“The U.S. government, for all the money and agents it’s thrown at the border over the past several decades, has never been able to practically “shut down the border” or achieve zero illegal crossings (all the legal issues with those proposals aside).
Between the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and January 2021, the U.S. has spent $333 billion to fund the agencies tasked with immigration enforcement, according to the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration nonprofit. The budgets for those agencies have been rising for years.
But more enforcement money hasn’t necessarily led to lower illegal crossings. As budgets have gone up, apprehensions of people who crossed the border between authorized ports of entry have gone up, down, and remained static. In other words, they don’t cleanly align: Though Customs and Border Protection reported 2.05 million apprehensions in FY 2023, it reported somewhat close to that number—over 1.5 million—in FY 2000. Annual apprehensions hovered below 500,000 from FY 2010 through FY 2018.”
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“The U.S.-Mexico border stretches nearly 2,000 miles, much of it treacherous. No matter the funding and no matter the enforcement mandate, there’s no way that agents could stop every illegal crosser traversing the deserts, mountains, and waters that make up the border region. That’s proven impossible along much smaller and more surveilled borders, such as the boundaries of East Germany and North Korea.”
“DeSantis came out in support of Florida legislation that would ban the sale of lab-grown meat in the state.
“I know the Legislature’s doing a bill to try to protect our meat. You need meat, OK? We’re going to have meat in Florida,” DeSantis said during a Friday press conference. “We’re going to have fake meat? That doesn’t work. We’re going to make sure to do it right. But there’s a whole ideological agenda that’s coming after, I think, a lot of important parts of our society.””
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“like many attempts to curb vegan alternatives to meat and dairy, DeSantis’ support for these bills is also aimed at protecting animal farmers from competition—even if such competition is basically hypothetical.”
“According to US intelligence, Russia wants to put a nuclear weapon into space. Such a weapons system, they believe, could be used to target Western satellites in orbit, knocking out communications and military targeting systems. These weapons would be utterly devastating if they were ever used.
Axiomatically, it makes a lot of sense to use nuclear weapons in space: the result of doing so is far more predictable than on land, where geography and the elements can make their deployment tricky. The outcome is also more calculable: given we are so reliant on satellites to communicate, move, and work, we would all feel the impact.
It’s for this reason the world has long agreed not to put such weapons in the ‘heavens’. But we know the tyrant Putin is no respecter of the rule book and international law. The development of so-called ‘Wunderwaffe’ – “wonder weapons” – is one of Putin’s obsessions. The fact this information is coming from US intelligence sources, not Putin’s usual idle boasts, suggest they at least have a grain of truth about them, though, and should be taken seriously. Very seriously.”
“There are real problems with America’s student loan system. But they mostly involve people who take on debt to pay for expensive graduate degrees.
Those problems are rooted in a little-known 2005 law that eliminated a cap on the amount of federal student loan debt that graduate students were allowed to take on. In the following decade and a half, the amount students borrowed for graduate school climbed.
Students weren’t just borrowing to pay for high-quality graduate programs. Some of the graduate programs that saw students take on the largest debt burdens were those that provided the least value in terms of quality instruction or earnings.
Graduate students, in other words, weren’t just taking on more debt. They were taking on more debt for less lucrative degrees, offered by programs eager to absorb federal loan dollars. Even as undergraduate degrees largely held their value, a bevy of newly subsidized graduate degrees have lured students into expensive programs of dubious quality.”
“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), calling the prices of bank overdraft protection “junk fees,” now proposes to interfere with these prices.
We’ve been down this road before. Last year, the CFPB proposed capping credit card late fees at $8 as part of President Joe Biden’s populist appeal to consumers who dislike this cost, which is obviously everyone. The problem, as I and many others explained at the time, is that late fees encourage timely payment, and their practical elimination leaves lenders unable to offset the risk of working with people who have lower credit.
The result will be fewer lines of credit available to those who need credit the most. But that’s a difficult outcome for most to see compared to the tangible benefit of lowering fees. Even consumers denied credit won’t know what or who to blame, so it’s no surprise that CFPB is expected to finalize the late fee rule any day now.
The next CFPB price control scheme would cap overdraft fees at levels as low as $3 per overdraft transaction. Commenting on this rule, Biden sounded perfectly populist: “For too long, some banks have charged exorbitant overdraft fees—sometimes $30 or more—that often hit the most vulnerable Americans the hardest, all while banks pad their bottom lines.” He added, “Banks call it a service—I call it exploitation.”
I get it. I remember the annoyance I felt when I was charged such fees. However, I reminded myself that it was the price to pay for not having one of my checks bounce or a debit card payment declined. It’s fair to wonder whether most of the people proposing these rules have ever had a checking account balance low enough to need the overdraft cushion.
In fact, overdraft protection is an optional, opt-in service that allows consumers to spend money they don’t have at the bank’s expense. Purchases are approved that would otherwise be declined for lack of funds. For low-income consumers, this service is sometimes vital. And indeed, consumers report by wide margins that they are glad it exists even though it naturally comes at a cost.
Thankfully for all of us, CFPB bureaucrats agree that banks should charge a fee. Unfortunately, they think they know best what these fees should be.”
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“Banks might go even further. Given the slim profit margins they earn on small bank accounts, it’s possible that the loss of overdraft protection revenue results in some simply abandoning the very customers—the least well off—whom interventionists claim to be protecting.”
“Ukraine began running out of ammo because that’s what Trump wanted. And because a European Union project to manufacture a million shells for Ukraine was six months late for its 2023 deadline, Ukraine’s daily artillery usage fell from 10,000 rounds to just 2,000 rounds, while Russia’s own usage remained elevated thanks to a huge ammo consignment from North Korea.
By mid-February, the Russians were on the march in and around Avdiivka. The ammo-starved Ukrainian garrison retreated – and kept retreating as the Russians’ momentum carried them farther and farther west.
But then, on Feb. 18, Czech defense policy chief Jan Jires shocked his audience when he announced – at a Munich security conference – that his government had identified 800,000 artillery shells “sitting in non-Western countries.” Those countries apparently include South Korea, Turkey and South Africa.
The shells could be had for $1.5 billion, Czech officials said.
“Most of these countries [are] unwilling to support Ukraine directly for political reasons so they need a middleman,” Jires said, according to Politico reporter Paul McLeary and other sources. The Czech Republic would be that middleman, if Ukraine’s allies – other than the USA, of course – would help to pay for the ammo.
Belgium, Canada, Denmark and The Netherlands quickly signed up. Soon, another 13 countries joined the Czech artillery club. In three weeks, Jires and his colleagues collected all $1.5 billion. Shells were on their way within weeks.
With months’ worth of shells on the way, Ukrainian brigades no longer had to conserve what little ammo they’d been saving for emergencies. In early March, Ukraine’s batteries opened fire.
Five miles west of Avdiivka, Ukrainian troops halted their retreat, turned and counterattacked. Finally enjoying something approaching adequate artillery support, they stopped the Russian offensive dead in its tracks in villages with names like Berdychi, Orlivka and Tonen’ke.
Artillery – a shortage of it – is the main reason the Ukrainians nearly lost a whole eastern oblast to the Russians this winter and spring. And artillery – a million shells brokered by a tiny Eastern European country – is the main reason the Ukrainians didn’t lose that whole oblast.
If artillery is the king of battle, the current kingmaker is … the Czech Republic.”
“The constitutional law here appears straightforward: Congress can’t outright ban TikTok or any social media platform unless it can prove that it poses legitimate and serious privacy and national security concerns that can’t be addressed by any other means. The bar for such a justification is necessarily very high in order to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights, Krishnan said.”
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“members of Congress have not provided concrete proof for their claims about Chinese digital espionage and seem to have little interest in offering any transparency: Before the committee voted to advance the bill Thursday, lawmakers had a closed-door classified briefing on national security concerns associated with TikTok.”
“For well more than a century, the federal government has enjoyed near exclusive authority over immigration policy, while states have largely been restricted to assisting in carrying out federal policies. The Supreme Court has reinforced this rule many times over many decisions, such as Truax v. Raich (1915), which said that “the authority to control immigration — to admit or exclude aliens — is vested solely in the Federal Government.”
Texas, however, now wants the Supreme Court to abandon this longstanding constitutional rule, and it thinks that the political tumblers have finally aligned in a way that would lead the Court to do just that.
Texas seeks to upend the longstanding balance of power between the federal government and the states through a law, known as SB 4, which allows Texas state courts to issue deportation orders that will be carried out by Texas state officials. The law is now before the Supreme Court in two “shadow docket” cases, known as United States v. Texas and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy v. McCraw.”
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“The reason why the federal government has historically had exclusive authority over nearly all questions of immigration policy is to prevent a single state’s mistreatment of a foreign national from damaging US relations with another nation. Indeed, Hines v. Davidowitz (1941) warned that “international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs” committed against foreign nationals.
Which isn’t to say that the United States must always treat foreign citizens with caution or deference — just that a decision that could endanger the entire nation’s relationship with a foreign state should be made by a government that represents the entire nation.”
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“the current Supreme Court has only a weak attachment to following precedent, especially when a precedent is widely disliked by modern-day Republicans. So there is at least some risk that the Court’s GOP-appointed majority will allow SB 4 to go into effect.”