As expected, the United States posted negative growth for the second consecutive quarter, according to government data released on Thursday.

“Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 0.9 percent in the second quarter of 2022, following a decrease of 1.6 percent in the first quarter,” the US Bureau of Economic Analysis announced.

The news prompted many outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, to use the R word—recession, which historically has been commonly defined as “economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.”

Netflix just dropped its high octane action movie The Gray Man on its streaming service. The streaming service reportedly dumped $200 million into the film’s production budget. While the money shows in its production values and top-flight acting, the storyline and plot don’t quite measure up.

This is surprising since the movie is directed, written, and produced by the Russo brothers (and others). The Russos are the dynamic duo of filmmaking: Their commercially released films have grossed nearly $6.7 billion worldwide on combined production budgets of $1.2 billion. Netflix is betting big on The Gray Man.

The Congressional Budget Office issued its Long-Term Budget Outlook for 2022 last week. The CBO’s view of the U.S. government’s fiscal future is, as always, really depressing. However, the new report drives home what the CBO’s analysts see as the most prominent fiscal threat to Americans: the U.S. national debt.

The analysts don’t come flat out and say it, but that’s the clear takeaway from the figures they used to illustrate the report’s visual summary. Here is the closely related pair of charts they’ve used to send that message:

How high can Uncle Sam afford interest rates to rise?

That has become more than an academic question since President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act into law in March 2021. The act marked the beginning of a surge of inflation for American consumers, which reached 9.1% in June 2022.

The Federal Reserve has been hiking interest rates to fight that inflation. Since March 2021, the Federal Funds Rate has risen from 0.07% in March 2021 to 1.21% in June 2021, with another .07 increase recently announced. That increase is forcing the interest rates the U.S. government pays on the trillions it borrows to rise as well.

“Ana Matosantos, 46, of Sacramento, has been appointed to the University of California Board of Regents,” proclaims Gov. Gavin Newsom in a July 22 press release. Matosantos, a Democrat who hails from Puerto Rico, has served as the governor’s Cabinet Secretary since 2019. The press release omits another key appointment. 

As we noted, in 2019 Governor Newsom appointed Matosantos state “Energy Czar,” calling her a “genius” and a person of “unrivaled professional accomplishment.” The unrivaled genius failed to prevent another round of rolling blackouts and continued energy woes. That should come as no surprise.

As more and more Hollywood films go “woke,” The Black Phone is a breath of fresh air. The well-crafted multi-genre horror film is also perhaps the year’s first bonafide sleeper. The small budget film has grossed over $100 million at the box office before going into streaming.

Experience is the best teacher. 

So, while my first introduction to the idea of entry barriers was undoubtedly as an undergraduate student, my first encounter with them was six months into my first job after college. 

I was working as an assistant project manager at an eight-month-old tech startup. It was much more than a ramshackle operation, as one might picture in someone’s garage—though some of the biggest firms of all time had their start that way. We hovered around forty employees and had secured tens of millions in funding. I mention these facts only to establish that it’s not merely mom-and-pops which run aground on the entry barriers I’ll be describing.

“I personally think the Department of Education should not exist,” former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently proclaimed. “Government has never made anything better or cheaper, more effective or more efficient. And nowhere is that more true than in education.” 

Back in 2019, a federal study found that the Department of Education does not know where the money goes, does not evaluate data well, and does nothing to solve longstanding problems. Federal agencies were not built for performance, the study found, and we should not be spending billions to get poor results.

From time to time, looking at the depressing panorama of Latin America, I think of Carlos Rangel, one of the region’s most admirable classical liberals of the second part of the 20th century. His books, more relevant than ever despite having been published nearly half a century ago, implicitly tell us two things. First, that it makes no sense to demand from the immediate present results that contravene a very old illiberal heritage, so it is up to each generation of classical liberals to gradually build on what the previous one has done. 

2020’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) continues to be an $800 billion example of waste and fraud in government spending that keeps on giving. And giving. However, calling it a “costly mess” or “the biggest fraud in a generation” doesn’t do justice to describe just how bad it is.

It started with good intentions. The PPP program was rushed through the U.S Congress to provide relief for businesses whose operations were shut down by state and local government-mandated lockdowns early in the coronavirus pandemic. The idea was to give them loans to keep paychecks flowing to their idled employees. The loans would be forgiven if the businesses used at least 75% of the funds they received to keep their workers on their payroll.