TransDigm is a company in the aerospace industry that supplies parts that go into many of the commercial aircraft you see flying around the world today. The company also supplies many parts that go into U.S. military aircraft.

The company is very profitable. But according to Bloomberg‘s Anthony Capaccio reporting, a big portion of TransDigm’s financial success comes from gouging U.S. taxpayers through extreme markups of prices on parts purchased by the Department of Defense.

The Pentagon is weighing legislation that would give contracting officers the power to demand back-up data on spare parts costs after its inspector general said TransDigm Group Inc. could be paid about 9,400% in excess profit for a half-inch metal pin.

The Defense Logistics Agency could end up paying TransDigm $4,361 for the “drive pin” in a July contract that should cost $46, according to a Pentagon review endorsed by the inspector general.

The review found potential excess profits for 98 of 100 parts sampled and concluded the Pentagon may end up paying TransDigm $91 million more in coming years for parts valued at $28 million, with excess profit per part of 95% to the 9,380%, the Defense Department’s inspector general said in an audit labeled “For Official Use Only” and obtained by Bloomberg News.

Back on May 4, Ismael Huazo-Jardinez, 33, was speeding down Highway 113 in the agricultural community of Knight’s Landing, approximately 26 miles northwest of Sacramento. The driver failed to negotiate a curve and smashed his Chevrolet Avalanche into a trailer home, claiming the lives of Jose Pacheco, 38, Anna Pacheco, 34, and their son Angel, who was only 10. The crash also left the Pachecos’ daughter Mariana, 11, with serious injuries. The intoxicated Huazo-Jardinez attempted to flee the scene, but neighbors tackled him. As we noted last month, Sutter County judge David Ashby, a 2016 appointee of Gov. Jerry Brown, granted bail to Huazo-Jardinez. This baffled the victims’ relatives and neighbors, who now have more reason for outrage.

An op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times on June 3 declares that selective excise taxes on cigarettes have saved “millions of lives” and that “a soda tax could too.” Those claims are implausible and leave a distorted impression about what these taxes can and cannot accomplish.

The three economists who wrote the column draw an analogy to the textbook example of gasoline taxes, justified as ways of reducing fuel consumption and curbing tailpipe emissions that can harm even non-drivers. Their collective opinion thus draws on standard public finance theories, dating back to the work of A. C. Pigou in the 1930s, concluding that the most effective way to get people to internalize the costs their consumption of a good imposes on others – a “negative externality” in econ-speak – is to tax it. The tax raises the price of the good as some of it is passed through to retail markets and, hey presto, consumers predictably buy less of it, thereby reducing the social costs of their own consumption choices.

As we noted back in 2013, when John Beale applied for a job with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, he claimed he had worked for former senator John Tunney of California. He didn’t, and nobody bothered to check. Beale said he served in Vietnam, where he contracted malaria, and therefore needed a handicapped parking spot. He didn’t serve in Vietnam and didn’t contract malaria. Nobody checked those claims either, and Beale got his handicapped parking spot, along with a job as an EPA “policy advisor.”

In 1994, Beale claimed he was a secret agent for the Central Intelligence Agency, but the mighty EPA failed to verify. That lapse enabled Beale to take more than two years off, with full pay, claiming he was in London, India, and Pakistan when he was actually kicking back at his vacation home in Massachusetts. Beale pulled off his CIA ruse for nearly 20 years, performed little if any work, and still drew retention bonuses. Beale continued to draw an EPA paycheck until 19 months after his retirement dinner cruise on the Potomac River, and 23 months after he announced he would retire. Beale also got retention bonuses even after he retired. As one representative asked in hearings shown on C-SPAN, “was that so he wouldn’t retire again?”

In his two and a half years in office, President Trump has enacted two major fiscal policy initiatives: tax reform legislation and tariffs on foreign goods imported to the United States. According to Bloomberg, the cost of tariffs may soon exceed the benefits of tax cuts for middle-earner households by a big margin:

Here’s how the math works: middle earners got an average tax cut of $930 for the tax overhaul passed in late 2017, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. The tariffs already in effect cost the average household about $831, according to research from the New York Federal Reserve.

Add in the additional tariffs on another $300 billion in Chinese goods that Trump proposed in May, and is still considering, and that increases the cost for an average family of four to about $2,294 annually, according to research from “Tariffs Hurt the Heartland,” a coalition of business groups.

In 2011, the U.S. Congress supposedly banned fiscal “earmarks“—the practice by which legislators would secure funding for special projects in their districts and states by trading their votes for various bills before Congress in return for these rewards. Too often, instead of serving the interests of the people in their districts, elected members of Congress would come to spend their time soliciting campaign donations from special interests and lobbyists who received the benefits of that spending, which made the practice inherently corrupt.

But special-interest budget earmarks didn’t go entirely away. Writing at The Hill, Kristin Tate describes how the game changed so that politicians in Washington, D.C., could keep playing by enlisting help from the bureaucrats they authorized to spend taxpayer dollars:

Watch any politician speak of balancing the government budget, and one of the first and most repeated phrases is related to “waste and abuse.” However, when the time comes to line up at the spending trough, nearly every politician is set to expend tax dollars, often on ridiculous projects. Considering all of the lip service from Democrats and Republicans on fiscal policy, why does so much of our federal funding go toward these expenditures that seem like random topics selected by dart throws?

The budget is broken, in part, because politicians count on two factors. First, voters do not pay very close attention. Second, when they do pay attention they want politicians to be doing something. Earmarking a half million dollars for a Sparta Teapot Museum or another $273,000 toward “fighting goth culture” might seem like exactly what your own member of Congress should be doing. But when you tally up all 435 representatives, 100 senators, and the needs of 50 states, the spending grows so large that ridiculous projects can be shoehorned into bills with little oversight.

Members of Congress love earmarks. They make great reelection fodder and present a stellar opportunity to get on the cover of the Palookaville Picayune. After all, if you have money from the other 434 districts for an in kind donation to your next term, then why would you not take advantage? Since a 2011 soft ban on earmarks, members of Congress switched from direct budget requests to using the federal bureaucracy to steer money to their districts. Spending bills include additional funds, which are divided at the discretion of government agencies as well as the White House.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a post-apocalyptic dystopia?

Hollywood loves the subject, with movies ranging from classics like Blade Runner to popular movie series like the Hunger Games to almost-completely forgettable films like those in the Divergent series.

I remember that last trilogy only because it was set in Chicago, which is well on its way to becoming the rundown city depicted in the film, although the series never adequately explains why the people of the future chose to abandon that city. Writing at City Journal, Steven Malanga explains why the Chicagoans of today are increasingly making that choice (emphasis mine).

President Trump has announced a 5 percent tariff on all Mexican goods exported to the United States, escalating in proportion to Mexico’s ineffectiveness in solving the border crisis. By October 1, the tariff would rise to 25 percent. Whatever one thinks of these tariff threats, a key element of the backstory is going unreported in the establishment media.

When Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) got word of Trump’s tariff plan, he dispatched his foreign secretary Marcelo Ebrard to Washington. Ebrard is a former mayor of Mexico City and presidential candidate, but there is more to the man.

As Ebrard told Francisco Goldman of The New Yorker, the Mexican politician became “committed to direct political action” to get Hillary Clinton elected in 2016. Ebrard had previously worked with Voto Latino and other groups in California, Arizona, Florida and elsewhere. The prospect of an presidential election victory for candidate Donald Trump, whom Ebrard compared to Adolph Hitler, prompted the Mexican’s work for the campaign of Hillary Clinton. This election interference by a foreign national failed to emerge during the 2016 campaign and prompted no investigation.

The thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising received wide play in the media and thorough treatment in a congressional hearing shown on CSPAN. These events recalled how China’s one-party totalitarian dictatorship deployed military force against peaceful demonstrators, killing hundreds. Similar events took place in North America, but have never received the attention they deserve.

The 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City were the first to be hosted by a Spanish-speaking country. Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional, in power since the 1920s, saw the games as a validation of its one-party rule. Mexican students saw it as an opportunity to protest the regime of PRI boss Diaz Ordaz. On October 2, 1968, ten days before the opening ceremonies, several thousand students gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the main square in the Tlatelolco neighborhood of Mexico City.

The tariffs President Trump has levied on foreign imports are bad economic policy for many reasons.

First, they are a barrier to trade, and trade benefits all trading partners. Yes, tariffs on China hurt the Chinese, but they also hurt Americans because there are gains from trade, and tariffs reduce those gains.

Second, they are a tax on American citizens, plain and simple. Tariffs raise the cost of imported goods and ultimately American consumers will pay those costs. If you argue that businesses will not pass on those costs to consumers (which will not be true in the long run), then American businesses will pay the costs.