Artificially low interest rates and monetary manipulation of the kind that the developed world, and more specifically the United States, have witnessed since the last financial crisis have consequences. One of them has been the ballooning of corporate debt in this country.

Regardless of how corporate America has used its access to tons of cheap new credit all these years (many companies, as is well known, have simply used it to buy back their own shares, whether it made sense or not, just to make their earnings per share look better), the result today is a highly dangerous level of debt at the heart of the economy.

When he first took office, President Trump pledged to eliminate 75 to 80 percent of all Food and Drug Administration regulations. A recent deregulatory effort is a small step in this direction. It also serves as a comical (and a little concerning) example of how far the agency’s regulatory authority extends.

The FDA recently committed to deregulating the frozen cherry pie market. Specifically, the agency is re-examining current regulations dictating that frozen cherry pies are required to be at least 25 percent cherries by weight and that no more than 15 percent of these cherries may be blemished.

Over the years, I have reported on the travails of Gilbert Hyatt, inventor of the first single-chip microprocessor way back in 1990. The invention earned Hyatt a lot of money, so he decamped from California, which levies income tax, to Nevada, which does not. California’s pillage people, otherwise known as the Franchise Tax Board, claimed the inventor lied about his residency and socked him with a bill of $13.3 million in back taxes and penalties.

In Nevada, Hyatt sued the FTB for harassment, fraud, and invasion of privacy. Nevada wound up awarding Hyatt $490 million in damages, later reduced on appeal, but the California pillage people still pursued the inventor. By August of 2017, the FTB claimed interest had boosted Hyatt’s tax tab to a whopping $55 million. The case landed with California’s Board of Equalization, which by a 3-2 vote ruled that Gilbert Hyatt was, in fact, a Nevada resident when California tax collectors charged him with lying about his residency.

Back in 2016, Gov. Jerry Brown appointed David Ashby, 39, as a judge in Sutter County Superior Court, a post that pays an annual salary of $191,612.  Judges are expected to administer justice in an impartial manner and guard public safety. Californians have to wonder about Ashby’s performance in a recent felony DUI and triple manslaughter case.

On May 4, Ismael Huazo-Jardinez, 33, was speeding down Highway 113 in the agricultural community of Knight’s Landing. The driver failed to negotiate a curve and smashed his Chevrolet Avalanche into a trailer home, claiming the lives of Jose Pacheco, 38, Anna Pacheco, 34, and their son Angel, who was only 10. The crash also left the Pacheco’s daughter Mariana, 11, with serious injuries.

In April 2019, the U.S. government set a new all-time record for the amount of money it collected through taxes in a single month, but at the same time, the budget deficit grew because government spending grew even more than revenue. The Associated Press‘ Martin Crutsinger has the story:

The federal government recorded a $160.3 billion surplus in April as revenues for the month jumped to an all-time high. But even with a flood of tax receipts, the deficit so far this year is running 37.7% higher than a year ago.

The Treasury Department reported Friday that the deficit for the first seven months of the budget year that began Oct. 1 totals $530.9 billion, compared to a deficit of $385.5 billion for the same period a year ago.

The Trump administration projected in March that this year’s deficit will hit $1.1 trillion, up from last year’s deficit of $779 billion.

“For more than three years, workers have been sounding alarms about [the University of California’s] efforts to outsource living wage jobs to poverty wage contractors. These latest charges highlight the scope of the University’s increasingly radical privatization scheme, which is ultimately focused on one thing—paying its lowest wage workers even less.”

That was Kathryn Lybarger, Local 3299 president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), in a May 2, 2019 statement. “This is not just about UC’s serial lawbreaking,” Lybarger added, “but its efforts to eliminate the last remaining middle-class careers in California.” With no apology to the understated union boss, the outsourcing is “just about” something else.

Many people lost a lot of money betting on Maximum Security to win the 2019 Kentucky Derby last weekend. The horse had been the favorite to win the 145th running of the Derby before the race, but was disqualified by track officials following its first-place finish, which vaulted the long shot Country Home into the winner’s circle in its place.

True, nobody could have predicted this particular outcome for the race and the circumstances under which it happened with any degree of confidence before it started, but for those who gambled on the horses running in the race, there was one certainty: the most they could lose by betting on the wrong horse to win was the amount of money they chose to bet. With that kind of certainty, most of the people who bet on the race gambled only money they could afford to lose if the outcome didn’t go their way.

Imagine someone who has late-stage amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (often called ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease). After battling the disease for years, the patient is largely paralyzed and their quality of life is drastically diminished. With no known cure, any attempts to prolong the patient’s life will be risky.

Who should decide whether the risk is worth taking? Should it be policymakers and bureaucrats? Or should the patients, their physicians, and willing drug providers be allowed to weigh the pros and cons themselves?

Right-to-try laws argue for the latter.

“Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration officially pulled the plug Thursday on the twin Delta tunnels,” the Sacramento Bee reports, and the governor thus fulfills his pledge to “downsize the project to a single pipe as he attempts to chart a new course for California’s troubled water-delivery system.” In one sense, this is good news.

As we noted, previous Governor Jerry Brown wanted two tunnels and the cost had surged to $20 billion. The original cost of $16 billion was still more than 2.5 times the benefits, according to Benefit-Cost Analysis of The California WaterFix, by Jeffrey Michael of the Center for Business and Policy Research at the University of the Pacific.

Before any digging started, the project already struck corruption. According to the state auditor, the Department of Water Resources did not follow state law when they replaced the program manager and selected the Hallmark Group without a request for qualifications. The cost of the DWR’s deal with Hallmark jumped from $4.1 million to $13.8 million, and the DWR was handing out no-bid deals to contractors without vetting them. And the problems were not just financial.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Debt Management, the U.S. government is just five years away from the point where every new dollar it borrows from the public will go toward funding interest payments on the national debt.

That is the main takeaway from the Debt Management Office’s Fiscal Year 2019 Q1 Report, which featured the Office of Management and Budget’s latest projection of the U.S. government’s borrowing from the public, shown in the chart below: