Earl O'Garro

My children: I have started this letter and stopped, started it and stopped, because there are some things a father does not want to be the one to tell. But the news will reach you in time, from every side, and if you are going to hear it from a hundred sources I would have you hear it first from me, and hear it plainly, because the truth is what I owe you, and because there is no one else in the world who loves you the way I do. Last night, on the nineteenth of May, in the y

In February of this year, the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran. They said it was to destroy Iran's nuclear program, to end the regime's sponsorship of proxy forces, to remove a threat from the board once and for all. The language was clean, technical, inevitable. There would be a reckoning — quick, decisive, surgical. That was three months ago. Today, the ceasefire that was supposed to produce a deal is what Donald Trump himself called "on massive life s

The primary in Kentucky's 4th Congressional District is three days away, and by every public accounting it is now the most expensive House primary in the history of the republic — more than twenty-five million dollars in advertising poured into one Republican contest in one Kentucky district. A great deal of that money has come, by way of a Washington super PAC called the United Democracy Project, from an organization whose own publicly stated mission is to persuade the Unite

Kevin Warsh walked into the United States Senate on Wednesday and walked out with fifty-four votes and the most thankless job in American economic life. The 54-45 confirmation — the narrowest, the most partisan in modern Fed history — tells you something about the moment, not merely the man. It tells you that the country is so divided on the basic question of what money is, and who should govern it, that even the appointment of a central banker has become a partisan blood spo

There is a moment in every father's life — a small, ordinary moment, perhaps over toast and homework, perhaps in the slow walk from a car to a schoolyard — when the country he lives in stops being an abstraction and becomes, suddenly and irrevocably, the thing his children will inherit. I have arrived at that moment more often than I would like, and never more sharply than in the slow, grinding, public revelation of what the men at the top of our republic did, knew, or refuse

On the first day of May, before an audience at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, the President of the United States stood at a podium in Florida and announced, with the easy cadence of a man returning from lunch, that his country would be "taking over" Cuba "almost immediately." He invoked the USS Abraham Lincoln by name, suggested its homeward course from the Persian Gulf could simply detour, and added, as if confirming an appointment on his calendar, "I like to finish a j

There is a particular kind of dishonesty that begins to bloom whenever a republic finds itself at war and would rather not say so. It does not announce itself. It comes dressed in idiom — in the casual phrase, in the smiling shrug, in the assurance that whatever just happened in the dark waters between two nations was hardly anything at all. President Donald Trump, on Thursday, after three United States Navy destroyers — the USS Truxtun, the USS Rafael Peralta, and the USS Ma

There was a time, not so long ago, when Americans believed that a number meant a thing — that a price was a fact about the world and not the polished opinion of a committee, that a dollar earned in the morning was a dollar still in the evening, that the savings of a working life would meet a working man at the other end of it without having been hollowed out by the hand of an economist. That belief — and let us call it what it was, a belief, half-religion and half-republican

There is a particular cruelty in being asked to pay for a war you did not vote for, did not believe in, and were promised would be over by now. The founder reading this on a Monday morning — the woman running a fourteen-truck logistics outfit out of Bridgeport, the man who put his second mortgage into a coffee roaster in Hartford, the immigrant family holding together a four-store dry-cleaning chain on the strength of a revolving line of credit — none of them ordered the stri

There is a number a man ought to be made to look at. Three hundred and fifty-two billion dollars, since the founding of the State of Israel — that is what the Congressional Research Service and the Council on Foreign Relations have, between them, totaled — of which two hundred and sixty-three billion was military aid: bombs, fighter aircraft, the iron domes that protect a country whose own iron grip on Gaza we are then asked, by the same Prime Minister, to also pay for. In th

A free people cannot indefinitely outsource the value of its currency to men in suits, regardless of their party. Whatever side wins this fight on Constitution Avenue, the enduring fight is older and harder.

There is a school in Minab, in the south of Iran, that is no longer there. A missile is reported to have killed more than a hundred and fifty people inside it — most of them, the United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Mission noted in March, schoolgirls between the ages of seven and twelve. The detail is not decorative; it is the floor of the argument. Whatever Benjamin Netanyahu says he is doing in Iran — and he has said, on the record, that he "crushed the Iranian regime's

There is, in this country, a building on Constitution Avenue that has come to mean what we will not say aloud. Its renovation cost a billion dollars more than promised — asbestos and sinkholes, we were told, the price of fixing what no one had thought to repair — and last week, on a Friday, the Department of Justice quietly closed its investigation into the man who signed the contracts. By Sunday, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina had withdrawn his objection to Kevin Wars

There is a theft that no one will prosecute, committed in broad daylight, announced in press releases written in the anesthetized language of men who have been trained never to say what they mean. This week, while the country argued about borders and budgets and who sat where on the Sunday shows, the Federal Reserve quietly announced that it had discontinued the runoff of its balance sheet, that it would begin, once again, reserve management purchases, that it would enhance i

There is something obscene, and I mean obscene in the old ecclesiastical sense — a thing set apart from the sacred — about the spectacle of grown men and women gathering quarterly in a marble room in Washington to decide, by vote, what the price of money will be, as if the cost of borrowing were a matter not of markets and risk and the patient accumulation of savings but of committee sentiment, of tea leaves read by bureaucrats, of twenty-five basis points conjured or withhel

There is a building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., a white marble edifice overlooking the National Mall, and inside it — or so we are told — the guardians of our money sit in quiet deliberation over interest rates and inflation targets and the careful, clinical language of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve has long occupied a peculiar place in American life: too powerful to ignore, too opaque to understand, and too insulated, its critics say, from the democrat

There is a number on the gas pump, and there is a number in the Federal Reserve's minutes, and the distance between these two numbers — the one you see with your own eyes and the one they discuss in rooms you will never enter — is the precise measure of the lie they are telling you about the economy. In March, gasoline prices surged twenty-one percent in a single month. The Consumer Price Index leapt to 3.3 percent year-over-year, nearly a full point higher than the month bef

One year ago this month, we were told that liberation had arrived — not in the form of expanded freedom, not in the loosening of the chains that bind the entrepreneur, the small manufacturer, the woman importing fabrics for her business in Flatbush — but in the form of tariffs. Executive Order 14257, signed with ceremony in the Rose Garden on April 2, 2025, promised that factories would roar back, that prices would fall, that a new era of American wealth was being born. The w

There is a clock in Manhattan, on Sixth Avenue near Forty-Third Street, that does not tell time in any way most of us would find comforting. It counts, instead, the accumulation of a national obligation that has now surpassed thirty-nine trillion dollars — a figure so vast, so untethered from anything resembling human experience, that one is tempted to look away, to treat it as abstraction, the way one treats the distance between stars. But this is not abstraction. This is th

There is a particular kind of dishonesty that passes for compassion in this country, and it has held us captive for generations. It is the dishonesty of promising people that the government will take care of them while building a system so bloated, so inefficient, and so politically untouchable that it slowly devours the very treasury meant to sustain the nation. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act has placed the question of Medicaid reform squarely before us, and the response — p