Washington Post (January 10)
“As spending climbs and revenue falls, the coronavirus” is forcing “a global reckoning.” The resulting “debt tsunami” will threaten “even stable, peaceful middle-income countries.” Costa Rica is just one such country “scrambling to stave off a full-blown debt crisis, imposing emergency cuts and proposing harsher measures that touched off rare violent protests last fall.” The “progressive, eco-friendly nation is weighing desperate solutions — including open-pit gold mining, even oceanic fracking.”
Tags: Coronavirus, Costa Rica, Crisis, Cuts, Debt tsunami, Desperate, Eco-friendly, Global reckoning, Mining, Open-pit, Peaceful, Progressive, Protests, Revenue, Scrambling, Spending, Stable, Threaten, Violent
Wall Street Journal (May 30)
“Critics are accusing President Trump’s 2018 budget of ‘gutting the safety net’ with cuts to food stamps and disability insurance. In reality, the White House is proposing long-needed reforms that would fix a dysfunctional disability system that traps Americans in dependency.”
Tags: Accusing, Budget, Critics, Cuts, Dependency, Disability, Dysfunctional, Food stamps, Insurance, Safety net, Trump, U.S.
Financial Times (November 3)
“Some kinds of public investment bring very high returns for the rest of the economy–such as spending on basic scientific research or fixing infrastructure bottlenecks–and they are under grave threat from today’s swingeing spending cuts in the US.” Austerity is reigning in public sector capital investment, which “has dropped to just 3.6 per cent of US output compared with a postwar average of 5 per cent.”
Tags: Austerity, Bottlenecks, Capital investment, Cuts, Economy, Infrastructure, Output, Postwar, Public sector, Returns, Scientific research, Spending, U.S.
