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Keeping tax cuts, rebooting tax code

Republicans claim they are slashing government, but they’re about to explode the budget deficit to extend President Donald Trump’s tax cuts — which would balloon interest payments on the national debt, already one of the largest expenses in the federal budget. That’s no way to slash the size of government. They could offset the lost revenue from tax cuts by reducing spending and entitlements, but that would require hard political choices. Instead, Senate Republicans are attempting to resort to budget gimmicks. Pretending the 2017 tax cuts were always going to be extended makes ...

Grocery prices will go up

We don’t grow much coffee within the United States. Only Hawaii and Puerto Rico are really capable of it and even if we started up tomorrow, American consumers demand so much that we would still need to import it. Tariffs will cause the price of coffee to go up. Profit margins are so low in the coffee business, most of the 10% tariff will go to price increases. We don’t produce bananas in the United States because our climate is not sufficient to grow bananas. They must still be imported. Tariffs will cause the price to go up. Cinnamon, cumin, black pepper, most red peppers, ...

No innocent bystanders now

I went down to the demonstration at the Washington Monument, surrounded by a multitude with signs, chants and oh so many causes under the bleak spring sky. In this setting I had a sudden epiphany: Protests are not only to send a message to the ruler golfing in Florida. No, the point of gathering is to know there are others with you, like you, to create cohesion among the thousands who chose the right to peaceably assemble. All over this land, in 50 states, American people were taking to jamming the streets. Cities, of course, like Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Milwaukee had ...

Yes, bring back the woolly mammoth

We have the dire wolf again. Thanks to the heroic work of Colossal Biosciences, the canine species that went extinct more than 10,000 years ago has been revived in a stunning act of so-called de-extinction. The dire wolf is a bit of a Late Pleistocene celebrity thanks to its role in the “Game of Throne” series as a symbol of the Stark family. What’s happening on the company’s 2,000-acre enclosure isn’t worthy of that fantasy book and HBO series, although it naturally brings to mind the blockbuster “Jurassic Park,” where a similar project inadvertently looses ...

Trump’s tariffs are likely to cause future economic trouble

Futures markets on Sunday were signaling more market carnage on Monday after two days of extraordinary declines. Normally you’d expect some rebound, even if it’s a dead-cat bounce, after such a huge selloff. But there are canaries in the tariff mine that are warning of economic trouble ahead. One canary is the biggest selloff in the junk bond market since 2020, the pandemic year. The premium that investors demand for holding high-risk corporate debt rose a full percentage point to 4.5% late last week after Mr. Trump’s tariff assault, according to the ICE BofA index. At a minimum ...

Economic chaos is anti-globalist revolution

Figuring out the future impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s new global tariffs has turned into the economic equivalent of trying to decode modern art: confusing, polarizing and mostly just a bunch of projections. Economists are squinting at charts like they’re Jackson Pollock paintings while totally missing the point. Maybe they should try asking the same people who’d just look at it and say, “Yep, that’s a masterpiece ... or maybe just something my kid made in daycare.” Those folks seem to have a better grasp of what’s going on right now. Just like “climate ...