Mar
14
2025

Cut, Baby, Cut

Note that today's Getty Image du Jour is dated June 1, 2023. It's 652 days later, and that number on the debt clock now (as I type) starts with "36" instead of "31". And, yes, that's trillions.

So in those 652 days, Uncle Stupid managed to spend $5 trillion of money he didn't actually have on hand.

James Freeman at the WSJ has some fun with Democrat antics, as they have apparently decided NOT to filibuster their way to a dreaded "government shutdown": And You Thought Schumer Was Upset. He quotes this bit from the Congressional Budget Office's Monthly Budget Review:

The federal budget deficit totaled $1.1 trillion in the first five months of fiscal year 2025, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. That amount is $319 billion more than the deficit recorded during the same period last fiscal year. Revenues were $37 billion (or 2 percent) higher, and outlays were $356 billion (or 13 percent) higher.

And it appears things will continue on that path for a while.

Veronique de Rugy reports: If the U.S. wants to cut spending, it can't ignore the Pentagon Most don't doubt that "defense" is a legitimate function of Your Federal Government, but…

In a February 22 post on X, DOGE announced that it held a preliminary meeting with the Defense Department and that it looks forward to "working together to safely save taxpayer dollars and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse." Heaven knows the DOD needs such supervision. Since Congress began requiring annual audits in 2018, it has never passed a single full audit.

As of late 2024, it had failed for the seventh year in a row, unable to fully account for an $824 billion annual budget. Pause and think about that: Much of the nation's single largest chunk of discretionary spending can't be completely tracked. Let's hope the DOD is better at protecting us from foreign enemies than tracking its own expenses.

One Pentagon official dryly noted that "things are showing progress, but it's not enough" and a "clean" audit is still years away. Imagine a taxpayer offering this answer to an IRS auditor.

I'm currently in the midst of preparing my tax return, and I note that the "Tax Reporting Statement" I got from Fidelity is 194 pages of smallish type. I didn't print it out. I'm glad TurboTax just slurps it up and (hopefully) puts the numbers in the right places.

(To be fair, a couple of those 194 pages are "intentionally left blank". Which means they aren't blank, they have "** This Page Intentionally Left Blank **" printed on them, which makes my brain hurt.)

Also of note:

  • Meanwhile, the DOJ is at the blackjack table, playing with taxpayer money. And Jack Nicastro reports: Justice Department doubles down against Google.

    The Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted its revised proposed final judgment on Friday to Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in its antitrust case against Google, which now spans three presidential administrations.

    The DOJ and the attorneys general of 11 states brought the case against Google under the first Trump administration in October 2020, accusing the company of monopolizing the search engine market. The plaintiffs accused the company of "implementing and enforcing a series of exclusionary agreements with distributors" to foreclose rivals from the search engine market.

    The DOJ criticized Google for paying Apple around $10 billion every year to make Google the default search engine on Safari, Apple's default web browser, and Siri—though savvy users can change it. The Justice Department also identified Google's "anti-forking" agreements as anticompetitive. These agreements require Android manufacturers to use Google's version of the Android operating system and provide default distribution of Google's apps and search engine. Manufacturers who don't comply lose access to the Google Play services and are excluded from lucrative revenue sharing agreements.

    Jack says, in his bottom line, that this "bodes poorly for domestic investment, innovation, and consumer welfare."

  • Somber note. I trust Reason's Ron Bailey to tell it to us straight, when he asks: How many Americans have died of COVID-19?

    Since Trump's COVID-19 national emergency declaration [on March 13, 2020], COVID-19 has either been the underlying cause of or contributed to the deaths of some 1.3 million Americans.

    That's a lot. Ron notes the checkered history of US government policy. Which, as we know, included plenty of blunders, misinformation, censorship, misdirected priorities, and incorrect guesses. All of which contributed to the death toll.

  • Another vote for US on UTC. And it's from that Grumpy Economist, John Cochrane: Time and Money.

    Daylight savings time is like inflation. The analogy helps to understand both.

    If we abandon time changes, should we use standard or daylight saving time all year round? Media and x were batting that question around last week. Daylight saving time seems to mean kids to standing out in the dark for the school bus in the winter. Standard time misses a lot of pleasant summer evenings.

    The answer is: it doesn’t matter. If we move to permanent daylight saving time, and people think that’s too early to get to school or work, they will adjust business or store hours to be an hour later.

    Imagine that we eliminated time zones, and switched to UTC (GMT). That’s (currently) 7 hours ahead of Palo Alto. Heavens, do you want all the schoolchildren to have to show up at 1 AM (8:00 AM UTC?) Of course not. The schools would just change their opening hour to 15:00.

    John notes that Milton Friedman wrote on this topic back in 1953. I was only two years old then, but somehow I must have picked up some psychic vibes that stuck with me up to now.

  • I'm not becoming a Junior fan. But I wouldn't mind dining at an establishment whose deep fryers used beef tallow. And there's another good idea available expressed by Charles Lane at the Free Press, who asks Can MAHA Beat the Junk Food Lobby?

    The vibe shift is powerful. But is it powerful enough to beat Big Soda and Big Grocery?

    Obesity and its evil twin—diabetes—are corroding America’s health. These chronic ailments also disproportionately afflict the poor. Yet for years, the federal government has been paying for soda, cookies, candy, and other nutritionally empty, obesity-engendering foods, via its main source of anti-hunger aid for low-income people: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as food stamps.

    Now, though, the lobbies’ hammerlock may be breakable, thanks to a convergence of interests between GOP spending hawks, both state and federal, and the MAHA movement, led by the new secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

    RFK Jr., America’s stopped clock, is wrong much of the time—witness his disparagement of the measles vaccine, a position that looks even worse amid an outbreak of the disease in Texas and New Mexico. One thing he’s not wrong about, though, is that federal subsidies support the production and consumption of unhealthful foods.

    Unfortunately, Junior's at HHS, and SNAP is under the USDA. But maybe something good will come out of "America's stopped clock". Come to think of it, that's a pretty good metaphor for the entire Trump II Administration.