Of all the various Great Ideas launched at education in the past couple of decades, none have done more damage than the Big Standardized Test, a practice that has been in place now for a generation. So on top of the other harms done by test-driven accountability, the cherry on top is that a whole crop of newbie teachers has emerged thinking that test-centric schooling is natural and normal and how the U.S. education system has always worked. Meanwhile, we are just about to enter the season in which school staffs start creating cutesy videos and holding noisy pep rallies in an attempt to convince these tests are Important and students should Do Their Best. Yuck. 

The BS Tests have been a source of toxic waste in schools for years and years, and they have created this toxic effect in three distinct ways.

High stakes for a narrow measure

A single test is used as a broad measure of educational achievement. It claims to measures reading and math and nothing else, and yet it is repeatedly used as a measure of educational quality, students achievement, and teacher/school effectiveness. States have used BS Test results to label schools as "failing" which can have consequences ranging from a loss of funding to charterization to plain old reputational damage. 

Attaching high stakes to the test has led to a twisting and warping of curriculum, with course content and even courses themselves judged by just one metric-- is it on the Test? Science, history, the arts, even recess cut from schools so that extra work can be put into getting studennts to raise those scores, because the BS Test turns schools upside down. The school doesn't exist to serve students by giving them an education; students exist to serve the school by generating test scores. The upside down school effect is particularly notable in manuy charter schools, where the scores are an important marketing tool and so students who don't help make good numbers have to be "counseled out."

Meanwhile, test scores make an easy reference point for journalists, especially when combined with such prestidigidatation as "days/months/years of learning" which is just a fun mask to slap on the increase or decrease in test scores. Or soaking test scores in VAM sauce to make them seem as if they Really Mean Something. Or the transformation of scores into a kind of stock market, rising and falling as if they are waves of data flowing through a single medium, rather than representing the scores of different students.

But, hey. If the scores represent real measures of reading and math skills, isn't all of this justfied? Isn't it?

Lousy tests

Have the Big Standardized Tests been checked for validity and reliability? Do they measure what they purport to measure? Will they produce consistent results (iow, if the same student takes the test multiple times, will he get pretty much the same score every time)? 

The most likely answer is "Nobody knows for sure, but probably not." 

Multiple choice questions are about the weakest measure of knowledge and skill we have. But written answers create an assessment challenge that is almost insurmountable at that scale (and certainly insurmountable by any bots currently available). Also, a test needs to be created for a particular purpose, while the BS Tests are sold as being useful for multiple purposes. "We will sell you," say testing companies, "a piece of string that can be used to measure the circumference of a cloud and the amount of water in a swimming pool."

If we start with the number of skills that the BS Test claims to measure and multiply it by the number of items that it would probably take to measure those skills, we arrive at a test much larger than the actual tests. 

All of this gives us ample reason to suspect that the BS Tests are less-than-awesome assessment tools, suspicions that might be quelled by extensive test testing to show validity and reliability. Except that there doesn't seem to be any such test testing out there. Meanwhile, folks keep arguing that if teachers just teach the standards, the test results will take care of themselves, despite the fact that test results vary wildly from year to year for the same teacher.

But, hey. It generates some data, and even that sketchy data should be useful for something. Shouldn't it?

Tortured data

When a classroom teacher uses an assessment to evaluate learning and instruction, she can dig down to a granular level. Go question by question, checking student responses against the test items to see exactly where students are going wrong (or right). 

But the BS Tests are black boxes. Policy makers have accepted the notion that a test manufacturer's proprietary material is more important than useful data for schools, so teachers are forbidden to so much as look at the questions on the test, and the results that come back to schools (in too many cases, still after too many months) are rough summaries. For years, my results for student on the BS Test were broken down into "reading fiction" and "reading nonfiction," and that was it. 

Imagine you are a parent whose child brought home a C on a major reading test, and the teacher wouldn't let you see the test and wouldn't tell you what areas your child needed help with and what areas were your child's strength. In response to the question, "What can we do to help him," the teacher replied, "Just, you know, work on his reading." That is where teachers are with BS Test results. 

This tiny sliver of data is one of the reasons that schools take to carpet-bombing students with a host of broad, unfocused "interventions." It's also why we've seen the booming cottage industry of pre-test testing, with schools giving multiple tests throughout the year in an attempt to identify students who can be dragged to a higher score and to identify the areas in which interventions for these students might help. The actual BS Test doesn't give us the information we need, so maybe a few rounds of NWEA MAP testing will tell us what the BS Test won't (spoiler alert: it won't, in part because it's hard to predict how students will do on a test that isn't very reliable or valid).

So very little useful data gets back to teachers and schools. It is almost as if policy makers are only interested in generating pass-fail labels for schools and not in providing data that would actually help improve performance.

Solutions?

Policy makers could fix any one of these three factors. They could reduce the stakes attached to the BS Test, or combine test results with other measures of education. They could simply require the tests to be better, and they could certainly require test manufacturers to provide more useful data in a more timely fashion. In fact, in some states, policy makers have taken some baby steps. But it's not nearly enough.

Underneath all of this, there are philosophical questions to be answered, like how does one distinguish between good schools and bad, can you measure the difference, and if you can, is there any benefit to trying to slap "good" and "bad" labels on schools or teachers. But I don't recommend holding your breath while waiting for policy makers to have serious philosophical conversations about education in this country.

But in the meantime, high-stakes large-scale standardized testing continues to be one of the single most destructive factors in U.S. education. If you handed me a magic wand, it is the very first thing I would disappear. Barring that, it would be great if we could just do better.

There are times when the direction for fiscal and monetary policy is obvious. During the Great Recession in 2007-09, it was clear to most that the Federal Reserve should be reducing interest rates and the federal government should be running larger budget deficits, to counter the effects of the recession. Perhaps this seems obvious? But during the Great Depression in 1932, the federal government reacted to lost tax revenue from higher unemployment with a large tax increase. A year earlier in 1931, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates out of desire to maintain the gold standard (that is, to keep the same value between US dollars and gold). Fiscal and monetary policy in the early 1930s were rowing together, but in the wrong direction.

Christina D. Romer discusses these and other episodes in “Rowing Together:
Lessons on Policy Coordination from American History” (Hutchins Center Working Paper #105, February 2026). She writes:

It is not enough for monetary and fiscal policy to be well coordinated. They also need to be moving toward the appropriate goal. To put it another way: Rowing together is great when the boat is headed in the right direction; it can be a disaster when the boat is headed in the wrong direction. Coordinated policy was a godsend in 2009; it was a tragedy in 1931. A corollary to this fundamental point is that sometimes rowing in opposite directions can be preferable. At least then, the boat stays where it is rather than move in the wrong direction. If monetary or fiscal policy is going astray, it is vitally important that the other tool of macropolicy be uncoordinated.

The current policy issue is that the federal government is running an expansionary fiscal policy with large budget deficits, and President Trump would like the Federal Reserve to run a more expansionary monetary policy as well with dramatic interest rate cuts. But as Romer points out in her review of historical examples, the US economy has some precedents here worth considering.

First, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, fiscal and monetary policy were coordinated on a substantial stimulus. There was a big tax cut in 1964, then spending increases related to the Vietnam War and social programs (“guns and butter,” it is sometimes called), followed by more tax cuts and spending increased when President Nixon assumed office. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve was cutting interest rates. The new head of the Federal Reserve under Nixon, Arthur Burns, viewed himself as a political ally for Nixon and cut interest rates further in 1971 to stimulate the economy in the lead-up to the 1972 election.

A prevailing economic theory of that time held that stimulating the economy in this way could lead to faster growth and only modest inflation. That theory went badly off the tracks by the mid-1970s as inflation and recession combined in what was called “stagflation.”

A second example, from the late 1970s and into the early 1970s, was that the federal government kept running large budget deficits, in part in response to the deep recession of 1974-75 and the double-dip recessions from 1980-1982. However, the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker did not coordinate with an expansionary monetary policy, and instead raised interest rates by six percentage points (!), and kept the rates that high for two years until inflation came down.

A third example, from the mid-1990s was that tax increases and minimal spending increases early in the Clinton administration, combined with the “dot-com” economic boom of the 1990s, led not only to lower budget deficits but to actual budget surpluses for a couple of years. During this time, the Federal Reserve did not raise interest rates, thus keeping a monetary stimuls in place. The overall result of this 1990s policy–contractionary fiscal policy and expansionary monetary policy–was that the US economy managed to dramatically reduce its budget deficits while continuing to grow.

These kinds of examples are what economists have in mind as they consider the current mix of fiscal and monetary policy. Here’s a figure showing the inflation rate on which the Federal Reserve focuses: core PCE inflation. “Core” means that price changes in food and energy are not included, because these fluctuate a lot, and the Fed is trying to focus on longer-term inflationary momentum. PCE refers to “personal consumption expenditures” index, which included more of consumer spending, and using a more flexible formula to allow for substitution between goods, than does the better-known Consumer Price Index measure of inflation.

Inflation spiked during pandemic, under pressure from coordinated strong expansions of fiscal and monetary policy, along with supply chain disruptions. Although core PCE inflation has come down since then, it’s still not yet down to pre-pandemic levels. In this situation, the Federal Reserve is going to be hesitant to cut interest rates dramatically. Among central bankers, the remembrance of what happened when Arthur Burns cut rates in the early 1970s and inflation took off remains crystal-clear.

As best I can tell, the strong preference for the Federal Reserve would be to re-run the 1990s, in which the government made a substantial effort to reduce budget deficits, and the Fed could then make sure that economic growth remained solid by counterbalancing the tighter fiscal policy with looser monetary policy. However, the Fed was also been gritting its teeth back around 2022 for a possible repeat of the early 1980s, when the central bank might need to fight inflation all by itself with a large jump in interest rates. Inflation has come down enough that a large jump no longer seems needed, but remains high enough that a large interest rate cut doesn’t make sense either. The lesson from the early 1970s about not letting a president prod a central bank into interest rate cuts for his own political purposes remains clear-cut, as well.

The post When Fiscal and Monetary Policy Row Together–and Not first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Donald Trump, speaking at a press conference at his golf club in Doral, Florida, because of course that is where you announce big decisions, today said that the war against Iran will end “very soon.”

Talking to the New York Post about oil prices, Trump said there was no cause for worry, because “I have a plan for everything. You’ll be very happy.”

He also said he doesn’t remember ever meeting Jeffrey Epstein, his poll numbers are higher than anyone has ever seen, and tiny plastic pigs will fall out of the sky.

I was thinking when I saw a photograph of Trump driving a golf cart yesterday that someone would get to him out on the links, and he would come up with some new line of bullshit about the war today. I should have known that he didn’t get his mind changed on the golf course. He came up with the idea that the war will end during a phone call with murder hornet Vladimir Putin.

Trump told The Times of Israel yesterday that he and Bibi Netanyahu would make a “mutual” decision about when the war ends. That’s out the window, now that he’s talked to his pal Putin, with whom he had “a very good call,” because He has never had a call with Putin that wasn’t “a very good call.” Trump told reporters today that he and Putin discussed ideas about ending the war in Iran and the war in Ukraine. Both. Because you cover all the bases when you have very good calls with the guy who started his war against Ukraine and has been prosecuting it for four straight years. Putin adviser Yuri Ushakov told Russian reporters today that Putin has presented Trump with “several proposals” for ending the war in Ukraine.

Can’t you see Trump out on the patio at Mar a Lago on the phone with Putin, and Putin says, how about we do this? You stop the bombing in Iran, and I’ll agree to take only a little bit more of Ukraine, and Trump covers the receiver and turns and asks somebody, “Is this a good idea?” We have no idea who Trump talks to before a call with Putin, or during the call, or afterwards, because he fired about two-thirds of his National Security Council staff in the White House and appointed his proposed Viceroy of Cuba, “Little” Marco Rubio with the additional job of national security adviser. Rubio, whose main job is Secretary of State, also runs USAID, which Trump closed and then had to reopen when someone told him that only Congress could do away with an entire department of the government that had been established by a law passed by Congress and signed by President John F. Kennedy, but who cares? He took the Kennedy Center away from him, why not USAID?

Yesterday, or was it last week, or last month, or last year? I get my timelines so mixed up these days. Anyway, whenever it was, Trump’s Putin go-fer Stevarino Witkoff came back from one of his meetings in Russia, or from all of his meetings, and told reporters that he had presented the Russians with “several proposals” for ending the war in Ukraine. And several proposals for Big Important Deals that could be made between Trump and Putin once the war had ended.

Trump today also told reporters that he and Putin had discussed oil prices. Because Russia is back in the oil business now that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced last week that the U.S. had lifted sanctions on trade in Russian oil so that India could start stocking its refineries again, because the Strait of Hormuz was closed…or something. This was at the same time it became known that Russia has been supplying Iran with targeting information on U.S. forces, including the positions of American warships and military aircraft. Russia has intelligence satellites, you see, and Iran doesn’t, and Russia is what foreign policy experts call a “key ally” of Iran.

At his Doral golf club press conference, Trump was asked how he could explain Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s recent comment that the war on Iran “is just beginning,” if the war will end “very soon.” Pete was talking about “the beginning of building a new country,” said the man who promised the U.S. would never again be involved in nation building, he would never get us involved in a war thousands of miles away, and from now on everything is “America First.”

So, let’s review: We are in the tenth day of our undeclared war against Iran. Trump’s latest poll number is 38 percent approval of his performance in office, 58 percent disapproval. When it comes to his war on Iran, his approval numbers are as low as 27 percent. Oil prices briefly hit $120 a barrel today before settling back to $110. Our stocks of high-tech weapons are being depleted at a rate that is unknown, but the word “unsustainable” is being thrown around by defense experts. China is said to be looking at what we’re doing in Iran and gazing across the water at Taiwan and licking its chops.

Somebody got cold feet in Florida, where the high today was 75 degrees, and the low tonight will be 73. Meanwhile, the new Supreme Leader of Iran hasn’t done a thing, and Trump is about to declare victory and go home.

Stay tuned. Who knows what he’ll do when the sun comes up tomorrow.

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The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for over 15 years, and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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It’s been a little over a week since we started to bomb Iran for “reasons.” Maybe it was because Trump had a “gut feeling.” Maybe because several Gulf states poured literally billions in bribes into the pockets of Trump, his family, and various members of the regime. Maybe because Russia ordered its favorite puppet to start a war. Maybe because Stephen Miller and Trump thought they would be able to use the war to finish their authoritarian schemes on America.

It’s becoming clear to the regime that they’ve made an enormous mistake. An enormous and fatal mistake, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it.

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

The regime would pay back all of the bribes it’s received. Jared Kushner, alone, got $2 billion. The Trump family has been paid so much in crypto, we’re not even sure how much they’ve sold our military for at this point.

Russia would get an enormous boost in oil profits and, gee whiz!, would you look at that? We’re lifting sanctions so countries can buy Russian oil! Boy! That sure is convenient for a country whose economy was on the brink of collapse just a few weeks ago.

The Evangelicals are thrilled, of course. This just might be the End Times! March on, Holy Crusaders!!!

This was going to be a quick and easy war. We would go in, blow everything up, kill the Supreme Leader, topple the government, and make Donald Trump look like a manly war hero! Iran, of course, would fight back just long enough that we would have to declare a “national emergency” and federalize the elections ahead of the midterms. Very sad. Hate to do it, but it’s for the best.

But it’s nine days later, and Iran hasn’t surrendered. Those fuckers selected a new Supreme Leader! They’re still fighting back! They’re killing people all across the Middle East and wreaking havoc! What the fuck?!

This was supposed to be over already! Trump was supposed to be rolling down Pennsylvania Ave. by now, enjoying his awesome victory parade and the praise of the people!

Instead, most of the country is furious with him, including a growing part of his own base. What? Did those fucking imbeciles really believe Trump when he said, “No more foreign wars?!” He’s lied about everything else, and NOW they’re surprised he lied about that, too?! WhatEVER!

And what is all this bullshit about running out of missiles?!

In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine reportedly said that Iran’s Shahed attack drones had proved a more difficult problem than initially predicted.

One source told CNN that the U.S. has been “burning” through long-range precision-guided missiles.

You mean we can’t make expensive, complicated missiles as quickly as cheap and relatively low-tech drones?! Drones that Iran has been stockpiling explicitly for this exact moment? How could anyone have foreseen such a thing? Except maybe the experts who warned that this is exactly the war Iran would fight?

A quick aside here: It’s important to understand that Iran is not fighting to win. It can’t, and they know it. This is a war of survival. What does that look like for Iran? Causing so much pain and suffering and damage to every hostile country in the Gulf that they demand the United States and Israel stop the attack. If we run out of interceptors and Iran can start launching drones that we can’t stop, the damage will be extreme. Ask Ukraine. The Gulf states will not put up with that crap for long. They wanted us to do their dirty work for them, not have death rain on their countries for weeks on end.

A second consideration for the regime is what happens if we DO run out of munitions. We’re the United States. The most fearsome and dangerous war machine ever to exist yadayadayada. If we literally run out of missiles, we suddenly look a whole lot less fearsome and dangerous. Ask Russia what it’s like to have your reputation as a military superpower evaporate.

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Meanwhile, Trump is ordering the peasants to stop paying attention to the price of gas. No, really.

What’s the price of oil looking like right now? Well, it’s 3:20 in the morning EST1

That drop from $115 a barrel is, if I understand it correctly, because countries are talking about releasing oil from their strategic petroleum reserves. That, however, is a stopgap measure. If the war drags on and oil production continues to be strangled in the Gulf, prices will skyrocket well past $100 and stay there.

And since Israel will not stop until Iran is crippled, permanently, this war is only just beginning. There’s a reason Trump is talking about sending troops in. If he backs out now, without toppling the regime, he’ll look weaker than ever. Of course, toppling the regime will be almost impossible according to our own intelligence experts:

Israel, of course, doesn’t really care, and they’re destroying everything: Schools, hospitals, desalination plants in a country suffering from acute drought. Israel is also blowing up oil infrastructure, which is causing widespread ecological damage, essentially waging chemical warfare by proxy. It’s also ensuring that the price of oil will spike further as the markets panic over the destruction of a major oil supplier. It’s also very likely to make the Iranian people turn towards their repressive government to protect them from the violently insane invaders attacking them. Remember “Hearts and Minds?” This is what the opposite of that looks like.

What could possibly go wrong?

So we’re stuck fighting a war we can’t get out of with objectives we cannot complete, and the longer we fight, the more damage to our own economy we do. An economy that is already teetering on the edge of collapse, just waiting for one or two more pushes to go over the edge.

We lost jobs in December and February. Unemployment is up. A sharp spike in gas and oil prices will push inflation way back up and drag the economy down like an anchor.

Here’s another terrible indicator that no one is really paying attention to (which is why you have me). I’ve been talking for a while now about two different bubbles, AI and the fucking banks AGAIN!!!!

In 2008-2009, the banks collapsed because they had hundreds of billions in bets tied up in mortgages that went bad. Did they learn their lesson? Fuuuuuuck no.

Well, sort of. Now they’re not just betting on mortgages. They’re betting on all kinds of debt. Credit cards, auto loans, grocery loans. Anything you can borrow money to pay for, they’re betting money on it. What happens when the economy sours and those loans default? The same goddamn thing that happened in 2008-2009. The banks can’t pay their debts, and the bubble pops. Boom goes the economy.

And look at that, rich people are starting to panic about their money:

Sentiment has soured around private credit in recent months, and retail investors are increasingly asking for their money back from funds like BlackRock’s $26 billion HPS Corporate Lending Fund (HLEND), which were designed to be open to wealthy ​individuals.

“It should serve as a warning sign for the industry and the rulemakers about the downside of illiquid funds for retail investors,” ​said Greggory Warren, senior stock analyst at Morningstar.

Last year’s bankruptcies of a U.S. auto parts supplier and a subprime auto ⁠lender, along with the collapse of a UK mortgage lender last week, have raised questions about lending standards.

“Subprime auto lender.” That’s literally the same scummy thing the banks did with mortgages, and for the exact same reason. More loans mean they can be bundled into “financial instruments” and used to place bets. Bets that are starting to go bad with predictable results. Fuck these people with a red-hot poker.

What’s an aspiring dictator to do when his quick and easy war turns out to be a quagmire that will make it impossible to win an election he cannot afford to lose? Worse, Trump’s dreams of riding high as a warhero and/or declaring a national emergency are dependent on public support. He’s so reviled, no matter how hard the regime tries to terrorize the country into submission, we are not going to play along.

Whether Iran manages to land a real terrorist attack or the regime (or Russia or American Nazis) stages a false flag attack, it won’t matter. The public is going to blame Trump and his stupid fucking war. The LAST thing we’re going to do is give him more power. “Please protect us from the fucking mess YOU made!” Yeah, that is not going to happen, no matter how much Stephen Miller masturbates himself to sleep dreaming of his own personal Reichstag Fire.

By attacking Iran in such a sloppy, stupid, and thoughtless way with no goals and no exit strategy, Trump has guaranteed the blue wave that was already coming will be an unstoppable flood washing away hundreds of corrupt Republicans up and down the ticket across the country. The House is lost. The Senate, once seen as a heavy lift, is now slipping out of the reach of the GOP. State legislatures and governorships are threatened. All of this two years before an election that will determine the fate of hundreds of Republicans facing life sentences in prison under a Democratic president with a real Attorney General.

If you thought Trump was desperate already, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet as the full realization sets in of just how much he’s fucked himself. I’d be more worried if there was a single competent fascist in the White House, but it’s a fucking clown show through and through. They’ll hurt a lot of people as they flail and sink. Our job is to keep them from pulling us under with them. Or rather, push them under and hold them there until they stop moving. Just to be safe. 😜

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There are only 277 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

Cynicism About News Helps Our Dictator

DCReport Readers, I want to strongly encourage you to look at the front page of The New York Times for Sunday, March 8, 2026. There are six stories, any one of which I would have been proud to author, and all of which upend any claim that The Times is no longer worth your time.

The great Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie Savage leads the page with a news analysis headlined “Trump Tramples a Line, Worn Faint, on War. He describes how, since the Cold War began, the Constitutional principle that only Congress can declare war has been progressively eroded.

As commander-in-chief, the President only has inherent authority to defend against a current or imminent attack. Trump’s war on Iran finishes wiping out that bedrock Constitutional standard, while the leadership on Capitol Hill, where Republicans control both chambers, does nothing.

Immediately below that piece, but still above the fold, is a Kenneth P. Vogel piece headlined “Pardon Industry Offers the Rich A Path to Trump.”

Selling Pardons

Vogel, a dogged investigative reporter, devotes an entire inside page to showing how Donald Trump is selling clemency and pardons to the rich. If that sounds like an impeachable offense, it is. Among those pardoned are some of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers, child sexual abusers, and white-collar criminals who will now get to keep their ill-gotten billions with no restitution to their victims.

This was an exceptionally difficult story to ferret out because public records are scant, and conspirators in these pardons-and-clemency-for-sale schemes aren’t eager to implicate themselves or Trump.

It’s also criminal in my view, as someone who both knows Trump and has taught law for the last 17 years, although I’m not a lawyer.

Taking money to let people out of prison or wipe their slates clean, even when it’s done through intermediaries or ancillary characters, is a crime, not an “official act.” That distinction matters because of a cockamamie 2023 Supreme Court decision that former presidents may not be prosecuted for any “official act” performed while in office.

Issuing clemency and pardons is an official act. Taking money isn’t, even if the money goes to confederates.

Also above the fold: “Colleges Respond to Upswing in Disability Diagnoses,” in which reporters Mark Arsenault and Steven Rich dive into the reasons for the last decade’s 50% jump in the number of students receiving special treatment for diagnosed disabilities. They found that some of these reflect refined techniques to identify disabilities and related physical and intellectual limitations. However, some of it reflects students gaming the system for a range of accommodations, such as extra time to complete quizzes, midterms, and finals.

Billionaire Boom

Right at the fold, a four-column headline suggests a threatening scenario: “Torrent of Money Transforms A Slice of Wyoming” This story documents America’s billionaire boom and how wealth is increasingly concentrated at the very top, a story I started making a kitchen-table topic in 1995 when I became a reporter for The Times, and I continued to pursue it for the next 13 years.

Back then, a small army of critics blamed me for, in their view, abusing income statistics to fabricate an issue. Those critics were never able to point to any conceptual or factual error, but that didn’t stop their attacks until the Obama era, when widening income inequality became so obvious that denial no longer resonated with anyone except cranks and the willfully blind.

Times reporters Katie Benner, Steven Rich, Mike Baker, and John Branch did a fabulous job of updating the economic data to show that the top 1 in 1,000 families is experiencing skyrocketing wealth, while the bottom half of Americans have merely doubled their minuscule wealth in the last 35 years.

The sixth story is about retirees who chose to stay in Gotham rather than go to Florida. As Kiplinger’s, the personal finance magazine, pointed out years ago, if you have your housing costs solved (own, rent-controlled, or rent-stabilized), then the big city is one of the cheapest and most culturally enriching places in America for those with a modest income. No surprise, but a sound reminder.

Unique Workplace Principles

It’s easy to fault The New York Times. Indeed, few people are more critical of the paper than those who work in its newsrooms.

That’s because newsrooms operate on principles different from any other commercial enterprise. There’s an old journalistic saying that “a healthy newsroom is a newsroom with lots of bitching” about what is and is not in the daily report, as the mix of news stories is known among reporters and editors.

Newspapers make mistakes just like every other institution. But they are virtually unique in owning up to those mistakes and ensuring the public is aware of them.

There’s another old saying in newsrooms: “Doctors bury their mistakes, lawyers see theirs off to jail, only reporters sign theirs on the front page for everyone to read.”

Standing Up

I once spent money on researchers to find out who originated that phrase. The oldest verifiable use was under my byline. But I did not originate it. If you know who did, please write to us via the DCReport Tipline.

Few institutions in America have the resources, the talent, and the institutional imperatives to stand fast against Trump. For a long time, The Washington Post stood for our Constitution and the liberties of the people. But then its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, decided his fortune mattered more than America’s future as a democracy of free peoples.

Now and then, Rupert Murdoch’s The Wall Street Journal breaks a big story that infuriates Trump. But Donald can rely on the WSJ opinion pages to, for the most part, give cover for his anti-democratic moves. The American edition of The Guardian, a British newspaper, is solid, as are many independent news websites.

If you want to live free. If you want your progeny and the progeny of others to enjoy our liberties, then one key thing you can do is start every morning by reading The New York Times.

That doesn’t mean you should concur with or believe everything you read. Read the first rough draft of history with a grain of salt, as I do. Recognize that some reporters are great and many are merely good, and that, overall, the news is a highly accurate recounting of the official version of events and the official criticisms of those events.

Or be cynical. Close your eyes. Donald Trump will exploit your ignorance, but he’ll never thank you.

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Where do you start? With the planning that left out the whole thing about Iran shooting back? With the use of an insecure curtained-off ballroom in Mar a Lago as the Iran war room? With the White House turning a real shooting war that is killing hundreds of Iranians each day into a macho meme campaign that features clips from video games mixed with real-world strikes on targets in Iran? With Russia providing targeting information to the Iranian military, and that causing our Treasury Secretary to relax sanctions on Russian oil because…well, we haven’t been told why, but gas prices headed ever skyward might have something to do with it.

You can’t keep up with the madness, because there is so much of it. The House and the Senate rejected a war powers resolution that would have ended military action in Iran and required Trump to get congressional approval before proceeding with his war. Republicans said Trump was justified in unilaterally attacking Iran because of the “imminent threat” posed by Iran. When Democrats pointed out that the word “imminent” does not appear even once in the notification and justification the White House provided Congress for the war, Republicans turned to something new…or is it old?...a charge that “Iran has waged a 47-year war against the United States,” so Trump was justified in attacking Iran because it has been our enemy for so long.

Who knew we have been at war with Iran for so long? This is the first we’ve heard of this 47-year war. Should it matter that Republicans can’t agree on why Trump must have the power to take this country to war on a whim, immediately after he walked out of a party in Mar a Lago? The White House itself can’t come up with a coherent reason for the war. Is it about regime change? “Imminent” nuclear weapons? Eliminating Iran’s ability to fund proxies that can strike U.S. “interests” in the Middle East? Eliminating or damaging Iran’s ballistic missile program?

See what I mean? When they’re caught out for contradicting themselves, for lying, for exaggerating, for denying that the war Trump and Hegseth talk about every day as, in fact, a “war,” they just keep babbling more nonsense, secure in the idea that if Donald Trump wants a war on Iran that it must be right.

Meanwhile, Trump has so far refused to interrupt his weekly flights on Air Force One to Palm Beach, where he spends time at Mar a Lago and goes golfing with his pals. The fact that there is an all-out war being fought against Iran – not because the Congress ordered the nation to war, or because anyone else thought bombing Iran was a good idea – but solely at his behest seems not to matter to him, or to anyone else in the Republican Party for that matter.

But now comes the piper insisting on being paid. Trade in oil has been severely interrupted, sending gas prices up everywhere, including the U.S., where the price of regular gas has increased fifty cents a gallon in a week. The price of diesel fuel has gone up even more, making the cost of shipping goods more expensive, and this on top of Trump’s insane tariffs that had already pushed the price of imported goods higher and then higher again, the ones everyone buys at Walmart and the corner store, forced small businesses to go out of business, including restaurants and family-owned firms distributing imported goods. And now we are told that this war that Donald Trump started just over a week ago has cost the United States one billion of our tax dollars each day.

Coming as I do from a military family, I must insist that we treat all this as background noise, because the United States is at war, and that has already caused soldiers to be killed and means that soldiers will likely continue to be killed, with Trump beginning to make noises about committing troops to combat on the ground in Iran.

I realized over the last couple of days that too much of what I have written about this war has been like what I have written above about Trump and the Congress and the justifications for the war and its effect on prices and all the rest. It is automatic to treat this war as if it is a gigantic and complex series of decisions and effects: if we attack this, how will Iran respond? If we use these munitions, what will that mean? Will we run out of those bombs before we can accomplish this goal? And what are the goals of this war, anyway?

The reality of this war and every war for that matter is death. We are told that more than 1,300 Iranians have been killed. The total killed on “our” side is much less. The CENTCOM “Live Tracker” of casualties as of this morning shows that missile and drone strikes by Iran have killed one person in Bahrain, three in the United Arab Emirates, one in Oman, six in Kuwait, 11 in Israel, with injuries around the region in the hundreds. CENTCOM also lists the six American soldiers who have been killed so far.

This is what those cold statistics mean: Most of those people were living and breathing and sitting down to eat dinner with their families one week ago. They tucked their children in bed, or they wrote emails home, or they chatted with their friends on the phone and at work.

And then they didn’t, because this war started by Donald Trump killed them. This is what happens when someone is killed: A death in this war takes a son or a daughter from a mother and father; a husband from a wife, or a wife from a husband; a father or a mother from their children; a brother or a sister from their siblings; a friend from his or her friends.

When a life ends, possibilities end with it. This war has taken from the world the contributions the dead may have made to their families, to their communities, to their countries. The contributions of the people who have been killed need not have been the invention of a new technology or the cure for a disease or a solution to a shortage of food or water. All they might have done was to make others happy, their friends or their families or their children or the people they work with.

But now that has been taken from them, and from us. It is the most profound loss there can be, because their deaths did not occur naturally as part of the wrinkling of time. Their deaths did not have to happen. They died because of the decisions of one man.

The man who sent the nation’s military to war has no idea what the consequences are. Last week, speaking of the soldiers who were killed in a drone strike in Kuwait, Trump told NBC News, “We have three, but we expect casualties, but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world. And sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is. Likely be more.”

A great deal for the world.

Trump attended the ceremony at Dover Air Force Base when the bodies of the six American service members were returned to U.S. soil. He wore one of his baseball-style caps, a white one with the letters USA on the front, at the ceremony. The same cap is for sale as a souvenir on his website where he sells other gimcrackery with his name and image and MAGA emblazoned on them. After the Dover ceremony, Trump and his Secretary of War and his other guests got on Air Force One and flew to his hotel/residence/club, Mar a Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.

I have written before about my grandfather, General Lucian K. Truscott Jr., and the remarks he made on Memorial Day in 1945 at the dedication of the American Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy. I grew up as the son of an army officer and the grandson of two army officers. I can remember attending Memorial Day ceremonies at army posts in Georgia and Kansas and Pennsylvania and Kentucky and at West Point. I can remember my father stepping out on the balcony of our apartment in Oberammergau, Germany, on Memorial Day in 1956 and 1957 and 1958 to blow the trumpet he was given in the Boy Scouts at Fort Myer, Virginia, the mournful tones of Taps sounding across the army post grandpa had seized from the German army when he was military governor of Bavaria in 1945.

And I remember what my father told me about the night before he left on his assignment to the war in Korea when he asked grandpa what it was like to command troops in combat. Dad said they were standing along a wooden fence behind the farmhouse grandpa and grandma bought in Virginia after the war. He said grandpa listened to his question, and then he just broke down crying, sobbing so hard he had to lean against the fence to remain standing. Dad said all grandpa managed to say was, “The bodies, son, all those bodies, those bodies, all those bodies.” He said it was the only time he ever saw his father cry in his life, and he said they never again talked about war.

There is no official record of grandpa’s remarks at Nettuno in 1945, but Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, who was part of grandpa’s army in Italy during the war, wrote this in his memoir, “The Brass Ring,” in 1971:

“There were about twenty thousand American graves. Families hadn’t started digging up the bodies and bringing them home.”

“Before the stand were spectator benches, with a number of camp chairs down front for VIPs, including several members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. When Truscott spoke he turned away from the visitors and addressed himself to the corpses he had commanded here. It was the most moving gesture I ever saw. It came from a hard-boiled old man who was incapable of planned dramatics.”

“The general’s remarks were brief and extemporaneous. He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his heart this is not altogether true.

“He said he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances. He would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn’t see much glory in getting killed if you were in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do.”

That “hard-boiled old man” Mauldin describes was 50 years old. Bill Mauldin was 23. Neither of them could have foreseen the day that the President of the United States would attempt to popularize his war with video game meme images.

I will be 79 years old next month, and I do not consider myself either old or hardboiled, but I come from an army family, and I can assure you that after this war, as it has been true after every war, the dead will speak louder than any of the noise we hear from the man who ordered them into a war nobody wanted and that neither they, nor the world deserved.

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