Tag Archives: political economy

I Have a Question

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NPR has said that if Federal funding is cut off, it may well see 180 local NPR stations forced to close due lack of funding.

NPR compiled a lengthy document in 2011 that outlined what would happen if the government cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-backed company that supports both NPR and PBS….

Neither NPR nor PBS appear to have updated that claim, or the underlying data, in the 14 years since.

Which raises my question: why have NPR and/or PBS not done anything in those 14 years to shore up their finances so as to keep those stations operational?

Bonus question: given that laziness or sloppiness or deliberate dependence on Uncle Sugar, on what basis would any rational American think Federal funding continue?

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.

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.

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.

A Gordian Knot Solution

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I have called, often, for the dissolution of the Department of Veterans Affairs on the basis of that agency’s, and now department’s, poor-to-nonexistent quality-level care for our nation’s veterans.

Now we get this. It’s from the end of the Biden administration, but this sort of thing is not unique to that one.

The inspector general report published Thursday confirms that a $2.9 billion supplemental request went unused because the agency failed to account for “prior-year recoveries” in its budget planning. Had the agency taken into account those recovered funds, the inspector general found, its projections “would have shown a reduced risk of a shortfall by year-end.”

And this, more generally:

The OIG review team found that Veteran’s Benefits Administration wasn’t consistently overspending in FY 2024 for either compensation and pension or readjustment benefits accounts, which were the subject of the budget request. “Realized prior-year recoveries,” which are “unspent deobligated funds,” weren’t included in the agency’s calculations, which contributed to the erroneous predictions.
“Had the realized prior-year recoveries been included in the calculations throughout the year, the monthly funding status reports would have shown a reduced risk of a shortfall by the end of the fiscal year,” the watchdog concluded.

Current VA Secretary Doug Collins has inherited this situation and the permeating VA internal culture; he has this:

It’s just a very, a department that is so bureaucratically bogged down that it has trouble doing its main mission, and that is taking care of veterans, and that’s why we’re actually working very hard to streamline processes, to get better help in place, and to have budgets and numbers that we can be accurate

To an extent, I disagree with Collins. It’s not worth the time, effort, money, or other resources to try to untangle this financial mess. It’s time for the Gordian Knot solution. Just get rid of the VA altogether, and convert the department’s current and putative future budgets to vouchers which our veterans can use to visit the doctors, clinics, and hospitals they choose and from which they’ll be able routinely to get timely care. Transfer the VA’s veteran housing mortgage facilities to HUD for execution.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.