On the menu today: Yes, the president said something characteristically stupid about inflation yesterday, so let’s look at what we can expect in the fight against inflation if Democrats win control of Congress. Meanwhile, the ticking time bomb of our entitlement programs continues to inch closer to detonation. And finally, some thoughts on nuclear waste. Read on.

Inflation Conundrum

I could write 2,000 words on the idiocy of President Trump declaring, “You know what I really love? I love the inflation,” when asked about the inflation rate rising from 3.8 percent to 4.2 percent.

(Trump then said of inflation, “It’s coming down. It’s going to come down like a rock.” This is the same promise he has made since gas prices spiked after the start of hostilities with Iran. Trump also said that the operation would take “four to five weeks” to complete, which was 14 weeks ago.)

But instead, with the prospects of a Democratic House and possibly Democratic Senate increasing, let’s examine what the country can expect on fighting inflation with a Democratic Congress in the final two years of President Trump’s second term.

Over the last year and a half, Democrats in Congress have been loudly critical of Trump’s widespread, ever-changing enactment of tariffs . . . while most Democrats insist that tariffs as a policy tool are good and should be used. Even the allegedly more centrist ones, like the New Democratic Coalition of 114 House members, don’t want to go into much detail about what tariffs they would attempt to repeal. Back in February, the NDC unveiled a 16-page “affordability agenda.” The NDC mentioned tariffs once, a pledge to “roll back the Unaffordable Trump Tariffs that are raising the cost of living for families and the cost of production for American businesses, farmers, and producers.” Which tariffs? Which countries? Which products? Partial or total roll back? Does China stand apart because of the national security implications? Eh, they’ll figure all of that out later, apparently.

And they’re quick to emphasize they’re not that opposed to tariffs in principle. In the very next sentence, the NDC writes they will “secure global markets for U.S. products and industries by preventing predatory foreign trade practices and protecting American workers from being undercut by foreign countries.”

Most Democrats are, at heart, economic protectionists and allies of unions who hate having to compete with inexpensive imported goods. So, most Democrats don’t really oppose Trump’s tariffs on a philosophical level; they just find them to be a convenient scapegoat for economic problems. Scott Lincicome wrote last June that Democrats are now sounding like libertarians on trade, and he pointed to some good examples of the phenomenon. But he also noted the Democrats’ new trade arguments “implicitly contradict longstanding, fundamental views on taxes, regulations, and the government itself” and asked, “[T]he big question now, of course, is whether these insights will last and whether Democrats will apply them beyond Trump-centric trade policy. Will they rethink antitrust, industrial policy, environmental regulation, and the administrative state with the same clarity?”

Heading into the 2026 midterms and the nascent talk of the 2028 Democratic primary, the evidence of a rethink is scant. This is the same instinctively statist Democratic Party, with even more adherents who are openly socialist.

Missy Ryan, writing over at The Atlantic:

Many Democrats want to explicitly link foreign policy to economic security, trade, and other concerns that policy makers have traditionally put in separate baskets. Some are now embracing tools championed by Trump, such as tariffs or other protectionist measures. (Biden himself endorsed some of this, keeping most of the tariffs Trump put in place in his first term.) Democrats would use such Trumpian tools, they hasten to say, in a smarter, more principled way than they believe the president has, to protect strategic industries rather than punish other nations or reward oligarch friends.

She points to Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy’s proposal for “responsible economic nationalism.” (Some would argue that is an oxymoron, like “deafening silence,” “civil war,” or “President Murphy.”) Murphy writes:

We need to decide that yes, we are going to create a distinct American economy. We are going to decide to have a certain set of industries and jobs here at home. We are going to combine domestic manufacturing with a breakup of concentrated corporate power.

The allegedly centrist NDC says it will help reduce grocery prices by “investing in small and medium-sized producers, manufacturers and retailers.” This means the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Meat and Poultry Processing Expansion Program, which provides grants from $10,000 to $2 million to help eligible meat and poultry processors expand their capacity. The administration is already providing $60 million for this program.

As luck would have it, just this morning, an industry report states that “nearly $2.5 billion worth of construction is underway in the U.S. meat and poultry sector, and more than $7.5 billion worth of construction planned for the future.” Some might wonder, with all this private-sector investment in expanding capacity, why the U.S. taxpayer has to pay the bill for more expansion, particularly when the industry is profitable.

The NDC’s agenda on affordability also includes “Increase the minimum wage.” If you make labor more expensive, then the cost of production goes up, and prices go up, unless the industry embraces more automation.

But there are plenty of Democrats who are further to the left than the NDC. Back in February, the further-left Center for American Progress proposed having the government remove credit card processing fees for grocery store purchases — to benefit grocery stores — in exchange for a two-year freeze on the prices of eggs, ground beef, chicken, pork chops, canned tuna, milk, cheese, butter, rice, flour, bread, pasta, cereal, potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, apples, oranges, strawberries, bananas, canned corn, dried beans, coffee, and canola oil. It’s a backdoor method of government-mandated price controls.

Of course, when you limit the amount of money a producer can make on a particular product, they are not inclined to make more of it. An artificial price cap leads to a limited supply. The U.S. government already tried price controls on food under President Richard Nixon, and it worked out terribly:

In actions dolefully reminiscent of dumping milk and killing little pigs during the Depression, U.S. chicken farmers and cattle raisers last week threw down the first major challenge to the Administration’s price freeze. Claiming that they cannot make a profit at present prices as long as the cost of freeze-exempt feed grains keeps rising, poultry farmers cut their losses by systematically gassing, drowning and suffocating a million baby chicks and selling their egg-laying hens. Other farmers sent pregnant sows to the slaughterhouse and dispatched old milk cows to hamburger heaven. These tactics raise a two-headed specter of shortages and higher prices for milk, eggs and meat in the next few months.

Though the prices that farmers charge are exempt from the freeze, they are being held in check because wholesalers and retailers refuse to pay more for supplies since their own prices are frozen. Thus farmers are killing chickens and taking other steps to reduce costs. Dairy farmers are being increasingly rigorous in picking out for slaughter all but the best milkers in their herds.

Scarcities of milk and other dairy products could develop by August. Herrell DeGraff, president of the American Meat Institute, predicts that beef supplies could well grow leaner and costlier by early winter. Cattlemen are avoiding oppressive feed prices by letting their steers fatten on grass, a process that takes about 90 days longer than grain feeding.

Shoppers have to settle for a more limited selection in the supermarket.

What Democrats want to do, whether they describe themselves as centrists, progressives, socialists, or communists, is the same as the current Trump approach of greater federal government control of the economy.

We hit the recent high of 9.1 percent inflation in June 2022 in large part because the tail end of the Trump administration and the first years of the Biden administration kept throwing more and more money into the economy, without a corresponding increase in goods and services. (As the Economic Policy Innovation Center succinctly put it, “The Biden-Harris Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 likely made inflation worse by contributing to short-term deficits.”) In California, Governor Gavin Newsom attempted to fight inflation by sending people money, increasing the money supply without increasing the supply of goods and services. Newsom did this in the form of mailing out debit cards with up to $1,050. As of April this year, 960,000 Californians never used the debit cards.

Democrats, like the president, are either tax-and-spend or borrow-and-spend in their governing philosophies. So far this fiscal year, the U.S. government has spent $1.2 trillion more than it took in and is on pace for a $2 trillion annual deficit, again. Last year the U.S. government collected a record $5.23 trillion in tax revenue, and so far this fiscal year we are $174 billion ahead of last fiscal year’s pace.

Because we have borrowed so much for the past two generations, we now pay more money on interest in the debt. Last fiscal year, the U.S. spent almost $1 trillion on interest payments alone; this year we’re on pace to spend more than $1 trillion. For perspective, all of our defense spending last fiscal year was $919 billion.

As my fellow Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle put it, “We’ve all decided not to think about it until we make landfall on whatever hellscape we’re approaching.”

The latest numbers from Social Security find that the Old-Age & Survivors Insurance Trust Fund is projected to be depleted by 2032, at which point benefits would be reduced by 22 percent. This is no longer a far-off problem. The senators who are elected this November will be in their final year in office in 2032; whoever wins the next presidential election will be in the final year of his first term.

The Medicare program isn’t in much better shape; the trust fund that pays for Part A, which includes inpatient hospital stays, will be unable to meet all its expected costs after the second quarter of 2033.

A few moments ago, I characterized the disturbingly bipartisan economic philosophy of so-called “responsible economic nationalism” as an oxymoron. But perhaps it would be simpler to say that we are governed by just plain morons.

ADDENDUM: We in the United States couldn’t get a safe nuclear waste site built at Yucca Mountain because Democratic Senator Harry Reid didn’t want it there. When President Obama killed the site after 22 years of planning, arguments, and preliminary construction, the U.S. government had spent $13.5 billion — and that’s in 2009 dollars; in today’s dollars that would be $21.4 billion.

Because of Reid and Obama, the U.S. doesn’t store its nuclear waste in just one extremely isolated site out in the middle of the desert. No, today the U.S. keeps 90,000 tons of nuclear waste stored at more than 100 sites across 39 states.

I mention this because the country of Finland is weeks away from opening the world’s first “nuclear tomb,” 1,430 feet underground “in rock older than animal life, built to stay sealed for 100,000 years and need exactly zero human attention from day one.” They built it for $1.6 billion.