Geezers. Ossoff. National Debt. Measles.

Geezers. Ossoff. National Debt. Measles.

Bill Clinton Joins the Geezer Club

Bill Clinton just turned 80, which makes him younger than both Biden and Trump, even though he left office 25 years ago. George W. Bush is also 80, and Obama, at 65, somehow looks a decade older. Our current president is 80, and Biden is 84 — old geezers, both. Maybe we’ve finally seen the last of the geriatric presidents. With the exception of Rahm Emanuel, every name floated for the next presidential race is a relative youngster.

Ossoff in 2028?

It struck me as odd that Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who is up for reelection, chose to take a shot at President Trump and his ever-present aide Natalie Harp. Ossoff said Trump “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.” I couldn’t figure out what that had to do with his Senate race against Rep. Mike Collins. The answer became clear once I saw that the prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi have Ossoff, alongside AOC, leading the odds for the 2028 democratic nomination. The Natalie Harp remark raised his national profile and racked up millions of hits on social media — notable for a senator who has otherwise kept a lower profile in Washington than his fellow Georgian, Raphael Warnock. My guess is that if Ossoff wins reelection, he’ll be an attractive option for mainstream Democrats hoping to counterbalance the party’s socialist wing and a possible AOC candidacy.

$40 Trillion and Counting

The US national debt just hit $40 trillion. With GDP at $32.38 trillion, that puts the debt-to-GDP ratio at 124% — up from just 31.5% in 2001. Didn’t Trump promise to balance the budget? Some promise. The CBO (my old employer) now projects annual budget deficits of roughly $2 trillion. I’d held out some hope that a republican-controlled White House and Congress might show a bit of fiscal restraint. But that hope has been in vain — politicians are fiscally irresponsible regardless of party. Markets have responded to the deficit news by demanding higher yields on long-term US Treasurys. Treasury bonds once carried a premium for their safe-haven status, but that status is fading fast. With government debt flooding the market, investors are demanding a premium, which pushes yields higher.

The Concerning Uptick in Measles

I wasn’t sure what to make of the measles outbreak. Headlines describing a “grim milestone” made it sound like a major epidemic, but the actual case count is “only” 2,295. The last time US measles cases exceeded that number was 1991, with 9,643 cases, following a staggering 27,808 cases in 1990. Annual cases then dropped to just 312 by 1993, after a second vaccine dose was recommended and school vaccination programs took hold.

Is this a result of Trump and RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine rhetoric? Both have linked vaccines to autism, a claim the scientific community rejects. But the CDC’s own webpage on vaccines and autism now reflects Kennedy’s views and has changed dramatically under this administration

(cdc.gov/vaccine-safety/about/autism.html).

Where it once stated plainly that there was no link between vaccines and autism, it now reads:

• The claim “vaccines do not cause autism” is not evidence-based, because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.
• Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.
• HHS has launched a comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism, including investigations into plausible biological mechanisms and potential causal links.

I wonder if the new CDC director agrees with this. Personally, I don’t know what to think. Big Pharma does not have the best track record when it comes to patient welfare. Research studies commissioned by Big Pharma are instantly suspect – I bet not a single one has results contrary to Big Phama’s dictates. I question even independent studies because we know that a large deal of research is compromised and possibly fraudulent.

But Trump is injecting (no pun intended) distrust with the MMR vaccine saying that it should be split into separate shots, even though researchers find no credible evidence to support that. Separate vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella currently aren’t available in the US, and the idea of splitting them is daunting — it would mean six shots for children instead of two. Trump has called – somewhat irresponsibly – the combined MMR vaccine “quite lethal” and pushed for separating the three inoculations to reduce what he claims is an elevated autism risk. Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, stood beside him when he said it.