Mexico won’t willingly write the check for Donald Trump’s wall. So the president is hunting for a way to make Mexico pay. That search isn’t going well.
Japan is aging fast. Here are some trends on total population and age distribution, according to projections from the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Japan.
I did not know that by far most violent deaths in the world are a result of murder, not war. The pattern is reported in Global Violent Deaths 2017: Time to Decide, by Claire Mc Evoy and Gergely Hideg. It's a report from Small Arms Survey, which is a research center at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. The report notes:
Record stock buybacks—driven in part by the corporate tax changes in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)—have sparked a media and political furor. Unfortunately, they’ve also created a great deal of confusion. To help elevate the debate, here are three things you should know.
"Everyone" knows that the future of the US economy depends on a well-educated workforce, and on a growing share of students achieving higher levels of education. But state spending patterns on higher education aren't backing up this belief. Here are some figures from the SHEF 2017: State Higher Education Finance report published last month by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
Germany is the fourth-largest economy in the world (after the US, China, and Japan). And it's economy is doing extremely well. For example, consider the conclusion of the IMF staff in "Germany: Staff Concluding Statement of the 2018 Article IV Mission" (May 14, 2018):
There seems to be an ongoing fear in the psyche of Americans that an economy based on intensive government planning will inevitably outstrip a US economy that lacks such a degree of central planning. I first remember encountering this fear with respect to the Soviet Union, which was greatly feared as an economic competitor to the US from the 1930s up through the 1980s. Sometime in the 1970s and 1980s, US fears of a government-directed economy transferred over to Japan. And in recent years, those fears seem to have transferred to China.