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Scene Calendar: Grammy winner Jim Lauderdale, fine art, live theater
Here's a look at what's happening this weekend and beyond in Gainesville entertainment.
These are the best things to do in Brevard this weekend, Aug. 7-13
Find your weekend adventure! Oddities Expo and space collectibles show top our list of fun things to do in Brevard.
MasterCraft Brings CarPlay And Android Auto To Its Pontoon Boats
If you're searching for an on-water nav app that also includes tunes, WhatsApp and other apps, there's finally a solution.
A cafe with Latin flavor and doggie daycare call Jersey City home
New businesses opening in Jersey City are a cafe offering dishes of the Latin diaspora and the first New Jersey location for a canine daycare chain.
Space for music on late-night TV has dwindled. New media seeks to offer an alternative
When CBS ended “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” earlier this year, it also shuttered the program’s robust music offerings.
Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, notching a Midwest victory for the left
The former public health official has defeated Rep. Haley Stevens, NBC News projects, despite facing a huge advertising disadvantage.
Fruit flies and other health violations revealed in Ann Arbor
Washtenaw County health inspectors cited several Ann Arbor restaurants for food safety and cleanliness violations.
AI and technology investment driving business travel growth
Figures from the GBTA Business Travel Index (BTI) Annual Global Report and Forecast revealed spend is forecast to increase 7.2% in 2026 while the volume of trips will increase 1.3%.
19 charged in $4M Pennsylvania home health care fraud schemes
Nineteen people were charged in Medicaid fraud cases involving more than $4 million in alleged false home care billings, authorities said.
Rep. Wesley Bell defeats former Rep. Cori Bush in a Missouri Democratic primary rematch
Bell won, NBC News projects, with ad support from a pro-Israel super PAC, while Bush had backing from prominent progressives.
Washington makes top 25 of Preseason USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll
The Washington Huskies found their way into the preseason edition of the USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll.
Expanding Financing to Match Today's HVAC Price Reality
As HVAC equipment prices soar due to supply chain issues and inflation, contractors are shifting towards offering diverse financing options to help homeowners manage costs, repair...
AI-generated stories rated better quality than human-written ones, study finds
Researcher says simpler writing by AI is easier to read and digest, but this does not mean human authors are obsolete
Orange County weighs restrictions on exotic wildlife entertainment after Sloth World controversy
Nearly a year after the Sloth World controversy sparked outrage across Central Florida, Orange County leaders are exploring whether they can prevent a similar situation from happening again.
Why AI giants’ political spending could balloon this fall
The fight over AI regulation, data centers and more will play a key role in the general elections.
Debut time-travel romance is light on science, heavy on pining
“All We Have is Time” by Amy Tordoff is a love story between an immortal and a time traveler. Our immortal, Beatrix, has been cursed never to die.
We must work together to find health care affordability solutions
There isn’t one single entity to blame for our nation’s health care crisis ― it is a systems problem requiring shared responsibility and real solutions.
Are automated CT exams on the way? Cardiologist shares concerns about radiation, regulation
Former SCCT president Ed Nicol, MD, knows there has been interest in the potential of automated CT exams. However, he isn't so sure they are possible at this point in time for a number of reasons.
The Beauty Of Settled Science
Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine. My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn’t. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free. Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research. Here are some of my favorite psychology findings: The brain is sculpted by reinforcement learning, and a key driver of this learning is a prediction-error-based algorithm located in the nucleus accumbens and implemented through dopamine. Psychedelic drugs exert their effects through 5-HT2A receptors, pointing to a role for these receptors in some sort of construct like the balance between priors and new evidence. Certain cognitive functions are localized to certain brain areas (for example, impulse control to the frontal lobes; linguistic structure to Broca’s area, linguistic meaning to Wernicke’s area. But injure one of these areas, or render a certain function useless (eg a blind person having no more use for their visual cortex), and these mappings can gradually shift - suggesting that neurons are general-purpose compute whose specialization is a contingent fact about convenience and efficiency rather than a necessity. Most personality traits and general capabilities are about 50% genetic and 50% random, with little role for family environment or childhood history, with a few notable exceptions like partisan preference. Recent research complicates this story, but the further you go from this basic picture, the gnarlier the chains of indirect causation you require. Neurons fire together in “brain waves”, whose exact frequency corresponds with the character of consciousness; These divide neurons into natural subpopulations and linked graphs. The gamma rhythm corresponds surprisingly well to items in conscious awareness. GABA receptors seem to be involved in something like relaxation. By hitting different GABA receptors in different ways, you can modulate the exact type of relaxation you produce. Hitting GABA-A directly is too powerful and can cause dangerous levels of sedation, but allosteric modulation of GABA is an incredibly fruitful strategy that underlies drugs from benzos to barbituates to alcohol. If you know your GABA-A subunits, you can target specific subtypes of relaxation; for example, Ambien hits GABA-A1 and induces sleep. Memory divides somewhat fuzzily into bins of immediate-sensory, short-term, and long-term, with separate retrieval and storage functions, and separate systems for declarative vs. procedural learning. These can be harmed selectively, usually by hippocampal injury, so that some patients can remember their life stories but not form new long-term memories, or learn new skills like bike-riding but not new facts. The exact substrate of memory is unclear but seems to involve new synaptic connections between neurons in at least some way. The ability of modern psychology and psychiatry to treat mental illness is real but limited. SSRIs work for half or slightly fewer than half of patients; antipsychotics work with extreme side effects; benzodiazpines work but produce addiction and tolerance in many (not all) people. Most supplements are stuck in Poor Quality Study Replication Crisis Hell, but melatonin and l-theanine stand out as especially promising. Psychotherapy works with moderate effect size, but (with a few exceptions) seems to be more about the relationship with the provider than the details of the therapy itself. Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects. Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but risk also increases with prenatal infection (especially rubella) and obstetric complications; there is suggestive evidence for roles of social stress and drug use (with psychedelics and marijuana making things worse, and nicotine if anything making things better). Bipolar and schizophrenia are so closely linked on a pathophysiological level that it seems like they might be the same disease; on the clinical level, they do seem to follow two separate courses/prognoses but can sometimes surprise clinicians by eg someone who seemed condemned to permanent schizophrenia unexpectedly recovering. The brain’s native reinforcement learning algorithms cash out in the phenomena of classical and operant conditioning; different reinforcement schedules reinforce at different levels, which can be exploited by bad actors to make especially compelling products (eg slot machines). None of these are immune to doubt. A few are speculative; one or two are genuinely unorthodox. But they’re all a step above one p = 0.049 paper that might not replicate. If they get overturned, they’ll be overturned by the same sort of genuine scientific shift that replaced Ptolemy with Copernicus or Lamarck with Darwin, not some sort of sordid discovery about someone entering random numbers into a spreadsheet. In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about The Beauty Of Settled Science: If you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage. The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news. Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention. Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun. Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty [...] A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid. Psychology isn’t centrally the new paper in Annals Of Recently-Breaking News saying that an n=5 study showing that large portion sizes increase support for terrorism. Psychology is centrally ideas like brain waves, GABA receptors, reinforcement learning, twin studies, and connectionism. People who think differently are worrying too much about BREAKING NEWS!!!, and should stop. The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied. It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation. And part of the reason social priming in particular was such a disaster was that it defied that heuristic, building itself up over hundreds of studies until it approached or even entered the pantheon of settled science - before collapsing (5-HTTLPR was also sort of like this). This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area. (I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science. I actually meant to distinguish between research-psychology-the-field vs. clinical-psychology-aka-therapy, but this framing unintentionally pushed against the point I wanted to make) Some commenters on the previous article understood this point, but challenged its weight. It’s very cool, they said, to know how many neurons are in which brain lobe, but the main way that Psychology affected their lives was through bad clickbait studies used to buttress dumb policies; some p = 0.049 study says that exposure to microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel into raisins, and now their company has to implement punitive DEI or be sued for hazardous work conditions. I won’t dispute this as an accurate description of how the sausage gets made, but it’s worth examining the trains of thought that connect this observation to a campaign against psychology in general: The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad, and I don’t have good heuristics for distinguishing dumb woke psychology from other psychology, so I’m going to assume it’s all wrong and bad. The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad; it seems useful to punish/discredit psychology as a whole to assist my campaign against it, so for propaganda purposes I will try to discredit psychology as a whole. To people in the first camp, my response is: come on, your heuristics aren’t that bad. “Microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel up like raisins” is in the woke category; “the hippocampal theta rhythm seems to be associated with both memory and pathfinding, suggesting an unexpected yet surprisingly compelling relationship between the two” is in the not-woke category, don’t play dumb here. To people in the second camp, my response is: deliberately exaggerated propaganda campaigns are bad and this is a confession, not an excuse. Inability to view science through anything but a political lens was what got us into this problem; doubling down on it is a temporary solution but a recipe for permanent disaster. If you pronounce entire fields of science to be acceptable collateral damage in your campaign against bad political actors, you will alienate not just scientists but patients, clinicians, and general lovers of truth. Instead, you can say the thing you mean - that woke partisans shouldn’t try to occupy and exploit the otherwise-noble science of psychology for their own political gain - and wage the same campaign with a halo rather than a comic-book-villain goatee. From the font of oracular wisdom that is Weird Sun Twitter: [ Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit i love you all conditionally but i love the good part of you unconditionally. even if it becomes a very small part 2:11 AM · Jan 22, 2015 1 Reply · 5 Reposts · 29 Likes ](https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/558084551772471298) This is how I feel about psychology1, too, but with a touch more optimism. The good part of psychology is enormous, a hoard of endless treasures. You just have to look past the headlines! 1 To play devil’s advocate - should one always be so magnamious? Astrology? Phrenology? These seem different in that their entire orientation was flawed from the start; they didn’t simply fail to find the correct constellation-personality connections, the whole project of searching for connections between constellations and personality was doomed from the start. More difficult might be asking the same question about education research, which is notoriously bad. I don’t know enough about education research to know if there’s some settled science of correct and enlightening results lurking in the background beyond the day-to-day froth of poorly-conducted and politically-motivated studies. I think if it’s 90% bad, 10% good, it’s correct to call it bad as a compact way of communicating a useful truth; I think psychology is better than that, but admit it’s a tough judgment call.
Two more House Democrats face primary danger: From the Politics Desk
Plus, the House Ethics Committee is investigating Ohio GOP Rep. Max Miller.
Beyond 'Pawn Stars': How One Entrepreneur Turned Hidden Wealth Into a Business Opportunity
Years of valuing luxury assets taught Michael Manashirov that true entrepreneurship isn't just about recognizing value—it's about finding better ways to unlock it.
Buc-ee’s lawsuit sparks a beaver takeover across Ohio cities
Major gas station chain Buc-ee's is suing Beaver's Mini Mart in Beavercreek. Ohio businesses are adding temporary beaver logos in support.
World Cup hero Ferran Torres says MAGA-inspired hat was 'not about politics'
The Spain forward wore a 'Make Spain Great Again' hat after returning to the country to celebrate the World Cup but said he wasn't making a political statement.
Advance Auto Parts first business to open at Newberry’s Highland Park
Free services include battery installation and engine code scanning.
Avoid This 1 Type of Job to Protect Heart Health, Cardiologist Says
In TODAY.com’s Never Have I Ever series, a cardiologist says to keep these suggestions in mind to protect your heart on the job.
Rabbit fever cases detected in US. How to check for symptoms
Cases of tularemia, or rabbit fever, have been detected in the United States. Here are symptoms and where the rare disease has been reported.
This summer isn't breaking heat records — yet. Wait until El Nino kicks in, scientists say
With parts of the globe aflame in wildfires, deadly heat waves parking over cities, record hot oceans and a strengthening super El Nino, it seems like we’re baking through the hottest year on record.
This summer isn't breaking heat records -- yet. Wait until El Nino kicks in, scientists say
With parts of the globe aflame in wildfires, deadly heat waves parking over cities, record hot oceans and a strengthening super El Nino, it seems like we’re baking through the hottest year on record.
This summer isn't breaking heat records -- yet. Wait until El Nino kicks in, scientists say
With parts of the globe aflame in wildfires, deadly heat waves parking over cities, record hot oceans and a strengthening super El Nino, it seems like we’re baking through the hottest year on record.
CFP bracket predictor: Where the preseason rankings get it wrong
Don’t automatically slot teams from the preseason poll into the 12 precious spots of the College Football Playoff. Let's play CFP predictor!
New ASE guideline aims to improve workplace safety for cardiac sonographers
Work-related musculoskeletal disorders are a major safety concern in the field of echocardiography, impacting up to 90% of all cardiac sonographers.
Indiana, Notre Dame got hosed, SEC got too much love in coaches poll
Who got snubbed, who got too much love, and which unranked team should be in the Top 25? Let's get to it in our coaches poll hot takes.
College football rankings are out. What you need to know about every Top 25 team
In order to help you get prepared for the upcoming college football season, we break down each team in the US LBM Coaches Poll Top 25.
‘I did not steal’: Jacksonville businesses accuse influencer of taking money without delivering. He denies it
A social media influencer accused by Jacksonville-area businesses of taking money for food reviews and failing to deliver what they expected is pushing back against the allegations, saying he never stole from anyone and that some of the claims against him are false.
‘One of Our Biggest Reinventions in Recent History’ – All of the Biggest Details on FC 27’s Open World The Grounds Mode
‘One of our biggest reinventions in recent history’ – all of the biggest details on FC 27’s open world The Grounds mode.
MrBeast Sales Slow, Angel Stock Falls, MUBI and Neon Look for Hits, and Will an NBA Franchise Set a Sales Record?
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) You probably remember egg prices spiking a few years ago. This led to a lot of debate between the pro-market/pro-competition/antitrust/Neo-Brandesian crowd and the center/center-right/center-left/abundance/libertarian crowd over the cause, whether it was the avian flu outbreak or whether industry consolidation led to price fixing, using avian flu as a convenient cover. Basel Musharbash wrote a whole investigation at BIG looking at it. Well, two years later, we have our answer: it was price fixing. The Justice Department found proof, via emails, of price fixing. Indeed, just the threat of an investigation brought prices down two years ago: I bring this up because at least half a dozen of my favorite political writers and pundits, who were skeptical about price fixing at the time, haven’t written any mea culpas on this issue. It’s really dispiriting and makes it much, much harder to trust their work on other issues. If you take a hard stand on an issue, then you get it wrong, you need to explain how and why you got it wrong. Or update your priors. This is how epistemological bubbles are formed! All of which is to say, it’s time for another installment of “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong”. Last issue, I mostly focused on the “wrong” side of the equation, so today’s is a bit more balanced, but with one big mea culpa (though I still stand by my original concerns). Let’s dive right in! Subscribe CORRECTION: UFC Didn’t Release Subscriber Data (But Seems to Have Bragged About It Internally) In my analysis of the viewership of UFC Freedom 250, I wrote... “Paramount has also released datecdotes bragging about their subscriber numbers. Earlier this year, they claimed that the first UFC fight on Paramount+ brought in 1 million subscribers.” Well, that datecdote did not come from a PR rep, but from great reporting from James Faris at Business Insider. The actual quote was this: “Paramount’s flagship streaming service generated about a million new subscribers on the day of its first-ever UFC event, Paramount product chief Dane Glasgow told employees in a town hall on Tuesday morning, three staffers who attended the meeting told Business Insider.“ This wasn’t the biggest goof in the world; even Faris emphasized to me that this is more a “clarification” than a correction. Still, it sounds like, internally, the folks at Paramount were very happy about this result—and I’m guessing they were happy with this news getting out—even though the gains didn’t last through the quarter, dropping to 700K adds. RIGHT: MrBeast’s Struggles Continue... I’m very skeptical about MrBeast’s burgeoning media “empire” and, in particular, its $5 billion valuation, as I wrote earlier this year and last year. Sure enough, according to Business Insider, regarding its “booming” consumer products division_:_ “US sales volume grew 13% year-over-year in 2025, following a 33% leap the previous year, according to a presentation deck dated May 2026....A February 2025 investor deck viewed by Business Insider showed Feastables’ net revenue more than doubled in 2024 from 2023, to $215 million, and was forecast to grow 74% in 2025, to $375 million.” [Emphasis mine.] If you told investors that you projected 74% growth but delivered 13%,1 that’s not ideal. But it’s not just MrBeast. Logan Paul and KSI’s Prime had sales drop in half for their energy drinks. It’s one thing to build a successful entertainment company and an entirely different thing to succeed in the heavily-consolidated-but-also-very-competitive consumer packaged goods space! CPGs are dominated by a few firms with very wide moats compared to YouTube, which has few barriers to entry. These businesses require different skill sets and have completely different business environments. WRONG: Does the NBA Have an $8 Billion Bidder? Almost as soon as I published my article about the NBA’s finances, casting skepticism on NBA expansion, I saw this Front Office Sports headline: One group “claims to have already raised $8 billion” for the Vegas expansion team. I mean, wow. That’s just $2 billion less than what the Los Angeles Lakers were valued at when they were sold just last year. And they’re arguably the most popular team in the NBA. (Side note: the new owner is now under an investigation for fraud in how he went about financing the Lakers and the Dodgers purchases.) So much for the “dried up” language I used in that article. (This is why I usually stick to my “Entertainment Nuance Guy” tone in articles...) I went off old information—from April, when I read/heard about the NBA downplaying expansion efforts—instead of doing a quick double-check for new news. That said...if you read the article, the market for Seattle is “slow”, with just one reported bidder. So I wasn’t entirely off. This goof has annoyed me since I first published it, mainly because it undercut that article’s real point, which I stand by: NBA franchises are really overvalued right now. Now, I get why NBA teams are overvalued. When it comes to owning sports teams, it’s basically never wrong to assume that some rich person somewhere will care more about owning a team (or just being part of a group since they’re so expensive) than the actual financials. There are only so many teams to own, and opportunities to buy in preferred markets don’t come along very often. This explains why the teams sell for such high multiples (usually above a 10 to 12.5 revenue multiple, which is very high). You only need one person to overpay! Beyond the ultra-wealthy luxury good explanation, I worry NBA teams are becoming speculative assets. More and more private equity investors are buying into NBA teams. But the value, in owning a team, comes from selling it later, not any meaningful relationship to revenue or profit growth. In other words, the newer NBA owners are increasingly expecting someone later to buy their inflated asset. That’s not sound economics; that’s the “greater fool” theory at work.2 At some point, actually making money has to matter. Especially since revenue growth is now below the growth of the stock market. (And this matters because the NBA doesn’t have easy levers to pull to drastically lower their costs—half of their revenue has to go to players and then you actually have to run a team, including coaching, training, travel, media expenses, and more—or raise revenues aside from one-off expansions in America and overseas.) I just don’t see how investors make their money back buying NBA teams, except for selling at a higher price later on down the line. But if revenue/profit growth continues to slow, at some point, someone will be left holding the bag. RIGHT: Baseball and Basketball are about equally popular. Related to the above, I wanted to cite two quick pieces of evidence for one of my other theories: that the NBA and MLB are about as popular as each other, but the NBA gets much, much better media coverage. One YouGov survey has that fans prefer basketball to baseball by 52% to 48%, which I’m guessing is within the margin of error for that poll. That’s virtually even, meaning they’re about the same popularity. Over on NBC, a recent Red Sox-Yankees game averaged 4 million viewers, higher than Sunday Night Basketball’s average of 3.4 million on the same network. A Yankees-Dodgers game averaged 3.9 million two weeks ago. Not every game averages this much, but it shows you that baseball isn’t far off from basketball, depending on the matchup. Altogether, the NBA is just slightly more popular than baseball, but NBC is paying MLB a fraction of what they pay the NBA, a point I’ve made before. RIGHT: Angel, MUBI and Neon Updates... I’ve long been skeptical about many of Hollywood’s buzziest startups/smaller indie studios. It’s not that they don’t make great movies—films like Anora and Everything Everywhere All at Once are amazing—or that they’re not (rightfully) pushing the majors to make better films, but...they get a ton of hype, and that hype often doesn’t live up to the reality or difficulty in scaling up. Starting with MUBI, well, The Wall Street Journal wrote a feature on MUBI’s struggles last April, best summarized by the subheader “After Sequoia valued Mubi at $1 billion, a left-wing revolt sent the indie film company into a tailspin”. MUBI lost $7.3 million on $200 million in revenue in Q4 2025, but reportedly hit a record 1.7 million subscribers at the end of Q1. As for Neon, Department M purchased a “significant stake” in the company earlier this year. How much is that “stake” worth? According to Deadline, “No financial figures for the Neon-Department M deal were disclosed.” So...that’s not great! If it was a big valuation, we’d hear about. Also, I found this curious: “Both Neon and Department M already have separate partnerships with Qatar. The Qatar Film Committee has a slate deal in place with the former, and a biopic production pact with the latter.” Color me skeptical about much Middle Eastern investment dollars. See: LIV Golf. Finally, as for Angel (formerly Angel Studios), their stock very, very slightly popped last month after Young Washington ($20 million budget) which made $45 million in the US, but their stock is still way down from its opening. Smaller Updates RIGHT: The WGA should focus on antitrust concerns! I’ve been on this for years. Post-WGA/AMTPT deal in 2023, I wrote an article for the Ankler calling on the WGA to focus and organize against industry consolidation. Sure enough, the WGA filed a lawsuit against the Paramount-WBD merger, and people are organizing around this issue now. I wish this energy had coalesced earlier (specifically to lobby Washington much earlier), but better late than never! WRONG: Actually, the chip shortage might be due to market manipulation. In my last “Long Reads for the Long Summer” article, I shared an article about how LLMs are causing memory chip prices to spike, which will make all electronics more expensive. Well, turns out, three RAM manufacturers control 90% of the market, and now a private lawsuit accuses them of price-fixing. So yeah. WRONG/UPDATE: The Odyssey will hold! Two weeks ago, I wrote, “As of this moment, we haven’t had a super-blockbuster, though The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday could all cross the $500 million mark. (At this point, The Odyssey would need a very strong hold to get there.)” Well, it’s safe to say it’s going to have that hold! It only dropped 30% in weekend two and IMAX screenings are sold out all month. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is also off to a great start. RIGHT: People are rushing to get shows out yearly. I’ve long been bullish on yearly, weekly-released shows, and Leslie Goldberg at The Ankler wrote about how many people in town are now listening. WRONG: Mark Carney reverses Canada’s stance on homegrown production. After writing about Canada installing domestic production quotas, Canada has backed off. WRONG: I don’t trust Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s online “views”. When I originally wrote about the latest Spider-Man film’s record-breaking trailer, I thought this was just YouTube views, but after watching this Corridor Crew video and doing more research, well, it’s all social views of the trailer globally. Really? That stat includes TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts views. Basically, I don’t trust it anymore. (This film will probably set record, but I trust the pre-sales data more.) RIGHT: Celebrity Production companies are still struggling. I’ve written about this for years, but the company that I didn’t track was Kevin Hart’s HartBeat, which was valued at $650 million but is struggling now and might just end soon, especially after Kevin Hart pulled his endorsement deals. And Bad Robot is moving to NYC. CORRECTION: SpongeBob is a “second run” title. In my 2025 recap article, I had _SpongeBob SquarePants_labelled as a “library” title, when it is still a “second run” show, with new episodes still coming out on Nickelodeon. CORRECTION: In my last “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong” update, I offered a correction from Doug Creutz and misspelled TD Cowen. Thanks, Grammarly! 1 Though he could have increased prices to make up for the gap, he couldn’t have increased them that much. 2 There’s a theory, which I think that Daryl Morey created and Bill Simmons popularized, that, to be successful building your team, you only need a handful of bad GMs in the league to take advantage of. To be clear, Daryl Morey’s theory was also for signing bad contracts, that you could always get out of bad contracts. Basically, there’s always someone who will make a bad trade. It’s not the same exact thing, but similar enough to the Greater Fool Theory that I really like it.
Judge overturns SCGOP decision, ruling Danny Ford can appear on ballot
A judge ruled that farmer Danny Ford II can run in the special GOP Senate primary after the party initially blocked him.
MySpace Is Coming Back. I Owe It My First Business
The old network is growing again as people flee the algorithm. It's a reminder of something every business gave up.
USA Wrestling Senior Sports Dietitian Nuwanee Tamaki contributes to American Sports and Performance Dietitians Association Women’s Wrestling Nutrition Guide
The American Sports and Performance Dietitians Association (ASPDA) has published a nutrition guide for women’s wrestling competitors, led by USA Wrestling Senior Dietitian Nuwanee Tamaki and Virginia Tech Associate Athletics Director for Sports Nutriti...
These 5 Side Hustles Are Hot Right Now, and Each Could Become a Full-Time Business
These fast-growing side hustle opportunities offer extra income now and a possible path toward a full-time business later.
You can try the newly-launched Switch 2 port of Final Fantasy 14 for free, right now, if you have a spare 117GB
"To help ensure a stable launch experience, subscription fees will be waived for approximately one month following release," says Square Enix.
Google Earth’s potential disinformation nightmare
A new feature briefly allowed Google Earth users to overlay AI-generated images on locations of their choosing
What to Eat and What to Avoid for Optimal Gut Health
Gut health can impact everything from sleep to the immune system, so Dr. Roshini Raj, associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health, shares her recommendations for preserving your gut microbiome. She shares the signs of an unhealthy gut, and what to eat to improve it. Dr. Raj also shares her tips for avoiding cyclosporiasis.
Elizabeth Siders files request for mental health evaluation
The attorney for Elizabeth Siders has asked for her mental health to be evaluated, citing concerns she may not be able to assist in her own defense.
‘Where’s Mitch?’ McConnell’s absence at Fancy Farm in spotlight
Sen. Mitch McConnell missed Kentucky's Fancy Farm picnic while recovering from a June fall, but his absence is now the event's biggest headline.
Watch college football Coaches Poll reveal. See who made preseason Top 25
The US LBM college football preseason Coaches poll has landed You can watch the Top 25 reveal live at noon ET on USA TODAY Sports' YouTube page.
The No. 1 Daily Exercise to Boost Gut Health, According to a GI Doctor
In TODAY.com’s Expert Tip of the Day, a doctor explains how physical activity supports better digestion and gut health.
Politics & Power: Scandals, splits, uncertain road to November mean midterms are still in flux
Scandals, ideological schisms, and foreign‑policy crises have blurred the midterm map. Candidate quality, outside spending, and voter perceptions of the economy — plus President Donald Trump’s outsized role — will determine control of Congress.
Lainey Wilson sold out at Iowa State Fair. Which concerts are next?
Iowa State Fair Grandstand concert tickets are selling quick, with one show already sold out. See which acts still have tickets.
Live updates: Michigan, Virginia, Kansas elections underway; Blanche Senate vote expected
Follow live updates on the elections as voters hit the polls in five states. Get the latest on Todd Blanche’s Senate vote for attorney general.
Where to watch San Francisco Giants vs Texas Rangers: TV channel, start time, streaming for Aug. 4
Here's how to watch Tuesday's Texas Rangers vs San Francisco Giants game, including start times, TV channels, scores and how to stream.
Auto & Transport Roundup: Market Talk
Find insight on Continental, Lufthansa , Kia and more in the latest Market Talks covering auto and transport.
Tesla's China footprint complicates path to possible SpaceX merger
Tesla's electric vehicle business in China looms as a key hurdle to a potential merger between Elon Musk's automaker and SpaceX because of complications it could pose for the space firm's business with the U.S. government.
Renovations at natural science museum making a great museum even better
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Acoustirats and Jordan Lauterbach to Perform at LI Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame on Aug 23rd
As part of the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame Soundtrack to Summer Series, the band Acoustirats will perform LIVE music and Comedian Jordan Lauterbach will open with comedy set at the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame in Stony Brook Village (97 Main Street, Stony Brook, NY) on Aug. 23th from 3-4pm. The event is free for members or with general admission ticket purchase or $10 at the door concert ticket purchase. For details on this and upcoming events please visit https://www.limusichalloffame.... About AcoustiRats AcoustiRats is an acoustic duo dedicated to stripping Good Rats classics down to their raw, essential form. Fronted by Stefan Marchello, lead singer and 36-year veteran of the Good Rats, alongside guitarist Matt McCarthy, who also did a run on guitar with the band. Between them, they've got decades of Good Rats DNA in their blood. After years of playing these songs loud and electric, Stefan and Matt are thrilled to break them down to the bare bones. No frills, no amps cranked to 11 — just voice, acoustic guitar, and the songwriting that made the Good Rats legendary. It's the same attitude and stories fans know, delivered in a raw, intimate format. For diehard Good Rats fans, it's a new way to hear the classics. For first-timers, it's proof that great songwriting doesn't need to be loud to hit hard. About Jordan Lauterbach Jordan Lauterbach is a fast-rising comedian who features prominently in clubs around the country. His autobiographical style and supreme wit keep audiences laughing for hours after they leave the club. Lauterbach is likable, relatable, and tremendously funny. He has opened for some of comedy's best and is quickly carving out an audience of his own.
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If Not AOC, Then Who?
What do we do if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides not to run for president in 2028? It makes sense that many leftists are currently focused on calling on her to take the plunge. But the absence of a Plan B, or even much discussion about one, is worrisome. The US Left can’t afford to sit out the 2028 Democratic primary. Doing so in 2024 was a disaster: our abstention self-marginalized anti-billionaire politics from the national conversation and thereby gave space for Harris to pivot to the “center” (i.e. the policy preferences of corporate donors, establishment hacks, and AIPAC). Abstaining again in 2028 would be especially counterproductive since democratic socialists now have so much wind in our sails after our big electoral wins in NYC and across the country. It’s time to deepen our momentum, organization, and profile — not to retreat to the margins during America’s single most important political battle. Even more urgently, keeping Trump’s heir out of the White House may depend on whether leftists and the party’s unprecedentedly disenchanted base can force the Democrats in 2028 to take meaningful steps towards a very angry electorate and away from the corporate-consultant blob that has helped get us into this mess. If AOC (or Abdul El-Sayed) decides to run, we should enthusiastically go all in — DSA, fighting unions, progressive organizations, anybody who wants to see a better country and world. But, as far as I can tell from the outside, there’s a real chance that she doesn’t run. And we can’t just wait and see where she lands before discussing alternatives, since AOC’s decision might not come for quite a while, giving us little time to scramble at the last minute for an alternative. So we should start working now on getting a Plan B into motion, and recruiting a good candidate for the role. Here’s one idea. A Worker Candidate — Healthcare Not Warfare 2028 Run a union worker Leftists don’t need to always run experienced, well-known socialist politicians for high-profile contests. Lula, the current president of Brazil, began his political career as a metalworker militant who ran for governor of São Paulo in 1982. Especially in an era of institutional distrust, it’s possible to lean hard into making a virtue out of a working-class comrade’s distance from traditional politics. Experience abroad shows this clearly. Rachel Kéké — an immigrant hotel housekeeper — ran as the candidate of the leftist La France Insoumise for the National Assembly in 2022, defeating a former minister in the Macron government. The Belgian Workers’ Party in 2024 won its first Flemish seat in the European Parliament by running Rudi Kennes, a three-decade veteran of the Opel Antwerp auto factory. And the South Korean left in 2024 elected auto factory militant Yoon Jong-oh to the National Assembly. If a tiny French Trotskyist organization could make such a big splash in 2002 and 2007 by running a well-spoken postal worker cadre for office — the LCR’s Olivier Besancenot received about 1.5 million first-round votes — it’s not far-fetched to expect that a much larger organization like DSA, together with a broader coalition of the willing, could run this playbook to much greater effect. This is especially the case now that almost everything DSA does immediately becomes a national news story. We don’t need someone famous. We just need a charismatic, well-vetted comrade who works in a relatable working-class occupation — e.g. a nurse, or a worker in auto or construction, or at Amazon. Ideally, they have a compelling personal story or have been part of a significant strike or organizing campaign, but even those criteria don’t necessarily have to be deal-breakers. The main lesson of the Graham Platner fiasco isn’t that we should never run outsiders for office (the momentum he generated proves the exact opposite), but that they need proper vetting and roots in democratic membership organizations like DSA or a union. In any case, there are plenty of ways to signal working-class authenticity without resorting to Platner’s or Fetterman’s performative macho white dude affect. Better to have someone of any gender or race who is actually working class, with firm socialist politics, who can speak from experience about the day-to-day realities of trying to make it in America. There are surely at least a dozen such worker leaders in our movement nationwide; we just need to sit down and convince one that their personal sacrifice for the greater good (i.e. running for president) will be worth it. If we don’t have a frontrunner with a clear path to victory like AOC (or El-Sayed, were he to win Michigan), it’s better to embrace someone whose decision to run in itself tells an important story about US politics: workers have been iced out of our political system and are now fighting hard to break back in. The novelty factor, in itself, would generate press. And it would help democratic socialists signal to the American public that our movement’s defining characteristic is that we represent workers vs. bosses, not that we’re “the furthest left” force in American politics — a framework that suggests we’re extremists and that helps our opponents isolate us from non-college-educated voters by highlighting extremely minoritarian (and misguided) stances included in DSA’s platform like prison abolition. We don’t get many opportunities to speak to tens of millions of Americans; we need to use these opportunities to broaden our appeal beyond those already in our orbit. Run to polarize the 2028 primary and general election around “Medicare for All” and “End All Aid to Israel” Why should democratic socialists use our scarce time and volunteer energy to run in a race we’re unlikely to win? Running in the 2028 primary will not only recruit us scores of members (imagine having a DSA member intervening in eleven nationally televised primary debates!), but — more importantly — it has the potential to be a decisive leap forward towards an America that finally starts meeting the needs of working people instead of HMO and AIPAC billionaire donors. Polarizing litmus tests are good, actually — as long as they’re fought for around popular demands in a thoughtful and strategic way. Democratic socialists have an opportunity and responsibility to make the 2028 primary about two of the most widely and deeply felt issues of our moment: domestically, America’s unaffordable, family-breaking private healthcare system; internationally, America’s bankrolling of the genocidal Israeli government. A candidacy relentlessly demanding Medicare for All and No Aid to Israel would pose a sharp question to the American public, the Democratic Party, and other 2028 contenders: Why can’t working-class Americans afford their healthcare bills at the same time that our government is spending at least $3.8 billion yearly to fund an Israeli regime eager to keep dragging us and the world into more forever wars? Our candidate can agitate around a clear message: I’m running to give voice to all those working-class Americans who are struggling to get by. No matter what state you live in, who you voted for in 2024, or your background, it’s just plain common sense that we should make healthcare more affordable instead of spending billions to enable the Israeli government’s crimes against humanity. Every American who agrees with me when I say ‘Medicare for All — Not a Dime for Israel’ should make their voice heard through our campaign. Racking up a high number of votes for this agenda is a crucial way to show the Democratic Party and the country as a whole that we can’t keep supporting a life-destroying status quo in our healthcare system and in the Middle East. If we want to defeat Trump’s handpicked crony this coming November, we need to speak to ordinary people’s frustrations with the status quo — we can’t keep running the same tired establishment playbook and expecting a different result. For those highly engaged voters (or skeptical media pundits) who raise concerns about wasting votes, the candidate can take the time to explain why this isn’t the case: It's true I'm a long shot. But Zohran showed anything can happen — and voting for me is a pragmatic decision, not a wasted vote. In a heavily divided primary with a large number of candidates and a very discredited establishment, my campaign and the democratic socialist movement I’m part of are positioned to be the balance of power if we can get a large enough number of voters to loudly demand Healthcare Not Warfare. Since there’s a high chance no candidate will get to 50% in the 2028 primaries, the Democrats could very well be heading towards a brokered convention, where a disciplined, principled current committed to breaking from corporate donors can play an outsized role in making sure whoever ends up with the nomination raises the banner of single-payer healthcare and cutting aid to Israel. How exactly could running this sort of primary campaign be translated into actual leverage? The candidate replies: I’m aiming to win the nomination, but if I don’t achieve that goal, my delegates and I will pledge our support in the primary only for a candidate who agrees in the general election to call for ending US aid to Israel and establishing Medicare for All at home. These are both winning planks for November against the Republicans, and the only reason I can see that other candidates haven’t yet raised these is that they’re still more scared of the donor class than they are of the people. That needs to change. If Democratic leaders want young people, workers, and those sick of the status quo to show up in big numbers this November, they need to meet us halfway. In this way, whether or not we win the nomination, democratic socialists could still play a decisive role in 2028. The approach outlined here is similar to what radical left parties periodically do in parliamentary democracies like Denmark or Sweden when they find themselves as a junior partner electorally: they dictate to center-left allies what their terms would be for enabling, from the outside, the formation of a new government. Running a Healthcare Not Warfare candidate will make it significantly more likely that the 2028 Democratic candidate stands with ordinary people instead of donors on these two pivotal planks — a shift that will, in turn, make it easier to achieve the existentially important task of defeating MAGA’s heir in November. Look at how much popular traction the Uncommitted movement got with a similar strategy in 2024 with so little on-the-ground organization — surely we can go much further with a working-class candidate, a much bigger DSA, and a Democratic Party base that has turned against Israel, billionaires, and the hacks in the party who prop them up. Objections and Responses There are quite a few objections to this proposal, many of which are very reasonable. Let me briefly address each here. Socialists shouldn’t waste their scarce time and resources on a candidate unlikely to win. This is a good rule in general, but there are important exceptions, and presidential elections are the main one. There’s no other political contest that gets anything like this level of attention and engagement in the US, so if you want to be a serious force in nationwide politics, you basically can’t afford not to have a candidate. Far from being an overall drain on our resources, running a dynamic 2028 campaign would likely result in a major net increase in members and capacity. In that spirit, the very pragmatic Milwaukee sewer socialists — who mostly ran to win at home in Wisconsin — supported Eugene Debs’s propagandistic presidential campaigns, which they correctly saw as a crucial means of recruiting to the Socialist Party. And now that the (post-1972) Democratic Party gives more weight to voters than party operatives in determining its presidential nomination, it’s become feasible to run as a socialist in primaries without risking a split in the vote against the Republicans in November. We should just support Ro Khanna, who also supports M4A and ending aid to Israel. I like Ro Khanna and would enthusiastically vote and canvass for him for president were he to get the nomination. But there’s a real chance that Khanna’s bid for office doesn’t catch on; he lacks the grassroots organizational apparatus of DSA, and, because he’s not really of the Left or labor (despite his current very good positions), he’s unlikely to generate the type of buy-in and enthusiasm that a DSA candidate would. Moreover, Khanna would be running as an individual, not as someone emerging from and building an organized movement — his campaign would not likely focus on building sustained power from below, nor would it likely polarize the 2028 primary around M4A and Israel aid. Also, and not inconsequentially, the poor electoral results for Tom Steyer and Saikat Chakrabarti this spring suggest that there’s perhaps not much of a popular appetite in the Democrats’ base to support multi-millionaire class traitors. Much better, then, to run a democratic socialist worker. If by Super Tuesday it’s clear that our campaign has captured the main left lane in the primary, Khanna should drop out and endorse us; conversely, if he’s managed to capture this lane, DSA could at that point transform its Healthcare Not Warfare campaign into an independent campaign to elect Ro Khanna focused on winning (and holding him accountable to) those two critical planks. An openness to consolidating an anti-corporate candidate by Super Tuesday is a necessary component of the strategy I’m proposing, because otherwise we risk splitting the primary votes (per DNC rules, you need at least 15% to get any delegates to convention). We should convince Shawn Fain or Sara Nelson to run for president instead. I agree it’d be great if either ran for president, but my impression is that there’s basically no chance that will happen in 2028, because both are firmly focused on their union leadership duties (and, in the case of Fain, beating back a federal witch-hunt). This plan could have DSA end up endorsing a non-socialist, non-DSAer for president. That’s against our principles. It’s a myth, and bad politics, that socialists can’t ever support candidates who aren’t members of their organization and/or who don’t call themselves socialists. Bernie, after all, was not a DSAer. And socialists abroad regularly make tactical decisions about if and when supporting a non-socialist candidate makes sense from the standpoint of promoting working-class interests, defending democracy, and building a socialist current in the process. If your “principles” prevent you and DSA from helping achieve the momentous stride forward of having a Democratic candidate in 2028 run on Medicare for All and ending aid to Israel, those “principles” are not very good. In fact, they actively undermine the causes they’re aiming to support. We shouldn’t confuse principles (working-class independence) with tactics (the best way to advance this in a given context). In my recent article in Catalyst on Milwaukee sewer socialism (I’ve uploaded the full text here), I have a section showing how similarly rigid rules about endorsements had to be eventually discarded in the old Socialist Party nationwide after WWI because they tended to lead socialists towards a sectarian abstention from broader anti-corporate electoral insurgencies beyond their party’s control. For what it’s worth, Lenin’s current under Tsarism frequently backed bourgeois candidates in the second round of elections and Lenin himself advocated that British Communists support Labour Party candidates; for his part, Kautsky in 1912 defended the German Social Democracy’s electoral pact with the Progressives in the runoffs. If our predecessors could be that tactically flexible in an era before the limits of their underlying strategic assumptions about intransigent class politics in capitalist democracies were made clear, then there’s no need to insist on being more tactically rigid today, after a century’s worth of accumulated experience. As long as you maintain your own political profile and organization while engaging in broader coalitional efforts, there’s zero inherent contradiction with the principle of political independence. More specifically: DSA and allied organizations should enthusiastically back Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed if AOC declines to run and he throws his hat in the presidential ring. (I have no idea whether he’s even considering this path, but there’ll surely be chatter about it if he wins his Senate race this November.) Though he doesn’t call himself a socialist, El-Sayed is a principled Berniecrat, a consistent fighter for Palestine, and would have a clear path to victory. Using the “s” word is far less important than whether a campaign fights for the interests of working people at home and abroad — and whether actively participating in it can grow the organized working class and the Left. And the same holds true if a less anti-corporate candidate were, under pressure, to adopt our two Healthcare Not Warfare planks. Why focus only on M4A and ending US aid to Israel? There are so many other important issues to fight for! Obviously there are many pivotal issues beyond healthcare and Israel, and our candidate — and especially our organizations involved in the campaign — should be prepared to speak on all of these. But one of the crucial lessons of the Zohran campaign is that you have to relentlessly stay on message if you want to cut through the noise. CNN and Fox News will want to talk about DSA’s views on Venezuela and abolishing the police; we need to polarize the debate on the widely and deeply felt issues that are most favorable for growing the Left, isolating our opponents, and winning urgently needed changes. One recent poll found 63% of Americans support M4A, even after respondents were told it would raise taxes and eliminate most private insurance. Another found that 74% of Democrats opposed “providing additional economic and military support to Israel.” And focusing on two demands sets the campaign up to be able to leverage its mandate to make clear demands upon other candidates (which we can’t do if we run with a laundry list of demands). Talking about a Plan B is a distraction from the more urgent work of building a groundswell of calls on AOC to run. It’s good for DSAers, fightback unionists, and progressive organizations to try to convince AOC to run. This proposal is meant as an addendum to pushes to get AOC to run and to line DSA up for that eventuality, not as a substitute for those efforts. But I’m worried that, like in 2024, we might eventually find ourselves with no time to find a viable alternative unless we start now. DSA, with its abundant deliberative processes, moves slowly. The approach you’re suggesting seems risky. If a DSA candidate runs but doesn’t receive a lot of votes, it’ll undercut our current national momentum. This is a reasonable worry. All big initiatives always carry risks, and the path I’m advocating is certainly not free of these. That said, if a Healthcare Not Warfare campaign doesn’t catch on like we envisioned, it’s a pretty simple pivot in March 2028 to explain that in the future we really need our standard-bearers like AOC, or our growing bench of national electeds, to step up in presidential primaries. Moreover, it’s worth noting that the risk of my Plan B proposal is on the whole significantly less than the risk entailed by an AOC run. We should all back her if she runs, since she’d fire up the base, provide huge openings for organizing, have a real shot at defeating a Republican (especially given MAGA’s unpopularity), be a great standard-bearer for our issues, particularly M4A and ending aid to Israel, and be less willing than mainstream candidates to capitulate to any anti-democratic machinations from Trump and co. But it’s also true that AOC could lose, which would be a devastating setback to the country and the Left. Or she could win and find herself unable to pass much, if any, of her (and our) program, a demoralizing prospect. So if we’re willing to take these risks with AOC (and we should), it follows that we should be able to take lower-level risks if she doesn’t throw her hat in the ring. What’s Your Plan B? The US Left is facing its biggest opening for growth and influence since the 1930s. Initiatives that would have been impossible a few months ago are now potentially feasible. A President AOC is now easier to imagine, but if she ultimately assesses that the risks aren’t worth the potential reward in 2028, we can’t be left flat-footed. So even if you’re not convinced by the specifics of my Plan B, I hope you can at least agree that it’d be a disaster for us not to have one — and not to start getting a Plan B into motion. Hopefully other organizers and political currents will put forward their responses and alternative ideas ASAP. The stakes are too high to just wait and see. More As always, please share this article widely. This newsletter depends on all you lovely people to get the word out. Thank you! I uploaded the full text of my Catalyst article on Milwaukee sewer socialism here (it’s updated and 3x as long as the version published earlier on this substack). If you haven’t yet, please make sure to subscribe to Catalyst here; I read every issue front to back, highly recommend. 🌹🎵 Ivan Lins (arranged by Arthur Verocai) — “General da Banda” 🌹🎵
Jacksonville-based Complete Health to pay $14M in Medicare Advantage settlement
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World Cup 2026: Ferran Torres talks winning goal for Spain, mental health and FIFA investigation into Argentina
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Ferran Torres Talks World Cup Championship, Mental Health
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Debt Digest | Federal Debt is a Health Care Problem
Welcome David Ditch to the Debt Dispatch! We are pleased to announce a new regular contributor: David Ditch will be joining the Cato Institute as a Policy Analyst for Budget and Entitlement Policy later this week. David has more than a decade of experience in fiscal policy issues, with a particular focus on federal spending. He previously worked at the Senate Budget Committee, the Heritage Foundation, and the Economic Policy Innovation Center. David’s areas of expertise include appropriations, transportation, agriculture, federalism, grantmaking, and policy options for deficit reduction. Originally from the Rochester, N.Y. area, David has a BA in Economics and Political Science from the University of Rochester and a MA in Political Management from George Washington University. David currently lives in Arlington, VA. You may have enjoyed his earlier guest posts: CBO: New Highway Bill Has More Spending, Taxes, and Deficits Trump Administration’s Proposed Changes to Federal Grants Highlight Problems of Big Government Here are this week’s reading links and fiscal facts: The federal debt is largely a health care problem. In a new report, the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation find that “In 2026, federal subsidies for health insurance, net of related payments to the government, are projected to equal $2.4 trillion, or 7.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). In CBO and JCT’s projections, those subsidies grow by 65 percent, reaching $3.9 trillion, or 8.4 percent of GDP, in 2036. Subsidies for Medicare contribute most to that overall growth, increasing by $900 billion. Over the entire 2026–2036 period, federal subsidies for health insurance total $33.6 trillion.” Cato’s Michael Cannon emphasizes, “The long-term federal debt problem is a health care problem. […] Only two categories of federal outlays will grow faster than gross domestic product (GDP): health care subsidies and interest payments on the debt. The former is, therefore, the primary driver of the latter.” The bond market fears deficits, not the loss of tariff revenue. Responding to a New York Times essay claiming tariff revenue has grown too important for a future administration to unwind, Cato’s Kyle Handley argues: “Bond investors are not attached to customs duties as a line item revenue source. They care about the government’s overall fiscal position.” He continues, “tariff revenue is a side hustle. And the Trump administration has already promised to dole out the funds through schemes like tariff dividend rebates, farm subsidies, and pay-fors on tax cuts or other spending.” Furthermore, “tariff revenue is simply not large enough to transform the government’s fiscal trajectory.” Take net interest for example: it “reached $970 billion in fiscal year 2025, absorbing 18.5 percent of federal receipts. Customs duties accounted for only 3.7 percent of receipts—and that was before refunds (see Figure 2).” Handley concludes, “The real bond-market concern is a large and growing interest bill, persistent budget deficits, and a political system unwilling to bring spending and revenue into alignment.” Medicare’s spending growth is driven by more volume and utilization. A Congressional Research Service report finds that Medicare spending “grew at an average annual rate of 7.3%” from 1985 through 2025, and the trustees project health care expenditures will keep rising “faster than gross domestic product (GDP) in most future years.” Citing CBO, the report attributes Medicare’s projected 2026–2036 spending growth to “23% from higher enrollment, 31% from inflation, and 47% from the growth of inflation-adjusted spending per beneficiary. In other words**, the largest single driver of Medicare spending growth during the next decade is expected to be higher volume and intensity of health care services.”** Boccia and Thakur explain: “as the economy grows, Medicare spending tends to grow at least as fast—and often faster—because the program automatically pays the bill for more and more healthcare consumption by seniors, even as prices rise.” The Fed has little control over market interest rates. Cato’s Jai Kedia documents that the Fed has held its rate target steady since December, yet “nearly every rate Americans actually borrow at has climbed over the same stretch.” Kedia continues, “The Fed did nothing, and the cost of credit went up anyway. […] Markets spent these months repricing macroeconomic events such as sticky core inflation, a volatile energy market driven by the conflict in the Middle East, and global trade disrupted by tariffs, among others. None of that required a policy change to show up in borrowing costs because markets, not the FOMC, set prices.” He concludes, “Accurately priced borrowing rates will come from credible disinflation and disciplined budgets and from a Fed content to follow the economy rather than pretend it leads it.” Nearly half of US farm income comes from taxpayers. Former Reagan OMB director David Stockman notes that “in the most recently completed full year (FY 2025) farmer incomes in the US totaled $97.8 billion, but fully 42.7% or $41.8 billion of that amount came from taxpayers, not the marketplace. Nor is this some kind of one-year aberration. If we look at the most recent decade as a whole, total farm income posted at nearly $708 billion, but, as indicated, fully $322 billion or 45% of this came compliments of US taxpayers.” Cato’s Chris Edwards explains why so little of that income is market-earned: “Farmers are businesspeople, but the government shields them from just about every type of weather and market risk. Furthermore, just about every part of the agricultural industry is subsidized, including insurance, loans, marketing, research, export sales, and land improvements.” The Debt Dispatch is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
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