Pun Salad

The most obvious, commonly used confusing term is “trade deficit.” “Deficit” inherently sounds bad. Everyone instinctively resists being in any kind of “deficit.” But those of us who understand the technical definition of “trade deficit” know that this “deficit” is merely the result of an accounting convention by which inflows into a country of money are counted as “positive” while outflows of money are counted as “negative.”

Yet as many economists, including the Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, have pointed out, if the convention were instead (as it could be) to count as a positive the monetary value of imports – and as a negative the monetary value of exports – then so-called “trade deficits” would instead be “trade surpluses.”

The words “trade surpluses,” alas, are more difficult to demagogue than are the words “trade deficits.”

• Affordability. Insufficient sensitivity to the cost of living proved costly for leaders from Marie Antoinette to Joe Biden. Last year, “affordability” was ignored by Democrats and amplified by Republicans. The Biden administration’s insouciance towards inflation helped elect Donald Trump, who pledged in his inaugural address to “rapidly bring down costs and prices.” Now that prices have continued to increase, “affordability” is a “Democratic con job.” While the word’s meaning might have changed, polling suggests voters’ views about the underlying reality haven’t. Poor Queen Marie could have advised Mr. Trump that when you’re building a new ballroom for the executive mansion it’s unwise to dismiss popular concerns about the cost of everyday staples.

PRESIDENT TRUMP was back in Pennsylvania last week to tout his economic record, but one of the lines that drew attention had nothing to do with jobs or inflation. He revived a crude slur he used in 2018, when he called several poor nations "s**thole countries" during a White House meeting with lawmakers. At the time, the president denied having used such language, but at the rally on Tuesday he boasted of it. The contrast was striking: A vulgarity that dominated the national conversation seven years ago generated little more than a ripple today.

A day earlier, another elected official's vulgarity was in the news. According to an investigation made public last week, Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican now running for governor, erupted in a profanity-laced tirade at TSA officers in Charleston's airport in October. She called them "f***ing idiots" who were "f***ing incompetent," snapped that she was "sick of your s**t," and proclaimed herself a "f***ing representative." The details are tawdry, but what's more telling is how unexceptional the whole episode feels. Members of Congress hurling obscenities at public employees (or at a constituent) used to be unthinkable. In 2025, it's just one more bit of political color.

The president of the United States is a hateful raging lunatic with all the empathy of Jeffrey Dahmer.

I’ll let you decide whether the term psychopath or sociopath better describes the president’s actions. On some level, we always knew the president was a nut of some kind, obsessed with grievances; vindictive and prone to posting late-night tirades on social media; uninterested in details; erratic, impulsive, spiteful. (“But he fights!”) You can run a company that enjoyed a wildly lucrative role conducting financial transactions among criminals, terrorist groups, and hostile states, and this president will pardon you, believing anything he’s told about how Joe Biden prosecuted him because he hated crypto. Or you can run a massive cocaine smuggling operation while being president of a South American country, and this president will pardon you, too, because he’ll believe anything he’s told about how your successful prosecution was a witch hunt.

This president cannot discern moral right and wrong through a person’s actions, like a normal human being. Donald Trump’s entire worldview of whether someone is a good person or a bad person depends entirely on whether that person offers praise or criticism of Trump. This is the person who runs the executive branch of the U.S. government, and this is a formula for disaster. This is, I suspect, a factor in why the Trump administration is so friendly to the likes of Xi Jinping and endlessly patient with Vladimir Putin, while sneering with contempt about leaders of European democracies. Trump does not see anything inherently morally objectionable about a brutal autocrat with a long history of egregious human-rights abuses, but he will never forget or forgive a European leader who ever uttered a critical word in Le Monde.

Carolyn Owens was 9 years old when her family became one of the first in America to get food stamps.

Her father could no longer work in the coal mines that pock the mountains here after an injury. He’d wait at the local government office to collect food coupons, part of a program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to help alleviate the shocking poverty he witnessed campaigning across Appalachia.

Owens would walk home from school to find peanut-butter sandwiches with a sliver of banana waiting for her and her 10 brothers and sisters. “Those sandwiches were like ice cream for us,” said Owens, now 73.

In the decades since, the federal government has poured more than $3.6 billion into trying to ease the hardship in McDowell County, according to estimates from the Economic Innovation Group, using current dollars. That doesn’t include the roughly $13 billion more in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid payments.

It hasn’t worked.