
A Stopped Clock Is Sometimes Right
Plus: Kamala Harris embraces 'No Tax on Tips.'
Time flies when youāre having fun. So we were startled this weekend to realize that weāBill and Andrew, that isāhave been writing this morning missive for six months. It was exactly a half year ago, on February 12, 2024, when the great Charlie Sykes passed the Morning Shots baton to us. We think the handoff was reasonably smooth, and we hope weāve managed to maintain at least something close to Charlieās pace. At least we havenāt (yet) been disqualified.
But we did want to take this half-anniversary occasion to thank all of youāfor reading, for subscribing, and (it appears from the growth in readers and subscribers) for recommending Morning Shots to others.
And we wanted to thank you also for your vigorous and well-informed comments, and for your corrections on those (of course, rare!) occasions when weāve been wrong. Happy Monday.
Six Months In
āBill Kristol
Speaking of knowing things, or at least occasionally guessing right, I will point out that this is how I began that first Morning Shots, on February 12, 2024:
Today I feel an obligation instead to grasp an unpleasant nettle: Joe Bidenās age.
President Biden is old. He seems frail. Heās running for another four-year term.
Letās be honest: Itās not obvious heās up to that.
This is a serious problem. Itās a problem because the American public doesnāt think Biden should be running for a second term. Partly as a result of that judgment, Biden now trails in the race for presidency. Itās a particularly urgent problem when the alternative is Donald J. Trump, whose second term could do incalculable damage to this country.
This is not a problem that can be dealt with by happy talk or by exhortations to circle the wagons . . .
Iāve believed for more than a year that President Biden should have chosen not to run for reelection . . . Iāve believed such a decision by Biden would produce a strong nominee, one who would enable voters in 2024 to feel they were voting not just against Trump, but for generational change . . .
All it takes is for President Biden to choose not to run again . . .
I still think Joe Biden should make this choice.
I think I was at least right about that. Itās obvious that the president made the right choice, and he deserves credit for doing so.
I want to thank those of you who differed with my judgment for doing so in a civil way. And I want to thank all of you for sticking with us over the last six months through good-faith disagreements on various issues.
As for those issues, I had thoughts on a bunch of them which Iād meant to burden you with this morning, ranging from the state of the race (remarkably good) to the state of Donald Trump (remarkably bad). But we have twelve weeks, five days a week, of Morning Shots ahead of us until election day. Thereāll be plenty of time for the consideration of all such topics of weight and moment, so I thought Iād spare you my thoughts for this one morning.
Rather, Iāll leave you with a quotation Iāve always liked from Federalist No. 1. The Federalist Papers were of course the Morning Shots of their day, missives by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (and occasionally John Jay) that appeared in New York newspapers from the fall of 1787 to the spring of 1788 making the case for the new Constitution. Andrew and I write today in defense of that same Constitution, now old but still very much worthy of defense, we think.
In any case, I will certainly acknowledge that our missives are not always at the same level as those of Hamilton and Madison. But I do hope that this passage from Federalist No. 1 captures the spirit of our rather less august enterprise as well:
In the course of the preceding observations, I have had an eye, my fellow-citizens, to putting you upon your guard against all attempts, from whatever quarter, to influence your decision in a matter of the utmost moment to your welfare, by any impressions other than those which may result from the evidence of truth. . . . I affect not reserves which I do not feel. I will not amuse you with an appearance of deliberation when I have decided. I frankly acknowledge to you my convictions, and I will freely lay before you the reasons on which they are founded. The consciousness of good intentions disdains ambiguity. I shall not, however, multiply professions on this head. My motives must remain in the depository of my own breast. My arguments will be open to all, and may be judged of by all. They shall at least be offered in a spirit which will not disgrace the cause of truth.
Morning Shotsāand of course The Bulwark as a wholeāalso aspires to offer arguments āin a spirit which will not disgrace the cause of truth.ā And we thank you for engaging those arguments in a spirit of good faith and good cheer.
Race to the Bottom
āAndrew Egger
Another thing we aspire to be at Morning Shots is consistent . . . which brings us to Kamala Harrisā latest policy proposal.
Rallying in Nevada this weekend, Harris made a new pledge to the hospitality-heavy state that, as president, she would āeliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.ā
This, of course, mirrors a policy idea Trump first rolled out earlier this summer, alongside a guerilla marketing campaign that exhorted supporters to write āVote Trump for no tax on tipsā on restaurant receipts. Hereās what we had to say about the pitch then:
As a policy matter, this is completely ridiculous. However you feel about Americaās idiosyncratic norms around tipping, the idea that a random subset of the hospitality and service sectorābartenders and restaurant servers, mostlyāshould suddenly get to pay essentially zero tax on their income is incoherent. If you want to lower taxes on lower earners, why not lower taxes on all lower earners?
Itās the sort of thing that gives you hives: candidates on both sides racing to propose huge changes to our basic tax structure, not because those changes would make the tax code more just, but because they hope it will nab them a few key votes in a swing state.
And yes, before you go nuts on me, politicians pander all the time. But thatās not the only route to picking up votes. You can imagine an alternate universe where Harris, instead of embracing āno tax on tipsā herself, made it a point of contrast, declaring she doesnāt intend to run Americaās economic policy via memes and gimmicks.
Barack Obama used lines like that to great effect in 2008, whenāfor instanceāhe stuck to his guns about fuel-economy standards despite worries they could hurt him in Michigan: āThatās the kind of truth-telling we need from the next president.ā This wasnāt a one-time thing: Obama also famously opposed a gas tax holiday that John McCain and Hillary Clinton had embraced.
There are, of course, worse things a candidate can do with their time than pander to voters. Donald Trump spent his weekend shorting out his supportersā minds with some of the dumbest conspiracy-theorizing weāve ever seen, insisting that the crowds Harris was drawing at her rallies were AI-generated fabrications. Even more insanely, Trump added that this meant Harris should be ādisqualifiedā from the election ābecause the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.ā
Obviously, having a rampaging, diseased mind like that on one side of the contest makes it hard to get worked up about a pandering proposal that almost surely wonāt become law. How many distortionary changes to U.S. tax policy would you be willing to accept to keep that man out of power? The number isnāt small!
But on a more elevated level, the no-tax-on-tips race to the bottom is a bracing reminder of just how far we still are from democratic high function. One day, one hopes weāll get to a point one day where things are calm enough, and the candidates are universally unobjectionable enough, that itās possible to throw out the bums who pander with nonsense like āno tax on tipsā on their ear.
Quick Hits
1. Not Going Peacefully
Does the Trump who thinks Harris should be banned from running for president for the audacity of actually drawing big crowds at her rallies strike you as the kind of guy whoās prepared to go quietly into the sunset should he lose? Joe Biden doesnāt think so either. In an interview released this weekend, CBSās Robert Costa asked the president whether he was confident there would be a peaceful transfer of power in November. āIf Trump loses, Iām not confident at all,ā Biden replied.
2. Lying with a Smile
JD Vance hit the Sunday shows this week to insist all that stuff youāve been hearing about him denigrating āchildless cat ladiesā is a big fat lie. āIf you look at what I said in context,ā he told CNNās Dana Bash, āthe Harris campaign has frankly lied about what I actually said.ā What he had been talking about, he insisted, was the need to get away from anti-family policies, like ridiculously high out-of-network medical bills: āIāve sponsored legislation to try to fix things like that so moms and dads donāt get these surprise medical bills. I think itās important for us to be pro-family. Thatās all that I have ever said.ā
This is some chutzpah! Just to roll back the tape again, here was what Vance actually said: āWe are effectively run in this country . . . by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that theyāve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable too. And itās just a basic fact.ā
3. Musk We Do This?
Trump has a big interview tonight with Elon Musk. Letās not pretend this is some major journalistic endeavor. Musk has endorsed Trump and has been pumping some truly uncut MAGA content straight into the veins of his tens of millions of followers on X. Itās not an interview. Itās a gift (unless there are some DeSantis-like tech glitches). Either way, Trump seems to be paying it back even before it happens. His campaign, notably, started running ads on X this morning.
I don't remember which show Vance was on but he went on and on about all the programs the Trump/Vance ticket would implement to support families. All of his programs had previously been introduced by Democrats and soundly voted down by the natalist/pro birth GOP. It was hard for me to keep my breakfast where it belonged.
There is a recording of Vance making the "childless cat lady" comment. Bash should have said' Wait a second, Senator. This is what you actually said" and gone to the tape. If you're not going to hold him accountable then what's the point of the interview?