“The US shipbuilding industry is a shadow of what it was in the final years of the Cold War. The Navy is reliant on only a handful of major shipbuilders that design and construct different ship classes: Huntington Ingalls Industries (aircraft carriers, submarines, amphibious ships, destroyers), General Dynamics (submarines, destroyers, support ships), and Fincantieri Marinette Marine Corporation (frigates). Higher production rates would require infrastructure costs and a larger workforce. Repair and maintenance are likewise constrained by the few public yards available.
A Department of the Navy review earlier this year found that top US Navy shipbuilding projects, from new submarines to surface ships, are delayed by years and facing ballooning costs.
The longest project delays, expected to be at least three years, are for the coming Block IV Virginia-class attack submarines and the Constellation-class guided-missile frigate. The Navy’s first Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, a priority for the Pentagon, isn’t expected to arrive until 12 to 16 months after its planned delivery, potentially leaving a hole in readiness plans for the nation’s nuclear forces. And the Navy’s next Ford-class carrier, USS Enterprise, faces a delay of 18 to 26 months.”
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“the US needs to make significant investments in rejuvenating its military shipbuilding capabilities and capacity, ramp up production, and streamline its design process. A clearer strategy for industry and establishing stable supply chains, as well as hiring and keeping talented workers, is critical, too. Larger investments and drastic changes may be needed to build and maintain a force beyond 300 ships.”
“Jeff Bezos, Larry Fink and Donald Trump’s Treasury pick Scott Bessent all agree: Turbocharging economic growth is the best route to reining in the U.S.’s massive $36 trillion debt. History is not on their side.
Bessent warns that this is the “last chance” for the country to grow its way out of the record debt without becoming a “European-style socialist democracy.” Fink, who heads the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock, urged the incoming administration in an Election Day op-ed to promote artificial intelligence and infrastructure investments to grow the economy and tame the deficit. And Amazon founder Bezos told economic power brokers at the DealBook Summit this month that the only way to solve the problem is to expand the economy by 3 to 5 percent a year while simultaneously trimming annual deficits.”
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“That’s a tall order that few modern presidents have managed to achieve for any sustained period. Bill Clinton famously generated budget surpluses while the economy soared at rates of more than 4 percent in the late 1990s. Ronald Reagan brought down deficits in 1984 and 1987 but otherwise ran up the red ink. And Trump himself will face even more significant challenges if he follows through on tax and tariff pledges that budget forecasters say could add $4.1 trillion to $15.6 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
Trump promised during the campaign that a combination of lower taxes, more energy production, looser regulations and punishing tariffs would generate “explosive” growth to pay down the debt. And government budgets would shrink by “trillions,” he said, with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy tasked with tackling government waste.
But Trump has also vowed that he won’t touch entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are by far the chief drivers of the debt and are projected to be insolvent by the mid-2030s. Imposing tariffs on imports could trigger reprisals that would harm growth, and even if they didn’t, many economists believe it would take a historic economic boom to meaningfully address the country’s fiscal challenges.
“You can’t improve this with growth,” said Tom Porcelli, the chief U.S. economist at PGIM Fixed Income. “You’d have to have 5 percent growth for a pretty decent amount of time to have any real notable impact.””
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” Fiscal watchdogs and credit-rating agencies have been clanging alarms for years about the U.S.’s growing debt, which is the accumulation of annual budget deficits. Rising deficits — which can be inflationary and push up interest rates — could become more acute as the population ages and spending for mandatory entitlement programs climbs. Even steep cuts to discretionary federal programs wouldn’t make a meaningful dent in the debt without extensive structural reforms.”
“European countries take a much more precautionary approach to additives in their food, Benesh says. “If there are doubts about whether a chemical is safe or if there’s no data to back up safety, the EU is much more likely to put a restriction on that chemical or just not allow it into the food supply at all.”
In the US, we’re more likely to see action at the state level. California banned four chemicals in 2023: brominated vegetable oil, Red Dye No. 3, propylparaben, and potassium bromate. This year, lawmakers in about a dozen states have introduced legislation banning those same chemicals and, in some states, additional chemicals as well. But federal oversight has been limited, constrained by priorities, authority, and by a lack of resources.”
“there are two main reasons Americans tend to overestimate the extent to which crime happens: Media coverage of crime can often overstate trends and sometimes sensationalizes incidents that grab people’s attention. And law-and-order campaigns — the kind of campaigns that Trump ran, for example — are a mainstay of American politics and appear in virtually every election cycle in local, state, and national races.”
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“The United States is, after all, a relatively violent country and has a higher homicide rate than its peers. But while crime is a problem, lawmakers tend to react too quickly to crime trends, often by passing shortsighted tough-on-crime laws that bolster the perception of public safety by, say, putting more cops on the streets, but end up exacerbating the existing flaws of the criminal justice system, including sending poorer and more marginalized people to prison.”
“Zheng Wei is a fairly common Chinese name. A tennis player, a movie director, an archaeologist, and multiple Chinese-American academics all share that name. So do an inventor at the consumer drone company DJI and a professor at China’s National University of Defense Technology.
And the U.S. government mixed up the last two people, with serious consequences, according to a recent lawsuit by DJI. The drone manufacturer is suing the U.S. Department of Defense for designating DJI as an arm of the Chinese military”
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“Similarly, the Pentagon claimed that DJI software engineer Zhang Tao was listed on a patent for a temperature-sensing device designed by China’s Military Science Academy. Again, DJI provided a declaration from its own Zhang Tao stating that he is not the same person as the Military Science Academy’s Zhang Tao.”
Saudi Arabia has withdrawn its goal of an alliance with the U.S. in exchange for recognizing Israel. Its people and the region are too heavily against it during the continued Israeli war in Gaza.
The Georgian people protest against their pro-Russia leader while the government cracks down. The protestors want the country to lean toward the EU, not Russia.