The Third Rail

As sweeping layoffs plague Big Tech, DEI jobs are taking the brunt of the blow.
According to a Bloomberg report, listings for DEI roles were down 19% last year — a larger downtick than in legal or general human resources departments per data from Textio, a company helping businesses create unbiased job ads.
“I’m cautiously concerned — not that these roles will go to zero but that there will be a spike in ‘Swiss army knife’ type roles,” Textio Chief Executive Officer Kieran Snyder told Bloomberg.
Other sectors besides have dramatically carved into their DEI departments after deploying mass layoffs in anticipation of a pending global recession.

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Buoyed by imports from China and exports to Russia, Turkey’s economy grew by 5.3% in 2022, after expanding 11.4% in 2021. Only two years ago, the country’s currency was melting down and government bond yields spiked to 24%.
Now its stock market is the world’s top performer with a year-on-year gain of 70% while the Turkish lira has stabilized.
This is the most remarkable turnaround in the checkered history of emerging markets, and what makes it all the more remarkable is that domestic economic policy had little to do with it. Turkey’s wily president Recep Tayyip Erdogan traded political chips with China, Russia, the Gulf States, Israel and Europe to position Turkey in the middle of a flood tide of trade flows created by American sanctions on Russia.--Goldman

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Jamaica experienced no economic growth in exports per capita from the Napoleonic Wars to the end of the Second World Wars. Since there is a high correlation between exports per capita and GDP per capita, at least after 1850, Bulmer-Thomas argues that there are solid grounds for concluding that the Jamaican economy on a per capita basis experienced no growth at all for more than a century after the end of slavery.

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The Third Rail

Social Security and Medicare.

Spending on these two programs alone consumes 45 percent of the federal budget. Along with Medicaid, these programs drive our current and future debt. And to emphasize the seriousness of our predicament, note that Medicare and Social Security together face a shortfall of $116 trillion over the next 30 years.

$116 trillion!

This is not a situation created by serious people. So where will the solutions come from?

Well, not from the Democrats or the Republicans. Joe Biden's State of the Union address included many slurs amid the astonishing volume of personal invasions and fine tunings he thinks we need. One slur was the charge that the Republicans want to cut Social Security. The Republicans were outraged. Cries and catcalls! Of course, the Republicans would never think of such a thing.

That's probably true. As Sowell has said, "If the Democrats came up with a plan for all Americans to jump off a thousand-foot cliff tomorrow, some Republicans would come up with an “alternative’ plan in which we would all jump off a 500-foot cliff next week."

How can we escape these numbers?

Limits on Social Security and Medicare are a minor threat to the elderly in this country compared to the disaster of a $116 trillion deficit in 30 years. The evil is not in its control, it's in the mindless pandering that created it. And the insincere and foolish claim that such a deficit will not be interfered with is not open to debate; the question is how it will be interfered with and how much destruction will be reaped from what the incompetents disguised as American leaders have sown.