Dave's filter

Kyrgyzstan has caught the fourth wave. Will Belarus miss it?

An $11 trillion deficit!? Excerpt:

Well, for the last few years, as per a legal requirement pushed through Congress by fiscal reformers, the Treasury has published within its financial report, for informational purposes, an annual Asset and Liability Statement for the government that does follow GAAP rules, using accrual accounting. And this statement shows the government's net liability increasing in 2004 by $11.087 trillion -- a good 27 times more than the official budget deficit.

Ronald Bailey on brain development and legal responsibility.

The U.S. spends much more on health care than the rest of the West. Are we just wasteful? Arnold Kling bets the rest actually spend too little.

On China and Taiwan: just kick the can down the road a few decades? Excerpt:

A second and politically more feasible approach would be to lock in the status quo by having Beijing and Taipei negotiate a 20-to-30-year "agreed framework" for stability across the Taiwan Strait. Such an agreement would eliminate the things that each side fears the most: for Taiwan, the threat that Beijing will attack; and for Beijing, the threat that Taiwan will cross the independence red line.

It couldn't hurt for U.S. diplomats to float the idea, but I don't think either side will bite. By far the most likely scenario is the status quo of a powder keg that has an even chance of going off in a mutually ruinous war, kind of like World War I.