We’re bringing back price theory with our series on Price Theory problems with Professor Bryan Cutsinger. You can see all of Cutsinger’s problems and solutions by subscribing to his EconLog RSS feed. Share your proposed solutions in the Comments. Professor Cutsinger will be present in the comments for the next couple of weeks, and we’ll post his proposed solution shortly thereafter. May the graphs be ever in your favor, and long live price theory!   Question: Some economists have argued that the Federal Re3serve should raise its inflation target from 2 percent to 3 or even 4 percent. Why might the effect of a higher inflation target on the quantity of real money balances demanded be larger in the long run than in the short run? (0 COMMENTS)

  On March 7, 2025, I highlighted Herb Stein’s article “Balance of Payments,” which appeared in David R. Henderson, ed. The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. That led to a lively discussion in the Comments section. Frequent commenter Warren Platts noted that the U.S. Net International Investment as a percentage of GDP has gone downhill since about 2007 and now sits at minus 90%. That might sound scary and it did make me wonder. But what matters to most Americans is not how much foreign investment there is but, rather, how much their net worth is and how that has changed. So I looked at those data and was reassured. The St. Louis Fed’s FRED site shows U.S. households’ net worth in current dollars from the 4th quarter of 1987 to the 4th quarter of 2024. It rose from $17.426 trillion in 1987 to $160.345 trillion in 2024. $17.426 trillion in 1987 $ is $47.641 trillion in 2024 $. So household net worth over those 37 years increased by 237%. Of course, the number of households increased too. According to FRED, it rose from 89.479 million in 1987 to 132.216 million in 2024. That means that average household wealth, in 2024 dollars, rose from $532,426 in 1987 to $1,217,504 in 2024, an increase of 129%. How about for the shorter period referenced by commenter Platts: 2007 to 2024? In 2007, household net worth was $65.754 trillion. In 2024 $, that’s $98.702 trillion. So household net worth increased by 62.5%. The number of households increased from 116.011 million in 2007 to 132.216 million in 2024. So household net worth per household increased from $850,799 in 2007 to $1,217,504 in 2024, an increase of 43%.   Note that these are averages, not medians. The net worth for a median household at each point in time is below the average. But what matters here is the average, given that the issue is the situation of the United States as a whole. It says that on average, Americans are getting wealthier despite (maybe partly because of?) increased foreign investment. (2 COMMENTS)

Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs has sparked a lively debate among economists and others: are tariffs good? Maybe some of them? Should governments then impose those tariffs that are good? While these discussions are interesting in themselves, they also raise a more general question: what should economists be doing at all? The title of this blog post is an echo of Buchanan’s seminal paper. However, while I allude to Buchanan, it is not his paper that I want to refer to. Rather, I want to point to another of Buchanan’s insights. Let me begin by quoting a revealing (and charming) story told by Richard E. Wagner, a student of Buchanan’s: While sitting excitedly in class the first day, I saw Buchanan glance at his roll sheet. He looked into the room as if looking for someone in particular, then said: “Mr. Wagner, what’s wrong with the American tax system?” I felt an adrenalin rush.  After my summer’s reading, that question was written for me, or so I thought … Instantly I began reciting things I read that summer about simplifying the tax system by reducing exemptions and deductions and such things. Buchanan seemed to be paying close attention to me, which pleased me hugely. When I finished, however, he responded: “Mr. Wagner, you have no business answering a question like that. We are democrats here and not autocrats.”  The gist of Buchanan’s response (which also runs through his work, beginning with Knut Wicksell, whom Buchanan greatly admired) is that economists are in no position to determine what people should want or to judge what is good for them. There is no “truth” in politics, Buchanan tells us in his The Limits of Liberty. And if one agrees with Buchanan and thus rejects “the truth-judgment approach to politics,” it follows that, as he writes in the first chapter, “we cannot claim to play as God, and we can scarcely carry off the pretense that our own private preferences reflect his ‘truth.’” Rather, it is up to the people—each and every one of them—to decide what they want and to be the evaluators of their lives. “A situation is judged “good” to the extent that it allows individuals to get what they want to get, whatsoever this might be, limited only by the principle of mutual agreement,” Buchanan tells us. It is not the job of economists—nor of political philosophers or anyone else, for that matter—to determine what is good for others. Where does that leave economists? They have an incredibly valuable role to play: they are to examine the consequences of different courses of action and recommend different ways forward, given what people want. Thus, economists are concerned with prudence. They ought to give people prudential advice about what are the best means to pursue given ends—very much in line with economists’ aspirations for value-free science. But let me hasten to add that this does not mean that economists should not chide the government for certain actions—indeed, this will often be their task. But in doing so, they must make it clear that they are only taking citizens’ perspective and not judging the governmental actions themselves. What I mean is that economists can criticise governmental action whenever it goes beyond the unanimous consent of citizens (because, to repeat, this is always the measure of “goodness”). But then economists are not putting forward their preferences—or their “truth”—but insisting that government accept the sovereignty of the individual. Economists should be democrats, not autocrats.   Max Molden is a PhD student at the University of Hamburg. He has worked with European Students for Liberty and Prometheus – Das Freiheitsinstitut. He regularly publishes at Der Freydenker. (1 COMMENTS)

To analyze society and the economy, and especially if the goal is to coerce peaceful individuals, an understanding of basic economics should be a must. Economics is needed to think clearly about the social consequences of individual actions and government interventions. An example a contrario was just given by President Donald Trump; the Wall Street Journal reports (“Trump Says He ‘Couldn’t Care Less’ if Car Prices Go Up,” March 30, 2025): “I couldn’t care less, because if the prices on foreign cars go up, they’re going to buy American cars,” Trump said. “I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are gonna buy American-made cars. We have plenty.” The president doesn’t seem to understand that a tariff also leads to an equivalent increase in the prices of competing domestically produced goods—American cars in this case. This is precisely why domestic producers of tariffed goods are happy: higher prices for their own products will be protected against foreign competitors. A tariff “protects” only if it allows domestic producers to get higher prices. (For more on this topic, see two of my recent posts, “The Basic Error About International Trade” and “Aluminum, Economics, and Liberty.”) Thus, nobody should have been surprised when Trump apparently warned domestic car producers not to rise their prices under penalty of punishment. He later denied having made this threat (see the March 30 WSJ report): The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump had warned executives that the White House would look unfavorably on such a move, leaving some of them rattled and worried they would face punishment if they increased prices. “I never said that,” Trump told NBC. Did he or did not? Perhaps he entertains “basic holistic” beliefs, to use the terms of his trade advisor Peter Navarro as reported by the WSJ: “If you look at this basically holistically, as they say, consumers and Americans are going to be better off, including all the jobs they get,” Navarro said. “They” are certainly not serious economists, who never speak in those terms. However, it must be that only “basic holistic” intuitions can justify the sort of trade war Navarro has been pushing on Trump, admittedly a fertile ground. At the time when he used economic theory instead to reason about such matters, Navarro was closer to reality. In his 1984 book, The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues are Stealing America (John Wiley & Sons), he attacked special interests and specifically explained how tariffs also push up the prices of domestically produced competing goods: In the absence of trade barriers, goods ranging from autos and apparel to shoes and televisions are offered to consumers at lower prices (or higher quality) than if U.S. producers manufactured them. However, when a device such as a tariff is imposed, the importer must pay a duty to the U.S. government to sell his product. This, in effect, raises the importer’s costs and forces the importer to raise his price by all or part of the duty. U.S. producers can then raise their prices, which hitherto were lowered by import competition. [pp. 75-76, my emphasis] Navarro offers other arguments that are not very original but at least in line with a couple of centuries of economic analysis, for example: However, as the economic analysis indicated, the choice is not between preserving smokestack industries or relying on high tech wonderlands. Rather, it is between a protected but inefficient and declining industrial base versus a more innovative industrial sector that, under the spur of import competition, can and does invest in rapid technological developments that promise a prosperous merger of the two worlds. [p. 89] The clear danger of this [protectionist] trend is an all-out global trade war. … And as history has painfully taught, once protectionist wars begin, the likely result is a deadly and well-night unstoppable downward spiral by the entire world economy. If the world is, in fact, sucked into this spiral, enormous gains from trade will be sacrificed. While such sacrifice might save some jobs in the sheltered domestic industries, it will destroy as many or more in other home industries, particularly those that rely heavily on export trade. At the same time, consumers will pay ten of billions of dollars more in higher prices for a much more limited selection of goods. [pp. 55-56] Of course, one cannot blame somebody for having changed his opinions and explained the reasons why he now thinks he was previously wrong. But basic holistic intuitions of the Tantric-New-Age sort can’t serve as a rational explanation. Nor can cozying up to politicians of all kinds provide a sufficient justification (see my article “Peter Navarro’s Conversion,” Regulation, Fall 2018). ****************************** Basic holistic stuff, by DALL-E and your humble blogger (1 COMMENTS)

Should monkeys have the same rights as humans? What about elephants, ants, or invertebrates? NYU philosopher Jeff Sebo makes the case for expanding your moral circle to many more beings than you might expect, including those based on silicon chips. Listen as Sebo and EconTalk’s Russ Roberts discuss to whom and what we owe moral consideration, how we determine a being’s intrinsic moral […] The post Do All Creatures, Great and Small, and Made From Silicon, Have Rights? (with Jeff Sebo) appeared first on Econlib.

I’ve always been skeptical of people that use “national security” as a justification for various repressive policies, including government secrecy, trade barriers, the military draft, censorship, and even taking over Greenland.That’s not to suggest that national security is never a valid concern—I would not advocate releasing nuclear weapons secrets—rather that the concept is overused, often as a way of achieving other more dubious objectives such as mercantilism and authoritarianism. One “tell” that national security is overused as an excuse for secrecy is that even top officials don’t take the concept seriously.  While Edward Snowden remains in exile for exposing US government crimes, top officials from both parties routinely flout national security laws, with no legal consequences.  Most people are familiar with Clinton’s emails and Trump’s bathroom full of documents, but there are many other such cases that could be cited, including previous slip-ups by Pete Hegseth. A recent example occurred with the Signal chat leaks to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.  I predict that none of the people responsible for leaking US military secrets will end up going to jail.  They are not “little people”. As with Watergate, the cover-up is often worse than the crime.  The administration initially denied that the leak included any classified information such as war plans or specific weapons systems.  The Atlantic then decided that if the government didn’t regard this information as classified, there was no reason not to publish the entire Signal chat.  It turned out that top government officials were lying to the press and Congress. When I was young, government officials would have had to resign after a fiasco like Signalgate.  Indeed, when I was young, an obviously unqualified cable news reporter would never be appointed Secretary of Defense, or confirmed by the Senate.  That America is long gone.  (Pete Hegseth once suggested that Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted for a much more minor security leak.)   Today, a different set of rules applies to the rich and famous.  Blue-collar types go to prison for violating prostitution laws.  The rich and famous purchase sexual favors with diamond bracelets and fancy dinners.  Blue-collar types go to prison for violating drug laws.  Rich and famous addicts go to rehab.   PS.  Older readers may recall Leona Helmsley saying: We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes. Actually, the rich do pay lots of taxes; it’s the criminal justice system where they have a huge advantage.  PPS.  There was an interesting case right here in Orange County where a 71-year old judge shot his wife after an argument, admitted to the crime, and even said he deserved to be convicted by a jury, and the jury still couldn’t reach a verdict.  Here’s the OC Register: A year and a half after Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Ferguson, while sitting in a police station, said aloud to himself “I killed her. Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, convict my ass. I did it,” the actual jury tasked with deciding his fate announced they were deadlocked during their ninth day of deliberations, which lasted longer than the trial itself. Imagine the same set of facts for a poor person.  You might say, “It’s complicated”.  Has there ever been a crime of passion that wasn’t?  Even black defendants get a break if they are rich and famous, as we saw in the OJ Simpson case. (0 COMMENTS)

  Federal Spending Is a Leaky Bucket   by Chris Edwards, Cato at Liberty, March 24, 2025. Excerpt: There are two sides to the inefficiency of federal spending. Spending is funded by taxes, which distort the working, investing, and entrepreneurial choices of individuals and businesses. Each additional dollar in income taxes causes about 40 to 50 cents of damage to the private sector beyond the tax amount itself. That damage is called deadweight loss. Republicans seem to understand this side of the fiscal equation, and they push to cut taxes. However, many Republicans do not seem to understand that the spending itself causes distortions and deadweight losses. Government bureaucracies waste resources, and the subsidy programs they run induce unproductive responses by individuals and businesses. Most federal programs are not worth the cost, as discussed in this study. Interesting Times by David Friedman, David Friedman’s Substack, March 25, 2025. Excerpts: What I am currently worried about is the potential for the present political situation to make America a much worse place, in any of several different directions. The obvious is the one that the left has been crying wolf on for a long time, development of a right wing dictatorship. The present administration claims the right to deport people into a foreign prison with no need to demonstrate that they are guilty of anything, even illegal immigration, based on a very stretched interpretation of an 18th century law. They are, sensibly, starting with the most unsympathetic victims they could find, but nothing in their interpretation of the law would prevent them from doing it to anyone else — at no point, in their view, are they required to demonstrate that their claims about the victims are true. I expect the courts to rule against them, the Supreme Court by a sizable majority. But there are faint murmurs among their supporters of the idea of ignoring the courts, sympathetic references to Andrew Jackson’s (probably apocryphal) “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Continued electoral success could move them farther in that direction and, even if it does not, would eventually change the makeup of the judiciary. And: The less obvious danger is in the opposite direction, a risk discussed in an earlier post. Suppose Trump’s administration goes badly, serious economic problems driven by rapid change, increased uncertainty, an increase rather than decrease in the deficit, serious foreign policy reversals, perhaps disasters. The Democrats end up with the presidency, both houses of Congress, a lot of angry supporters. They have already demonstrated their willingness to engage in lawfare against their enemies. The claim that everyone commits three felonies a day is doubtless an exaggeration, but a sufficiently committed prosecutor drawing jurors from a sufficiently biased local population can, as already demonstrated, get multiple felony convictions for a misdemeanor on which the statute of limitations has already run. Even without a biased jury to convict, prosecution alone can impose very large costs — and anyone can be prosecuted for something, a problem I discussed in an earlier post.   Naturalized Immigrants Probably Voted Republican in 2024 by Alex Nowrasteh and Krit Chanwong, Cato at Liberty, March 25, 2025. Ezra Klein recently interviewed David Shor, a data scientist at the Democratic consulting firm Blue Rose Research. Shor made two important immigrant-related points. First, the foreign-born share of the population in a county was highly correlated with a shift toward Trump. Second, Trump likely won the immigrant vote. Naturalized immigrants went from favoring Biden in 2020 by 27 points to favoring Trump by one point. This abrupt change destroys the common immigration-restrictionist argument that more open immigration policies will tilt the country leftward, an argument commonly made by Elon Musk that explains why he decided to support Trump in the 2024 election.   Why Economic Sanctions Against Iran Are Backfiring by Matthew Petti, Reason, April 2025. Excerpt: Although the United States has the power to seriously disrupt economic life in other countries, the book argues, the consequences don’t always serve American interests. Sanctions hurt the prosperity and political standing of Iran’s pro-American middle class the most. They also make the government more paranoid and remove important incentives to play nice. Everyone seems worse off. The U.S. has tried to wash its hands of the policy’s consequences for ordinary Iranians, blaming their poverty on domestic “corruption and economic mismanagement” rather than on sanctions. But the data are clear. The Iranian economy was booming from 1988, the end of the country’s war with Iraq, to 2011, the beginning of former President Barack Obama’s intensified sanctions campaign. DRH note: The article “Sanctions” in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics is excellent. (1 COMMENTS)

Tyler Cowen recently made an uncharacteristic mistake: But there is another way to pose the question and that is “should the resources in the EU be allocated toward export, or not?” And then exports are VAT-free, and within-EU sales generally are not VAT-free. So there is an encouragement to exports here. America has sales taxes, but VAT rates usually are higher. Thus you can say that Europe does more to encourage exporters than does the United States. Of course you can say the same about many other European government interventions. Germany’s notorious Sunday closing laws also encourage more exports. Send it to the US, and let it be sold on a Sunday, bitte! (Just not in Paramus, NJ.)From an American point of view, I don’t think anything is wrong with this kind of “export subsidy” (and that is not how I would describe it in a first-order sense, but we are steelmanning here). Note that he did not call a VAT an export subsidy, but did suggest that “there is an encouragement to exports here”.  I don’t see how that is true.  If you have a 20% VAT, and export goods to another country with a 20% VAT, obviously there is no advantage.  But what if you export to a country with no VAT?  Consider a $100 item that sells in Europe for $120 due to the VAT.  According to PPP it would sell for $100 in countries without a VAT.  So once again, there is no obvious encouragement to export.  (PPP may not hold for other reasons, but that has no bearing on whether VATs encourage exports.) I’m not suggesting that you cannot construct an argument where VATs encourage exports.  Thus, if you compared a VAT to a situation with no VAT and a bigger budget deficit, the imposition of a VAT might result in a lower real exchange rate and more exports.  But that’s true of any device for raising tax revenues, and I don’t see Tyler making that argument.  The fact that within-EU sales are VAT-free seems completely irrelevant, unless I’m missing something. One other point, and this is not aimed at Tyler’s post.  If it were true that VATs were like export subsidies, then they would be exactly the opposite of tariffs.  European tariffs discourage US firms from exporting to Europe.  European export subsidies would encourage US firms to export to Europe, as export subsidies are equivalent to import subsidies.  So if VATs were like export subsidies, then they would also be the exact opposite of import taxes. (0 COMMENTS)

Michael Huemer’s book The Problem of Political Authority examines various arguments given in favor of establishing the existence of political authority, which he defines as a property containing two aspects: (i) Political legitimacy: the right, on the part of a government, to make certain sorts of laws and enforce them by coercion against the members of its society – in short, the right to rule. (ii) Political obligation: the obligation on the part of citizens to obey their government, even in circumstances in which one would not be obligated to obey similar commands issued by a nongovernmental agency. Huemer spends several chapters examining the most popular arguments for establishing political authority and finds them all lacking. He does take care to point out that this, in itself, does not automatically lead to a conclusion that governments should be abolished: If there is no authority, does it follow that we ought to abolish all governments? No. The absence of authority means, roughly, that individuals are not obligated to obey the law merely because it is the law and/or that agents of the state are not entitled to coerce others merely because they are agents of the state. There might still be good reasons to obey most laws, and agents of the state might still have adequate reasons for engaging in enough coercive action to maintain a state. Huemer devotes two chapters to examining social contract theory as an argument for political authority – the first on traditional social contract theory as proposed by John Locke, and the second on more modern social contract theories based on the idea that a government could have hypothetically been arranged as a result of a social contract, and that real-world authority and obligations are created out of this hypothetical agreement. Huemer pretty convincingly refutes both forms of social contract theory. Among his arguments is that all forms of the social contract argument (whether historical, implicit, or hypothetical) lack any of the features needed for a contract to generate valid agreement or obligations. For example, some people argue that by accepting government services, people are showing that they have implicitly consented to pay taxation as part of the social contract. Huemer argues that doesn’t work, because taking an action indicates consent to some scheme only if you could reasonably believe that had you not taken that action, the scheme would not be imposed upon you. Suppose I forcibly compel you to buy cookies I bake – one hundred dollars for a half-dozen cookies, every month. Let’s say that I later find out that you ate some of the cookies. It would be obviously absurd to say that you eating the cookies shows you had implicitly consented to the transaction, and it was therefore a valid agreement. You’d still have been forced to give me the hundred dollars regardless. There’s one more issue I have with social contract theory that Huemer doesn’t describe. In order for a contract to be validly binding, it needs to be clear exactly what the contract contains. Yet even among social contract theorists, there is surprisingly little agreement here. They’ll all agree that a social contract exists, but wildly disagree about what that contract actually entails. People on the left and the right will both object that some law or institution “violates the social contract” but disagree about which laws or institutions do so, and what the violated terms are. Note, this can’t be resolved by something as simple as pointing to the existing set of laws (or the Constitution, perhaps) and declaring that those laws are what represent the social contract. For one, if the social contract just means “whatever laws are currently on the books,” no social contract theorist would have any grounds to argue some existing law or institutional arrangement is in violation of the social contract. Given how frequently social contract theorists make this claim, it’s clear that the social contract is not the same thing as the existing set of legislation or legal institutions. Second, and more fundamentally, the social contract is itself supposed to be what provides an explanation for why the government has the authority to create legislation in the first place. So using existing legislation or legal institutions to try to demonstrate the existence or content of the social contract is question-begging. If existing legislation or state institutions are “the social contract” then it’s meaningless to say the social contract is what justifies existing legislation or state institutions. In practice, much social contract theory discourse seems to be little more than different people equivocating over the term “social contract” to mean “whatever arrangements I, personally, happen to favor.” Now, maybe I’m wrong about that, but there is a way to test. If social contract theorists were attempting to work out what the contents of this unwritten social contract really are (rather than using it as a Trojan Horse to smuggle in their own policy views), we should frequently expect to see social contract theorists highlights aspects of what the social contract contains that they might dislike. Jason Brennan made a similar criticism of much of Constitutional legal theory, arguing that it tends to follow this process: 1. Start with a political philosophy–a view of what you want the government to be able to do and what you want to the government to to be forbidden from doing. 2. Take the Constitution as a given. 3. Reverse engineer a theory of constitutional interpretation such that it turns out–happily!–that the Constitution forbids what you want it to forbid and allows what you want it to allow. When I read academic writing by constitutional legal theorists, it seems like basically everyone (conservatives, liberals, libertarians) does this. Isn’t that bizarre? For example, why don’t more libertarian legal theorists just say, “Yes, the Constitution allows X, even though X ought to be forbidden, and so to that extent, the Constitution is bad.” Why don’t we see more left-liberals saying, “A just society would allow X, but, alas, our Constitution forbids X and is to that extent a bad Constitution.” We do sometimes see this, but for the most part, people of every ideology tend to argue that the Constitution allows or forbids exactly what they would want it to allow or forbid. In the same way, I can’t recall any social contract theorists arguing “the social contract unfortunately allows X which should be forbidden and it forbids arrangement Y which should be permitted.” It always seems that whatever the terms of this social contract are, it just so happens to contain the exact terms that are most conducive to the political ideology of the person arguing about the importance of upholding the social contract. Any real-world contract with contents so hopelessly indeterminate would never be validly binding. I see no reason why a hypothetical social contract would be either. (0 COMMENTS)

The recently announced auto tariffs are expected to raise roughly $100 billion per year in revenue. How does that compare with other major tax increases? According to the Tax Foundation, the previous record was $76.8 billion for the 2011 tax increase to finance the ACA (Obamacare).   In real terms, the auto tariffs are not as large as some of the previous tax increases, but it remains one of the largest tax increases since 1968.  (The CPI is up about 50% since 2009.) With more tariffs expected soon, the ultimate Trump administration tariff program may well end up being the largest tax increase, even in real terms.  So what do the Democrats think of this policy, one of the most consequential changes in federal tax policy in my entire life? I checked with the New York Times, and as usual they had very long article that contained lots of interviews.  I was especially interested in learning what the Democrats thought of the policy.  The article did present the views on a number of key political figures, but none of them were Democrats.  Indeed, other than Trump, none of them were Republicans.   You may believe that the NYT has a liberal bias, but I’m quite certain that when Obama’s tax increase was proposed, the “newspaper of record” provided at least some coverage of Republican views of the legislation.  Do the Democrats plan to repeal the auto tariff next time they take office?  Do Republican congressmen have views on the issue?  Isn’t that something that we should know? It is certainly interesting to learn that Trump’s tariffs are opposed by the leaders of Canada, Mexico and France, but given that the tax is actually paid by Americans, I wish they’d told us what American politicians thought of the idea.   Here’s AI Overview: The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” (Article I, Section 8), including tariffs, and to regulate commerce with foreign nations. However, the President also has authority to impose tariffs, particularly through delegated powers and under certain conditions, such as national security threats or unfair trade practices. I’m having trouble understanding the legal basis for these tariffs.  It’s hard to believe that Canada is a national security threat, and our free trade agreement with Canada was negotiated by President Trump in 2020.  As recently as last fall he called it the best trade deal ever.  So the “unfair trade practices” also doesn’t seem to apply. In the past, the Supreme Court has often taken the view that governments can do pretty much whatever they wish.  Thus although the “takings clause” says that eminent domain applies only to projects with a “public use”, the courts have ruled that a public purpose is almost anything the government says it is.  Maybe that reasoning applies here as well. I notice that the administration denies that the bombing raid on Yemen is a “war”, and yet insists that we can use “war powers” to deport Venezuelans.  So war also seems to be one of those things that have a fairly loose definition–war is migration, not bombing. The bottom line is that we should not expect the Constitution to be an effective limit on the powers of the US government. PS.  It is also expected that there will be a major tax cut enacted later this year, which will take the form of extending the earlier Trump tax cuts, which were otherwise set to expire.   (0 COMMENTS)