“Paradoxically, the faster government debt escalates toward an inevitable debt crisis, the less politicians and voters seem to care.”
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“Why are we no longer responding to soaring debt and its economic consequences? While there are many factors, the three most important are these: 1) We’ve convinced ourselves that deficits do not matter; 2) partisan politics and the collapse of lawmaking have turned deficits into a weapon to be politicized rather than a problem to be solved; and 3) few of us are willing to face the unpopular reality that this issue cannot be resolved without fundamentally reforming Social Security, Medicare, and middle-class taxes.”
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“The driver of this debt is no mystery. The combination of rising health care costs and 74 million retiring baby boomers is driving annual Social Security and Medicare costs far above their payroll tax and Medicare premium revenues. These annual program shortfalls—which must be funded with general tax revenues and new borrowing—will exceed $650 billion this year on their way to $2.2 trillion annually a decade from now, when including the interest costs of their deficits. Specifically, by 2034 Social Security and Medicare will be collecting $2.6 trillion annually in revenues while costing $4.8 trillion in benefits and associated interest costs.”
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“Over 30 years, CBO data show Social Security and Medicare facing an annual shortfall of $124 trillion while the rest of the budget is roughly balanced. By 2054, these two programs will be contributing 11.3 percent of GDP to annual budget deficits, or the current equivalent of $3.2 trillion in annual program shortfalls (including the interest costs of their deficits). As for the rest of the budget, CBO projects that tax revenues will continue to rise, and other program spending to fall, as a share of the economy. This means the entire long-term deficit growth is driven by Social Security, Medicare, and the interest cost of their shortfalls.”
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“We cannot grandfather out of reform the 74 million boomers whose costs are driving the $124 trillion shortfall. Nor can we tweak our way out of this. If the system is to be kept afloat, Social Security’s eligibility age must rise, its benefit growth formulas must be significantly curtailed for above-average earners, and its taxes may need to rise too. Medicare premiums must steeply rise for above-average earners, and its elevated costs addressed either with a new choice- and competition-based premium support system or with ambitious price and payment reforms to scale back costly procedures.”
“Asserting that Biden’s bullseye comment had anything to do with political violence is obviously ridiculous. Moreover, Republicans know that it is ridiculous. In fact, they rightly criticized The New York Times and other media outlets for embracing the preposterous idea that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was morally responsible for the attempted assassination of Gabby Giffords. The accusation against her was remarkably similar: The media seized on a map, circulated by her political action committee, that placed target crosshairs over Giffords’ district. There is no evidence whatsoever that Giffords’ shooter ever saw the map or that he was influenced by Republican rhetoric or even motivated by conservative ideas at all.
It is absolutely fair to call out the double standard. It’s true mainstream media wholly embraced the idea that Republicans are to blame for political violence because of things like the crosshairs on the map but said nothing critical about Biden’s bullseye comment. But Republicans like Vance aren’t calling out that double standard—they are participating in it. They are doing the same thing from the other side: blaming political violence on Democratic rhetoric.
It’s true that both parties, their activists, and their acolytes in the media could all benefit the country if they turned down the overheated rhetoric. Routine accusations that such-and-such political leader is a fascist, or Hitler, or a communist, or a dictator are not making things better for anyone. But words do not have some hypnotic power to induce others to commit violence. As always, when a deranged person takes up a gun and attacks someone, we should blame that individual—not other people’s words.”
“Vance is perhaps the GOP’s leading practitioner of responding to questions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by pivoting to Mexico and fentanyl. “What are we talking about?” he asked at a voter forum in February 2022 as the invasion was imminent. “We’re talking about a border 5,000 miles away between Ukraine and Russia. That’s what our leaders are focused on. If we had leaders half as concerned about their own border as they were about the Ukraine-Russia border, we would not have a border crisis in this country.””
“Vance is an outspoken protectionist, nationalist, and anti-corporate hawk who’s bound to shift any future Trump administration in an anti-trade, anti-immigration, and anti-market direction. That can only mean bad things for the cost and availability of housing.”
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“The federal government hasn’t regulated rents at private buildings since World War II. There’s a good reason for that. A mountain of economic evidence suggests rent control is a terribly counterproductive policy.
The research couldn’t be clearer that where rent control policies suppress rents, they also suppress the supply of rental housing (by reducing construction or encouraging conversion of rental units to for-sale units) and reduce the quality of rental housing (by limiting investment).
The people who get a rent-controlled unit pay lower prices and stay in their units longer. The people who don’t get a rent-controlled unit end up paying higher prices. Cities as a whole suffer from declining investment and economic growth.
A rent control policy adopted in St. Paul, Minnesota, saw an exodus of developers from the city. New York City’s long-standing “rent stabilization” policy is producing vacant, dilapidated buildings that no one has the money to fix or redevelop.”
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“Vance is an arch-protectionist who’s endorsed Trump’s call for 10 percent tariffs across the board. Slapping taxes on imported materials needed for housing construction would make the costs of construction higher, lower housing production, and ultimately raise costs for consumers.
The Republican Party’s 2024 platform calls for deporting immigrants as a means of making housing more affordable.
Vance has been an outspoken proponent of this idea, saying on X last month that “not having 20 million illegal aliens who need to be housed (often at public expense) will absolutely make housing more affordable for American citizens.”
There’s a certain chilling logic to this idea: Lowering housing demand through mass deportations will lower housing prices as well.
New research however suggests the negative supply effects of kicking immigrants out of their homes outweigh any price declines caused by falling demand for housing. While immigrants consume housing, they also build housing. A recent study found that increased immigration enforcement creates a shortage of construction labor that lowers housing production and increases housing costs.”
“”A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran—but not these weak little bombing runs,” Vance said in a Fox News interview at the Republican National Convention on Monday. “If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard, and that’s what [Trump] did when he took out [Iranian Gen. Qassem] Soleimani.”
Vance praised Trump for trying to “enable the Israelis and the Sunni Arab states” to fight back against Iran. In a speech to the Quincy Institute in May, Vance tried to sell a U.S.-Israeli-Arab alliance as a way for the United States to “spend less time and less resources in the Middle East.”
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Instead, Trump ended up overseeing a massive U.S. military buildup in the region during his term and nearly went to war with Iran.
Vance even wants to add another counterinsurgency to America’s “forever war” roster. In July 2023, he told NBC News that he would “empower the president of the United States, whether that’s a Democrat or Republican, to use the power of the U.S. military to go after these drug cartels” in Latin America.
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Trump and Vance also share the establishment view that the United States needs to get ready for a conflict with China over Taiwan. At the convention, Vance told Fox News that China is the “biggest threat” to America, and he has voiced support for building up the Taiwanese military with American weapons in the past.”
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“The stance that puts Trump and Vance most at odds with the foreign policy establishment is their opposition to U.S. military aid for Ukraine. In a February speech to the Senate, Vance complained that the “experts have a new thing that American taxpayers must fund and must fund indefinitely, and it is called the conflict in Ukraine.” He has also written about the munitions shortages that the war is causing, a rare moment of honesty by a politician about the limits of U.S. power.
Vance told Fox News at the convention that Trump will “go in there, negotiate with the Russians and the Ukrainians, [and] bring this thing to a rapid close.” He also said that the war simply wouldn’t have started if Trump were in office. Yet in practice, Trump’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine were just as hawkish as those of his successor. In fact, Trump was the first U.S. president to send weapons to Ukraine—a fact that he bragged about at the time.
And tellingly, at the presidential debate in June, Trump blamed President Joe Biden’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan for causing the Ukrainian conflict. “He was so bad with Afghanistan, it was such a horrible embarrassment,” Trump said. “When [Russian President Vladimir] Putin saw that, he said, ‘You know what? I think we’re going to go in.'”
It’s not really an argument against war—just a promise to be better at it than the last guy.
Many Democrats and Republicans want to have their cake and eat it too. They know that Americans are fed up with endless military conflict, but they want to make their opponents look weak. Liberal criticisms of Trump’s foreign policy were just as incoherent as conservative criticisms of Biden’s foreign policy.
But wanting to win harder is not a strategy. And America’s problems are not simply a lack of gumption. Vance may be more willing to acknowledge the limits of U.S. power than his competition. When it comes to actually applying those insights, he falls far short.”
“”A disproportionate number of undocumented immigrants are convicted of driving without a license” or “using a false Social Security Number,” notes the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force. But immigrants “are less prone” to committing crimes that are unrelated to their immigration status, it continues. “Existing evidence shows that immigrants do not represent a threat to public safety any more than every other segment of the population.””
“Hasina’s exit on an India-bound military helicopter came after crowds broke a curfew and stormed the prime minister’s residence in the capital Dhaka, following weeks of bloody protest.
The movement that ultimately toppled her started with students frustrated at their lack of job prospects and snowballed to include ordinary Bangladeshis facing increasingly tough economic conditions. But the jubilant scenes in the capital Dhaka come at great cost; around 300 people have been killed since the protests started in June, and the country’s future remains uncertain as a military-backed caretaker government steps in.
After a decade and a half in power, Hasina’s legacy is complicated. On the one hand, her government built modern infrastructure and improved development opportunities, especially for the poor. But she also increasingly cracked down on the press, as well as the opposition, and as time went on, many forms of dissent.
Army General Waker-uz-Zaman announced Monday that the military had taken control of the government; parliament is being dissolved, and the government is formulating a plan for fresh elections.
“The country is going through a revolutionary period,” Zaman said in a national television address. “We request you to have faith in the army of the country. Please don’t go back to the path of violence and please return to nonviolent and peaceful ways.”
Though a people-power movement has won a victory in driving Hasina out, the young democracy is entering a period of major uncertainty; indeed, what happens next for Bangladesh is anyone’s guess.”