Senators are complaining about President Trump's decision to impose tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum.

The New York Times reports:

Republican lawmakers blasted the announcement, underlining how far Mr. Trump has strayed from the party's traditional orthodoxy of embracing free and open markets. Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, called tariffs "a tax hike the American people don't need and can't afford."

"Let's be clear: The president is proposing a massive tax increase on American families," said Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. "You'd expect a policy this bad from a leftist administration, not a supposedly Republican one."

It's one thing to complain. It's another thing to actually do something.

Bloomberg Businessweek has a grim report on the performance of Harvard's endowment over the past ten years:

Harvard over the past decade posted a 4.4 percent average annual return, among the worst of its peers. It even lagged the simplest approach: Investing in a market-tracking index fund holding 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds, which earned an annual 6.4 percent.

MIT's endowment returned an annualized average 7.6% over the same period, Yale 6.6%, the magazine says. The article doesn't make clear precisely which ten year period it is speaking about.

Harvard's endowment is more than $30 billion, so a percentage point here and there can translate into a lot of financial aid money, faculty salaries, or whatever.

The comment of the day is by reader-watchdog-community member-content co-creator-participant Douglas Levene, remarking on the post here headlined Responsible. Kind. Honest. Respectful. Mr. Levene writes:

It's not true that today's public schools, dominated by leftists, don't try to inculcate virtues into their students. The virtues they teach are not bourgeois virtues, however, like kindness, respect, obedience or cheerfulness. Rather the only virtue taught in public schools today seems to be the leftist virtue of equality. That's the reason for all the "diversity" and "social justice" training — that's the leftist version of civics.

I'm not familiar enough with the public schools to know whether Mr. Levene's assessment is accurate. The comments are open for those who wish to agree or disagree while observing the virtue of "respectful."

During a recent brief family visit to Washington, D.C., I found myself at the playground — actually, the "outdoor play and learning environment" — of Beauvoir, the National Cathedral Elementary School. The school, which goes from pre-kindergarten through 4th grade, has a 17,000-volume library, after-school classes in Mandarin, Spanish, and French, and tuition of about $36,000 a year.

What I found particularly interesting was the gateway to the rustic, vast, and state-of-the-art playground. It opened in 2013. Etched into the concrete were four words.

Responsible. Kind. Honest. Respectful.

David Brooks has written two recent New York Times columns about the Millennial generation.

From today's column:

I asked the students what change agents they had faith in. They almost always mentioned somebody local, decentralized and on the ground — teachers, community organizers...I came away from these conversations thinking that one big challenge for this generation is determining how to take good things that are happening on the local level and translate them to the national level, where the problems are.

From the earlier column:

Brown University will start providing full-tuition scholarships to students in the Brown/Trinity Rep MFA programs in acting and directing, the university announced in a press release. Neither the Associated Press nor the New York Times, both of which picked up the news, drew the connection, but Harvard's graduate program in theater, based at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, has come under public fire for "burdening its students with loan debt averaging about $78,000 each." If Harvard, with its vast endowment, can't come up with the scratch to fund its program, at least there's another Ivy League institution an hour's drive south that sees the opportunity here and has chosen a different approach.

The criminal investigations circling around President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu — and the precedents for them — are the subject of my column this week. Please check out the full column at Newsmax here and at the New York Sun here.

Frederic Filloux, drawing on an increasing amount of academic research about news quality and social media, has a really interesting look at the reasons Facebook is going to have a hard time fixing what Filloux describes as the social network's "reliability problem."

Warren Buffett on Saturday released his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, covering the year 2017. This year it struck me as newsworthy more for what was omitted than for what was in there.

Despite Buffett's Democratic-leaning politics, there was nothing in the letter complaining about President Trump. No pleas for free trade, no pleas for immigration reform to accommodate the "dreamers," no pleas for gun control, no major complaints about the tax law (though some brief discussion of how it affects Berkshire). No mention of the #MeToo movement, though there is a borderline inappropriate comment in Buffett's letter about how board members encouraging CEOs to consider possible acquisitions is "a bit like telling your ripening teenager to be sure to have a normal sex life."

The reaction to the announcement of Harvard's new president is the topic of my column this week.

Harvard University had only just announced its next president before he came under attack — not for anything he did, but for who he is.

That is, in the eyes of his critics, at least, a "white male."

Please check the full column out at the New York Sun here, at Newsmax here, and at the New Boston Post here.

The New York Times has a nice front-page look at a situation in which Medicaid recipients get better health care coverage than people who pay for private insurance, and how that breeds resentment and creates perverse incentives. The Medicaid recipient profiled in the story is an aspiring opera singer: "to supplement the scant income she gets from singing gigs, she drives for Uber and Lyft a few nights a week, sometimes more, in Boston. She earned about $15,000 last year, making sure she stayed under the threshold to qualify for Medicaid."

You might think Uber, with its reported $48 billion valuation, could afford to make employer-provided health insurance available to its employees, but it's hard to compete with the deal Medicaid is offering, and the cost of private insurance would end up getting reflected in either higher prices for customers, lower cash wages for drivers, or lower eventual profits for shareholders.

An Ipsos/University of Virginia Center for Politics poll of presidents from Eisenhower through Trump found President Kennedy was the highest rated. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed "the cult of JFK endures even unto the third generation," but as I put it on Twitter, "Another way to look at it is, growth-oriented tax cuts + military buildup = very popular president." There's a book about this.

The FBI got a phone call warning about the Florida school shooter, but dropped the ball and failed to follow up on the tip, the bureau acknowledged today. It reminds me of how the FBI was aware of the Boston Marathon bombers but failed to take them seriously enough to prevent the attack. Or how the agency was slow to act against the doctor who was molesting Olympic gymnasts.

You'd think all that, along with the other FBI scandal, might be enough to erode the standing or credibility of the Comey-Mueller crew when it comes to their statements about Hillary Clinton's emails or President Trump's campaign and Russia.

The "Wheels" column in the New York Times is headlined "More Luxury Buyers Ditch the Imports and Pick Up a Truck."

It features two examples. One man "was leaning toward an Audi A6" but instead:

bought a Raptor version of the Ford F-150. The Raptor is a truck with the soul of a racecar: It has a 450-horsepower engine, a 10-speed transmission, electronic ride settings for seven different road surfaces, big chrome wheels, a power tailgate, cameras at all four corners and an adaptive cruise control system similar to the Audi's. With all those options, the sticker price came to about $80,000.

Another example is a guy who:

just bought an F-150 Lariat with a bevy of options, including heated rear seats. "I can put my mother back there, and she's in heaven," he said. "There's no doubt in my mind this is a luxury vehicle."

Bloomberg News reports, "In the past five years, Amazon increased lobbying spending by more than 400 percent, a rate of change that far exceeds rivals'."

The article goes on:

In 2015, it hired former Obama White House Press Secretary Jay Carney as senior vice president of corporate affairs. He now oversees the Washington policy office, which has almost doubled its number of registered lobbyists to 27 from two years ago. That roster does not include outside lobbyists like former Senator John Breaux, a Democrat, and his Republican partner, onetime Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.