BIDENOMICS: Americans are racking up more ‘phantom debt’ — why that’s a problem.

Some types of debt can haunt you.

“Buy now, pay later” loans, especially, can be hard to track, making it easier for more consumers to get in over their heads, some experts say — even more than credit cards, which are simpler to account for, despite sky-high interest rates.

Over the holidays, the use of installment payments hit an all-time high, up 14% year over year, according to Adobe’s latest online shopping data.

Buy now, pay later is now one of the fastest-growing categories in consumer finance, according to a separate report by Wells Fargo.

“Because no central repository exists for monitoring it, growth of this ‘phantom debt’ could imply total household debt levels are actually higher than traditional measures,” said Tim Quinlan, senior economist at Wells Fargo and co-author of the report.

They keep telling me the economy is booming but all I see is mountains of debt — private and public.

UM…: New York Times Outs Taylor Swift as Gay … or Something.

FUNNY, THAT DOESN’T LOOK MUCH LIKE SANCTUARY: New York mayor sues bus operators that brought migrants from Texas for $708m.

SCORE ONE FOR THE GOOD GUYS: Threats of a Wider War As Israeli Strike Takes Out Terror Commander in Lebanon. “There already is a wider war — and that’s because Biden and Blinken’s negotiating partners in Tehran ordered a wider war.”

WEIRD HOW THE BIG HEADLINE NUMBERS GOT REVISED DOWNWARD MUCH MORE QUIETLY 11 OUT OF 12 TIMES: Initial US employment reports overstated by 439,000 jobs in 2023.

There’s something wrong with previous U.S. jobs reports.

The government quietly erased 439,000 jobs through November 2023, a closer look at the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows.

That means its initial jobs results were inflated by 439,000 positions, and the job market is not as healthy as the government suggests.

Since the government wiped out 439,000 jobs after the fact, the total percentage of jobs created by the government last year is even higher.

Increased government hiring has been driving the jobs numbers higher.

Even the made-up numbers suck when you look past the headlines.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: There’s Useless, Then There’s Lloyd Austin Useless. “There are a lot of strange things that I could have come up with in my rather fertile imagination that might set the tone for this year, but having the Secretary of Defense win a game of hide and seek with the President of the United States is out there even for me.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: New Vulcan rocket sends privately-built Moon lander to space.

The launch of Vulcan, a 200-foot (60-m) tall rocket with engines made by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, was a crucial first for ULA, which developed the rocket to replace its workhorse Atlas V rocket and rival the reusable Falcon 9 from Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the satellite launch market.

The stakes were high for Vulcan. Boeing and Lockheed, which own ULA in a 50-50 split, have been seeking a sale of the business for roughly a year. And the launch was the first of two certification flights required by the U.S. Space Force before Vulcan can fly lucrative missions for the Pentagon, a key customer.

Peregrine is set to land on the moon on Feb. 23 with 20 payloads aboard, most of which will seek to gather data about the lunar surface ahead of planned future human missions. It marks the first trek to the moon’s surface as part of NASA’s Artemis moon program.

There’s a lot riding on Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines, which seem to have performed beautifully.

THIS MIGHT BE WORRISOME IF THE US INTEL COMMUNITY GENERATED MORE ACCURATE INTEL JUST ONCE IN A WHILE: U.S. Intelligence Believes Israel Can’t Win If It Fights Both Hamas and Hezbollah.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Saving the Panama Canal will take years and cost billions, if it’s even possible.

Some shippers have expressed frustration that the canal authority isn’t moving faster to address low water levels.

“No significant infrastructure projects have gone ahead in Panama to increase the fresh water supply,” Jeremy Nixon, chief executive officer of Japanese container transportation company Ocean Network Express Holdings Ltd., or ONE, wrote in a letter to Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo Cohen that was seen by Bloomberg. “We sincerely hope that as ONE, and on behalf of our customers, that some urgent action can now be taken.”

Panama’s presidential palace didn’t respond to a request for comment on the letter.

A combination of climate change and infrastructure expansion are to blame for the canal’s woes. The canal authority completed a new set of locks in 2016 to increase traffic and keep pace with the growing size of cargo ships. What it didn’t do was build a new reservoir to pump in enough fresh water.

Then the drought hit.

Droughts come and go but inadequate infrastructure was a problem that should have been accounted for.

YES WE DO AND YES IT IS: We Have an ‘Affordability Crisis’ and It’s Slamming Our Food Budgets.

LOST HIS MIND OR CYA? Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine Has Lost His Mind on Transing Children.

HEALTH: You’ll Never Believe How Bad This Is for Your Heart. “I have noticed though that if there’s one thing that sends my blood pressure higher than a lunch of ramen noodles and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, it’s getting stuck in traffic. As it turns out, I’m not alone.”

GOOD LORD: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Swatted. “In any case, I’ve got to believe that SWATing the Attorney General is a pretty risky gambit. I mean, I’m pretty sure any AG is going to have the resources to pursue the perps. Likewise, I’m pretty sure he can get a warrant for the device data, and even an unregistered burner phone can be tracked.”

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: When Will We Stop Worrying About Whether Old Entertainment Will Offend People? “Not only is the BFI warning that mid-20th-century spy thrillers might be offensive to modern snowflakes, but it’s also claiming that audiences found these movies offensive when they first hit theaters.”

CHANGE: Florida Is First State Allowed to Import Drugs From Canada in Bid to Reduce Costs.

GAME OVER: Here’s What Happens When Commie Busybodies Fight the Gaming Market.

BIDENOMICS: The Welfare-Industrial Complex Is Booming.

Drill into the nation’s 3.7% unemployment rate, and you’ll find a growing welfare-industrial complex beneath the seemingly strong labor market. Government, social assistance and healthcare account for 56% of the 2.8 million net new jobs over the past year, and for nearly all gains in blue states such as New York and Illinois.

The tens of thousands of migrants pouring into big cities need to be tended to. So do the hundreds of thousands of drug-addled and mentally ill homeless living on the streets. Progressive government doesn’t do anything on the cheap. America’s welfare state has thus become a proverbial Big Dig, and it keeps getting bigger.

New York City is spending $394 a day—or $143,810 a year—to house and feed each migrant, many in formerly posh hotels. Mayor Eric Adams grouses about the flood of migrants, but what does he expect when the city makes itself a welfare magnet?

Meantime, the homeless population continues to swell, even as government shovels more money into housing subsidies—nearly $43 billion in the Democrats’ March 2021 Covid bill alone. The number of homeless shot up 85,389 between 2019 and 2023, with California and New York combined accounting for about half the increase, according to a recent federal government report.

The national media is perpetually puzzled why regular Americans aren’t giving Presidentish Joe Biden credit for the booming economy. But it isn’t booming for working Americans — which the media would know if they cared to meet any.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Who Is and Isn’t on Epstein’s List, and What does it Mean? We’ve Got the Names.

HEALTH: Chemicals that may cause cancer, infertility ‘widespread’ in packaged products like Cheerios. “Products that had among the highest levels of plastics were Yoplait’s Original Low Fat French Vanilla; Ben & Jerry’s vanilla ice cream; Wendy’s crispy chicken nuggets; Burger King’s Whopper; General Mills’ original Cheerios; Perdue ground chicken breast and Del Monte sliced peaches, according to the report.”

WHEN YOU’RE IN A HOLE…: I Know How to Save Star Wars (and Marvel, Too).

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: West Coast shipping rates surge as Red Sea fallout goes global.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: OK — I’ve Got the Perfect Gig for Vivek Ramaswamy. “Vivek Ramaswamy’s casual ease with curb-stomping idiotic questions from the Dem cheerleading squad is a breath of fresh air relief from the stench of the roll over and play dead Republicans in Washington. I would once more remind you, dear readers, that I haven’t had a nice thing to write about this guy until now.”

DECOUPLING: Apple’s suppliers have so far spent $16 billion to move from China.

New research by investment bank TD Cowen seen by AppleInsider estimates that Apple’s loss of earnings because of China are considerable, and in part are behind its suppliers moving, or reshoring, to other countries.

“Over the last four years since the start of the pandemic, we estimate Apple’s revenues have been impacted by over $30 billion,” says TD Cowen in the note. This comes from “undersupplying the market due to production disruptions stemming from component supply, available labor pool, and/or government-mandated movement restrictions.”

TD Cowen’s analysts believe that because of this impact on its manufacturing chain, Apple and its 188 major suppliers are all investing to reshore as quickly as possible — and that they will continue to do so.

There’s been a lot of money exiting China with much more to come.

IOWA: Nikki Haley Managed to Insult All of Iowa’s GOP Voters With 1 Weird Trick.

WHICH OFFICE DO I GO TO, TO GET MY WORDS BACK? Attorney for Carol Swain Sends Letter to Harvard Corporation Demanding Answers for Plagiarism by Disgraced President.

The Tennessee Star obtained the letter written by an attorney representing Dr. Carol M. Swain, sent on Wednesday to the Harvard Corporation, including Interim President Alan Garber and Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker, demanding answers about what Swain claims is plagiarism of her work by outgoing President Claudine Gay.

The letter revealed Swain requires answers about what Harvard considers “duplicative language,” which is what the university has acknowledged Gay committed in several of her academic works.

Writer and activist Christopher Rufo in December raised allegations that the former Harvard president plagiarized material from Swain’s work for her 1997 Ph.D. thesis. Swain is a former political science professor at Vanderbilt and a graduate of both the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Yale University.

Swain expects Harvard explain the difference between “duplicative language” and “verbatim copying” without attribution, whether the institution requires quotation marks to be used for “the identical replication of another author’s language,” and when it is appropriate to retroactively edit an academic text to include quotation marks around another author’s language.

In the letter, the lawyers wrote that Swain also demands Harvard declare whether Gay’s dissertation, which Swain alleges included material plagiarized from her book Black Faces, Black Interests, meets the Harvard University Guidelines for PhD Dissertation from 1997.

“How many instances of duplicative language in a scholarly work would constitute plagiarism?” The attorneys queried, “Would five instances of duplicative language constitute plagiarism? Would 50?”

Swain also asked through her attorney for Harvard to clarify whether “the discovery of plagiarism in a dissertation after a Harvard degree has been awarded” would “impact the status or validity of the degree conferred?”

Swain’s questions have been largely ignored by the mainstream media, which doesn’t seem much interested in intellectual theft from a black woman.