May 9, 2023
More and more Americans are getting too old to work.
Why it matters: Even if the job market cools off from its current hotness, that could mean labor shortages will be with us for the long term.
State of play: Declining fertility rates, and increasing life expectancy, is expected to lead to a drop in working-age populations across all G20 countries, according to projections cited in a recent report from Moody's Investors Service.
Driving the news: The job market is still going strong, per the latest nonfarm payrolls report from the Labor Department.
That is from September 1, 2022, to March 31, 2023. That's $132.57 Billion per month. With five months left in the fiscal year, which will add approximately another $662.85 billion to the National Debt. A total debt for this fiscal year of $1.591 Trillion. Who needs a debt ceiling?
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed the federal government under President Biden has run a near-$1 trillion federal deficit in the "first seven months of fiscal year 2023."
CBO’s report dropped on Monday, giving lawmakers insight into the current state of the federal deficit.
The nonpartisan agency found that in the first seven months of FY2023 alone, the federal government has racked up $928,000,000,000.
Ant-Man’s Evangeline Lilly laments society that villainizes masculinity in men Ant-Man Actress Evangeline Lilly shared a rant on masculinity and femininity on Instagram on Thursday.
Lilly gave her opinion seemingly unprompted while visiting the Siwa Oasis in Egypt. The 43-year-old actress is known for her roles in Lost and Ant-Man, with fan bases that have garnered her two million followers on the platform.
GOP SENATORS QUESTION NAVAL DRAG QUEEN AMBASSADOR EFFORT FOR SECURITY REASONS
“Why are we only applauding masculinity in women and villainizing it in men? And why are we only applauding femininity in men and debasing it in women? Why can’t we just allow for all of it?” Lilly wrote.
A False Idea
I (Duane) once taught a Sunday School class of high school juniors and seniors, including my daughter (and co-author of The Last Safe Place) Kimberly. Over time it became clear to me (1) that these youth held a shared assumption or idea (whether consciously or not) and (2) that this idea was coloring everything I taught them about the gospel. They all, implicitly, believed it—and yet, it was completely false.
The idea was that they could not or should not accept anything unless they understood it. Their unstated assumption was that if they didn’t understand something, then they should be suspicious of it. In other words, they assumed that when a doctrine or statement or scripture “didn’t make sense” to them, their inability to understand or make sense of the issue served as evidence that the doctrine/statement/scripture was wrong—or at least, imperfect or incomplete. And this idea was creating doubts in them about the Church itself and its doctrines.
It’s sickening how much Big Pharma bosses have profited from the COVID-19 pandemic, after overselling billions of people around the world on the wondrous qualities of their vaccines.
Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel made nearly $400 million last year on his stock options and still owns a reported $2.8 billion of shares in the company plus his salary and perks.
His Pfizer counterpart, Albert Bourla, pocketed a $33 million salary last year, on top of the millions in Pfizer shares he sold.
But before they ride off into the sunset to count their filthy lucre, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton plans to investigate whether their companies misrepresented the efficacy and safety of the vaccines and manipulated vaccine trial data.
The Biden administration last week proposed or finalized regulations totaling $182 billion in compliance costs while adding 1.8 million yearly paperwork hours, according to a report by the American Action Forum (AAF).
The most expensive rule for consumers was the Environmental Protection Agency ‘s (EPA) strict new tailpipe emissions limits for passenger cars, which would cost businesses roughly $180 billion in “vehicle technology costs” through 2055, the AAF calculated, citing the government’s own publicly available cost-benefit analyses of each regulation. The proposed regulation — which the EPA hopes will push two-thirds of all passenger car sales after 2032 to be all-electric — was initially announced in April alongside comparable regulation for heavy-duty vehicles and was formally proposed on May 5.
May 8, 2023
America has long been the biggest military spender of any of its allies, but other nations aren’t holding up their end of the bargain. It’s time to rethink NATO burden sharing, says Justin Logan of the Cato Institute, a Washington D.C. think tank that studies many public policy issues, including a more restrained foreign policy that keeps the U.S. strong for future generations.
As of last year, the U.S. can include 50 of the world’s countries as formal allies, plus dozens of other informal partnerships. The U.S. shoulders a vastly disproportionate amount of the economic burden: While U.S. allies account for about 36% of world economic output, they contribute just 24% of global military spending.
This imbalance allows allies to spend money on domestic priorities while U.S. taxpayers pick up the tab for their national security. Every U.S. president since Eisenhower has called this out, but the solution is far from simple. It likely involves reevaluating our alliances, pulling back from firm commitments, and following a three-pronged approach to spurring allies to take on more economic responsibility involving institutions, military deployments, and diplomatic signals.
Tumult in mid-sized institutions caused banks to tighten lending standards both to households and businesses, potentially posing a threat to U.S. economic growth, according to a Federal Reserve report Monday.
The Fed’s quarterly Senior Loan Officer Opinion survey said requirements got tougher for commercial and industrial loans as well as for many household-debt instruments such as mortgages, home equity lines of credit and credit cards.
OK, it’s time for me to keep a promise.
Back in October 2022, I wrote an article called Why (almost) everything we told you about passwords was wrong. The article summarizes how a lot of what you’ve been told about passwords over the years was either wrong (change your passwords as often as your underwear), misguided (choose long, complicated passwords), or counterproductive (don’t reuse passwords).
Most damningly of all, the vast effort involved in dispensing this advice over decades has generated little discernible improvement in people’s password choices. If it hasn’t quite been a wasted effort, it has certainly represented a galactically inefficient use of resources.
We know that this advice isn’t what it’s cracked up to be thanks to intrepid researchers, such as the folks Microsoft Research, who made it their business to discover what actually makes a difference to password security in the real world, and what doesn’t.
If you want the full, three-course meal version of why all the password advice you've been told stacks up to much less than the sum of its parts you can read the original article. Here's the snack version:
Household spending is expected to decrease significantly over the next year, according to a New York Federal Reserve survey released Monday that reflects downbeat consumer sentiment as well as a potential slowdown for inflation.
The central bank Survey of Consumer Expectations for April showed that the outlook for spending fell by half a percentage point to an annual rate of 5.2%, the lowest level since September 2021.
That came with a corresponding decline of 0.3 percentage point in the overall outlook for inflation over the next year. Respondents expect an inflation rate of about 4.4% in the next 12 months, still well above the three-year outlook for 2.9% and the five-year view of 2.6%.
All of those levels are still above the Fed’s 2% inflation target, though they are drifting closer to the goal.
At Churchill Downs, the horses are merely the backdrop of this American cultural touchstone event.
While royal watchers the world over focused on Westminster Abbey and the first coronation of a British monarch in nearly seven decades, the sporting world had other interests in mind this weekend. The first Saturday in May always brings with it the country’s longest continually-run sporting event, the Kentucky Derby.
Among major sporting events, the Super Bowl brings with it more television eyeballs than the Derby. The Indianapolis 500, held later in the month of May some 120 miles or so north of Louisville’s Churchill Downs, attracts more people.
But the Kentucky Derby stands as perhaps the nation’s premier spectator sport precisely because, more than any other event, the spectators are the sport.
The article is from a Chinese publication. Please read with a grain of salt.
In recent years, the world has witnessed fierce US-China rivalry, the Covid-19 pandemic wreaking havoc on global systems and the fallout from the Ukraine war on supply chains, as well as an acceleration towards multipolarity, where power is more evenly distributed among several advanced economies.
The transformation of China, a trusted economic partner to many countries, into a mediator of global importance is just one example of the move away from a unipolar world. This is coupled with de-dollarisation gaining momentum.
anandaigua and Manhattan’s Chinatown are about as different from each other as two places in the same state can be. One is a small town in the bucolic Finger Lakes region, where almost everyone is a white English-speaker. Chinatown packs nearly ten times as many residents, many of them foreign-born and Chinese-speaking, into a much smaller space. What links them, and many other small towns and neighbourhoods across America, is financial services: both host community banks that cater to local needs.
Some see such institutions, generally defined as having less than $10bn in assets, as inefficient historical relics. They account for as much as 97% of the total number of America’s banks, but less than 14% of assets and deposits.
The top House Oversight Committee Republican said that lawmakers have now gathered substantial evidence of President Joe Biden and his family’s foreign influence-peddling schemes and that he intends to reveal it this week.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) joined Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo on this week’s “Sunday Morning Futures” where he outlined the latest developments in the probe of the “criminal” scheme involving the Biden clan.
In the hours before he's due at Upper Darby High School, senior Khalid Doulat has time to say prayers, help his mother or prepare for track practice.
It's a welcome shift from last year for him and thousands of students at the school, which pushed its start time back by more than two hours — from a 7:30 a.m. start time to 9:45 a.m. One goal for the change: to ease strains on students that were more visible than ever coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’ll be honest, I’ve been much happier in the mornings,” Doulat said. “I’ve been more positive, and I’ve come to school smiling more rather than, you know, grudging out of bed and stuff like that at 7:30.”
The idea of later school start times, pushed by many over the years as a way to help adolescents get more sleep, is getting a new look as a way to address the mental health crisis affecting teens across the U.S.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas declared last week: “The border is not open. It has not been open, and it will not be open subsequent to May 11th.” His statement calls to mind the famous Marx Brothers line, “Who gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
Better go with what you are seeing. Joe Biden has let in some five million illegal aliens and countless more expect to join them when pandemic-related restrictions end on the 11th.
Look closer and you’ll see among them large numbers of unaccompanied, military age men. War correspondent Michael Yon reports that many are Chinese nationals equipped with identical “kits.”
That sure appears to be a covert invasion by elements of the People’s Liberation Army on the eve of a shooting war with Communist China. Team Biden’s facilitating – and lying about – it amounts to treason.
This is Frank Gaffney.
Activists have concluded that since they lack ideological control over the Court, it must be delegitimized.
From the New Deal to well past the Reagan era, progressives serenely regarded the United States Supreme Court, and thus the third branch of government overall, as being securely in their hands. The pieties they mouthed during this period — about the sacredness of Marbury v. Madison and the importance of judicial independence to a vital republic — had the distinct virtue of being true.
Anew type of drug is generating excitement among the rich and the beautiful. Just a jab a week, and the weight falls off. Elon Musk swears by it; influencers sing its praises on TikTok; suddenly slimmer Hollywood starlets deny they have taken it. But the latest weight-loss drugs are no mere cosmetic enhancements. Their biggest beneficiaries will be not celebrities in Los Angeles or Miami but billions of ordinary people around the world whose weight has made them unhealthy.
Treatments for weight loss have long ranged from the well-meaning and ineffective to the downright dodgy. The new class of drugs, called glp-1 receptor agonists, seems actually to work. Semaglutide, developed by Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical firm, has been shown in clinical trials to lead to weight loss of about 15%.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) slammed the Biden administration’s move to send 1,500 troops to the southern border, arguing the president was sending the soldiers to “do paperwork” and not “secure the border.”
“President Biden is sending 1,500, quote, soldiers to do paperwork, and he’s not going to secure the border,” Abbott said in an interview with Fox News Sunday.
The national focus on the southern border has increased as the federal government’s Title 42 policy, a federal rule that has allowed the government to strictly regulate border entries, gets set to expire this month.
