scott Lincicome at the Cato Institute's website dispenses handily with the idea that industrial policy and tariffs and such are necessary for national security reasons. 

Tim Miller at The Bulwark on why Paul Gosar is absolutely part of the nuttiest wing of the Repubican side of the aisle in the House. 

This piece by Roger Kiska at the Acton Insitute's website actually dates from December 2019, but I saw it shared on Facebook and its message, that the leftist assault on our civilization's Judeo-Christian foundations explicitly takes its cue from Gramsci's notion of the long march through the institutions is even more salient now.

Jonathan Tobin at the New York Post says that one sure sign of the imperiled health of our society is that it can't debate trans ideology's effect on kids.

Donald G. McNeil, the recently fired New York Times science writer, writing at Medium, recounts his experience with what happened. 

Religion News Service on Beth Moore's split from the Southern Baptists:

“She has been a stalwart for the Word of God, never compromising,” former Lifeway Christian Resources President Thom Rainer said in 2015, during a celebration at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville that honored 20 years of partnership between the Southern Baptist publishing house and Moore. “And when all is said and done, the impact of Beth Moore can only be measured in eternity’s grasp.”

Then along came Donald Trump.

Moore’s criticism of the 45th president’s abusive behavior toward women and her advocacy for sexual abuse victims turned her from a beloved icon to a pariah in the denomination she loved all her life.

“Wake up, Sleepers, to what women have dealt with all along in environments of gross entitlement & power,” Moore once wrote about Trump, riffing on a passage from the New Testament Book of Ephesians. 

Because of her opposition to Trump and her outspokenness in confronting sexism and nationalism in the evangelical world, Moore has been labeled as “liberal” and “woke” and even as being a heretic for daring to give a message during a Sunday morning church service.

Finally, Moore had had enough. She told Religion News Service in an interview Friday (March 5) that she is “no longer a Southern Baptist.”

“I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists,” Moore said in the phone interview. “I love so many Southern Baptist people, so many Southern Baptist churches, but I don’t identify with some of the things in our heritage that haven’t remained in the past.”

Batya Ungar Sargon, Newsweek's deputy opinion editor, writing at Persuasion, on how the anti-racist vision is "perfect for affluent whites who want to be heroes in a story about justice."

If anything here is a must-read, it's Washington Examiner editor Hugo Gurdon's takedown of the leftist hijacking of the term "equity."