Too much brrr not enough budget tightening Credit: Getty
April 9, 2024 - 6:30pm
→ US deficit to exceed $1.5 trillion in 2024
Going only another $1.5 trillion in the hole for the year, it turns out, was a bit too optimistic. The US government has hit a $1.1 trillion annual deficit just halfway through the fiscal year, per the latest CBO report.
If current spending continues — and there’s no reason to expect otherwise — the US will overshoot its projected debt for the year by almost 50%.
And yet, just over a month ago, the same CBO released their report projecting a $1.5T deficit for the entire year. At this rate, the deficit will be $2.2T, a 47% overshoot and even higher than the projected deficit in 2031. https://t.co/r882Jc6TvY pic.twitter.com/hbVpYlluY4
— James Lavish (@jameslavish) April 8, 2024
With the election a few months away, we’ll likely see a number of expensive programmes dangled to sweeten the pot for voters. Just this week, the Biden Administration pitched a student debt relief plan for 30 million Americans. The US money machine goes brrr…
→ Bernie Sanders and Labour HQ come under attack
Bernie Sanders’ office in Vermont and the Labour party headquarters in London were both been targeted in recent days amid rising tensions on the Left.
Youth Demand, a group that’s linked to Just Stop Oil, vandalised Labour HQ with red spray paint as part of a week of protests over the war in Gaza. Across the pond, a man set fire to Sanders’ offices on Friday while staff were inside, perhaps in an odious nod to the Senator’s 2016 slogan “feel the Bern” (no one was hurt). His motives have not been determined.
The progressive Left has something of an army of activists and protesters — usually focused on climate change, abortion and racial issues — but as the war in Gaza eclipses other causes as The Current Thing, the establishment Left has found itself in their crosshairs. Freud was certainly onto something when he described the narcissism of small differences…
→ The plight of the Palestinian writer
The world lost a creative spirit this week. Walid Daqqah, who was convicted of commanding the group that abducted, tortured and killed an Israeli soldier in 1984, died of cancer in an Israeli prison after 38 years behind bars. An Amnesty International representative called the death “heart-wrenching”, while the group’s post on X referred to him as a “Palestinian writer”.
The death in custody of Walid Daqqa, a 62-year-old Palestinian writer who was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails after 38 years of imprisonment, is a cruel reminder of Israel’s disregard for Palestinians’ right to life ⬇️https://t.co/hSz0gdZgVj
— Amnesty International (@amnesty) April 8, 2024
His is only the latest in a long line of wrongful deaths at the hands of the powerful, according to online observers: Gloucestershire builder Fred West, painter Adolf Hitler, and notable architect Adolf Eichmann. True artists always suffer for their work.
