Matthew Belloni, writing at Puck regarding the claim from anonymous CBS sources that The Late Show lost $40 million last year:

Nobody can know for sure. All I can tell you is what I’m hearing. Several sources at both CBS and Skydance insist the decision was based on economics, not politics. After all, if this was about appeasing Trump, they argue, Cheeks would have pulled Colbert off the air ASAP rather than giving him 10 more months in the chair. “Trust me, there’s no conspiracy,” a very good source close to Colbert told me tonight. Still, two other people with deep ties to CBS and Late Show suspect otherwise. After all, when a network decides that a show is too expensive, executives typically go to the key talent and ask them to take pay cuts, fire people, or otherwise slash costs. That didn’t happen here — though with Colbert said to be making between $15 million and $20 million per year, a pay cut wouldn’t have solved the problem on its own. And given the company’s willingness to fold to Trump, there’s no reason for you or me to think they would stand up to any political pressure, or resist any specific demand (which, of course, is the reason to not settle frivolous litigation…). If Chris McCarthy, Cheeks’s counterpart on the cable TV side, cancels The Daily Show in the next couple weeks, I think we’ll have a good idea what’s going on. But for now, I cautiously (and skeptically) believe that this was mostly an economic decision.

In the end, the math just didn’t add up.

CBS pulled the plug on Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” due to financial considerations, the network explained. The news sent the far-Left trades into a tailspin.

Consider:

• CBS Canceling Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ Is an End of an Era for Television — and a Chilling Sign of What’s to Come
• Writers Guild Calls for Investigation After ‘Late Show’ Cancellation, Citing Bribery Concerns
• The TV President’s War on Democracy Comes for TV’s Institutions

Cue the crying rooms and coloring books.

Then again, these same sites have been promoting and amplifying Colbert’s far-Left shtick for years, so naturally they’re upset. Few media voices pushed the progressive agenda more forcefully than Colbert.

And, apparently, that came at a price. A hefty price.

The timing and optics are terrible, but Stephen Colbert’s show costs more than $100M a year to produce and is losing more than $40M a year. CBS execs had been mulling for a long time whether to pull the plug. Details https://t.co/gjSuazpef9

— Matthew Belloni (@MattBelloni) July 18, 2025

Puck News reports that CBS shells out $100 million a year to keep “The Late Show” afloat. Even more shocking? The show reportedly loses the Tiffany Network $40 million, or more, each year. 

Imagine that – the network swallows hard and coughs up millions just to put a late-night talk show on the air. Colbert’s salary, reported to be at least $15 million annually, didn’t help. The show’s large staff of 200 members hurt, too.

The show wasn’t losing that much money a few years back. Late-night TV show revenues have crashed in recent years. What was once a profitable landscape is now in cost-cutting mode.

• “The Tonight Show” shrank from five nights to four last year
• “Late Night with Seth Meyers” fired its house band.
• And, when CBS said goodbye to “The Late Late Show” host James Corden, it chose a cheaper program to replace him. (That show is gone now, too)

So why did CBS voluntarily cough up $40 million for clapter, Colbert style? After all, it’s show business. Recall how ABC canceled “Last Man Standing” despite strong ratings due to the sitcom’s large budget. That’s what we were told at the time.

The numbers must add up. And they didn’t for “The Late Show.” Yet CBS absorbed those losses up until now.

Why?

To grasp the big picture, it helps to take a step back. CBS’s news division has become another part of the Trump Resistance. Anchor Margaret Brennan’s “journalism” has become so sloppy she’s frequently showcased in conservative podcasts and web sites.

This is being shared everywhere, and it should be, because it’s historically illiterate, antagonistic to a fundamental value, and done so condescendingly from a highly paid “news” desk.

CBS Margaret Brennan blames free speech for the Holocaust.
pic.twitter.com/hRGvVuvjE4

— Will Cain (@willcain) February 16, 2025

‘I don’t really care, Margaret’: Vance carpet-bombs Margaret Brennan interview with inconvenient facts and common sense https://t.co/M9de6eGkjM pic.twitter.com/2iz9IjxyWI

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) January 27, 2025

CBS’s 2024 vice presidential debate put its overt biases in prime time.

And let’s not forget how CBS’s “60 Minutes” selectively edited Vice President Kamala Harris during the heat of the 2024 campaign to make her sound more presidential. President Trump sued CBS over the matter, and network brass settled for $16 million.

Liberal critics decried that settlement (as did Colbert). That, plus CBS’s parent company Paramount’s pending merger with Skydance is why the network cut ties with Colbert’s “Late Show,” they argue.

That assumes a broadcast company must ignore a program that sets it back millions each year. CBS was willing to pay that price for its preferred agenda, but not indefinitely.

The post SHOCK: Colbert’s Anti-Trump Propaganda’s Insane Price Tag appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

One more reason to defund PBS: Their reporters and researchers have no respect or understanding of libertarianism or libertarian voices (except on issues when libertarian ideology happens to match their own). Just see how PBS has covered Argentina’s president Javier Milei, whose free-market reforms since taking office in December 2023 have already borne fruit, as the country's notorious inflation, running rampant when Milei won office, has cooled drastically, while the unemployment rate remains steady and things in general have stabilized. Yet PBS ignores his undeniable success in favor of bashing him with any tool at hand, no matter how old. Most recently, PBS News Weekend on Saturday devoted a segment to “The Disappeared,” the political prisoners murdered by the military juntas in charge of Argentina from 1976-1983, during the country’s “Dirty War.”  ANCHOR JOHN YANG: This week, a human rights group in Argentina said it had identified a man who had been taken from his mother at a secret detention site more than 40 years ago during the country`s so called dirty war under the rule of a military dictatorship. He was reunited with his sister who had searched for him for years. But there are concerns that the government of Argentine President Javier Milei is reversing longstanding policy to continue the search for the tens of thousands of citizens who were abducted, never to be seen again, ‘The Disappeared.’ Special correspondent Kira Kay reports from Buenos Aires. Kay had nothing to say about Milei having actually successfully conquered the "economic chaos" she referenced. KIRA KAY: But activists say all this progress is now at risk through actions by Argentina`s new government. In November 2023, Argentina elected President Javier Milei, a libertarian economist who promised to address the country`s economic chaos. Facundo Robles managed the Wilson Center`s Latin America program. FACUNDO ROBLES, Former Latin American Program Coordinator, Wilson Center: In the period that goes from February 2017 to February 2025, inflation was 7800 percent. Milei, he`s drastically decreasing the size of the state. He fired 40,000 people out of the public sector. At PBS, firing government workers is a very bad thing. Stopping runaway inflation, not so much. After Kay reported Milei has “questioned the number of 30,000 junta victims” she returned to Robles, who made a petulant point that “as long as Milei controls inflation, people will be like, say whatever you want.” That was one of the few scattered clues from PBS that yes, Argentina’s notorious runaway inflation is being controlled under Milei. On April 17, economics reporter Paul Solman got on Milei’s case regarding the $Libra meme coin, which “shot up from pennies to dollars when endorsed by Argentina`s President Javier Milei, then crashed back down to pennies within hours. Milei is now under investigation because investors suspect a rug pull.” On November 20, 2023, Nawaz described Milei’s recent election victory as “thanks to an exhausted and angry electorate.” Inevitably, she compared him to Trump (being anything like Trump is bad at PBS) and noted he was a “self-described anarcho-capitalist” who had “pledged to shut down Argentina`s Central Bank, adopt the U.S. dollar as national currency, and make deep economic cuts….” She gave out a warning about Milei's far-right threat in the form of a question to her guest expert, Oliver Stuenkel. NAWAZ: ….Milei is close to the former far-right Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro. He`s also a supporter of former U.S. President Donald Trump. What does Milei`s election mean for the relationship between Argentina and the U.S., led by President Biden, who has warned consistently about the rise of far-right authoritarian leaders? On the November 19, 2023 PBS News Weekend, before Milei's victory was announced, anchor John Yang’s coverage was already being ridiculously biased, a harbinger of the slanted coverage to come from PBS. YANG: In Argentina polls have closed and the tightly contested and closely watched presidential runoff election. Much of the attention is on far-right Libertarian candidate Javier Milei, whose brash style and embrace of conspiracy theories have drawn comparisons to Donald Trump.

The second use is more resource-saving  than the third.

At my cottage in Canada, I have running water from a pump in the lake but not safe water. So in what we call the “bath hut” I have a bottle of clean water from which I pour a little into a Dixie cup when I brush my teeth. After I’ve finished brushing, I swirl the toothbrush around in the Dixie cup water and then empty the water.

I used to throw away the Dixie cup immediately after, but when I had a friend visiting last week, I noticed that he reused his. So I started doing the same.

What I found, though, is that the cup lost a lot of resilience after the second use. So I started throwing the cups away after the second use.

Then my numerate mind went to work. I realized that getting the second use was more important than getting the third use. Why?

Here’s why. Imagine that I’m at my cottage for 18 days, which is approximately right. If I use each Dixie cup once, I use 36 (one in the morning and one in the evening.) If I use each cup twice, I use 18 of them, saving 18 Dixie cups. If I use each cup 3 times, I use 12 of them, saving an additional 6.

 

So the saving in resources from a second use is triple the saving in resources from a third use.

The point generalizes. What if I went for a fourth use? Then I would use 9 cups. The saving from the fourth use would be only 3 cups. And so on.

What’s the point?

There are really two points.

The first is the power of thinking on the margin. The next use, in going from 2 to 3 uses, is less resource-saving than in going from 1 to 2 uses.

The second relates to an issue I worked on when I was the senior economist for energy with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers: the CAFE mandate. CAFE is short for Corporate Average Fuel Economy. The mandate was part of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, a law that President Ford signed in 1975. It was an indirect result of the price controls on gasoline, imposed by Nixon and kept by Ford. People were facing an artificially low price of gasoline and, OMG, were acting as if they were facing an artificially low price of gasoline. They weren’t switching to fuel-saving cars as quickly or extensively as many government energy planners thought they should.

So rather than get rid of the price controls, Congress and the president came up with a requirement that each auto manufacturer, for a given model year, reach an average fuel economy of x miles per gallon, where x steadily ratcheted up over the years.

I had 2 bosses at the CEA, chairman Martin Feldstein and member William Niskanen. Bill and I would have liked to repeal CAFE but that wasn’t going to happen. So we argued against further increases and in favor of relaxing the standards.

We were unsuccessful.

But here’s an argument that I didn’t emphasize but should have. The fuel economy saving from moving from a mandate of, say, 20 mpg to a mandate of 22 mpg is greater than the fuel economy saving of moving from 22 to 24. Imagine that in the United States, people drive their 100 million cars an average of 10,000 miles, for a total of 1 trillion miles. With an average mpg of 20, they use 50 billion gallons of gas. If the mandate is raised to 22, they use 45.5 billion gallons, for a saving of 4.5 billion gallons. But if the mandate is raised from 22 to 24, they use 41.7 billion gallons, for an extra saving of 3.8 billion gallons. If the mandate is raised from 24 to 26, they use 38.5 billion gallons, for an extra saving of 3.2 billion gallons. Notice that, just as with Dixie cups, each increment of required mph saves less gasoline than the previous increment.

I’m assuming away behavioral effects. The so-called rebound effect is that with higher mandate fuel economy, the price of an extra mile falls, and so people will drive more miles. But this assumption doesn’t hurt my reasoning because with each increment of mandate mpg, the rebound effect attenuates also.

So this is one of the things a microeconomist who studies regulation does on his vacation. Oops. I’m in Canada. Not vacation, but holiday.

The post Dixie Cups, CAFE Standards, and Numeracy appeared first on Econlib.