US News The Senate Armed Services Committee has added $45 billion to President Joe Biden’s military spending plans in its annual defense policy bill. This week’s boost brings the bill’s topline budget figure to $847 billion. [Link] A major bill expanding health care and benefits for veterans exposed to toxic military burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan passed the US Senate. [Link] The House Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee approved a budget of $2.9 billion for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), $417 million higher than the White House’s original budget...
budget
The Fed’s Rate Hike Is a Shot in the Dark
The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) today announced an increase of 75 basis points to the target federal funds rate, raising the rate to 1.75% from 1%. June’s meeting today was the third meeting this year at which the FOMC has raised rates. Coming into the March meeting this year, however, the FOMC had not raised the target rate since March of 2020, even though price inflation began to accelerate during the second half of 2021. Today’s 75-basis-point increase is the largest increase since late 1994 when the FOMC raised the target rate from 4.75% to 5.5%. Notably,...
News Roundup 6/16/2022
US News Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said the link between domestic terror attacks and easy access to powerful guns is “beyond dispute.” [Link] World News The world’s nine nuclear-armed countries spent $82.4 billion upgrading their atomic weaponry in 2021, eight percent more than the year before. [Link] According to the UN, 100 million people are forcibly displaced. [Link] Russia Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that some Biden administration officials are privately expressing concern that sanctions on Russia are worsening the global food crisis, exacerbating inflation, and...
News Roundup 6/15/2022
US News The US defense contractor L3Harris is in talks to take over NSO Group’s surveillance technology. The US imposed visa restrictions on 93 Nicaraguan officials. [Link] Russia Biden blames rising gas prices on Russia invading Ukraine. The President said, "I'm doing everything in my power to blunt Putin's gas price hike. Just since he invaded Ukraine, it's gone up $1.74/gallon. Because of nothing else BUT that!" [Link] The US expects the announcement of more weapons for Ukraine at a meeting of nearly 50 nations in Brussels that will take place on Wednesday. [Link] The head of the...
News Roundup 6/14/2022
US News Reps Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan introduced a bill to cut $100 billion from the defense budget. [Link] The Pentagon's new AI and data chief says the Pentagon bureaucracy is so inefficient it took several days for him to receive his common access id. [Link] Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi s pleaded guilty to four out of five charges brought against him by US authorities, claiming he belonged to al-Qaeda and was responsible for war crimes in Afghanistan. [Link] Colombia A leader of the Colombian rebel FARC group has been killed in a military operation, according to President Ivan Duque. [Link]...
News Roundup 6/10/2022
US News Biden asked for an $813 billion military budget, which represents about a 4% increase from the $782 billion that was approved for 2022. Congress wants more, and the Biden administration appears poised to agree. [Link] The FBI arrested Republican Ryan Kelley, a candidate for Michigan governor, on Thursday for misdemeanor charges in connection with the Jan. 6 US Capitol riot. [Link] ICE performed over 1.2 million searches in the LexisNexis database over seven months. LexisNexis was paid $1.7 million. [Link] Biden held a call with Juan Guaido and reaffirmed his support for Gaudio’s...
Minimizing Risk and Maximizing Lethality: This Is Your Security Force
On May 24, 2022, eighteen-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos murdered twenty-one people, including nineteen young children, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The horror of what unfolded over the course of seventy-five minutes is blamed by activists on the fact that guns are readily available to miscreants. But the guns held by the local police were not used to stop the killer until he had already committed mass murder. Parents at the scene of the crime have reported that when they rallied for the police to storm the building, they were accused of interfering with a security...
It’s 1979, Not 2009
Break out your mom's bell-bottoms and dad's leisure suit from your parents' attic. It's 1979 again (at least economically) Don't listen to the perpetual doomsayers who claim this is the beginning of the big crash. It's not. Yes, the American economy is a huge mess, and the economy is going to get a lot worse. But no, it's nothing like the housing crisis of 2008 or the 1929 stock market crash that began the Great Depression. It's not even remotely similar. There Won't Be a Housing Crash It's true the housing crisis of 2008 was created by some of the same factors we have in our economy...
Exposed: The Lies of Biden’s Tax Policy
As President Joe Biden’s tax policy discussions start heating up, some familiar lies have made their way back into the political parlance. There are four specific lies upon which I’ll focus here: The rich need to pay their “fair share” The Trump tax cuts only went to the wealthiest Americans Nobody making less than $400k will see their taxes increase under the Biden plan The wealthy pay less taxes than their secretaries Progressives generally classify the “rich” as the top 1%, those evil “millionaires and billionaires," as Senator Bernie Sanders used to say (until he became a millionaire;...
Ambassador Ford Lied About Giving TOW Missiles to Al-Qaeda in Syria
In September 2017, U.S. official Brett McGurk expressed concern that Syria’s northwest Idlib province had become “the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.” Idlib had fallen to al-Qaeda, in the form of a jihadist coalition led by the group’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, in March 2015. Despite acknowledging that Idlib, the last bastion of the supposedly democratic and secular Syrian opposition, was dominated by al-Qaeda, McGurk failed to also note that U.S. planners themselves had played a key role in the terror group’s successful capture of the province. Specifically, he failed to...