On Friday the House overwhelmingly approved a massive increase in military spending, passing a $696 billion National Defense Authorization bill for 2018. President Trump’s request already included a huge fifty or so billion dollar spending increase, but the Republican-led House found even that to be far too small. They added another $30 billion to the bill for good measure. Even President Trump, in his official statement, expressed some concern over spending in the House-passed bill.

The best way to look at tariffs or import quotas or other protectionist restraints is to forget about political boundaries.

Janet Yellen didn’t make much news this week when she testified before the House and Senate banking committees. She continued to defend the Fed’s low interest rate policy, painted a very optimistic picture of the American economy, and struggled to defend her opposition to Audit the Fed.

In the past here at mises.org, we’ve looked at several different ways of comparing government spending across presidential administrations. No matter how we look at it, we’re forced to conclude that Republican presidents cannot be counted on to spend less than Democratic presidents. 

This Sunday the long awaited seventh season of Game of Thrones will premier on HBO. Two Mises Institute scholars, Matthew McCaffrey and Carmen Elena Dorobăț, have written extensively on the economics of the series, noting that:

George R.R. Martin’s story touches on a variety of economic issues, from the implications of not having an economic system at all, to the problems of money and public finance.

Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 20, no. 1 (Spring 2017)

The shock landslide defeat of PM Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in the recent Tokyo metropolitan elections — and the triumph there of Tokyo Governor Koike’s new party (Tomin First) — has lit a faint hope that the radical Japanese monetary expansion policy could be on its way out. The flickering light though is not strong enough to soothe the mania in Japan’s carry trades and so the yen continued to slide in the aftermath of the elections.

Thousands lined up to purchase recreational marijuana legally at 12:01 a.m. on July 1. At Euphoria Wellness, with a location in southwest Las Vegas, a crowd of 400 to 500 people were lined up at midnight. Other locations had just as many.

Among the first to purchase was state senator Tick Segerblom, who has a strain of weed named after him: “Segerblom Haze.” The senator tweeted that he believed the state would rake in a million dollars in tax money this first weekend. Judging from the lines out the doors at dispensaries in just my neighborhood, I don’t doubt his projection.