The Graph That Explains Everything
Picture a graph. On one axis, you’ve got the guns that represent military spending. On the other, everything else: fertilizer for crops, Medicare, daycare. That’s your butter. Now draw a curve that bows outward, like the edge of a bowl. That curve represents every possible combination of guns and butter an economy can produce given its current set of workers, factories, and technology.




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When Trump told his guests that the country can’t afford daycare because it’s fighting wars, he was making the most explicit guns-over-butter argument from an American president in several decades. He wasn’t trying to have both, like LBJ. He was picking a side. But if his remarks caught people off guard, it might be because his own administration made the opposite argument just days earlier.

Just a few days before Trump’s remarks, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went on television and lectured Iran about how much better off its people would be if the government stopped wasting its resources on weapons and invested in civilian welfare instead. Rubio was making a guns-and-butter argument about Iran at the same moment his own president was making the identical choice in the opposite direction. The irony was, to borrow a phrase, almost childishly obvious.

President Trump on Monday said the U.S. should no longer serve as the “policemen of the world.”

“We more and more are not wanting to be the policemen of the world,” Trump said during a joint press conference with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.

“We’re spending tremendous amounts of money for decades policing the world, and that shouldn’t be the priority,” he said. “We want to police ourselves and we want to rebuild our country. And the president understands that.”{mosads}

Trump ran on the promise that he would extricate the U.S. from foreign wars.