May
11
2025

Sorry, "Our Money" Is Not Your Money

Today's Getty Eye Candy has the description:

Protesters Rally Against Elon Musk Outside OPM Office

WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 05: Protesters rally outside of the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building headquarters of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on February 05, 2025 in Washington, DC. The group of federal employees and supporters are protesting against Elon Musk, tech billionaire and head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and his aids [sic] who have been given access to federal employee personal data and have allegedly locked out career civil servants from the OPM computer systems.

Ah, good times. But I wanted to point out the "HANDS OFF OUR MONEY!" sign. Being held up by (it appears) a masked man, appropriately. And… well, see my headline.

In the present day, James Freeman is not sympathetic to the plight of the masked men. He thinks Washington Needs a Lot More DOGE (gifted link).

Media outlets continue to report that Elon Musk and his DOGE colleagues are aggressively slashing and burning their way through the Beltway bureaucracy. Sadly for taxpayers, the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office keep telling a different story. Specifically, CBO’s monthly updates consistently show Washington on the same unsustainable spending bender that it’s been on for years.

CBO reports today:

The federal budget deficit totaled $1.1 trillion in the first seven months of fiscal year 2025, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Adjusting for some shifts in the timing of payments, that sad ocean of red ink is $123 billion larger than the shortfall at this time last year. This means another year of an annual federal deficit that approaches $2 trillion. Federal spending continues to increase at a rate of about 7% compared with the same period last year, so there’s no austerity in Washington.

But there's plenty of delusion.

Also of note:

  • Who made him the Doll and Pencil Commissar anyway? Emma Camp speaking truth to power: Trump is wrong. Cheap goods are awesome.

    Donald Trump doesn't think Americans deserve stuff. The right number of pencils for a family? Five. The right number of dolls for a little girl? Two, maybe three. His comments in recent interviews bear a striking similarity to those of left-wing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), who in 2015 famously bemoaned that consumers have too many deodorant options.

    How did Trump—who campaigned on a promise of reducing inflation—become so eager to have Americans pay more for everyday commodities? While Trump may have made overtures to reducing prices, he's long supported the kinds of economic interventions most likely to lead to inflation. And if you believe that protectionism is the path to prosperity for everyday Americans, your definition of prosperity starts to change pretty quickly.

    Just a few months into his second term, Trump has so far enacted a sweeping protectionist agenda. He's levied staggering tariffs that have hiked prices on everything from mattresses to cars to strollers and tanked the stock market. However, Trump and his defenders have remained strident, arguing that Americans just don't need affordable imported goods.

    I guess you don't get to the top of either party these days without being an arrogant asshole, eager to assume you're the best person to determine what Americans "really need".

  • Achtung, kinder! Wie viel uhr ist es? At Skeptic, Gerald Posner answers: It’s Time for Papal Transparency on the Holocaust.

    The Catholic Church has a new leader—Pope Leo XIV—born in 1955 in Chicago, Robert Francis Prevost is the first American to head the church and serve as sovereign of the Vatican City State. Many Vatican watchers will be looking for early signs that Pope Leo XIV intends to continue the legacy of Pope Francis for reforming Vatican finances and for making the church a more transparent institution.

    There is one immediate decision he could make that would set the tone for his papacy. Pope Leo could order the release of the World War II archives of the Vatican Bank, the repository with files that would answer lingering questions of how much the Catholic Church might have profited from wartime investments in Third Reich and Italian Fascist companies and if it acted as a postwar haven for looted Nazi funds. By solving one of last great mysteries about the Holocaust, Pope Leo would embrace long overdue historical transparency that had proved too much for even his reform-minded predecessor.

    I would like to think the church has nothing to hide. But if so then why so secretive?

    But my main takeaway from the article is: Whoa, I am older than the Pope.

  • Jonah Goldberg says "shibboleth", I say … how do you pronounce that anyway? Before you answer, be glad you don't live in Ephraim.

    But back to Jonah, who writes on The ‘Neoliberalism’ Shibboleth.

    My friend Cliff Asness is fond of tweeting his dismay over the horseshoeing of American politics when it comes to economics (and other things). One of his pithier expressions of this lament: “We now have two economically far left (and economically ignorant) parties, they just differ in their preferred pronouns.”

    Now, Cliff isn’t using “pronouns” literally. His point is that the fringier economic policies of the left and the fringier economic policies of the right are substantially similar but culturally or stylistically opposed to each other. If you’re an advocate for industrial policy on the left, you’ll use different buzz-phrases and shibboleths than an advocate of industrial policy on the right will. But you’re still for industrial policy. You might have different winners and losers in mind, but you’re still picking winners and losers. Then again, sometimes, both the left and right are just haggling over the same constituency, making losers of everybody else.

    Might be paywalled. Subscribe, hippie.