Category: Update

In late January, Paul Jacob reminded readers that the biggest domestic issues, inflation and over-​spending, were being overshadowed in the first flush of the Trump Administration’s rush to Get Things Done.

And then went on, in the following weeks, to talk up DOGE and other Trump efforts to root out “waste, fraud and abuse.”

There is no contradiction here. It’s a question of balance. Paul quoted Veronique de Rugy in that January commentary. So why not quote her again in defense of praising DOGE, to the extent it does good?

In “Yes, Cutting Government Waste Is Important,” Ms. de Rugy argues that those who shrug “off the cost-​cutting work, arguing that finding waste in discretionary spending is like bailing water out of the Titanic with a teacup” are “missing part of the point.

After all, politicians do spend large sums without restraint, much of it borrowed, on boondoggles that most Americans wouldn’t support if they knew what was happening.

It’s also a matter of good sense. Imagine telling a family drowning in debt that they shouldn’t bother canceling unnecessary streaming subscriptions or eating out less because “the real problem is the mortgage.” It’s a bad argument when applied to household budgets or the federal budget.

The opposite thesis was made eloquently years ago by British comedian David Mitchell:

Of “eliminating waste” he sarcastically counters “if only we thought of that!” Mitchell’s message is the jaded one that waste is an inevitable part of bureaucracy and we must learn to live with it.

But that is not what DOGE is finding. The waste in Washington today is Volney’s veritable “intestine” condition, featuring, in this ruin of empire, a twisted mess of special projects cooked up by Democrats to employ their family members and college roommates to push DEI to the tune of over $100 million.

That is waste, sure. Abuse, of course. But it is also a parlaying of tax funds for partisan pet projects.

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Pictured at top: Volney, author of The Ruins, who provided the inspiration for today’ title.

Protesters, caught up in the cause of continuing government waste, fraud and abuse, protest outside the Space X facility in Hawthorne, California. Cuz Elon Musk. Musk denies that DOGE is in any way radical. It is, he says, “common sense.” 

“Trump has said the nation, facing $36 trillion in debt, must cut federal spending,” explains the Los Angeles Daily News today.

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DOGE protests are also taking place at Tesla dealerships across the country.

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“Cuts to the Department of Education are hitting the highly valued Nation’s Report Card,” writes Lexi Lonas Cochran, today, “even as sirens blare on student test scores.” 

The 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was recently canceled, and the top official in charge of it was put on leave, leading advocates to doubt a promise from the Department of Education that NAEP would not be affected by the cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). 

Educational experts like the testing system, but admit that in both reading and math, “the gaps between the lowest-​performing and highest-​performing students are still growing.”

Obviously government schooling is failing, bureaucrats are most concerned about testing, and DOGE’s cuts alarm them.

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Meanwhile, CNBC has probably found an effective way to spread unease, maybe even panic: “Social Security has never missed a payment. DOGE actions threaten ‘interruption of benefits,’ ex-​agency head says.” Or so says the headline.

Americans revel in quadrennial presidential debates and arguments made by talking heads on TV, but many, many people were made deeply uncomfortable by the public tiff broadcast from the White House between Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, on one side, and the President and Vice President of the United States on the other:

We might wish to ask ourselves — why?

CNN’s characterization of it was interesting:

A remarkable shouting match broke out in the Oval Office on Friday between President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, who was hoping to appeal to the US for continued security assistance during his trip to Washington. Raising their voices, Trump and Zelensky — along with the Vice President JD Vance — engaged in a tense back-​and-​forth about the nature of US support, and whether Zelensky had demonstrated enough gratitude.

But the “shouting match” was figurative, not literal. No one shouted, exactly. But voices were raised as Zelensky and Trump talked over each other. Someone was being impolite in that.

People unused to conflict that is demonstrated politely, and then devolves into a debate about manners, tend to think that all public meetings should be “nice.”

Not when war is the subject matter, perhaps. 

In this case, Zelensky made his appeal in public, in a “nice” public setting, and the American leaders, Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, rose, ahem, to the occasion.

They have been called bullies for this, on TV and in social media. Perhaps it is the repeated you should be more thankful line that really galls.

But is Trump right? Is Zelinsky “gambling with World War III”?

Or is it Mr. Trump who gambles with WWIII? The U.S. siding with Russia after invading Ukraine might embolden further aggression by Russia or other authoritarian regimes (read: China).

Whether shouting or not, it was a tad tense. Tellingly, Trump defended the fracas. “But you see, I think it’s good for the American people to see what’s going on.”

“The inspection by Members of Congress on September 23, 1974, of U.S. gold stocks stored at the Fort Knox Bullion Depository,” explained a 51-​year-​old press release, “marks a unique departure from the long standing and rigidly enforced policy of absolutely no visitors.”

As mentioned yesterday by Paul Jacob, the policy of No One Admitted No How was immediately reinstated after that date — at least Senator Rand Paul (R‑Ky.), like his father before him, got nowhere when he tried to take a peak.

We have to go back to the days of Ike to reference a believable audit of the gold hoard. Which is why many people suspect all or most of the gold is actually gone. 

The rabbit hole one can fall down while looking into this is like many other federal government rabbit holes: confusing, alarming, and dark.

But would it matter if the government — or, more precisely, the Federal Reserve, actually — sold it all?

Some say no. “Since The US Isn’t On The Gold Standard, It May Not Matter How Much Is In Fort Knox,” is an apt summary of one theory. “The amount of gold held at Fort Knox might not even matter. The US went off the gold standard in 1971, meaning gold no longer specifically relates to the value of the American dollar. With this move, the gold at Fort Knox remains part of the U.S.’s overall monetary wealth, but mostly as a Treasury Department commodity — something the department can trade with other countries.”

This Ranker article does answer the next logical question. “Why keep it then? According to former Federal Reserve chairperson Alan Greenspan, ‘just in case we need it.’”

Rumors amongst gold bugs (and “conspiracy theorists”) in the 1990s had it that Alan Greenspan was actually the man who divested the gold holdings — as a way to manipulate the perception of inflation while he inflated the money supply. The notion is that Greenspan sold gold every time gold spot prices spiked. His idea was to manage the price of gold as the best way to manage inflationary expectations of consumers. Such was the conjecture, anyway. 

What is well known and understood is that Greenspan took the price of gold very seriously indeed, as his response to Rep. Ron Paul (R.-Tex.) over 25 years ago shows:

I think the price of gold has, over the decades, been a generally usable indicator of what the level of inflation has been. Obviously, during the period of an active gold standard, which was really prior to World War I, the price level pretty much locked itself in to the gold price. In fact, by definition it did.

The issue of buying and selling gold as the price changes is indeed exactly what we used to do. We used to, at a certain thing called the gold points, which was the price of gold plus the transportation cost differentials, we, that is, the United States Treasury, stood ready to buy and sell gold at a spread, as indeed all other participants in the gold standard did. So in that regard that was exactly what was happening.

But, needless to say, since we have gone off the gold standard, and especially since 1973, there has been basically a general float of the dollar vis-​a-​vis gold, which means that the gold price is like another commodity’s price.

Nonetheless, like a lot of commodity prices, and perhaps better than most, it has been useful, in my judgment, in trying to get some sense of what inflationary pressures have evolved in this country.

By the way, there are other conjectures out there about where the gold could have gone. 

Finally, let us not forget one of the all-​time goofiest heist concepts in movie history, involving a plot to irradiate the Fort Knox cache to make it useless as a backing for the dollar, in the 1964 Bond film Goldfinger.

But that was before Nixon destroyed the last vestige of the gold standard.

There used to be comity in Washington, D.C., because there was a system in place that allowed the two vying parties to fleece the public while “justifying” the fleecing. Paul Jacob wrote about this over a decade ago:

[H]ere was the genius of the system: The slight cuts in growth rates allowed left-​leaning Democrats to hysterically decry the cruelty of the “cuts” that Reagan was “imposing” — courtesy of the accounting tricks allowed by the post-​Nixon Budget Control Act — despite the illusory nature of those cuts.

Republican politicians, meanwhile, could go home to boast of those “cuts.”

Meanwhile, deficits ballooned under Ronald Reagan, and Republican voters came to accept deficit financing (growth in debt) as a natural thing, almost good. With the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency, and a post-​Clintonian reaction giving majorities in both houses to Republicans, this trend solidified.

Paul Jacob, “Dumbline Democracy,” Townhall (July 8, 2012).

The comity ended as increasing numbers of Americans came to disbelieve in the confidence game the two parties engaged in. This led to the selection by one of the parties of a candidate enough outside the con artists’ guild to upset the out-​of-​control order. Trump, that is.

So now that key bit of legislation, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, is finally under serious targeting:

In a move that could give President Donald Trump more freedom to enact his agenda, Republicans are attempting to repeal a law which ties the hands of presidents who don’t want to spend particular funding appropriated by Congress.

Known as impoundment, the practice of declining to spend funds provided by Congress dates back to President Thomas Jefferson.

Since 1974, however, it has been tempered by the Impoundment Control Act (ICA).

Nathan Worcester, “Republicans Seek to Unleash President’s Power to Not Spend,” The Epoch Times (February 16, 2025).

The constitutionality of impoundment has never reached the Supreme Court. The practice was started by Jefferson, who used it to stop Congress from unconstitutional spending — but because impoundment was not in the Constitution itself, it’s open to obvious challenge, and to the argument that it is an example of executive overreach.

The whole issue comes down to the fact that the Constitution provides inadequate means of the executive to stop Congress from unconstitutional acts, as well as the states to stop the federal government as a whole from the same. The constitutional crises associated with slavery expansion in the mid-​century are now endlessly discussed. But current dysfunctional partisan over-​spending is at least as serious a problem. 

Thankfully, we have an easier marker for a constitutional crisis now:

See also “The Fourteenth Amendment Escape Clause,” July 8, 2011.