Sep
4
2026

A Worthy Contender For Pun Salad's Official Motto

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Of course, our Amazon Eye Candy du Jour provides one possible choice. But Christian Schneider's headline in NR is pretty good too: There's No Problem Government Creates That It Can’t Make Worse. His current example:

Take socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani [Please -- PS], who has cooked up a plan to set up five government-owned grocery stores in the city. Mamdani has said that these city-owned stores, the last of which is set to open in 2029, will offer up to 30 percent discounts on some items.

Yet this government “solution” to higher grocery prices (exacerbated, incidentally, by the president’s actions to increase tariffs on imported goods), has run into an obvious roadblock. Local grocery stores and bodegas won’t be able to compete with taxpayer-subsidized stores, so many of them will go out of business, turning the supposed “food deserts” the government stores were meant to ameliorate into actual ones.

No problem, says Mamdani’s grocery czar — the city is considering “policies and programs, grants, incentives that can come alongside these grocery stores to support other local independent businesses.”

In other words, taxpayers are not only going to be forced to subsidize discounted groceries for certain shoppers; they are then going to be forced to subsidize other private grocery stores so they can compete with those government stores. The city wants to pour more cash into a problem the city itself is creating. (Nonetheless, the existing grocery stores and bodegas are suing the city to prevent this unfair competition from becoming a reality.)

It would probably make the motto too long, but I'd add the infuriating punchline: "… while insisting at every step it was doing you a favor."

But speaking of government-created problems, here's Gabriel R. Llanes at the Federalist describing another one: The Wealth Gap Is Real, And Washington Created It.

I have spent 17 years in Republican politics, and I owe my party a hard truth: The desperation those men feed on is arriving here. The gap between the wealthy and the middle class is real, it is growing, and it is unsustainable. Federal Reserve data now shows the top 1 percent of households holding nearly 32 percent of the nation’s wealth — more than the entire American middle class, the 50th through 90th percentiles, combined. The bottom half of the country holds 2.5 percent. Seven months ago, New York City, the capital of American capitalism, inaugurated a democratic socialist mayor. Voters are not imagining the disease. They are being sold the wrong diagnosis — and a cure my family has already survived twice.

Here is what actually happened. For decades, Washington spent money it did not have; the national debt has now crossed $40 trillion, and the government spends $1.33 for every dollar it collects. To keep that borrowing painless, the Federal Reserve turned to quantitative easing, creating trillions of new dollars to buy government bonds. The flood shows up in a statistic called M2, the total money in the economy: cash, checking, and savings. After 2020, M2 exploded by roughly 40 percent in two years, growth rates the St. Louis Fed notes exceeded even the inflationary 1970s.

When money multiplies that much faster than the goods it chases, prices rise, but never evenly. The new dollars land first in asset markets — stocks, bonds, real estate — and reach paychecks last. Economists have understood this since the 1700s; the Austrian school calls it the Cantillon effect. If your wealth was a portfolio and a home, the flood lifted you. If your wealth was a wage and a savings account, it drowned you. The wealth gap was not built by free markets. It was built by a government printing press, the largest quiet transfer of wealth from the middle class to the asset-holding class in American history.

I'm not a fan of the class-warfare implications—it's not the fault of the wealthy that they're in position to take advantage of monetary policy, and they don't deserve to be punished for it. Still…

Coincidentally, Bryan Caplan has a number of insightful Reflections on Americans’ Net Worth. Those reflections are based on the Federal Reserve's "Survey of Consumer Finances". And, as Bryan says, they demonstrate "the chasm between populist pessimism and actual data on Americans’ net worth."

Bryan has 20 of them. Here are the first three:

  1. Economists have long known that inequality is relatively low for consumption, medium for income, and high for wealth. What they rarely emphasize, however, is how much wealth depends on age. The richest Americans aged 65-69 are worth about 30x as much as the richest Americans aged 18-24.

  2. Net worth is very high in absolute terms. The median is over six figures by the mid-30s. Americans at the 75th percentile are millionaires by their mid-50s. Americans at the 90th percentile are millionaires by around 40. Claims about middle-class, middle-aged Americans who “can’t afford” eggs or gas or beef are nonsense.

  3. The most sensible argument for worrying about trade deficits is that we’re “living beyond our means.” Trade deficits represent borrowing, and we can’t keep borrowing forever. But given Americans’ extraordinary net worth, the most sensible argument for worrying is still senseless. After 50 years of unbroken trade deficits, we’re wealthier than ever.

… and I recommend you check out numbers 4-20.

Also of note:

  • Unfortunately, we're all collateral damage. Daniel Hannan notes bellicosity: JD Vance declares war on economics.

    JD Vance is the latest postliberal to embrace what is now, for all intents and purposes, an anti-growth position.

    In his latest book, Communion, Vance inveighs against those perennial straw men, the GDP-obsessed economists. We keep hearing about these mysterious figures, cold-hearted calculators who believe that GDP is the only measure that counts. Oddly, despite running the world’s foremost classical liberal think tank, I have yet to meet one.

    Vance, though, is convinced that people who “struggle to put a value on anything that can’t be specifically measured” not only exist, but run America. The country is governed, he tells us, “by numbers on a spreadsheet and the people who built those spreadsheets.”

    Also in the running for Pun Salad Official Motto: "Beware politicians who claim to know what would make you truly happy."

  • Good question. And the WaPo editorial board asks it: State control over oil broke Venezuela. Why is Trump doubling down? (WaPo gifted link)

    President Donald Trump’s removal of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro in January offered a generational opportunity to counteract the failures of Venezuela’s socialist policies. A pro-America opposition appeared ready to usher in a free market and end the state’s suffocating grip on oil production. Eight months later, the White House’s deal with Maduro’s former vice president risks entrenching the people and policies that tanked the country’s economy in the first place.

    Under the sketchy terms of an agreement Trump unveiled this week with Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, the Pentagon receives a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, which has just been granted 100-year concessions to drill in 17 oil fields that contain an estimated 65 billion barrels. The State Department receives rights to buy 20 percent of the output at cost and gets first dibs on purchasing the remainder. The Venezuelan government would purportedly receive $200 billion in tax and royalty payments over the next 25 years.

    The Trump administration has earned a bad reputation for crony capitalism by taking equity stakes in at least 30 private companies, including Intel and Westinghouse. But a deal of this magnitude makes the U.S. government, at least on paper, one of the world’s largest corporate holders of oil. State control of the industry was an original sin of Chavismo, named for left-wing populist strongman Hugo Chávez, whose despotic rule from 1999 to 2013 included a nationalization drive that kicked off Venezuela’s economic death spiral.

    Also in the running for Pun Salad Official Motto: "Beware politicians who think they can run businesses."

  • And finally: do not vote for any pol who babbles about "genocide". And don't believe what you read in the New York Times, either: Because, as David Harsanyi documents: The 'Gaza Genocide' Is a Hoax.

    In May 2025, Tom Fletcher, the United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, went on BBC Radio and told the audience that 14,000 babies in Gaza were going to die "in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them."

    According to UNICEF, there are around 20,000 babies in the entirety of Gaza. Which means 70% of all infants were in danger of dying in mere hours. An "utterly chilling" figure, Fletcher stressed.

    The New York Times, along with numerous other establishment media outlets, relayed Fletcher's allegation to its credulous audience without any skepticism. The usual experts were summoned to discuss this unfolding famine on cable news. And the antisemites across social media amplified the claim.

    No matter how far-fetched a story is about Israel, including preposterous evidence-free accusations that it trains dogs to rape Palestinians, papers such as The New York Times will spread it to feed the perception that the Jewish state operates as a genocidal entity. And no matter how often the claims are debunked, they keep at it.

    David lays out the facts. His bottom line: "There is no genocide. And there was no famine. There was a war. And the bad guys lost."

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