Category Archives: Economics

What are the goals of Trump’s tariffs?

President Trump announced Friday another pause on some tariffs on products imported from Canada and Mexico after a rocky week for equities markets trying to price in their effects. At the same, he says that tariffs could go higher than 25% in the future.

Trump’s stated reason for imposing the tariffs on the two USMCA partners is their failure to control illegal immigration and drug trafficking across their borders into the United States. Apparently, the president believes tariffs are the cure for just about anything, including illegal immigration.

But in a Q&A aboard Air Force One, Trump returned to the more traditional mercantilist arguments in favor of tariffs that he campaigned on. Asked if he is worried about a recession, Trump replied no, adding,

“All I know is this. We’re going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs and we’re going to become so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend all that money, I’m telling you, you just watch. We’re going to have jobs, we’re going to have open factories, and it’s going to be great, and the plane is landing, and thank you for a lot of good questions. Thank you very much.”

There is a lot to unpack in that relatively short answer.

First, the president seems to believe taxing and spending are the keys to a strong economy. He tells the reporter “you’re not going to know where to spend all that money.” But it won’t be the reporter or anyone else in the private sector spending the money. It will be the government.

He also says the tariffs will collect “hundreds of billions of dollars.” As the president has also suggested tariffs could replace the income tax, it is worth noting that would require thousands of billions of dollars, not hundreds. Three thousand billion, to be exact, when counting the $500 billion in corporate taxes collected last year in addition to $2.5 trillion in personal income taxes.

But the last part of his answer carries the main foundation of Trump’s economic vision.

Candidate Trump promised tariffs would protect domestic manufacturers and their employees from cheaper foreign competition. Indeed, imposing tariffs similar to those imposed upon U.S. imports to its trading partners would cause manufacturing productions and jobs lost to China and other, lower labor cost countries would return to the United States. All this begs the question: What is the goal of the tariffs? Are they meant to collect revenue, perhaps enough to replace the income tax, or to protect domestic production? “Both!” Trump and his supporters would probably answer. It’s win-win. Americans will be so tired of winning some might be hospitalized for exhaustion. But tariffs can’t do both. It’s physically impossible.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Trump’s cuts could cause (necessary) economic pain

On Sunday, President Trump posted the following to his Truth Social account:

ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE. REMEMBER, WE HAVE A COUNTRY TO SAVE, BUT ULTIMATELY, TO MAKE GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE. MAGA!

For any supporters concerned Trump’s resolve to cut federal spending might moderate that would seem to allay those concerns for the moment. And despite all the wailing coming from beneficiaries of federal largesse, the cuts made so far don’t even amount to a haircut for the federal leviathan.

To put them in perspective, the cuts proposed so far by the administration, based upon recommendations by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), are all within a the category of the federal budget called “Discretionary Spending.” Discretionary spending for fiscal year 2025 is projected to be $1.848 trillion. Overall spending is projected to be $7.028 trillion.

So, DOGE is only looking to make cuts to about one quarter of total spending. About half of that one quarter is Defense spending at $859 billion. Trump has said he wants to cut military spending, but that appears to be contingent upon China and Russia agreeing to cut theirs in a future, theoretical deal.

Meanwhile, the Senate just passed a spending bill that increases defense spending by $150 billion.

That leaves about one eighth of the budget affected by DOGE cuts. And DOGE certainly isn’t even trying to cut all of that one eighth.

Still, what cuts are made have the potential to punch far above their weight. Closing down USAID, for example, even if a lot of its funds are eventually spent, constitutes a major policy change given the revelations about what the agency was doing with those funds. Opponents of everything from covert regime change operations to censoring domestic political speech may be quite pleased with the difference firing just a handful of federal employees might make.

There is also the potential for outsized economic pain from cutting a relatively small percentage of the federal budget. Given the Federal Reserve’s $5 trillion tsunami of new money created since 2020, the U.S. economy is in an “everything bubble” and even marginal cuts to federal spending might be the pin that pops it.

Bubbles represent capital deployed for nonproductive ends and need to be popped. But no one is happy when it happens. Typically, bubbles blow up under one president and pop under the next. Guess who gets the blame?

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Is the Federal Reserve Loosening or Tightening and What Will It Do Next?

Since September, Jerome Powell’s Federal Reserve System has been cutting rates as if a financial crisis were looming. Just as in 2006, Powell raised the federal funds rate to 5.25 percent in the summer of 2023 and left it there until September of the following year. This past September, he cut rates by 50 percent in September and by 25 more basis points at the following Fed meeting just as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke did Starting in September 2007. We all know what happened next.

That’s where the similarity ends, however, when it comes to overall monetary policy. When Bernanke started his cuts in September 2007, he did so the way the Fed had always done so, with open market operations. The Fed began buying government securities from its member banks, thereby increasing the supply of dollars available to those banks, which forced the federal funds rate down. That’s not the way it’s done anymore.

After Bernanke embarked on what he euphemistically called, “quantitative easing,” which is basically doing the same open market operations on steroids, a new dynamic emerged. Since the member banks accumulated large deposits at the Federal Reserve, something they never had before, interest rate policy became separated from management of the money supply.

No longer did the Fed accomplish a lower fed funds rate by buying securities to supply member banks with more dollars. It now could simply lower the interest rate it paid on member bank deposits at the Fed to incentivize member banks to lend to each other at a lower rate. Doing so without actually increasing the base money supply will encourage commercial bank lending but does not have the exponential effect that both lower interest rates and more “base money” can have.

Commercial banks also create money when they lend on a fractional reserve, but it is limited compared to the money created by the Fed. If the Fed lowers interest rates, commercial banks are incentivized to make more loans, creating new money, but that money is “destroyed” once the loans are repaid. Thus, commercial bank monetary inflation reaches an equilibrium point, with occasional deflations, if the Fed doesn’t change the money supply.

The same money creation and destruction dynamic applies to the Fed itself but on a much larger scale. Money is also destroyed when loans held by the Fed are paid down, thus decreasing the base money supply. But the Fed has always been a net creator of money over the long term, which is why consumer prices have always increased over the long term.

That brings us to today, where the Fed seems to be unburdened by what has been, as Vice President Kamala Harris would say. That’s because unlike in autumn 2007, when the Fed’s balance sheet increased by necessity to achieve its first two rate cuts, its balance sheet has decreased since beginning cuts this past September. This is just continuing the monetary tightening the Fed began in 2022 when its balance sheet peaked at $8.9 trillion. Through August of 2024 it has reduced its balance sheet to $7.1 trillion and kept on reducing it right through its September and November rate cuts to $6.9 trillion, where it stood as of its November 21, 2024 release.

So, the Fed is lowering the federal funds rate while decreasing the money supply. So, is it loosening or tightening? One could make an argument either way and it gets even more complicated than that.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

No, Republican Tax Cuts Did Not Contribute to the National Debt

During his first term, Donald Trump signed a bill significantly reducing corporate tax rates and lowering personal income tax liability for most Americans. He has promised to further lower income tax rates for corporations and individuals in his forthcoming second term.

This has provided the opportunity for Democrats and other opponents of tax reductions to make the perennial claim that tax cuts signed by Republican presidents have and will continue to blow up the national debt. This claim is demonstrably false.

There are some economic issues that provide room for argument depending upon which economic school one adheres to. However, this issue is not debatable. No tax cut signed by a Republican in the past fifty years has increased the debt more than it would have otherwise increased had the tax cut not been implemented.

It’s easy to understand why the public believes this superficially plausible claim. If the government is running deficit X under the current tax schedule and that tax schedule is reduced, the government will collect less revenue and the deficit will increase to X + less revenue collected. It makes perfect sense.

The only problem is it has never been the case that the government collected less revenue after a Republican tax cut. Never. Ever.

Don’t take my word for it. Just look at tax receipts. Since this tax cut/debt fable began during the Reagan years, look at tax receipts after the tax cuts he signed. They increased so significantly that by his last year in office the government was collecting almost double the amount of taxes it was collecting in Carter’s last year.

While this may seem counterintuitive, it is nevertheless true. The explanation probably lies in what has come to be known as the “Laffer Curve,” named after economist Art Laffer. This theory also has its own little Democratic Party myth built into it. Democrats like to claim Laffer was wrong when he said “tax cuts pay for themselves.” This myth is wrong in two ways.

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administrations. Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Job Creation Still Hasn’t Recovered from the Useless Covid Lockdowns

“Dow closes at record high after blow-out jobs report” proclaimed NBC News on Saturday. It is not surprising the story would ignore all historical perspective, even history within the past few months. Incumbent presidents routinely take credit for job creation during their administrations and the gullible American public largely believes them. Perceived as prospectively continuing the policies of the Biden administration, good news from the jobs report helps Kamala Harris’s election chances.

It isn’t just ignoring that only two months ago, the Bureau of Labor statistics revised downward their previously reported number April 2023 – March 2024 by over 800,000 jobs (around 27 percent)*. It’s the surreal practice of even talking about supposed job creation over the past four years as if most of it weren’t just recovering jobs lost during the 2020 Covid lockdowns.

During March and April of 2020, the BLS reported net job losses of almost 22 million. Of course, these were not the type of job losses sustained during the 2008 financial crisis. These were people ordered to stay home by the government as part of a suite of responses to Covid that did nothing but harm.

As people were allowed to go back to work, there were several months for which the BLS reported millions of “jobs created.” But everyone understood these were mostly just people previously ordered to stay home returning to work. At least while Trump was still president.

But once Joe Biden was inaugurated, the national media started ignoring that reality and treating higher than usual jobs reports as vindication of “Bidenomics.” The truth is it took years just to recover the number of jobs lost during March-April 2020. The 22 million jobs reported lost during that period were not added back until September 2022.

That’s 31 straight months of zero jobs created on net while millions of undocumented mouths to feed entered the country. That is an economic blow the likes of which modern Americans have never experienced in their lifetimes. And the problems it created were by no means solved after September 2022 when the economy finally began adding new jobs on net. One cannot just start counting jobs created after September 2022 as “net jobs.” One also has to recognize the opportunity costs of the lockdowns.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? 

Why Federal Reserve rate cuts won’t matter as much this time

Equity markets continued to sell off on Monday prompting continued calls for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in September. Combined with the dismal jobs report on Friday, the selloff has also soured the outlook for a “soft landing.” Economist Mohamed El-Erian echoed the opinions of many others that the Fed held interest rates too high for too long, thus failing to prevent a recession and sharp stock market correction.

Putting aside the free market objections to the Fed being involved in manipulating interest rates – or existing at all – this analysis is useless at best for several reasons.

First, Fed rate cuts always come “too late” in the business cycle to prevent market crashes and recessions. Looking back at Fed open market operations history, one can see that even when the Fed had been cutting rates for over a year, as it had been prior to the 2008 crash, it did not prevent the bubble it had previously blown up from popping.

There are several reasons why the Fed will always be “too late.” The first is fundamental. While the Fed is holding interest rates artificially low, malinvestment is occurring. Capital is being directed towards projects that aren’t really profitable at market interest rates. These can include unwarranted expansion of otherwise profitable business ventures or capitalization of projects that shouldn’t be launched at all (see “Pets.com” from the 2000 dotcom crash).

At some point, the reality of unprofitable investments fueled by unsustainable debt asserts itself and those malinvestments must be undone. The market overcomes the efforts of the Fed and liquidates unprofitable ventures, unsustainable debt, and, unfortunately, millions of jobs that never should have been created in the first place. All of the above must be redirected towards better use, which takes time. That period of reallocation is called a recession.

It should be noted that even the Fed’s efforts to avoid recessions with monetary policy are wrongheaded. What it attempts to do with interest rate policy and monetary inflation is keep inefficient, unprofitable businesses alive. These are sometimes called “zombie companies” because they aren’t really viable going concerns. They are only able to keep operating because the Fed creates conditions under which they can borrow money at artificially low rates.

Regardless, economic laws are like forces of nature. They always win in the end, often immediately after supposed experts announce their demise. Recall Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s 2008 reassurance that “subprime is contained” or President Bill Clinton’s triumphant 2000 declaration that “we’ve ended the business cycle.”

This time around, Fed rate cuts may have even less chance of achieving the mythical “soft landing.” That’s because part of what used to be part and parcel of rate cuts has already been done, namely monetary inflation or as it is now euphemistically called, “quantitative easing.”

Prior to 2008, the Fed achieved rate cuts by purchasing government debt securities in open market operations. This simultaneously added new dollars to the economy and drove down interest rates. The latter was simply supply and demand. A greater supply of money meant its price – interest rates – declined. Conversely, when the Fed wanted to raise interest rates, it sold securities to its member banks, decreasing the supply of money.

Since the 2008 crisis, the Fed doesn’t manage interest rates that way anymore. Because its member banks built up huge deposits at the Fed, for which the Fed paid them interest, it could now manipulate interest rates by simply changing the rate it paid its member banks. This effectively separated interest rate policy from the creation of new dollars or the destruction of existing ones.

The Fed’s response to the 2008 crisis was twofold. It forced interest rates down to near-zero by lowering the rate it paid on deposits and added trillions of new dollars to the economy by purchasing government and mortgage-backed securities. It promised at the time to unwind the vast expansion of its balance sheet – from less than $1 trillion to over $4 trillion – when the “once in a lifetime crisis” was over.

But after unwinding only a small fraction of that increase 2018-19 coupled with modest interest rate increases, the Fed increased its balance sheet to just under $9 trillion and took interest rates back to the zero bound in 2020.

This is where it gets complicated. Conventional wisdom says the Fed began “tightening” in 2022 with the first in a series of interest rate increases in March and reduction of its balance sheet later in the year. Indeed, the Fed did eventually raise the federal funds rate to over 5% (where it remains today) and reduce its balance sheet from a peak of $8.9 trillion to about $7.2 trillion as of this writing.

However, the balance sheet reduction is not the tightening it appears to be. That is because even though the Fed has reduced its balance sheet and the M2 money supply has decreased slightly from its 2022 high, a “stealth easing” has been occurring that no one is really talking about.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? He writes weekly articles on his Substack.

Why are most people so eager to accept the suicidal climate change narrative?

Most people probably don’t realize what terms like “net zero” really mean in terms of their way of life. I use the words “way of life” purposely instead of “standard of living” because I don’t believe the latter term conveys the magnitude of the effect eliminating fossil fuel use would have.

Eliminating fossil fuels would return civilization to a pre-industrial existence, one which a large percentage of the current world population would not survive. Those who did survive would live at a level far below what anyone living in the fossil fuel-powered world could even imagine.

So, why are so many so eager to embrace a narrative that promises such hardship for themselves and their children? Certainly, there is some delusional belief that “renewable” energy will replace most fossil fuel energy, but it seems impossible that most people honestly believe that. Regardless, their leaders are coming right out and telling them a substantial lowering of their standard of living will be necessary – what Barack Obama often called “shared sacrifice.”

Whether Mr. Obama or his ilk will be doing any of the sharing is a subject for another day.

Before trying to explain the average American’s willingness to believe, I will tell you my own reaction to the climate change narrative from the perspective of one who remembers when it was not a major issue, even for environmentalists. It is only fair that I do my best to explain my own biases as they were when “climate change” first became a thing.

Unlike most people I know, I’ve always had a predisposition towards the free market. I had it long before it would have ever occurred to me to say the words “free market.” But even while working those first, minimum wage jobs everyone works in their teens or early twenties, I had a general impression that commerce was a good thing and business owners were making a positive contribution to society.

This despite a liberal arts education that, in retrospect, did everything it could to convince me otherwise.

This impression was bolstered by my even earlier interest in history. History, or “social studies,” as it was called in my Catholic grammar school, was my favorite subject. I did well in it. If you asked any of my grammar school classmates in 1979 what I was going to be when I grew up, most would have guessed history teacher.

An interest in history and a predisposition towards the free market aren’t mutually exclusive, the overwhelming anti-capitalist bias in modern college history departments notwithstanding. In fact, any objective look at the history of the past five hundred years would only confirm one’s belief in the free market.

All this is relevant to the way I saw the climate change narrative when it first became one of the dominant narratives in the major media. Having a knowledge of history that supported my pro-free market disposition, I found the climate change narrative extremely dubious right from the start.

Let’s review what we were asked to believe at the time. We have a certain political movement that promoted an alternative economic system to capitalism for hundreds of years. That economic system was implemented to various degrees in virtually every country in the world. And at the moment it spectacularly failed, its proponents suddenly discovered a threat to the planet that could only be solved by adopting that failed system.

Are you kidding?

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? 

Trying to ‘create jobs’ is dumb

It is the first week of the month, meaning we can expect a new ADP jobs report on Wednesday and the foolishly much-anticipated BLS jobs report on Friday. Based upon whether jobs created in March based on the report beats or misses expectations, President Biden will either gloat about the results or talk about something else.

Biden is certainly not unique in this respect. Every president since the report was created has tried to take credit for the jobs created during his administration. In most cases, pronouncements on this subject are carefully worded to read literally that “XXX jobs were created during my administration,” acknowledging that perhaps some other factors contributed to the supposed new jobs than the dear leader’s will and mighty actions alone.

So, at least we have that.

Nevertheless, the tweet we can expect from the president on Friday, BLS willing and the creek don’t rise, will imply heavily that it was his policies that are directly responsible for the hundreds of thousands of new jobs the report says were created the previous month.

There are several problems with this whole scenario, the most serious among them being that the Federal Reserve considers this report (or an alternative report based on the same methodology) in deciding how to conduct monetary policy going forward. Voters also take these reports seriously, to the extent they remember them on election day, and certainly the pronouncements of the incumbent president on the total number of jobs created during his previous term.

The first thing people should understand is the jobs report is largely fiction. It is not a literal tabulation of the total number of jobs created minus those lost. No one knows that information. Rather, the BLS conducts a phone survey, applies some formulas, and largely guesses how many jobs were created. It’s not as if there is nothing to it, but it is a very imprecise tool. That’s why it is common for the BLS to significantly adjust its findings for previous months while reporting the latest findings. And even the adjustments are based largely on voodoo.

Think climate change models. Or Covid mortality projections from March 2020. The BLS jobs report may or may not be quite that bad. But as the great Vincent Vega would say, “It’s the same ballpark.”

But while poking holes in the methodology of the jobs report is good fun for nonbelievers in the government religion, it misses the main point: trying to ‘create jobs’ in the first place is dumb. It is economically counterproductive. It’s the opposite of what any for-profit business should be trying to do.

Whether bringing a new product to market or simply trying to remain competitive in an existing market, businesses are constantly trying to produce more products at lower cost. The most significant costs for most businesses are labor costs. Therefore, businesses are constantly trying to produce more output with less employees.

Less jobs, not more.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

There is no such thing as ‘regulatory capture’

I was in the hearing aid business a few decades ago. As a minority shareholder and chief operations officer, it was my job to build out a network of retail stores, manage our manufacturing operations, and manage the relationship with a foreign manufacturer that provided us products not previously available on the American market. We also had a plan to sell less expensive hearing devices in pharmacies.

Opening our first retail store was an exciting endeavor. We had a good location in a plaza with a solid anchor on a very busy intersection. We prepared our grand opening for months and were understandably excited for our first day of business. We ran ads in all the local newspapers and looked forward to our first patient walking through the door.

The advertisements did generate phone calls, but the first one was not from a potential customer. It was from the State Department of Health, informing us there had been a complaint about one of our newspaper ads. We were required to submit a response to the complaint after which the department would make a determination of its validity and any further action against or required of us.

Obviously, the complaint didn’t come from a customer; we had no customers yet. The complaint came from a local competitor who literally waited for our first hour in business to call the state. This is the way the world works.

The complaint was found to be without merit – our ad was not misleading or out of compliance with any regulations – but it certainly took the edge off an otherwise happy day. We lived and learned.

A few years later, after confirming there were regulatory barriers to selling “assistive listening devices” (not quite hearing aids, but helpful for mild hearing loss at about 1/10th the price), we tried to lobby the state legislature ourselves. We successfully got our revision to the applicable statutes into a bill about other matters that was sure to pass and were told by the lobbyists we hired that it appeared we would be successful.

Then, on the very last day of the legislative session, the language was taken out after an all-out assault by a much better-funded set of lobbyists claiming our devices would be dangerous if not fitted by an audiologist.

Obviously, our device that peaked at 30 decibels (the average iPod at the time peaked at over one hundred decibels) posed no health risk to those who used it. But it did pose a revenue risk to those who hired the lobbyists – the audiologists. They also argued that hearing loss in some cases indicated other health issues that may not be discovered if the patient didn’t have an exam by a licensed professional before attempting to treat their hearing loss.

In 2022, the FDA approved the sale of full-blown hearing aids over-the-counter (OTC). Apparently, those other health conditions are no longer a concern. The big corporations have finally adapted their business models to include lower cost products and thus they can be allowed without small upstarts like our little firm disrupting their dominance. So, for almost twenty years, consumers were deprived of a significantly lower cost option for hearing loss for no valid reason whatsoever.

This is the way the world works.

One might ask, “How can you say there is no such thing as regulatory capture after having those experiences yourself?”

Simple. The term ‘regulatory capture’ implies there were once regulatory agencies that operated in an adversarial relationship with large corporations for the so-called “public good” that were later ‘captured’ by those corporations and made to serve the corporations’ interests. But that never happened.

‘Regulation’ itself is and has been from the very beginning a practice created by large corporations for the sole purpose of crippling or eliminating competitors.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? 

Progressivism, Trump or Biden-style, is one giant rip-off

2024 is a presidential election year which means both major political parties will be telling their fairy tales about how they have in the past and will again in the future, if you will only elect their man, “save America.” It’s important to remember that both political parties are “progressive” parties, however one of them may object to that appellation. The Republicans merely embody the original progressive profile: fervently Christian, Republican, and corporatist.

The only difference in the Democratic Party is the Christian part. They are equally as religious but have replaced Jesus Christ with “Gaia” or more commonly “the environment.” But otherwise, they’re essentially the same.

We will hear much this year about the supposed gulf in ideology between the two parties. One claims to champion free markets, individual liberty, and limited government, while the other claims to look out for the little guy, protect the earth for and from future generations of humans, and pursue a more “equitable” distribution of wealth.

But once in power, either party will essentially do the same thing with only slight differences in emphasis. They will both govern as progressives have governed for the past one hundred plus years. And it is important to realize that, once the sales pitch about “progress” is set aside, progressivism boils down to one, giant rip-off. Military adventurism, business regulation, fighting climate change, and even “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are all part of it.

Certainly, there are people who genuinely believe in these things, just as there were during the early progressive movement. But they are the true “useful idiots.” The people who will actually make any of the latest progressive initiatives reality are all crony capitalists in bed with the government, just like a century ago.

Before the progressive era, the traditional way for governments to rip off their citizens was military spending. The highwater mark was war. A war that would cost $150 billion in today’s dollars was made to cost $500 billion instead, with the “profits” flowing to contractors, politicians, and other parasitical fauna. So, every government that thinks it can win is on the lookout to gin up a nice, juicy little war.

But even outside of war, military spending has been and remains a scam. The United States fought a 20-year war in Afghanistan, accompanied by several other military adventures in the Middle East including the large one in Iraq. When the last of these was supposedly ended in 2021 – and before the war in Ukraine began – military spending was still scheduled to increase in 2022.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?