The Debt-to-Income Ratio (or DTI) is a standard way to measure the burden of debt that every citizen and consumer should understand. Investopedia describes the term as “a personal finance measure that compares an individual’s debt payment to his or her overall income. The debt-to-income ratio is one way lenders, including mortgage lenders, measure an individual’s ability to manage monthly payment and repay debts. DTI is calculated by dividing total recurring monthly debt by gross monthly income, and it is expressed as a percentage.”

For governments, the Debt-to-Income ratio is no different, except that here the burden of national debt uses Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to represent the national income.

The people who run Facebook have some very strange ideas about the speech rights of the company’s customers, which they’ve encoded into computer algorithms that act to censor voices to which the company’s management, staff and/or advisers object.

The latest example of this censorship involves a multi-part series of articles that the Liberty County Vindicator of Liberty County, Texas, ran about the Declaration of Independence in advance of the Fourth of July holiday, which the newspaper posted on its Facebook page. The Vindicator‘s editor, Casey Stennett, reports on what happened when the newspaper reached Part 10 of their series:

I’m not talking about the World Cup here, but Russia’s challenge, along with six other countries, to Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. The Russians will be discussing those tariffs with the Trump administration, the first step in challenging them before the World Trade Organization. Those tariffs are bad for Americans because they raise the prices of steel and aluminum, which makes products made of steel and aluminum more expensive for American consumers.

Tariffs impose harm on both the importing and exporting country, but most of the harm falls on the country that imposes the tariffs. An elementary principle of economics is that there are gains from trade, and it follows from this that anything that impedes trade–such as tariffs–reduces those gains, both to buyers and to sellers.

The streets of San Francisco are riddled with an estimated 8,000 homeless, ranging from the young who rejected or were rejected by their families; to vets so scarred they cannot rejoin the society they thought they went to war to protect; to the down-on-their luck or just plain not ready for real life. Within a week on the street, most who had not already been on drugs will have tried at least one; within weeks on the street the majority are addicted.

Across the country, the numbers of homeless are growing, estimated at 554,000 nationwide, despite a roaring economy.

Also across the country, an opioid epidemic is capturing both the likely and unlikely in its death grip, killing more than 30,000 a year.

Taxpayers may have noticed that federal Department of Justice bosses seem to have trouble giving the people’s elected representatives, charged with oversight of the DOJ, the documents and information they request. The DOJ seems particularly reluctant when the information involves possible misconduct by DOJ officials. On the other hand, the DOJ appears eager to hand out millions of taxpayer dollars to just about any group that wants it.

In 2016, the DOJ’s Office of Violence Against Women (OVW) gave $8,379,218 to the “Consolidated Grant Program to Address Children and Youth Experiencing Domestic and Sexual Assault and Engage Men and Boys as Allies.” The “Violence Against Women Tribal Governments Program” got $33,647,321. The DOJ dished a full $24,266,723 to the “Rural Sexual Assault, Domestic Violence, Dating Violence, and Stalking Program” and the Improving Criminal Justice Responses to Sexual Assault, Domestic Violence, Dating Violence and Stalking Grant Program” got $29,622,711. And so on, 766 grants for a grand total of $452,866, 693.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and other prominent Democrats want to abolish the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency commonly known as ICE. Rep. Mark Pocan plans to introduce a bill that would eliminate the agency, which dates to the administration of George W. Bush. Whatever the merits of abolishing ICE, taxpayers might note that calls for the abolition of any federal agency have been rare. 

During the recent presidential campaign, Sen. Ted Cruz called for the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service, and he has a strong case. The IRS is by far the most powerful and intrusive agency in the federal government, known for targeting advocates of lower taxes and more accountable government. The IRS gets workers’ money before they do through withholding and in the case of an audit, the IRS makes the presumption of innocence disappear. As Sen. Cruz notes, a flat tax would eliminate the need for the IRS in its current form. 

Brainstorm Cell Therapeutics Inc. recently made headlines for attempting to offer an experimental treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (commonly shortened to ALS or called Lou Gehrig’s disease). This path-breaking treatment, named NurOwn, is a personalized cell therapy which works to promote motor neuron growth to reestablish nerve-muscle interaction.

The treatment was going to be the first attempt to offer patients access to experimental treatment under the new national right-to-try legislation. However, due to a lack of funding, Brainstorm decided not to pursue this option and instead focus on FDA approval. NurOwn is currently in phase 3 of the FDA’s approval process and will likely be approved in 2019 or 2020.

It seems like every time there’s a full moon, there’s a new scandal at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. This time it has to do with the VA’s operation of nursing home facilities for America’s veterans. The troubled agency has been hiding the poor quality of the care it provides at its veterans homes compared to similar facilities in the private sector.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf yesterday declared her willingness to go to jail to protect her “sanctuary city” policy, attacking the “bully in chief” for “trying to intimidate our most vulnerable residents,” i.e., undocumented migrants.

She may want to rethink Oakland’s continuing to pay homage to an earlier bully against would-be immigrants: namely, the Cesar Chavez Educational Center, Cesar Chavez Park, Cesar Chavez Branch Library, and Cesar Chavez Soccer Field.

Regularly using such terms as “wetbacks,” “wets,” “scabs,” and worse in describing illegal workers*, Chavez initiated a well-organized “Illegals” campaign that included paying Mexican border guards to stop Mexicans trying to cross the border, patrols on the U.S. side of the border by United Farm Worker (UFW) thugs, and reporting undocumented immigrants to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

Mayor Schaaf and others (including I) rightly deplore the Obama and Trump administrations’ policy of separating children from their parents, but we ought not at the same time celebrate the man behind arguably worse “wet lines” practices along the border: “County, state, and federal officials gave the UFW a free hand in this wilderness. No judge’s order put any limit on what the union’s night patrol might do to people it caught, nor did Mexican authorities in the cities of San Luis, Sonora, or Mexicali provide any protection to those who tried to cross illegally. If you got picked up by the UFW, you were on your own.”

Greetings, American friends,

Do you hanker for a job putting roofs on houses in the hot summer sun, or cutting up carcasses (and your fingers) in a frigid meat or poultry packing plant, or doing manual labor on construction sites and roads in all kinds of weather, or cooking, bussing tables, and washing dishes in a restaurant, or cleaning toilets and making beds in a hotel, or harvesting apples, strawberries, asparagus, and hundreds of other crops that require exhausting stoop labor, or cleaning office buildings at night, or taking care of affluent people’s kids while they go to work, or mowing lawns and trimming foliage for homes and businesses? If so, you can probably find an employer who will be happy to hire you—after all, you at least speak English—and you can thereby strike back at Jose and Esmeralda by “stealing” a job from an immigrant worker, maybe even an “illegal alien.”

Let me know how it goes for you, amigos. The world really is your oyster, you know.

***

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. Higgs is also the author of the book, Taking a Stand: Reflections on Life, Liberty, and the Economy.