" U.S. budget deficit widens to $100 billion in October . "

" The numbers: The U.S. ran a $100 billion deficit in October, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday.

That’s wider than the $63 billion deficit recorded in October 2017 as spending rose 18% while receipts increased by 7%. Adjusted for timing shifts, the deficit was nearly equal at $110 billion vs. $111 billion in October 2017, the Treasury said.

What happened: The U.S. spent $353 billion during the month while it only took in $253 billion.

The U.S. spent $84 billion on Social Security, $69 billion on defense, and $53 billion on Medicare.

The big picture: As October is the first month of the government’s fiscal year, it’s still very early to project whether the annual budget deficit will reach $1 trillion after ending fiscal 2018 at $782 billion.

The Congressional Budget Office projects the deficit will come in just shy of $1 trillion, at $981 billion, due to the impact from the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act and new spending. The deficit more generally is expected to widen as the baby boomers age — boosting entitlement spending while cutting revenue.  "

" Michael Gerson: Are we sincere about second chances?     "

" WASHINGTON -- Those of us who participated in the 2000 presidential election are getting political PTSD from the current gubernatorial and senatorial recounts in Florida.

President George W. Bush was eventually declared winner in the Sunshine State (and thus the election) by 537 votes out of about 6 million cast. But for 35 long days of counting and challenging and pleading, it was mainly the lawyers in charge.

During this period, Bush did a lot of brush clearing on his Crawford, Texas, ranch. The bloody scratches on his arms indicated how his frustration was being unleashed against unlucky cedar trees. I worked on some victory remarks and had a concession speech ready just in case. But eventually, I went to movies during the day. I was too distracted to pay much attention, though I remember seeing the film version of "Charlie's Angels," because, well, Lucy Liu.

Nearly two decades later, the Florida electorate is still balanced on a political knife's edge. Yet one measure passed in last week's midterm by a lopsided margin, and may have a larger, more lasting influence than any contested race. Voters approved Amendment 4 to the Florida Constitution by a majority of nearly 65 percent. This returned voting rights to more than a million people who have committed felonies (other than murder or sex offenses) and served their time. It was the largest expansion of the franchise since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and women's suffrage.

The U.S. Constitution specifically allows for the suspension of voting rights for those guilty of "participation in rebellion, or other crime." But after passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments -- mandating equal political rights for African-American men -- restricting voting rights became a priority for the forces of Jim Crow. In legal systems that routinely arrested and convicted black people on thin or false charges, bans on voting by felons were effective tools to ensure white supremacy.

Not many states now retain lifelong voting bans. The more frequent debate today concerns whether people on probation and parole should be allowed to vote. But these types of limitations (before Florida's change) still prevented voting by one in 40 adults in America and by one in 13 African-Americans. Amendment 4 solved about a quarter of this problem.

The arguments against felony voting bans are ultimately simple. How can you tell men or women leaving prison that they have paid their debt to society, that they should resume responsibility for their lives, and yet deny them the most basic right of a self-governing citizen?

The denial of voting rights is a way to mark a returning citizen with an invisible scar or brand of stigma and suspicion. It says that we share some geography, but not really a community. And this type of distrust, or half trust, is an invitation to recidivism. Rather than helping ex-prisoners avoid violence, gain jobs and remake their lives, this expression of skepticism worsens the odds they strive against.

Right out of college, I worked at an organization named Prison Fellowship Ministries, which did outreach to prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families. My boss was Charles Colson, who had been incarcerated for crimes related to the Watergate scandal. He wrote: "I served time in a federal prison. And while I paid my debt to society in less than a year, it took me 30 years to have my voting rights restored. Maybe I'm not a good example, having been part of a national political scandal. But what about a young person, say, in his early 20s, who is convicted of three minor drug offenses? Once he serves his time, grows up and straightens out his life, should he be denied the right to vote again? I know politics is a bare-knuckled game, but demonizing an entire class of Americans for electoral gain is wrong."

Republicans have often opposed measures to expand the franchise, for fear it would hurt them politically. My considered response? Tough. There are two ways to respond to the hostility of minority voters toward the GOP. First, try to restrict the franchise through stealthy means. This strikes me as a wall of sand against the waves. It is undemocratic, unethical and eventually discrediting.

Or second, compete for minority voters in a fairly constituted electorate. Republicans who find this impossible are practicing politics without inspiration, imagination and faith.

Beyond the political calculation is a moral question: When we talk about second chances in this country, do we really mean it? The voters of Florida have given their answer -- not in a squeaker, but a landslide. "

" Bezos Invades Trump’s Backyard
Amazon is the new king of Queens, where you-know-who got his start in real estate. "

" One of Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags on a long shelf of punching bags is Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Mr. Trump says (tweets) that Amazon rips off the Post Office, should be investigated, blah, blah, blah. The animus likely has more to do with the impossibly wealthy Mr. Bezos’s purchase in 2013 of the Washington Post at a price ($250 million) that would be like the rest of us buying a roadside antique. He has since let what seems like a battalion of Post writers spend their days tormenting Mr. Trump.

So when you look at the two places Amazon picked for its new semi-headquarters, an admittedly conspiratorial case could be made that after all the high anxiety of the selection process, Mr. Bezos picked Queens, N.Y., and Arlington, Va., as a big you-know-what to Donald Trump.

Queens is where Mr. Trump grew up and where his father Fred got his start in the business that became the Trump empire. As of this week, Mr. Bezos is the new king of Queens, wallowing in more New York tax subsidies than the Trump Organization ever dreamed of when building its gold-plated towers. Mr. Trump may never set foot in Queens again so long as the Amazon logo looms like an ISIS flag planted in his lost homeland.

Meanwhile, if you look out from the White House and down across the Potomac River, you can catch a glimpse of the great commercial white elephant called Crystal City in Arlington, Va. All of a sudden in President Trump’s backyard, Mr. Bezos is the most famous, if not the biggest, real-estate developer in the Washington area.

We wonder if the prospective 25,000 Amazon workers coming to Long Island City in Queens are in on the joke. Across New York’s political spectrum—though not including Mayor Bill de Blasio or Gov. Andrew Cuomo—the site selection is something that does not compute.

Even Queens’s own super socialist, Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is aghast at the more than $2.5 billion in tax breaks and construction grants the city and state are giving Amazon.

Gov. Cuomo said Tuesday: “This is a big money-maker for us—costs us nothing, nada, niente.” This remark belongs in the annals of Democratic tall tales. It depends on the meaning of “us.”

By “us” Mr. Cuomo means the politicians who will collect Amazon’s tax revenue. The “us” for whom the cost of this is “nada” does not include the millions of wage slaves in New York who supply the likes of Messrs. Cuomo and de Blasio with tax payments every April to fund the tax breaks “they” give to a Jeff Bezos.

In a bizarre moment of honesty, Mr. Cuomo let the cat out of the tax bag Tuesday when he said the subsidies were needed because a “level playing field” doesn’t exist between high-tax states like the one he runs and low-tax states like Texas.

Visitors to New York remark all the time about the astonishing number of high-rise condominiums under construction in the city. The politicians like to cite the mushrooming condos as evidence of the city’s “vitality.”

This is the reality: Politicians from both parties green-light developers’ seemingly endless condominium construction because to them every unit in those buildings represents just one thing: a taxpayer pod.

The people who live inside New York’s taxpayer pods, like the new Amazon workers, are essentially revenue robots, who will pay a New York City income-tax rate of nearly 4% and a state tax rate of almost 7%. But there’s more: Mr. Bezos is also sending his new workers to a state that no longer has a full federal deduction for state and local taxes, making the tax bite worse than those low-tax states.

As to New York’s street-level energy, it is real enough and for many worth the high price of admission. But most of that vitality—restaurants, museums, music, sports events, clubs, cocktail bars—comes out of after-tax income. New York’s politicians don’t build condos to the clouds because of that stuff. They want people like the arriving Amazon workers, with their estimated average salaries of $150,000, to pay for all the other dumb financial deals they’ve made, primarily contracts with public workers unions.


A recent issue of Crain’s New York Business noted that the city’s annual comptroller’s report estimates that “retired New York City workers’ future health costs will be $103 billion. The city has set aside only $5 billion, projected to last until 2026, and plans to pay-as-you-go thereafter.” Even Batman can’t solve that problem for Gotham.

Those public-union legacy costs are the reason no money is available to rebuild the city’s famously deteriorated commuter infrastructure—pot-holed streets that would embarrass a Third World country, a catch-as-catch-can subway system and crumbling train tunnels into and out of New Jersey. No dummies, Amazon’s negotiators got the city to agree to let it build a private helicopter pad at the new site so it can fly workers over the gridlocked streets.

But hey, it beats Crystal City. "

Write [email protected].

" WASHINGTON — While the bombastic U.S.-China “trade war” has been getting the headlines, U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have been waging a quieter battle to combat Chinese theft of trade secrets from American companies — a practice so widespread that even China trade boosters regard it as egregious.

The Trump administration’s much-ballyhooed campaign of tariffs will eventually produce some version of a truce — economists say that any other result would amount to a mutual suicide pact. But the battle against Beijing’s economic espionage is still accelerating, and it may prove more important over time in leveling the playing field between the two countries.

To combat Chinese spying and hacking, U.S. intelligence agencies are increasingly sharing with the Justice Department revelatory information about Chinese operations. That has led to a string of recent indictments, and in one case, the arrest abroad of an alleged Chinese spy and his extradition to America to face trial.

The indictments don’t just charge violations of law — they expose details of Chinese spycraft. And there’s a hidden threat: The Chinese must consider whether the U.S. has blown the covers, not just of the people and organizations named in the criminal charges, but others with whom they came in contact.

This law-enforcement approach to counterespionage requires public disclosure of sensitive information, something that intelligence agencies often resist. But it seems to be an emerging U.S. strategy. The Justice Department has pursued a similar open assault on Russian cyberespionage, with three recent indictments naming a score of Russian operatives and disclosing their hacking techniques, malware tools and planned targets.

China, like Russia, is displaying an increasingly freewheeling and entrepreneurial approach to espionage. Several indictments unsealed since September reveal how the Ministry of State Security, the Chinese spy service, has operated through its regional bureaus — in this case the Jiangsu provincial office of the ministry — to obtain precious U.S. technology.

The indictments allege that from 2010 to 2015, the Jiangsu branch ran a team of nine hackers who tried to steal U.S. techniques for making jet engines. This is a subtle and highly valuable aspect of aerospace technology, one of the few that China hasn’t yet mastered or stolen, and the Chinese evidently wanted to obtain by stealth what they couldn’t produce on their own.

“The concerted effort to steal, rather than simply purchase, commercially available products should offend every company that invests talent, energy and shareholder money into the development of products,” said Adam Braverman, the U.S. attorney in San Diego who helped prosecute the cases.

The San Diego indictment lists the hacker names used by the alleged conspirators, handles such as “Cobain,” “sxpdlcl,” and “mer4en7y.” A separate indictment charged an officer in the Ministry of State Security named Yanjun Xu, a deputy division director in the Jiangsu bureau, with trying to steal jet-engine secrets from GE Aviation; Xu was arrested last April in Belgium after he began trying to penetrate the company’s operations, and he was extradited to the U.S. last month. The U.S. in September arrested a U.S. Army reservist named Ji Chaoqun and charged that he had helped the Chinese gain information about aerospace industry targets.

This month, the Justice Department also unsealed a September indictment that accused a Chinese company and its Taiwanese partner, both funded by the Chinese government, of trying to steal eight trade secrets for a memory-chip technology known as “DRAM” from Micron Technology Inc., based in Silicon Valley. The indictment notes that the Chinese government had identified DRAM as “a national economic priority” that Beijing was determined to obtain.

The indictment, brought by the U.S. attorney in San Jose, uses blunt language to describe the alleged plot: “In order to develop DRAM technology and production capabilities without investing years of research and development and the expenditure of many millions of dollars,” the defendants “conspired to circumvent Micron’s restrictions on its proprietary technology.”

What gives these indictments extra bite is that President Xi Jinping had promised back in 2015 that China wouldn’t conduct economic cyberespionage anymore. That pledge followed an indictment the previous year that revealed an elaborate plot by Chinese military hackers to steal U.S. commercial secrets.

But in the espionage world, promises not to spy are dubious, at best. Over the last three years, the Justice Department has charged former CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee and five other Americans for stealing secrets on behalf of Beijing.

As a rising power, China is also a rising threat in the intelligence sphere. The U.S. counterattack, in part, seems to be a public revelation of just how and why Beijing is stealing America’s secrets — overt payback for covert espionage.  "

“ IT’S THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR ! “   ………. The Holiday Season ?!   ….. Nope !  ..  Me Stonesian Brothers and Sisters  -- Your
Young Joeykins is talking about one thing and one thing only    :   Another pending Rolling Stones North American Tour  .  As everyone already
knows , Stones’ tongues have been popping up as tour teasers in Los Angeles  , CA  ;  Omaha , NE  ;  Seattle , WA  ;  Chicago  , IL and many other
U.S.A. locations for the past two weeks . The pending tour is expected to begin in Mid – April ( Brrr……….  hopefully they are thinking Florida ) and
lasts a good two or three months .
     It is with this wonderful news that Emperor Xi and myself sat down for drinks Friday Evening at the Brazen Head ( Assistant Bar Manager
Heather substituting for the vacationing Christy ) in order to discuss just how many Stones’ Shows we plan to attend next year .  As we sipped
the Laphroaig 18 Year Old ( one of those rare gems that simply MUST be tried to understand  , words do her no justice  …….  Xi had the foresight
to stockpile the stuff when it was available  [  It is GOOD to be the Emperor  ] )  both Xi and myself agreed that we will only attend DOMED
Stones’ Concerts . The last thing one needs is to be dancing in the aisles to Satisfaction in the pouring rain   --- especially at  $ 1K per VIP Ticky .
That being said  , it looks like the only option this tour is State Farm Stadium ( www.statefarmstadium.com )  in Phoenix, AZ ( Glendale )  . 
The Emperor expressed concern that Arizona is now a ‘ purple ‘ state and I marveled restlessly how the Democrats sneaked into the territory
and managed to pick off a Senate Seat . Nasty  . Still , I brayed ,  “ The Republicans will hold a 53 – 47 seat majority for the next few years .
This is MORE than enough to push through another Supreme Court Justice . “   Xi concurred    --   and with Justice Bader Ginsburg falling down
nearly every other month these days it looks like it is only a matter of time before the Great Man :  [ President Donald J. Trump ( Supreme
“ PRECIOUS ! “ Leader ! ) ]   gets his chance .  After all , the human body only has so many ribs to spare    . * Ouch !!!!  *  Emperor Xi
even remarked ,  albeit jokingly  ,  that President Trump may pick POCAHONTAS as a replacement  . I stated that I am no betting man  ,
no High Roller  , but I would bet the ranch that there is not a chance in Hell our beloved Poca gets on the Supreme Court  . After all  ,
it would take at LEAST eighteen months of Spit Kit Results (  ……… “ that Lil’ KIT !!!!!   “  ……… “ THAT Lil’ KIT !!!!!!!! “ ) in order to determine
if she would be the very first Native America Supreme Court Justice . ( ….. Xi , his Entourage and myself now start laughing hysterically ,
falling off our bar stools and rolling around on the floor in delirious , euphoric ecstasy .  Xi is more Native American than Pocahontas      )  . 
     Soon Assistant Bar Manager Heather appeared  , wrapped her arms around the Emperor whilst ‘ licking ‘ his ear  , and the two of them disappeared
together   -- with the Laphroaig 18   -- into the Robert Emmet Room not to be seen again for the rest of the evening .

“ I LOVE YOU ALL !!!!!    “ 

I guess President Trump is getting his wall after all.