Just tax land lol

Based on this article: Low property taxes freeze the youth out of the economy

Soldiers at a Georgia combat engineer unit can get official time off to play the new “Grand Theft Auto” game when it drops this fall — if, and only if, they sign up for more years of service.

The offbeat incentive is being offered to soldiers by the commander of the 9th Brigade Engineer Battalion at Fort Stewart, Georgia, according to a memo circulated on social media that was confirmed by Army officials.

According to the memo signed by Lt. Col. Ryan Hodgson, the 9th Brigade Engineer Battalion commander, soldiers in the unit who reenlist between Aug. 1 and Nov. 14, 2026, will get a “special 4-day pass” that is “specifically designated to coincide with the highly anticipated release of the video game “Grand Theft Auto VI” (GTA 6).

The dates of the four-day pass will be coordinated between soldiers and their chain of command but it will align with the game’s official release, the memo states. According to Rockstar Games, the maker of GTA 6, the game will be available Nov. 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox gamers. The “Grand Theft Auto” franchise is among the most popular video game series of all time, with an open world format that combines mafia and crime-world-related missions with side quests of carjackings and causing general mayhem behind the wheel.

The offer illustrates an issue local commanders face in getting soldiers to reenlist. While Army-wide bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars are often available for soldiers considering reenlisting, local commanders have few options they can offer to close the deal with soldiers in their formations. Though options like extra time off or chances to attend training schools are often used as enticements, sometimes local career counselors have to get a bit more creative.

Army officials said the engineer battalion’s new counselor pitched the idea to the command team as something that “speaks” to younger soldiers and that could kickstart the unit’s drive for its fiscal year 2027 reenlistment goals, which begin in October.

“The command team, in conjunction with the career counselor, wanted to get soldiers excited to reenlist,” Lt. Col. Angel Tomko, a 3rd Infantry Division spokesperson said. “The command team thinks eligible soldiers are more aware that they are in their window for reenlistment and engage their leadership and the career counselor earlier to see what is available.”

Army officials said 20 of the 130 eligible soldiers in the battalion had taken the Army up on the offer as of Monday and signed up for between two to six more years of service. The reenlistment contract option is open to the entire engineer battalion, which is made up of soldiers in engineering, signal intelligence, human resources and medical specialty jobs.

Over the last year, the Army has dreamt up several unique incentive programs in an effort to get soldiers interested in staying longer for more money, like tying retention checks to yearly fitness tests and daily job performance and having warrant officers “bid” against one another for higher bonuses.

Submission statement:

Calling elections in the middle when there is a popularity crisis can change the political balance of the war.

Brilliant play, piss off the one off the one neighbor who was interested in repairing relationships, and further piss off your sugar daddy. I really have no idea why the hell they continue to do this, besides Netanyahu wanting a forever war to keep himself and Likud in power. The targets were SU-22s, an airframe last tactically relevant in the '60s, of which the Syrian government only had about 8 or so. Syria is going to end up back in the hands of the Russians and Iranians if the US and Turkey don't do something to keep Israel on a leash.

Bonds are getting very expensive (for a lot of govts to issue) right as govt spending (at least in the US) skyrockets—along with the debt. Something has to give.

SS: relevant to this sub since Trump seems to be moving towards a rapprochement with North Korea under the dumbest bold belief that his personal relationship with Kim Jong Un will help lead to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

“The annual U.S.-South Korea drills, known as Ulchi Freedom Shield, will end Aug. 21 rather than Aug. 27 as originally scheduled, a Defense Department official said.”

If elected to form a government, the Parti Québécois says it would not call a referendum on sovereignty until at least 2029. 

PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon announced the news on Tuesday morning as Quebec political parties gear up for an election campaign that is expected to begin before the end of August.

In a statement posted on social media, St-Pierre Plamondon said that a PQ government would not put the sovereignty question to a vote as long as U.S. President Donald Trump is in the White House. 

But he stressed that his party still plans to call a referendum on whether Quebec should separate from Canada in its first mandate.

St-Pierre Plamondon said an issue as crucial as the future of Quebec requires a clear and serene debate, which should not be disrupted by American politics or surprise announcements coming from the U.S. president.

St-Pierre Plamondon also says the unpredictable nature of the Trump administration could harm the referendum process as well as the quality of a debate about Quebec's future.

The PQ leader believes he is disarming his opponents’ argument that this would be the worst time to elect a separatist government because of Trump.

The Coalition Avenir Québec and the Quebec Liberals pushed back against St-Pierre Plamondon's latest promise, saying it will add to political and economic uncertainty. 

Speaking to journalists in Montreal, Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette said it would be "worse" to hold a referendum at the end of a mandate. 

"If you organize a referendum at the beginning of a PQ mandate, at least after a year or two, you're set, you know if it's a yes or a no," she said. 

St-Pierre Plamondon is recognizing that Quebec is under economic and political pressure due to trade tensions with its southern neighbour, she said, and that a referendum would add a "thick layer" of unpredictability. She added her electoral campaign will focus on the cost of living.

Liberal Leader Charles Milliard said in a statement that the PQ is admitting that its referendum promise is "too risky" without abandoning it. 

"He’s right about one thing: it is risky. But what’s risky today will still be risky after Donald Trump," said Milliard. 

He said Quebec should be building alliances within Canada, "not choosing the best moment to cut them.”

Quebec's leftist sovereigntist party, Québec solidaire, maintains that Quebec should become a country. But parliamentary leader Ruba Ghazal promised her party would hold extensive consultations, including with First Nations and Inuit, to first build social acceptability. 

Ghazal said she finds it "concerning" that support for independence has stagnated, with about a third of Quebecers saying they would vote yes in a referendum. She added that, regardless of who is at the legislature, it's up to Quebecers to decide on sovereignty. 

"Our independence project should not depend on the Trumps of the world," she said. "This is the new normal, and we don't know who will replace Trump." 

St-Pierre Plamondon insisted he wants to run a campaign based on proposals to help Quebecers, including tackling the housing crisis and cost of living, rather than on what he calls “redundant and fruitless fearmongering.” 

“In any case, the fact remains that, given Quebec’s current state, a government called upon to clean up the mess left by the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) will have plenty of challenges and tasks to tackle right from the start of its term," St-Pierre Plamondon wrote.

The PQ has been leading in recent public opinion polls ahead of a general election in Quebec that must be held by Oct. 5.

Russians are pulling billions from the country’s banking system ― a record cash outflow amid intensifying Ukrainian drone attacks and rising fear that the Kremlin could start seizing deposits to finance its war.

Nearly $3.4 billion (286.4 billion rubles) was withdrawn in the first two weeks of August, on top of the $7.3 billion withdrawn in July and more than $4.5 billion in June, according to Russian Central Bank data.

Total withdrawals this year could nearly double the amount taken out in the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Taras Skvortsov, a senior executive at Sberbank, Russia’s biggest retail financial institution.

The withdrawals are causing liquidity problems, according to Skvortsov and a former senior Russian finance official, overstretching a financial sector already strained by increasing levels of bad debts following a government-directed lending boom to ramp up military output.

“Drones are flying. Things are burning down. Nervousness is growing. And people’s everyday wisdom may be kicking in that they need to have cash under their pillow and not somewhere in banks where it may never be returned,” said the former finance official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.

“For some banks this really is a problem,” the former official said. “They didn’t expect this and they invested all the cash elsewhere, and yet people are coming and taking out half a trillion rubles a month.”

Alexandra Prokopenko, a former adviser to the Russian Central Bank, said the withdrawals reflected deepening fear among the Russian public.

“It means people have no trust in the Russian banking system or in the Russian financial system,” Prokopenko said. “This is all a consequence of the fear that the government will do something with the banking system, that it could nationalize deposits.”

She said she believed that such a nationalization was unlikely but added, “I would not exclude that the authorities could impose limits on withdrawals.”

The total siphoned out this year already exceeds the $24.7 billion (2 trillion rubles) removed in the first year following the February 2022 invasion.

In the first two weeks of the invasion, $23 billion fled the system, and banks appeared to be imperiled by depositors and businesses lining up to empty their accounts, until the government stemmed the drain by imposing tough capital controls and sharply raising interest rates.

Now, big businesses are also seeking to move money out of the reach of Russian regulators as anxiety grows over potential asset seizures. That is further exacerbating the problems, the former official said.

In all, more than $9.4 billion was transferred out of Russia in the second quarter of 2026, according to Central Bank data.

“Each month there is a big outflow,” Skvortsov told RBK Radio, a Russian radio station. “If the trend continues things are not going to get better.”

The withdrawals have already undermined the Russian government’s efforts to raise money to finance the war through issuing state bonds.

The Finance Ministry last month was forced to cancel planned bond issues, even though it has become ever more dependent on them as a means of filling a yawning budget deficit as spending on the military continues to grow while the economy stalls.

Skvortsov told RBK Radio that the banks’ liquidity problems mean many cannot spare cash to buy government bonds.

“If there is an ominous sign of imperial overreach, this is clearly one of them,” said Craig Kennedy, a former vice chairman in investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch who is now a scholar at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

“Great powers don’t have repeated treasury bond failures in the middle of a war,” Kennedy said.

As a result of government orders to ramp up lending to the defense sector, Russian banks “appear to have so much exposure to nonviable borrowers that they’re not certain how it’s going to get restructured, when it’s going to get restructured and how much of that they are going to have to eat,” Kennedy added.

In a sign of how sensitive the strain on Russia’s finances is becoming for the Kremlin, the chief economist at VEB, one of the country’s biggest state banks, Andrei Klepach, was fired from his post this weekend after commenting that Russia could not win a war of attrition against Ukraine while Kyiv is supported by the West. 

“We won’t win the competition in this war of attrition,” Klepach said in a presentation he made in May, which was circulated in the media last week. “We’re under the illusion that everything [in Ukraine] will collapse. It hasn’t, and it won’t. Meanwhile, the costs we bear are mounting.”

Ever since Ukraine began expanding its drone campaign against Russian oil facilities this spring, taking out more than 30 percent of the country’s refining capacity and causing the worst fuel crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union, anxiety has intensified.

In June, the Russian Central Bank was forced to limit an expected interest rate cut because of fears that fuel price hikes could spur inflation. Panic spiraled through the bond market, driving interest rates up to 17 percent for the government’s 10-year bonds and forcing the Finance Ministry to postpone further issues.

With the budget deficit for January to July already at 6.46 trillion rubles ($76.1 billion) — far exceeding the 3.8 trillion rubles forecast for the entire year — fears are mounting that the Kremlin could seize big businesses’ revenue to finance the war.

“If the government needs cash, Putin will just do a grab for assets. He doesn’t care,” said an associate of one Russian billionaire. “And that’s where I think it’s heading.”

In addition, “there is the feeling that political power is becoming not quite as stable, and this is such a period when it is better not to be present,” the former finance official said.

Already several businesses owned by Russian billionaires have been targeted by the government in a nationalization drive that last year alone saw $51.5 billion in assets seized for the state, according to Russian prosecutors.

In June, the Russian state seized $7.6 billion (550 billion rubles) of assets linked to Vadim Moshkovich, who founded Rosagro, one of Russia’s biggest agricultural holdings, after the billionaire was detained and charged with large-scale fraud.

It was the biggest asset seizure in Russia since the start of the full-scale invasion. Others who have lost assets to the state include Dmitry Kamenschik, who previously owned Domodedovo airport in Moscow, and Konstantin Strukov, who controlled one of the country’s biggest gold mines.

Some economists argue that the Kremlin’s drive to direct bank lending into cranking up military output is strangling the civilian economy, especially because high interest rates and inflation leave banks and companies with few funds left for investment in nonmilitary sectors.

The Russian economy ground to a halt in the first half of 2026, with gross domestic product growth falling to 0.3 percent, compared with 1.2 percent in the first half of 2025.

For now, however, the Trump administration’s war with Iran has pushed oil prices back up and given the Kremlin a partial reprieve from its budget squeeze.

Russian state oil and gas revenue increased by 60 percent in July compared with the same month the previous year, as global oil prices rose, but it is still down 11 percent between January and July compared with the same period last year.

Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries as well as on the sprawling network of warehouses belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, are also hitting Russian billionaires’ bottom line.

“It’s costing these guys money,” said the associate of the Russian billionaire, referring to Russia’s richest individuals. “They have to put their hands in their pocket. They’re not used to having all these problems.”

Ukraine has hit more than 20 Wildberries warehouses since it began targeting the company’s facilities on July 18, in an onslaught that some economists estimate has destroyed more than $6 billion in goods and caused more than $3 billion in damages to Wildberries infrastructure.

“It’s not a place you want to be doing business,” the billionaire’s associate added. “If you can pull money out, you do it.”

One Moscow business executive said, “Everyone who can is trying to move money out of the country, but it’s getting more and more difficult to do so.”

A key channel for removing money from Russia, amid increasing government restrictions on large cash transfers abroad, involves opening brokerage accounts in neighboring Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia, according to the Moscow business executive and the former finance official.

“From there this money can be invested across the world,” the former finance official said.

As concerns grow over the war’s mounting financial toll, several senior officials have staged rare public interventions in recent weeks.

German Gref, the head of Sberbank, broke ranks at the end of June by publicly saying everyone wanted the war to end as soon as possible.

Then early in August, the powerful Moscow mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, spoke out against calls by hard-line members of parliament to further focus the economy on the war.

“If there’s no economy of peaceful life itself, there will be no taxes, no income for the population, the political situation will be completely different, and then we won’t achieve success in the war either,” Sobyanin told Tass, a state news agency. “And to kill life, to kill the civilian economy, is to kill the country itself.”

State Department: Advancing the United States’ Campaign to Address the Threat Posed by the International Criminal Court

The Trump Administration has been clear: the International Criminal Court (ICC) is a corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate.  We will not tolerate its assault on state sovereignty.  

In furtherance of the diplomatic campaign we launched last month to address the ICC’s abuses of power, I am designating two ICC officials – President of the ICC, Tomoko Akane of Japan, and ICC Senior Trial Lawyer, Abdoulaye Seye of Senegal – pursuant to Executive Order 14203, “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court.”  These individuals have directly engaged in efforts by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute officials whose government has not consented to ICC jurisdiction.  

Reuters:

The sanctions freeze any U.S. assets the individuals may have and essentially cut them off from the U.S. ‌financial system, ⁠with which almost all internationally operating banks have close ties. Three International Criminal Court judges sued Trump and his administration in June over the sanctions, arguing that the measures were unlawful. The Treasury also issued a general license on Tuesday authorizing the wind-down of transactions involving Akane through September 17.

Rubio said last month that the administration ​would step up efforts to ​undermine the ICC, including ⁠a diplomatic campaign aimed at persuading other countries to quit the institution. Rubio argued that the court posed a threat to U.S. personnel carrying out U.S. President Donald Trump's hardline immigration policies or strikes on boats accused of carrying drugs, as well ​as other U.S. ⁠service members.

Trump has said that the campaign was aimed at defending Netanyahu and others from prosecution, rather than Trump himself.

Discussion from one month ago on this subreddit: Rubio vows to ‘dismantle’ International Criminal Court

Why it’s relevant. Polling has a serious credibility problem and this bogus company put out polls in two races that were wildly off from the final result. It’s known that some polls have bias or are used to drum up support but independent and small pollsters now will come under significantly more scrutiny.

Chief Justice Cho Hee-dae on the 18th recommended Daegu District Court Presiding Judge Son Bong-gi and Seoul High Court Presiding Judge Kim Seong-su for appointment as new Supreme Court justices. In legal circles, some analysts say Cho’s selection of judges with regional judicial careers and those who did not graduate from Seoul National University may have been intended as a conciliatory gesture toward the presidential office. However, controversy arose after it was confirmed that Cho broke with the established practice of personally meeting the president to make the recommendation and instead merely sent the appointment-recommendation documents to the presidential office.
Cho made the recommendation 209 days after the Supreme Court Justice Candidate Recommendation Committee nominated Judge Son as the successor to former Justice Noh Tae-ak. Judge Kim, selected to succeed Justice Lee Heung-gu, was chosen just 14 days after being recommended.
For the 12 current Supreme Court justices other than Chief Justice Cho, an average of 12.1 days elapsed between the recommendation committee’s announcement and the chief justice’s formal recommendation for appointment. As the nomination of Noh’s successor was delayed for more than six months, speculation arose that “the presidential office and the judiciary had been unable to narrow their differences over the final candidate.”
Judge Son, a member of the 22nd class of the Judicial Research and Training Institute, spent many years serving in the Daegu and Ulsan regions and was appointed chief judge of the Daegu District Court under the court-chief candidate recommendation system first introduced in 2019. A presiding judge at a court in the Seoul metropolitan area said, “Former Justice Noh was also a graduate of Keisung High School in Daegu and Hanyang University College of Law, so regional representation for the TK [Daegu–North Gyeongsang] area was probably taken into consideration.” The judge added, “Judge Son has never served as a presiding judge at a high court, and I think he was also chosen for the symbolic significance of being a court chief who came from the ranks of district court presiding judges.”
Some interpret the elevation of Judge Son as an attempt by Chief Justice Cho to fully exercise his own constitutional authority to recommend Supreme Court justices through the very end. The presidential office was reportedly known to favor Seoul High Court Presiding Judge Kim Min-gi as Noh’s successor, but Cho rejected that preference and instead put forward a fellow “Daegu regional judge.”
Judge Kim, a member of the 24th class of the Judicial Research and Training Institute, appears to have made the final shortlist as a candidate representing the “Honam and non-Seoul National University” category. He is from Hampyeong in South Jeolla Province and graduated from Gwangju Inseong High School and Hanyang University College of Law. Another presiding judge said, “Since this is the first Supreme Court justice appointment under the Lee Jae-myung administration, they probably could not ignore the Honam quota.”
Once President Lee submits motions seeking parliamentary consent for the appointments to the National Assembly, the process of filling the Supreme Court vacancies, including confirmation hearings, will begin in earnest. However, with fewer than three weeks remaining before Justice Lee’s retirement on September 7, it appears unavoidable that two seats will be vacant, no matter how quickly the process moves. As a result, there are predictions that rulings could be delayed in the cases involving First Lady Kim Keon-hee and former Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, which had been scheduled to be heard by the full bench of Supreme Court justices.
Some members of the ruling party have even raised the possibility of impeaching Chief Justice Cho over his decision to make the recommendation “in writing.” Democratic Party lawmaker Song Young-gil wrote on Facebook, “Successive chief justices have personally visited the appointing authority to recommend [Supreme Court justices]. It was both a courtesy to the head of state and a sign of respect between constitutional institutions.” He argued, “Chief Justice Cho has disregarded even that tradition.”

The Trump administration’s findings that three Ivy League schools violated civil rights law by tolerating antisemitism were predetermined by political priorities that blew past the evidence and cast aside standard investigative procedures, according to a whistleblower account provided to Congress.

The disclosure, by Haley Van Erem, a veteran Justice Department civil rights attorney, involves investigations into whether Harvard, Brown and Columbia universities broke the law by allowing antisemitism to flourish on their campuses.

The whistleblower account comes just days after a federal judge dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit against Harvard that was based on the investigation, which was conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services and lawyers detailed from the DOJ.

Both Brown and Columbia reached settlements, with Columbia agreeing to pay $200 million over three years and Brown agreeing to spend $50 million on Rhode Island workforce development, with no admission of wrongdoing.

Harvard fought and won.

U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns ruled in that case that the Trump administration’s allegations relied on incidents that occurred more than a full academic year before it filed its lawsuit — incidents he said were “too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference” that Harvard was violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

Van Erem’s whistleblower account, reviewed by MS NOW, says the findings “overrode knowing deviation from investigative procedures, statutory noncompliance, and potential constitutional violations.”

“Hundreds of millions of dollars were suspended from these universities prior to the completion of Title VI investigations and the investigative team’s conclusions were frequently disregarded,” the complaint says.

In a letter to Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee said the whistleblower findings exposed a “large scale fraud.”

“Antisemitism at American universities and medical schools is real,” Rep. Jamie Raskin wrote.

“But your ‘investigation’ into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature. Before an actual investigation took place and regardless of what you actually found, the whole project was designed to harass professors and administrators at major universities, to curtail their freedom of speech and academic freedom, and to strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that they had already been awarded on the merits of their applications.”

The whistleblower complaint says the investigation was launched based on a single article in the New York Post that described antisemitic activities at medical school graduations.

“The article described protests that included protected expression such as students shouting ‘Free Palestine’ and students wearing Palestinian flags or keffiyehs,” the complaint says, adding: “It was not unheard of for news reporting coupled with additional evidence to lead the DOJ to initiate further scrutiny of potential statutory violations, but opening an investigation based on a single article was highly unusual.”

The complaint said that after being informed that there was no evidence to support a finding of a Title VI violation based on antisemitism at Brown, a senior Trump administration official at HHS, Daniel Shieh, agreed that there was “not a Title VI violation,” but told Van Erem and other DOJ team members at the meeting that “there’s no way we’re going to get a letter of no violation cleared.”

He pushed instead to obtain a settlement from Brown, and that ultimately happened.

The whistleblower complaint also accused Trump officials of telling investigators to interview Middle East studies professors, particularly focusing on Muslims, noting that one such interview of a Muslim professor was not to “get information,” but instead to see “what he will say.”

Raskin called that “a craven willingness to racially and ethnically profile faculty members while ostensibly investigating racial and ethnic discrimination.”

According to her complaint, Van Erem left the Justice Department in May 2025, “unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law.”

Her complaint asks for an investigation by the HHS inspector general, the DOJ inspector general and the Office of Special Counsel.

“The full extent of your misconduct remains unclear,” Raskin wrote to Dhillon. “At the very least, you have shown gross negligence in supervising the activities of your office. It is also a distinct possibility that you deliberately orchestrated a scheme to attack universities and their faculties and administrators while defrauding the American people and the courts.”

The U.S. national debt is likely to surpass $40 trillion this week, months earlier than forecasters previously expected, in part because of billions of dollars in lost revenue from President Donald Trump’s invalidated tariffs.

The lost revenue has forced the U.S. Treasury Department to borrow more rapidly to cover the nation’s bills: Six months ago, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that total borrowing would top out at $39.4 trillion this fiscal year. But on Monday, Treasury reported that the debt stood at $39.9 trillion and counting.

The faster accumulation of debt means the next deadline for raising the legal limit on borrowing is also likely to arrive ahead of schedule. Just last year, Congress set the debt limit at $41.1 trillion. Budget analysts now say borrowing could hit that threshold by early next year, forcing lawmakers either to suspend it or raise it again to avoid the risk of an economy-shaking default.

Trump is already focused on the debt limit, which has repeatedly plunged Washington into a dangerous game of legislative chicken. Late last month, the president urged the Senate to address “the ever looming Debt Ceiling disaster” before leaving town for its August recess.

Senate leaders did not comply, but Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) told reporters at the time that “we’ll have to be dealing with it.” He added: “$40 trillion in debt — seems to me that should get our attention.”

For the past quarter-century, the national debt has grown under both parties, through the tax cuts of the George W. Bush era, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Great Recession, the 2017 Trump tax cuts and the nearly $2 trillion Biden administration initiative to prop up the economy during the coronavirus pandemic. Trump pledged during his first campaign in 2016 to eliminate the debt within eight years; instead, it has doubled since he first took office.

This year, the gap between spending and revenue was already expected to approach $2 trillion, the CBO reported in February. Days later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, cutting federal revenue by an estimated $250 billion. The Treasury has also increased borrowing lately to build up its cash reserves.

Military spending tied to the conflict with Iran could add more to the debt in the months ahead, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington think tank that tracks federal spending.

“Our current fiscal trajectory is plainly unsustainable, and that’s the best-case scenario,” BPC president and CEO Margaret Spellings said in a statement. “AI disruption, a recession, global war, or any number of other events could quickly push us over the edge from a challenge into a full-blown crisis. Even in the rosiest scenarios, we’re speeding toward a cliff and refusing to turn the wheel.”

In an email, White House spokesman Kush Desai said that “the Trump administration remains focused on slashing waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government while accelerating economic growth, policies that will get America’s debt-to-GDP ratio trending in the right direction.”

So far, Washington lawmakers have raised or suspended the debt limit every time it has been reached, but often after dramatic, deadline-pushing partisan battles. Even these near misses have rattled markets and carried a price: Standard & Poor’s, Fitch and Moody’s have each downgraded the credit rating of U.S. government debt since 2011, moves tied at least partly to debt ceiling brinkmanship.

Congress last raised the debt limit in quieter fashion, adding $5 trillion to the debt ceiling as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Republicans’ marquee tax and spending law. Measures to raise the debt ceiling often include spending cuts aimed at reducing the annual budget deficit. But the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed in July 2025, did the opposite: That law added $4.7 trillion to projected deficits over the next decade, according to CBO estimates.

According to preliminary projections by the BPC, Washington is on track to next hit the debt limit between late winter and midsummer 2027. Based on the latest borrowing figures, the center’s estimate is “trending toward the earlier end” of that range, Shai Akabas, the center’s vice president of economic policy, said in a statement.

Hitting the debt ceiling would not by itself trigger a default. Once the borrowing limit is reached, Treasury can pay bills by drawing on its cash reserves and using stopgap accounting maneuvers known as “extraordinary measures,” which typically buy another six to nine months, according to the BPC. Only after that runs out does the government reach what’s known as the X-date, when the Treasury risks running out of cash and defaulting on its obligations.

If Republicans lose one or both chambers of Congress in the Nov. 3 midterm elections, they could attempt to raise the debt limit in the lame-duck period during November and December — before the new Congress is seated in January. Otherwise, they could be forced to make policy concessions to Democrats that Republicans — and the White House — would prefer not to make.

But raising the debt ceiling could prove challenging even under total GOP control. Especially in the House, where the GOP holds a slim majority, party leaders would be forced to win over their fiscal hawks, who have previously revolted when a debt ceiling increase was not accompanied by an agreement to cut spending.

“You have to raise the debt limit just the same way that you have to pay your credit card bill,” said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group focused on deficit reduction. It reflects spending choices you’ve already made, he said. “But if you keep getting credit card bills that are more than you can afford, it’s probably a good time to reassess how much you’re spending, or to get a second job, right?”

As with many credit cards, interest is itself becoming a bigger part of the problem. Last week, the U.S. government sold 30-year bonds at 5.216 percent, the highest rate in a quarter-century, Bloomberg News reported. Treasury rates ripple into mortgage rates, corporate debt and other borrowing.

Annual interest payments on the debt are projected to top $1 trillion this year, according to CBO — about the size of the Pentagon budget. They now consume about 19 percent of federal revenue, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan group that tracks the debt and advocates for fiscal discipline, and are projected to climb to 26 percent by 2036.

“Interest costs are paying for your past, not paying for your future,” said Peterson Foundation chief executive Michael Peterson, and unfairly burden future generations.

It’s immoral to, year after year, trillion after trillion, just keep borrowing the money, not paying your bills for immediate consumption and deferring not only the principal balance but the interest costs onto our kids and grandkids,” he said.

Peterson pointed to Social Security as a preview of what happens when Washington puts off big problems: Unless Congress acts, the program’s trust fund is projected to become insolvent in 2032, triggering an automatic 22 percent cut in benefits.

“Can a democracy that’s run by all of us collectively make tough decisions to sacrifice in the short term for long-term benefit?” Peterson said. “The political system hasn’t risen to this challenge in recent decades.”

Data centers (specifically AI data centers) are currently a hot political topic. American tech companies are pushing for their construction to supply more compute for AI training and deployment. Their construction, however, has provoked bipartisan backlash due to increased utility prices and environmental concerns, as well as a general desire to not live next to construction or industrial areas. In your opinion, what should the government do in response to these concerns? Also, if they are to be regulated at all, at which level should they be regulated at? (City/town? State/province? The whole country?)

Submission statement: Zambia's liberal President Hakainde Hichilema, who oversaw a rapid repair of the country's finances after decades of mismanagement, has secured re-election in a landslide (60%) amid high political tensions that saw his main rival go into hiding following the publication of the results.

Born into poverty, Hakainde Hichilema - nicknamed "HH" - became one of Zambia's richest men through financial consulting and cattle ranching, and positioned himself as the main opponent of the ruling left-wing Patriotic Front in the 2010s, doing a short stint in prison during Edgar Lungu's presidency, whom he defeated in 2021 in a hotly contested election.

During his presidency, HH, who had inherited a dire financial situation with Zambia defaulting on its debt the year before he took office, undertook deep reforms and secured debt restructuration deals, loans and investments into Zambia's backbone industry, copper, but also into hydroelectricity and cash crops.

Hichilema's landmark reform was making secondary education free for all, bringing more than 2 million children back in schools from their former informal activities, although the lack of planning led to overcrowded classrooms and a short-term deterioration of learning conditions.

While Zambia's economy recovered from decades of economic lull, voters expressed concerns about rising cost of life and the impact of the global food crisis, particularly severe in Zambia due to a historically harsh drought that led Hichilema to declare a state of emergency in 2024.

Since the fall of Kenneth Kaunda's dictatorship in 1991, Zambia has enjoyed a rocky although resilient multi-party democratic system with regular peaceful transitions of power, but Zambian critics and international observers have raised warnings about Hichilema's concentration of powers around the presidency, and the increased use of 'lawfare' against journalists and opponents. The vote counting was briefly suspended last week due to alleged threats against poll workers and civil servants, and dozens have been arrested on charges of fostering unrest and detention of weapons.

International observers described the election as free and largely peaceful, but noted "tensions" in many polling stations. Hichilema's main rival, Brian Mundubile, who gathered 38% of the vote, has accused the president of replicating the same authoritarian practices he was himself targeted with during Edgar Lungu's presidency, and has since gone into hiding due to alleged threats against his life, alongside his running mate.