Pun Salad

From the good folks at Reason: Milton Friedman's warning to DOGE.

That "Iron Triangle" has labeled corners: Politicians, Beneficiaries, and Bureaucrats. They work together in symbiosis to stymie even small reductions in Uncle Stupid's spending.

But the Iron Triangle gets plenty of aid and comfort from spending-friendly media.

Example 1 today is Slashdot which picks up a WaPo report with a dire warning: America's NIH Scientists Have a Cancer Breakthrough. Layoffs are Delaying It..

Yup, the brave NIH researchers were FINALLY ABOUT TO WIN the 54-year old War on Cancer. But now we'll JUST HAVE TO WAIT, thanks to DOGE!

Remarkably convenient timing for that breakthrough, wasn't it?

But Example 2 is even more painful, because it comes from Indispensible Jim Geraghty; at his WaPo perch, he opines: Trump’s policies on learning and speaking English are incomprehensible.

I would have not expected Jim to churn out a boilerplate plea for funding some federal bureaucracy he likes, one indistinguishable in form from dozens, if not hundreds, appearing over the past few months.

I would not have expected his apparent assumption that taxpayer money going into a federal office will axiomatically cause lots more English-speaking students walking out of school doors across our fair land.

I mean, this is the guy who wrote The Weed Agency.

And now, more on tariffs, sorry:

• But Kevin, you say that as if it were a bad thing. Oh, wait. It is. Kevin D. Williamson observes: Our Treasury Secretary Is an Economic Illiterate.

  The number on your paycheck, in an economic vacuum, doesn’t mean anything at all. Wages are meaningful only in relation to prices—it is not the number on the check that matters but what you can get with it. If a beachfront property in Malibu cost $50 and a Rolls Royce cost $10, then the guy who makes $14,000 a year is fabulously rich. But a “six-figure income” is less something to boast about when the median house sold costs more than $400,000. A seven- or eight- or nine-figure income was basically nothing in Germany in the 1920s, when the price of a loaf of bread hit 200 billion Reichsmarks.

  You’d think that this would not need explaining to a man such as Scott Bessent, the hedge-fund guy who currently serves as Donald Trump’s treasury secretary—because, of course, Mr. “Real America” hires his help from Soros Fund Management. But during a speech to the Economic Club of New York—whose members somehow did not laugh themselves into aneurysms—Bessent declared: “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream. … The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security.”

  “Upward mobility” is another way of saying “higher real wages,” “real” in this context meaning “inflation-adjusted,” i.e., higher wages relative to overall prices. “Cheap goods” is another way of saying “goods with relatively low real prices,” meaning goods with low prices relative to wages. It surely was not lost on the members of the Economic Club of New York, sniggering discreetly into their pinstriped lapels, that lower real prices and higher real wages are, in the technical terminology of academic economics, the same goddamned thing. I don’t mean that one is as good as the other or that one is a useful substitute for the other—they are the same thing in the same way that 3+2 is the same thing as 2+3.

  Well, sure. I don't think Bessent is as dumb as he sounds. (He's a Yale grad, albeit not in economics.) The best explanation is hinted at in KDW's bottom line: he's fallen in with a bad crowd:

  Is a more affordable mortgage or insurance premium “the American dream” in full? Of course not.

  But, then again, neither is being bossed around by a semi-literate, porn-star-diddling game-show host and his dopey hedge-fund henchmen, who all seem to think what Americans really need is higher prices at Walmart.

• And that crowd is having some coherence problems. As described by Joe Lancaster: Trump advisors struggle to defend, or even explain, his tariff strategy. (Bessent makes another appearance.)

  As Trump's advisors took to the Sunday morning talk shows to defend their boss' plan, one thing became clear: There was no plan.

  "Are these tariffs permanent? Or are they a negotiating tactic?" Kristen Welker asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Meet the Press. "Some administration officials have said they're permanent. President Trump himself has said he's open to negotiating."

  […]

  But that wasn't the message every advisor was offering.

  "This is not a negotiation," White House trade advisor Peter Navarro told Fox News. "This is a national emergency based on a trade deficit that's gotten out of control because of cheating."

  "There is no postponing" the tariffs, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS. "They are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks." When asked about the other advisors' claims that 50 countries had offered to negotiate, Lutnick replied, "The tariffs are coming. He announced it, and he wasn't kidding."

  And, as the ancients foretold, the fish rots from the head.

  Amid mixed messaging from top White House officials, President Donald Trump was asked directly on Monday whether his sweeping tariffs are negotiable or here to stay.

  "They can both be true," Trump responded. "There can be permanent tariffs and there can also be negotiations because there are things that we need beyond tariffs."

  Just what jittery investors need to hear, Don.

• That pesky Constitution. Damon Root whines: Trump's tariffs violate the constitutional separation of powers.

  President Donald Trump has unilaterally imposed tariffs on much of the world. Yet the authority to impose tariffs is nowhere to be found in Article II of the Constitution, which is where the limited powers of the president are enumerated. Rather, the authority "to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises," as well as the authority "to regulate Commerce with Foreign nations," is to be found exclusively in Article I, which is where the powers of Congress are spelled out.

  Trump's trade war thus usurps the constitutional authority of Congress in violation of the separation of powers.

  The U.S. Supreme Court has confronted this sort of executive malfeasance before and struck it down with appropriate vigor in a number of notable cases. In Biden v. Nebraska (2023), for example, the Court declared President Joe Biden's student debt cancellation plan to be unlawful because it was an example of "the Executive seizing the power of the Legislature."

  Boy, there's something else thing we needed: another Constitutional crisis.

• Like Indy shaking off the evil spell in Temple of Doom. Virginia Postrel is Waiting for the Fever to Break.

  As Donald Trump disrupts international trade, sends suspected gangsters to indeterminate imprisonment in a Salvadoran hellhole without due process, wages war on the right to counsel, abandons American allies, and throws Ukraine under the bus—as Donald Trump does, in other words, pretty much what he promised—I haven’t written anything about this mess beyond retweeting the work of more energetic writers. Trump wants to make the United States a Peronist nation and a whole lot of people voted enthusiastically to go along with his mad ideas. Having watched friends and former allies enthusiastically embrace Trumpism, I feel like the loved ones of a smallpox victim after vaccination but before effective treatment. Yes, the illness might have been prevented. But now that it’s here, all we can do is let it run its course and hope the patient survives without too many scars.

  I’m both comforted and disheartened by historical perspective. Human history is as much a story of folly, ignorance, and cruelty as of genius, perseverance, and generosity. In particular my recent reading of Christopher Cox’s Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn is both encouraging and frightening. Someone—Jonah Goldberg maybe?—called Trump the worst human being to occupy the White House since Woodrow Wilson and, notwithstanding some notable villains, that seems about right. Cox makes the case that Wilson was awful on about every dimension imaginable. As president, he sought tyrannical powers with frightening success. But the nation survived him.

  I reported on Cox's bio of Wilson here. Fun fact: Both Wilson and Trump were enthusiastic users of John Adams' Alien Enemies Act, the only living legal remnant of the Alien and Sedition Acts.