Remember Jimmy Carter?

One of his key E/Os, which amusingly isn't prominently on display at his library (I went looking for it 10+ years ago) was his order halting all civilian nuclear fuel reprocessing.

Fission reactors inherently create a large quantity of nuclear waste.  But not all waste is equal when it comes to nuclear energy; some isotopes are short-lived and while very dangerous when created become non-dangerous almost-immediately.  As just one of many examples the cooling water gets "activated" in a BWR (Boiling Water Reactor) and thus you cannot enter the turbine room of a running unit because it is emitting fairly high-level radiation.  However, within a very short time after the reactor is shut down that has all decayed and there is no problem with going in there to work.  Since you would generally not want to actually try to work on a running steam turbine this isn't much of a problem operationally (although it does make for some interesting design requirements around the entry space to said turbine room so someone doesn't get accidentally irradiated!)

But some isotopes, especially those in the actinide series, are very long-lived, with half-lives in the thousands of years (or worse.)  The general rule is that after 10 half-lives of any radioactive substance there isn't any left to care about (do the math on it; it is in fact sound) but obviously 10,000 years (or worse) is wildly beyond the current lifetime of civilization as we know it -- and thus trying to claim you can "guarantee" something will remain contained and safe during that amount of time is a fantasy.

This leads to one inescapable conclusion: The only safe place for such material is inside an operating reactor since it is less-dangerous than everything else that is going on in there at that moment.  That is, since you must contain the fuel in a reactor while its running there's no "extra cost" in safety or price to simply put it in there, and there is in fact a benefit in that while the amount of energy it releases is small it is not zero and by being bombarded with neutrons in the reactor it will, over time, be broken down into lighter elements which are dangerous for a shorter period of time.

But today there is no reprocessing because when Carter destroyed the investments in that industry which had been made, even though Reagan reversed that order immediately upon taking office no commercial firm has been willing to take that risk of its investment being destroyed a second time.

Now the Supremes have been asked to rule on whether a private company can be licensed to store said waste away from the inherently dangerous reactor it is associated with.

I don't know how that decision will play out but its a question that arises due to a general problem with long-amortization investments generally that are subject to either Congressional or Presidential revocation since Congress turns over every two years and the Presidency every four or eight.

We must fix this and not only in the context of nuclear power.  Indeed, I would argue we may need a Constitutional Amendment that allows, for some subset of licensed activity, that an operating license over a given period of time is inherently attached to licensing authorization initially and cannot be modified or revoked without it being considered a 5th Amendment taking subject to immediate and summary compensation for the value that has been destroyed including the prospective profit that would otherwise be earned.

That does not mean that a license cannot be conditioned on, for example, proper operating practices or some other objective criteria delineated at the time of issuance related to, for example, environmental impact.  But it does mean that the firm in question must be protected against a different Congress or Administration changing the rules on what is permissible in terms of alleged or real environmental impact after the licensing occurs, and private actions that are aimed at the same goal must be subject to the same protections -- that is, the rules must be established at the time of the original permit and only a violation of those rules at that time can stand as a valid reason to revoke it.

Why can't we do this through legislation?  Simply put the EPA's actions, among other regulatory agency actions, make clear that the whims of political change are simply too mercurial to trust over an amortization period that extends beyond two Presidential terms -- and in some cases anything beyond one Congressional term, or two years, is too great an ask.

America, for example, proved that thorium-fueled reactors with a molten-salt coolant were functional in the 1960s.  I put forward a prospective path for energy self-sufficiency that required no outside-the-US inputs and would last for hundreds of years, providing not only electricity but also liquid hydrocarbon transportation fuel.

Why would not some large private company go after this hard?  After all having a several hundred year predictable-cost supply of gasoline, diesel fuel and electrical power looks pretty darn attractive, does it not?  In a world of geopolitical risk (which isn't going away ever, if history is a guide) an autarkic solution to America's energy needs that is sustainable for hundreds of years and resolves 99+% of the nuclear waste problem through online reprocessing, thus keeping all the high-level stuff in the plant where you can't evade having it anyway, this is a win on so many different levels assuming you had the tens or hundreds of billions accessible to invest you'd be nuts not to.

The reason it hasn't happen thus has to be an externality and the obvious externality is that any Administration can destroy it on a whim and for those who say "oh they'd never do that" well Carter did so nobody with two firing neurons in their head is going to take that risk a second time.

We need to fix this folks and nowhere is it more-important than in the energy sector.

Lots of historical context here, all the way back to the Catherine the Great.

Its important to understand history if you're going to try to understand what is going on in the present.  The history between Ukraine, Russia, Europe and more (including the US, given both World Wars and NATO) is quite-complex, and unfortunately many Americans seem to not know any of it.

This doesn't excuse anything, but understanding the complexities of the past help inform why things might have gone sideways as they did, and can serve as an important set of facts with which to view both current and, presumably, future events.

He has to act now -- and so must Congress.

$296 billion in all revenues and $603 billion spent last month; all of which was with President Trump in office.

This, while Speaker Johnson (and Trump) both want to continue this insane level of spending beyond revenues -- more than a 50% deficit last month -- until the end of September.

This is, on an average basis, worse than Joe Biden's last months in office (October - January) as the total across October to present is $1,147 billion -- or, if you prefer to be fair, equally bad since January is typically 1120 payments month and thus usually has a large amount of received corporate taxes, and it did this year as is usually the case.

Note that Social Security, which people will try to lump in, is not the problem.  It takes in a huge amount of tax (and pays out a huge amount); in contrast Health and Human Services spent $145 billion last month which is more than all income tax receipts deposited from individuals and more than 14 TIMES that deposited from corporations and yet the total deposited from Medicare tax was $28 billion -- or just nineteen percent of what was spent.

For rather-obvious reasons you can't cut CMS program benefits by 80%.

But you can cause costs to fall by close to that amount if you go after cost, and the Executive has the means to do that as I've pointed out through using 15 USC Chapter 1 and the two standing Supreme Court decisions backing its applicability to medical, pharmaceutical and health-insurance related businesses, including of course those involved in Medicare Advantage.

In total CMS has spent $1,030 billion thus far this year or one third of the total $3,039 billion spent by the Federal Government and yet it has received only $164 billion in taxes against that, or sixteen percent of what it has spent.

In addition prescription drug spend in Medicare has risen a stunning 80% over last year's run rate -- that currently stands at $74 billion against $41 billion this time last year while the entire last year spend was just over $100 billion.

Hospital payments are up 20% over last year and physicians payments are up 31%.

There is no way to tax out of this nor any other way to stop this runaway train other than by taking a meat axe to costs and it is clear that there is no way this sort of increase in spend comports with inflation or anything associated with it.  15 USC Chapter 1 is clear and again, the Supreme Court has ruled twice that actions taken by these industries are not exempt from that criminal law.

The full plan I put forward back when I wrote Leverage and then added detail to it as Obamacare came into focus is still where I believe long-term this must go but that requires Congress to act -- and without a threat to veto literally everything until they do it they won't.  However, directing every hospital in America, every medical provider, every drug company and every other entity within the medical field to post one single price for each procedure or item that every person will and does pay with all such charges and costs advised in advance, publicly available and easily searchable with no game-playing, and further require that affirmative, written consent be collected in advance of action taken or thing provided except in emergencies where consent is physically impossible, nor can you bill for anything you cause (such as an infection you GIVE the patient), with any attempt to game or otherwise obfuscate this order resulting in a Racketeering indictment with the predicate act being criminal extortion ("buy insurance or get a 10x bill up your back door"), thereby  immediately breaking any and all collusion between insurance companies, PBMs, pharmacies, drug companies, doctors, clinics and hospitals, which will restore competition immediately, and further make clear that any provider or pharmaceutical company that does not do this will be prosecuted under 15 USC Chapter 1, fined to the maximum extent of the law corporately which each person differentially charged a separate and distinct offense AND all of their executives will be criminally indicted, tried and upon conviction they will do 10 years in federal prison.

This can be done right here, right now, entirely within the Executive between the FBI and DOJ and Congress neither has to pass anything nor can Congress prevent or halt it.

Insurance company agreements to pay rest with their customer, the insured.  They must not ever do what they do now, which is to make both health and billing decisions in the middle and thus forcibly impose cost-shifting and ratchet prices which inures directly to their benefit and screws both Americans generally and the government as their operating margin is fixed by law.  There is of course much more and the link above explains it all -- but in the immediate time frame we must focus on what the Executive can do as Congress clearly will not until and unless they're forced to by their constituents.

If this is done at the Executive level prices will collapse immediately -- and, along with it, all the convoluted billing and insurance schemes, and their employees, will disappear.  Yes, that will be extremely disruptive to those employed in such pursuits and produce an immediate and deep recession.

We have no choice and it has to happen right now.

It is not possible to stop this in-process trainwreck now without serious disruption to our economy -- that is simply not avoidable and the option to do so all the way back to when Obama was in office, and I put forward a plan to do so which would have had much less disruption and evaded this entire fiscal mess, was ignored.

If we do not stop it now the consequences literally grow by the day and risk fiscal and possibly even civil collapse.

Trump does not have six months to sit on this until the new fiscal year and Speaker Johnson has repeatedly lied about "this will be the last CR" so there is no reason to believe any such thing will be forthcoming -- not that it matters because if not dealt with now the probability of a market crash into the fall and winter followed by a long economic malaise that will not clear in time for the elections is nearly-certain.

Politically the hit has to be taken right now because the economic impact will be severe and of course the current Administration will be blamed for it -- and yes, they're partly responsible not only for attempting to play games with the current CR but in point of fact Trump was President four years ago too, before Biden -- and did nothing to stop it then despite, I remind you, multiple campaign platform planks in 2016 that would have largely done so.  But no matter the apportionment of blame across parties and Administrations and sessions of Congress the hit has to be taken now and this foolery must be stopped with finality so that NEVER AGAIN can a federal department find itself collecting only sixteen percent of its spend in taxes and being a full THIRD of every dollar the government spends; there is no way we will get through the next couple of years without this blowing up the economy and the mid-term elections will begin to be contested next spring.

By next summer we have to be on the path of recovery; there is no avoiding the very large economic hit, so the choice is to either do it now -- not an empty promise (that will once again prove to be a lie) for the fall but right now -- or have it happen into the maw of the election in which case the GOP loses both House and Senate and that is if the bond market allows this "oh we'll work on it" charade to continue for that long.  It might not, and if it doesn't all assets will collapse in price, rates will soar irrespective of The Fed cutting off essentially consumer and corporate borrowing and unemployment will shoot the moon concurrent with real shortages and perhaps worse.

There is commentary that Trump's policies and actions may have an "intended" side effect of letting some of the air out of the market bubble -- in stocks, that is.

The problem with such a view is that it is much like putting a bandage on a sucking chest wound -- the reason you have the wound is that something punctured your chest; if that thing is still in there (e.g. a bullet) you better do surgery and get it out, and if its not you better debride the wound, repair any internal injuries and close the hole, not put a bandage over it.  In either case while you might be able to get the person to an OR that way its not a solution to the problem.

The problem, in this case, is runaway deficits and the place it is occurring is in part in NGO and similar spending thus addressing that is a positive but the root of the issue -- nearly all of it -- is in the medical (and post-secondary educational) sectors.  Worse, the now-passed CR in the House (which still must be voted on in the Senate) does nothing to address any of it because it does not cut back a single dollar of deficit spending -- it in fact continues all of it through September 30th.

The problem isn't "insurance" or "financing" it is cost and to the extent that you allow cost-shifting via either financing or "insurance" you make it worse because the market pressure that otherwise keeps cost in check (that which can't be paid for won't be bought thus irrespective of "demand" the price will fall) has been removed.

Add any sort of cartel behavior to this, such as paying people to do something irrespective of whether the outcome is positive, neutral or negative and you will get people that find ways to arbitrage that very rapidly -- and if that conduct violates a law or three (like 15 USC Chapter 1) but nobody is ever arrested or prosecuted for it then quite-rapidly every such arbitrage opportunity will be abused.

The medical system twice tried to argue (Royal Drug and Maricopa County) that there was an exemption when it came to "health insurance" and similar.  Twice they lost at the Supreme Court so the law is settled.  These are not civil offenses; they are criminal felonies carrying 10 year prison terms and yet nobody will bring said charges.

The same is true with illegal immigrants.  8 USC 1324 is clear as to the penalties to be imposed on those who harbor, employ or assist illegal immigration and the add-ons in sentencing if you do so and said illegal immigrant turns out to be a violent felon and either injures or kills someone are especially severe.  In fact in the latter case the penalty is life in prison for everyone who aided, abetted or harbored such a person.  Go read the law for yourself; there is no exception for anyone who knowingly, or with reckless disregard, provided such aiding, abetting or employment -- including housing.

You can't realistically deport ten million or more illegal aliens, but you can make it impossible for them to work or live in the United States because nobody will take the risk of going to prison for 10 years or more to facilitate them doing so -- and thus they'll leave on their own.  You need no new laws for this; the law in question has been on the books since the 1950s and if the government starts enforcing it no American will take the now-realized and real risk of hard felony prison time.  If you do this labor value for American citizens and lawful permanent residents will rise and the cost of housing will fall.  The same is true if we end H-1b Visas; labor value for Americans and lawful permanent residents will rise and the cost of housing will fall!  That's two economic beneficial offsets to what will otherwise be a difficult time and both will occur due to the immutable laws of supply and demand with no outside government influence required.

The entirety of the Federal Deficit problem is found in the medical system -- not "Medicare" or "Medicaid" -- the system itself and its pricing models, all of which are facially illegal under Royal Drug where it was ruled that insurance companies that negotiate prices are not immune from an argument they've monopolized or restrained trade.

Never mind Robinson-Patman which makes illegal price discrimination for buyers of like kind and quantity when it comes to physical goods.  You can differentiate in price based on cost of collection or invoicing, sales costs, packaging, delivery and similar but you cannot use pricing differentials as a means of restraining or steering trade and the very presentation of a bill to someone that has a "cash" charge ten times what the "negotiated" price might be is hard evidence of violating all of these statutes.

This distortion, all of it wildly illegal, also greatly increases the cost of employing Americans and thus, in part, drives offshoring of labor to other nations where such constraints and costs do not exist.  If we end it companies will have economic incentive to return jobs to America which increases the American tax base and improves Americans' standard of living.

Congress may not want to cut discretionary spending but Congress does not set spending in these programs; they are "on automatic" and while Congress could curtail these programs its not part of the appropriations process, never mind cutting benefits is political suicide.  You don't have to cut benefits if you take a meat axe to cost by enforcing the law.

The Administration can bring the charges as the Executive is in charge of faithfully executing upon the laws of the United States and there's nothing Congress could do to stop -- but they also cannot force it to happen either.

A recession without addressing this problem will simply make the deficit worse because it will crash stock prices, will likely substantially whack home prices, will seriously impact employment, will do nothing to repatriate jobs back to America and tax receipts will fall while leaving the large contributors to government spending, medical care, untouched or even rising in total spend.

The Trump Administration is out of time on this; the rug has to be pulled out from under these "industries" and the best way to do it is to enforce the law and both void and eject all federal involvement in college cost and loan support, along with revoking the non-discharge nature of student loans in bankruptcy for all forward lending by private parties.

Schools that cannot substantiate to students that their all-in price is worth it and convince private lenders who are entirely at risk if the borrower defaults that the student will be able and willing to pay and thus will not default will be forced to lower costs.  Those that cannot do either with their current structure of programs and such will have no choice but to alter said programs and structures so as to drop cost.

Decades ago higher educational learning without a University was very difficult; the material you needed to study for law, medicine, chemistry, physics and similar was simply not available outside of such enclaves and thus the logical place to acquire said knowledge was to physically be present at said university.  This is no longer true; now virtually everyone can obtain that information and study it from a laptop or even a phone anywhere in the world.  Universities must not be permitted to continue to exploit what amounts to a monopolist position on "credentials and learning" when in fact there is little or nothing unique about them worth that sort of premium.  Yes, access to professors and other learned professionals has value -- but it is much less than it was just 20 years ago, and infinitely less than it was in the 1970s before you had computers and the Internet.

Durable economic rebalancing requires removing the capacity of economic actors to enforce arbitrage.  This is, in fact, what 15 USC Chapter 1 and 8 USC 1324 are about; both are laws designed to criminalize the exploitation of Americans by various means which amount to cartel behavior and only if we demand said laws be evenly enforced against all will we ever see any of these problems resolved.

In short you have to kill the corruption at all levels, including things like promising people "cheaper" energy then tripling the price by mandating "green" power, which makes those installing that capacity a ton of money and screws everyone else.  Its all fine and well if the people vote for that higher price and know what it will be in advance but that is never how this sort of thing has been sold to the public.

There is always some level of grift and fraud in every economy but at a certain point that becomes so attractive in comparison to actually producing goods and services honestly that it expands exponentially and chokes off honest business and entrepreneurship.

If you allow the grift and fraud to continue beyond that point the outcome will be fiscal, economic and social collapse, with each "intervention" to try to stop it producing less benefit for the public at-large, more skewed toward those who control how the intervention happens and each spike higher will be both more-severe and shorter-lived until an effort fails entirely.

History is full of these examples; Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe and many others -- and every one of them has ended in disaster.

Our time to choose otherwise is short -- in fact, it may be on the verge of expiration.

We must choose wisely.