Why More Secession Means Lower Taxes and More Trade

[This article is Chapter 9 of Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities.]

When we hear of political movements in favor of decentralization and secession, the word “nationalist” is often used to describe them. We have seen the word used in both the Scottish and Catalonian secession movements, and in the case of Brexit. Often the term is intended to be pejorative.

U.S. Debt Reaches $34 Trillion

Total public debt reached $34,001,493,655,565.48 at the end of 2023, with over $2.5 trillion added since the end of 2022.

The U.S. Treasury reported $6.1 trillion in outlays, but only $4.4 trillion in receipts for the 2023 fiscal year, resulting in a deficit of almost $1.7 trillion.

Figure 1: Cumulative receipts and outlays of the U.S. government

The Fed’s Bank Term Lending Program Probably Won’t Ever Go Away

The folks at the Federal Reserve haven’t said whether they will continue the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) which is set to expire on March 11, 2024. Jay Powell was asked about it during the November meeting Q & A and said they’d start thinking about it in 2024. With $131 billion outstanding in loans to banks and credit unions collateralized by U.S.

The Incredibly Costly Path To Attaining Equality

It is now the year 2525. Equality has finally been attained. Yes, it took quite a while to attain this goal. Why? This is because as we approached it, as we became closer and closer to this ideal, as people became more and more identical, there were fewer and fewer people of genius to do the heavy lifting. And those few who still remained were not at all as smart as the top of the IQ (a thousand pardons more mentioning this concept) distribution used to be earlier in the day.

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