Reviewing Harvard’s Federal Funding

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The Trump administration has begun reviewing Harvard University’s $9 billion in Federal funding. The question I have is how badly does Harvard need any Federal funding?

Harvard’s endowment is some $53.2 billion as of last year, and the school got a 9.6% return on its endowment’s investments last year. That allowed its endowment to grow by nearly 5% year-on-year despite disbursements from the endowment.

Harvard claims $6.4 million in annual operating expenses as of last year, and it spent $749 million in scholarships and its own grants for its students.

With all of that, I ask again, how badly does Harvard need Federal funding? The school’s endowment doesn’t seem to be doing much more than collecting dust, investment returns, and net growth, while the school collects billions of average citizens’ tax money for its programs. Given that, why should citizens of Iowa, or Montana, or Utah—or New York, or Illinois, or California—pay for Massachusetts-domiciled Harvard’s spending decisions?

My answer: Harvard has little to no need for taxpayer monies.

That Includes You, Mr Newsom

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California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom claims to be worried that Party is too judgmental and toxic and that We talk down to people. We talk past people.

Then he said this:

I mean, this idea that we can’t even have a conversation with the other side…or the notion we just have to continue to talk to ourselves or win the same damn echo chamber, these guys are crushing us[.]

These guys are crushing us. Not, “We need to converse/debate/argue/talk with folks about ideas that we think help all Americans.” It’s “We need to do better at beating the other side so we can win.”

Party will remain toxic to the American idea as long as its goal is wholly independent of working toward the national weal and wholly focused instead on doing down the other side.

Golden Dome

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William Forstchen, historian, author, and reputed EMP expert, wants us to build President Donald Trump’s (R) golden dome, an evolution of former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative which was designed to destroy incoming ICBMs before they could reach their detonation locations in an attack on the United States. He’s right, but his emphasis is too narrow. His concern:

We have to defend the United States against an EMP attack, which could destroy us in a matter of minutes.

He cited studies, as summarized by Fox News, some statistics:

Congressional reports from 2002 and 2008, said that 80%-90% of Americans would be dead a year later if an EMP strike happened.

That would result from energy and water distribution network failure, power failure, financial system failure, transportation failure, and the resulting lack of food in the cities and the lack of water in urban areas from small to large.

The problem that’s not being addressed, though, is that an EMP does not need a nuclear detonation to generate it. Small EMP devices can be built relatively easily, and our destruction can be achieved with a collection of these small devices being used to destroy our financial and communications data centers, nodes in our energy distribution networks, nodes in our water distribution networks, nodes in our mass transportation and shipping centers.

All of these would aggregate to a nuclear EMP in their end result, and these smaller devices are much harder to detect. The several Departments in our Federal government and the several private companies in our tech industry need to get seriously involved, both in partnership with each other and separately, in figuring out how to detect and neutralize these devices, also.

Forced Out?

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The Wall Street Journal is claiming that Dr. Peter Marks, [t]he Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, has been pushed out or forced out, depending on whether you’re reading the headline of the lede. The news writer, though, gave the fact of Marks’ departure in the second paragraph:

He submitted his resignation after a Health and Human Services official earlier in the day gave him the choice to resign or be fired, people familiar with the matter said.

Even stipulating the description to be accurate—it is carefully sourced to anonymity—Marks’ decision plainly was a wholly voluntary choice.

He could have held out for being fired, but he chose otherwise. He voluntarily resigned. Pressure might have been applied, but he easily could have resisted the pressure.

This distortion isn’t unique to the WSJ; it’s a broad and hoarily held misrepresentation by the press at large.

Apart from that, there were valid reasons for wanting Marks to go, and he made crystalline one of them in his resignation letter.

It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies[.]

Those aren’t the words of someone who’d be gainfully employed any further; firing him would have been a legitimate response. He was given a choice, though, and he voluntarily chose.

Nobody forced him to make that choice. Nobody pushed him in one direction or another.

A Cost of the Left’s Obstructionism

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This one is our national debt and the interest due on it.

• the average interest rate on debt will exceed the economic growth rate by 2045, sparking the beginning of a debt spiral
• Federal debt held by the public will rise from 100% of GDP in FY2025 to 156% of GDP by 2055
• annual deficits will grow from 6.2% of GDP in 2025 to 7.3% of GDP by 2055

The obstructionism of the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party isn’t even centered on principle, only on anti-Trumpism and anti-Republicanism and anti-Conservatism.

Potentiating the economic disaster that our debt and associated interest payments portend, those things would accumulate into the loss of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. That, in turn, would feed back negatively into our economy, forcing it onto the vagaries of foreign currencies and currency exchange rates.

This is why the DOGE-led spending cuts must be enacted into law by Congress. This is what the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s obstructionism will cost us.