Worry About the Federal Deficit is the title of an article William Silber posted on LinkedIn several weeks ago. In it, the retired finance professor distills a lifetime of research and experience into a warning about the fiscal state of the U.S. government.
Fitch’s downgrade of the U.S. government’s creditworthiness earlier this month is hitting Americans seeking to become homeowners squarely in the pocketbook.
United States Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) is the author of the National Strategy for Social Connection Act, which would,
. . . create an Office of Social Connection Policy within the White House to work across federal agencies to develop effective strategies for improved social infrastructure and issue national guidelines for social connection similar to existing guidelines on sleep, nutrition, and physical activity. It would also provide funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to better understand the epidemic of social isolation and loneliness.
For Californians, this may recall the state’s attempt to improve people’s self-esteem.
The Beacon blogsite recently featured a two-post debate on the feud between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and the Walt Disney Company. The first post, by Samuel R. Staley, concluded that the governor’s “powerplay against Disney increasingly seems aimed at intimidating the business community and other opponents to stay silent [on public policy issues].” The second post, by Graham H. Walker, concluded, “the state is legally entitled to shape its public classrooms, and also to pull the plug on the special favor it had earlier granted to Disney. DeSantis’s effort to rescind Disney’s power over Reedy Creek does not violate Disney’s rights.” Each commentary offers an interesting perspective, and readers should explore them.
Argentina’s recent primary election has shocked international public opinion and surprised even the locals, given the magnitude of the victory of Javier Milei, a libertarian economist and political newcomer whose discourse has elements of right-wing populism as well.
Julius Robert Oppenheimer is once more in the news, thanks to the highly publicized film “Oppenheimer.” As a physics graduate student at Princeton University in the early 1960s, I had occasional interactions with Oppenheimer, who was then the director of the Institute for Advanced Study. He was not very friendly to students at this stage of his career. But having suffered more than his share from “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” he remained a sympathetic figure to most students.
The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) is demanding that the California Globe correct a story about a secret biological lab in Reedley, near Fresno. The trouble is that the Globe did not publish the report in question, and the information in the story turned out to be correct.
Ludwig von Mises said something amazing—a sentence with just 25 words—with a profound insight into how societies work, or could work.
Washington, D.C. can be an awful place during the summer. “Horrible, hot, and humid” is the phrase that headlines Washingtonian‘s Caroline Cunningham 2017 article discussing how to cope with it. By the end of the article, it’s clear relief can only be found from “cold, sweet, recirculated air.”
[Editor’s Note: The following reviews the play The Leman Trilogy, which is set to return to Broadway this fall. This article was originally featured on The Beacon in 2021.]
If you happen to visit New York City soon, get tickets for The Lehman Trilogy, the three-and-a-half-hour play that traces the story of three generations of the family that founded the company whose collapse in 2008 symbolized and fueled the worldwide financial disaster.
