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Canada Has Pulled Off a Brain Heist (axios.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Seoul-born Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, a professor at Brown University known for her work on fake news, is moving to Canada. So is Alan Aspuru-Guzik, a Harvard chemistry professor working on quantum computing and artificial intelligence. They are among 24 top academic minds around the world wooed to Canada by an aggressive recruitment effort offering ultra-attractive sinecures, seven-year funding arrangements -- and, Chun and Aspuru-Guzik said in separate interviews with Axios, a different political environment from the U.S. The "Canada 150 Research Chairs Program" is spending $117 million on seven-year grants of either $350,000 a year or $1 million a year. It's part of a campaign by numerous countries to attract scholars unhappy with Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and other political trends, sweetened with unusually generous research conditions.
Any president has a year of overlap with the previous one with respect to economics. Trump was elected in November, generally wouldn't pass a budget until about March, and then you have 2-3 quarters before those policies are enacted and the economy feels those policies in earnest. Trump dragged his feet with respect to his first budget, so that shifts the curve. When the economy finally caught up to Trump's big mouth, you not only saw a decline in the market but chaotic fluctuations not seen since the global economic crisis of 2008 and a short hiccup in late 2016/early-2016.
Dubya was able to relish in Clinton's strong economic policies, and Obama kicked off his term facing the aftermath of Dubya's poor economic policies. Trump exploited Obama's economic policies to a ridiculous level to the point of actually trying to take credit for the booming economy during his first year, yet with the Dow down more than 2000 points since Janauary, alone, where's President Shitgibbon to take credit for *that*?
Trump is going to run the country like any of his businesses, which is to say, drive it directly into the ground. We're talking about a man who whent bankrupt selling wine, steak and gambling to the American people. Nothing about that suggests he's a saavy businessman, let alone a capable politician.
Wrong, there was no surplus, it was all Washington doublespeak. There are two parts to the national debt - public debt and intragovernmental holdings. During the Clinton years the public debt part was paid down by borrowing money in the intragovernmental holdings mostly from Social Security. So the debt was not paid down, excess Social Security funds that by law are required to be re-invested into securities became additional intragovernmental debt. During the Clinton years the national debt total continued to rise:
FY1993 $4.411488 trillion debt
FY1994 $4.692749 trillion debt, increase of $281.26 billion
FY1995 $4.973982 trillion debt, increase of $281.23 billion
FY1996 $5.224810 trillion debt, increase of $250.83 billion
FY1997 $5.413146 trillion debt, increase of $188.34 billion
FY1998 $5.526193 trillion debt, increase of $113.05 billion
FY1999 $5.656270 trillion debt, increase of $130.08 billion
FY2000 $5.674178 trillion debt, increase of $17.91 billion
FY2001 $5.807463 trillion debt, increase of $133.29 billion
FY2001 was Clinton's last budget submitted before Bush took office.