EconAir

Secretary of the Treasury PRELIMINARY SUMMARY OF FISCAL YEAR 2025 BUDGET   The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) made their latest projection in January, 2025. The projected deficit in fiscal year 2025 will be around $1.8 trillion, the difference between about $5.2 trillion in revenue and $7.0 trillion in expenses. Interest on the national debt this year will be around $950 billion, over twice the interest expense in the fiscal year 2021 budget and equal to the defense budget. By 2035, the CBO expects the  yearly  budget deficit to increase to $2.7 trillion.   Interest expense this year passed budgeted outlays for the military. It is about equal to Medicare, and also to total non-defense discretionary spending.   Leaving aside Social Security and Medicare, interest expense is  about 20% of total budget outlays. Interest expense is about half the budget deficit.   The $1.8 trillion budget deficit is 6-7% of total GDP, or approximately 10% of consume...

UPDATE. In the 15 years since I wrote this, college tuition continues to rise faster than the overall price index, admin costs continue to go up, and full-time faculty number are going down. But the most outrageous change is that as state and federal aid goes down, students are assuming much of the cost of college in the form of student loans. Many were from private colleges that were frauds; some have been closed down. Total student debt is around $1.8 trillion, more than credit card debt. About an average of $40,000 per borrower. A high percent are in arrears or default. And, unlike credit card debt, student debt does not disappear in a personal bankruptcy. Students learn a new,  scary lesson - about compound interest.  A report published on August 16, 2010, using the largest database of information on higher education (IPEDS), has concluded that a major reason for the rapid increase in the cost of higher education has been the increase in the number and cost of administrati...

    Dr. Andrea Dragon   Seaweed Saves England                    Each of the  hundreds of  millions of shells Great Britain fired from thousands of field guns, howitzers and mortars during World War I contained two explosives: cordite, a kind of nitrocellulose (what Americans call smokeless powder) to propel the shell out of the artillery piece and send it flying toward the target, and TNT, the shell's high explosive payload to blow up the target on impact.   In the early months of the war, the demand for cordite far exceeded the manufacturing capacity of Great Britain's explosives factories.  To meet production demands, in October, 1914, the British Army contacted representatives from DuPont and its 1912 spinoff Hercules, who were the leaders of New Jersey's established explosives industry, and signed agreements with them to produce nitrocellulose and cordite, load it and TNT into shells, and...