“”Households who buy government debt reduce their savings in productive private investments,” Kent Smetters and Marcos Dinerstein wrote in 2021 for the Penn Wharton Budget Model. “As the spending is unproductive, the economy is poorer and total savings is lower due to capital crowd out.”
“Government spending redirects real resources in the economy and can crowd out private capital formation,” they add. “An additional $1 trillion debt this year could decrease GDP by as much as 0.28 percent in 2050.”
If you take that insight and apply it to a world of governments on a collective borrowing spree, you end up with a hobbled global economy where prosperity becomes increasingly elusive.
“Medium-term growth rates are projected to continue declining on the back of mediocre productivity growth, weaker demographics, feeble investment and continued scarring from the pandemic,” note IMF’s Adrian, Gaspar, and Gourinchas. “Projections for growth five years ahead have fallen to the lowest level in decades.”
Heavy government borrowing also creates risk for the financial sector by putting banks at the mercy of massive debtors of uncertain creditworthiness. “The more banks hold of their countries’ sovereign debt, the more exposed their balance sheet is to the sovereign’s fiscal fragility,” note the IMF analysts.
Heavily indebted governments also reduce their ability to act as backstops in case of financial crisis as they become the likeliest causes of crises of the future. As they continue to borrow, they reduce the likelihood that productive private economic activity will grow them out of their financial problems.
“Higher government debt implies more state interference in the economy and higher taxes in the future,” The Economist points out in its interactive overview of global government debt. Also, add the editors, rising debt “creates a recurring popularity test for individual governments” which often goes poorly in terms of fiscal responsibility because paying outstanding bills isn’t popular with voters.”
“Even if these subsidies were to create a manufacturing boom, it probably wouldn’t lead to an employment boom because most manufacturing output today is produced by robots.”
“Washington is spending another $61 billion to help Ukraine. But most of the money will flow through the US economy first.
The new law will allow the Pentagon to send existing weapons — everything from bullets to missiles to tank parts — to Kyiv and then simultaneously backfill that inventory with new manufacturing efforts for US armories.
There are 117 production lines in about 71 US cities that are set to produce those weapons systems, according to research from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).”
“At a press conference, the Kentucky Republican pinpointed two men responsible for that delay: former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and former President Donald Trump.
“The demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who in my opinion ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin,” McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters. “And so he had an enormous audience, which convinced a lot of rank and file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake.”
“I think the former president had sort of mixed views on” Ukraine aid, he added, before alluding to the failed attempt to add border security provisions to the bill, “which requires you to deal with Democrats, and then a number of our members thought it wasn’t good enough.”
“And then our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all,” McConnell said. “That took months to work our way through it.”
The top Senate Republican has been an ardent supporter of Ukraine aid and battled a slew of conservative voices who have sought to block it. He called the expected passage of the bill “an important day for America, and a very important day of freedom-loving countries around the world.””
“This noise was not produced by some kind of sonic weapon, however. It turned out to be crickets. Literal crickets.
And yet, this did not put Havana syndrome panic to rest, even though subsequent analysis by medical experts and U.S. intelligence suggests that the condition is not real. In 2022, the CIA concluded that the symptoms described by various officials were not caused by “a sustained global campaign by a hostile power.” The FBI’s analysis was that Havana syndrome is a “mass sociogenic illness,” which sounds pretty scary, but actually means that the symptoms are essentially caused by social contagion, under conditions of extreme stress, paranoia, and among members of an insular community. Writer Natalie Shure likened it to the “demonic fits” experienced by girls during the Salem witch trials.
“It means that the perceived diagnosis spreads socially, almost like an infectious pathogen would, with symptoms either triggered, exacerbated or wrongly ascribed to a phony cause,” she wrote in a November 2021 piece for Slow Boring. “People experience various maladies all the time and the cause is not always clear.””
“When school districts get rid of advanced offerings in a bid to reduce racial inequality, they end up doing to opposite of what they claim to intend. While wealthier families can move to better school districts or enroll their children in private schools, smart—yet poor—kids end up getting stuck in “equitable” classrooms that leave them under-stimulated and ignored.”
“Rubio doesn’t even get through the first paragraph of the piece before making a significant error. “Today,” he writes, Congress no longer views industrial policy with the same skepticism that it once did, but “what replaces unfettered free trade remains hotly debated.”
Unfettered free trade? That’s hardly an accurate description of the current status quo in the United States—a fact that Rubio surely knows, since Florida’s sugar and fruit industries are the beneficiaries of some of the most aggressive protectionist policies on the books. Even before former President Donald Trump ramped up the use of tariffs, America had more protectionist policies than other large, developed economies: A 2015 report from Credit Suisse called the United States the world’s most protectionist developed nation.
Rubio’s inability to describe the current status quo matters. It’s a failure of the ideological Turing Test, and it reveals that he misunderstands the economic policies he’s trying to shift—or that he is deliberately misinforming readers about them. Either way, this ought to call the rest of his claims into question.
Unfortunately, that’s far from the only mistake in the piece.”
In January, an Iranian exploding drone hit a US military base in Jordan, killing three US service members. The Washington Post cited a defense source who said the weapon was a small attack Shahed-101.
The drone was able to sneak past American defenses by shadowing a US drone also landing at the base — a trick believed to have been picked up from Russia, Bloomberg reported.
“Russia and Iran are learning from each other. That is almost as important as the technology-sharing itself,” Matthew McInnis, a Pentagon intelligence officer who was a State Department representative for Iran, told the outlet.
But Iran’s influence goes beyond Russia. Iranian-backed Houthis have curtailed trade in the Red Sea in recent months by perpetrating drone attacks on cargo ships.
Bloomberg reported that Ethiopia had used Iranian drones to squash rebellions in the country, while Tajikistan, Algeria, and Venezuela were also partnering with Iran.