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WB TIANA’S TAKE: The real population bomb to come? Social Security’s looming bankruptcy
This affects the entire country.

Throughout President Donald Trump‘s second, nonconsecutive term, pundits across the political spectrum have warned that the economy is on the cusp of mass job losses. They have cited everything from the demonstrable downward pressure on the labor market from tariffs to Trump’s orders for the Federal Reserve, an independent body, to immediately slash the federal funds rate.

But as the nation hits a dangerous economic inflection point, its long-predicted future demographic crisis will not be that we have too many people for too few jobs, as is often warned about. But rather too few people will be available to work at all.

Democrats like to blame the nation’s demographic decline on Trump’s immigration policy. Yet so long as the White House remains focused on deporting illegal immigrants, especially with an emphasis on the criminal illegal immigrants and welfare queens who are overwhelmingly a net-negative on Uncle Sam’s balance sheet, the enforcement of already extant immigration law is not the problem.

Over the year starting July 1, 2024, the Census Bureau found that the nation’s population only increased by 1.8 million people, or 0.5%. That’s about half as fast as it averaged 20 years ago. The core cause is, and always has been, the birth dearth of the last decade.

The birth dearth is a consequence of collapsing marriage rates. While fertility among married women has held roughly constant over the last three decades, it has fallen off among unmarried women. And because fewer young people are getting married, the overall fertility rate has crumbled. This means that whereas the annual rate of the population’s natural increase due to births minus deaths was steady from the end of the baby boom until the 21st century, it began a precipitous decline around the Great Recession.

Now, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that American deaths will outpace births by 2030, meaning that, absent immigration, the population will begin to shrink in four years. Even accounting for the CBO’s immigration assumptions, which lie somewhere in the average between former President Joe Biden’s open borders and White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller’s dream to obliterate legal immigration, the number of seniors age 65 or older is slated to increase an average 1.6% per year for the next decade, while the number of people younger than 25 years old will decrease by 0.8% annually.

In other words, we have an increasing rate of retirees aging …

The Clear Labels Act Would Change What You Know About Your Prescription Medication
This is performative politics again.

Senators introduced legislation on Thursday that would require prescription drug labels to identify where the medication was made, adding momentum to a yearslong campaign to bring more transparency to the often elusive generic drug industry.

At a hearing last week, members of the Senate Special Committee on Aging criticized manufacturers for routinely concealing the locations of their drugmaking plants as well as the suppliers that provide key ingredients. ProPublica described this lack of transparency — and how it was enabled by the Food and Drug Administration — in a series of stories that found the agency had quietly allowed troubled foreign drugmakers to continue selling generic medication to unsuspecting Americans.

The Clear Labels Act, introduced by committee chair Rick Scott, R-Fla., and ranking member Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is meant to help patients, doctors and pharmacists know more about the drugs they use and prescribe. Current labels often list only a distributor or repackager of a medication and sometimes provide no information at all. The proposal calls for labels to disclose the original manufacturer as well as the suppliers that produced their key ingredients. Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., and Katie Britt, R-Ala., also signed on to the proposed legislation.

“Every American deserves honesty and transparency about what they are putting into their bodies,” Scott said. “It is wholly irresponsible that we’re living in the dark when it comes to where our medicines are made.”

ProPublica had to file public records requests and sue the FDA in federal court to obtain information about where generic drugs are made and whether government inspectors had flagged those factories for safety or quality concerns. ProPublica ultimately created a first-of-its-kind tool that empowers consumers to find the information themselves.

Ninety percent of the prescriptions in the United States are for generics, many of them manufactured overseas. For patients and their doctors, identifying where medication was made and the safety records of those factories had been nearly impossible until now.

Rx Inspector, the tool ProPublica introduced late last year, includes factory location information and inspection histories when available for nearly 40,000 generic drug products. Doctors, patients and researchers say they are already using it to better understand where medication comes from and to find more information when a generic causes unexplained health problems.

The Clear Labels Act would require manufacturing location information on packaging for brand-name drugs as well as generics.

Ohio State University professor John Gray, who testified at the hearing, suggested that packaging could include a QR code linking to the data on a website. Gray is working to assign quality scores to specific versions of generic drugs and said the code would allow patients and doctors to easily find those scores while researching medication and their manufacturers.

“Low-quality drugs have human consequences,” Gray said.

Gray said he is using Rx Inspector to fuel his work, which is funded by the Department of Defense. The tool, he said, …

Minnesota green energy program funded by Obama fined for killing bald eagle: ‘National treasure’
Every delay has consequences.

Editor’s note: This story includes graphic images of the remains of an animal that some readers may find disturbing.
EXCLUSIVE: The University of Minnesota is facing a proposed penalty of over $14,000 after it was discovered that a green energy initiative funded by a grant from the Obama administration was responsible for the gruesome death of an American bald eagle.
The incident occurred at the University of Minnesota’s Eolos Wind Energy Research Field Station in Dakota County, Minnesota.
Photos obtained by Fox News Digital show the moment a University of Minnesota wind turbine struck the bald eagle, dismembering it into three pieces and leaving a bloodied carcass on the floor below.
A violation notice says the university violated the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act by killing the eagles without what is called an "incidental take permit." As such, the university is facing a proposed civil penalty of $14,536 for illegally killing what one Department of the Interior official called a "national treasure."
HOUSE REPUBLICANS SOUND ALARM OVER CCP-LINKED FAKE RESEARCH THREATENING US TAXPAYER-FUNDED SCIENCE
According to a Department of the Interior violation notice reviewed by Fox News Digital, the university was aware that bird collisions were a danger and was in the process of testing its collision detection sensors when the incident occurred.
The eagle’s remains were discovered in pieces. The lower torso and tail were found by technicians first, while the head and wings were not found until over a month later.  
Following the incident, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sent the university a letter, urging the institution to reassess the turbine’s danger to eagles and to consider applying for a long-term permit for incidental take of eagles. However, the January notice of violation issued by the DOI does not indicate that the university has since obtained any such permit.
SNOWSTORM COULD'VE SPARKED GRID CATASTROPHE IF BIDEN CLIMATE POLICIES WEREN'T REVERSED: ENERGY DEPT
The Minnesota turbine is a part of the university’s Eolos Wind Energy Research Consortium, a wind-energy research collaboration. The construction of the turbine was funded by a $7.9 million grant from the Obama Department of Energy awarded in 2010, according to local outlet the Minnesota Daily.
One of former President Barack Obama’s first major legislative achievements was the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), which according to a report by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, appropriated an "unprecedented $90 billion to ‘lay the foundation …

Can the late shah’s son sell the Trump administration on leading a postcleric regime in Iran?
Am I the only one tired of this?

Once a distant figure in exile, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has emerged as a rallying symbol for many Iranians demanding change. His name echoes through the streets during recent protests, reflecting a growing following both inside and beyond Iran’s borders.

The son of the late shah settled in the United States after the 1979 Iranian Revolution and has leveraged his royal pedigree and a flurry of media appearances over the past year to raise his political profile. Publicly, Pahlavi has stated he aims to become a transitional leader should the regime collapse.

Yet Washington remains cautious: As of Jan. 8, President Donald Trump appeared reluctant to meet with Pahlavi. In mid-January, White House envoy Steve Witkoff met with Pahlavi — until now, the only high-level American government official to do so, Axios reported. According to polls cited in the article, one-third of Iranians support Pahlavi, while another third do not. Still, it’s a statistic that pollsters say is above any other opposition leader.

Iranian opposition leader Reza Pahlavi speaks during a news conference in Washington on Jan. 16. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP)

“Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has re-entered Iran’s political imagination,” wrote Ali Siadatan, an Iranian-Canadian educator, in the National Post. “Today, his support extends beyond traditional royalist circles, reflecting not nostalgia for the past but a search for continuity amid collapse.”

‘Revolutionary’ government teetering?

From the outside, the Iranian government’s hold on power appears at its weakest point since the shah was overthrown in the 1979 revolution. With street protests and subsequent violent government crackdown — casualty figures are hard to know due to long spells of internet blackouts — the U.S. is keeping a sharp eye on events. On Jan. 26, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group arrived in the Indian Ocean, putting it closer to assist in any possible U.S. operations targeting Iran.

Should there be a power vacuum, Pahlavi is “the only alternative,” said Salman Sima, a former political prisoner who fled Iran to Canada to escape persecution for his pro-democracy activities. “It is really obvious,” he added, given that it is, “these days, the only name you can hear from inside Iran.”

Sima believes the crown prince is a “unifying figure” who has found support among progressives and conservatives. “He doesn’t take a side, he doesn’t say ‘I’m going to be the shah,’ or ‘I’m going to be the president,’ or ‘I’m going …

Proposed California ‘wealth tax’ may backfire on liberal politicians as state’s revenue base dries up
Policy without accountability is dangerous.

The Golden State prides itself on its egalitarianism and willingness to make some of the rich in California squirm.

This desire to take billionaires down a notch is evidenced by the “wealth tax” currently generating debate among financial pundits and gathering signatures in an aggressive ground game before a November vote, if it makes the ballot. The wealth tax proposal has a strange side effect: it boosts the wealthiest cream of the crop and punishes those below them. After all, there’s pride as well in being one of the special few who can manage to keep their heads above water in a political environment that punishes wealth creation.

Take San Francisco: the city’s population growth has been more or less flat over the last few decades, yet its wealth has positively exploded. Just spit-balling: for every three slightly above-average citizen profiles the city bleeds, it gains one high-income, far above-average human capital powerhouse with an advanced degree.

The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is a “one-time tax” distillation of this same process. The rich who can weather a levy on capital assets without missing a beat, as it applies to both their personal and business endeavors, will gain relative status over those who feel compelled to “flee” to a friendlier red state locale. While in absolute terms they’ve taken a financial hit, they can rest easy knowing they’ve cleared the field of several elite peers and even industry competitors.

As economist Robert H. Frank has noted, Charles Darwin has as much to teach us about economics as Adam Smith. The elk with the larger antlers wins, with nary a care for any general condition of very large antlers on elks (or the elk equivalent of a “pro-business” regulatory and political environment).

A shrinking pool of billionaires to tax

“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

There’s a reason the above phrase applies to business-unfriendly New York City, and not Lubbock, Texas. In the second quarter of the 21st century, those words have found a second home in California’s tech sector as well.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who sits at the helm of the most valuable company in the United States, is notable for shrugging off this wealth tax proposal.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (Ng Han Guan/AP)

“We chose to live in Silicon Valley, and whatever taxes, I guess, they would like to apply, so be it,” Huang told Bloomberg in early January. “I’m perfectly fine with it.”

Startup Y Combinator’s Garry Tan and Sequoia’s Michael …

Two ‘narco-terrorists’ killed in latest military strike in Eastern Pacific
Every delay has consequences.

The U.S. military conducted its latest operation as part of Operation Southern Spear on Thursday, killing two suspected “narco-terrorists” in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. The strikes were announced in a social media post on X by U.S. Southern Command.

“On Feb. 5, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations,” read the post. “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations. Two narco-terrorists were killed during this action. No U.S. military forces were harmed.”

On Feb. 5, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking…
— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) February 6, 2026

It is the first military strike on a suspected drug trafficking vessel since Jan. 23, in which there were also two people killed in the Eastern Pacific. So far, at least 119 suspected drug traffickers have been killed in military strikes as part of Operation Southern Spear that President Donald Trump authorized in Sept. 2025.

Earlier on Thursday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said on X that Operation Southern Spear has caused some “top cartel drug-traffickers” to stop their activities due to the “recent (highly effective) kinetic strikes in the Caribbean.”

“This is deterrence through strength,” Hegseth said. “@POTUS is SAVING American lives.”

WINNING: Some top cartel drug-traffickers in the @SOUTHCOM AOR have decided to cease all narcotics operations INDEFINITELY due to recent (highly effective) kinetic strikes in the Caribbean.

This is deterrence through strength. @POTUS is SAVING American lives.
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) February 5, 2026

The latest strike comes on the same day Gen. Francis L. Donovan assumed command of U.S. Southern Command. Donovan will “oversee U.S. military operations and engagements across Latin America and the Caribbean.”

“Together with our partner nations, we will continue to address shared challenges, uphold democratic values, and ensure a safe and prosperous future for the region.”- #SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan.

Gen. Donovan took command of …

Warshach test: Trump’s Fed chairman pick keeps monetary analysts guessing
Law enforcement shouldn't be political.

President Donald Trump has pummeled Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for years over interest rate policy. But in just mere months, Powell’s term will be up. Former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh has been nominated by Trump to succeed Powell as the central bank’s top official. Here is what to expect.

Powell, 73, is set to depart as Fed chairman in May, though he has the option to remain on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors until Jan. 31, 2028. Such a move would no doubt anger Trump, who chose Powell as Fed chairman during his first White House term.

Trump announced last month that he had chosen Warsh, 55, to be the next Fed chairman over National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett. The pick came as a surprise to some, given that Hassett was seen as the front-runner for the job for some time.

The backdrop

Trump has been hounding Powell and the Fed to cut interest rates more aggressively since he entered his second term. Trump’s push for lower interest rates was undoubtedly a top agenda item in interviews that the president conducted for the role.

Kevin Warsh. (Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

But the pick also comes at a time when Fed independence is being closely scrutinized.

POWELL DEFENDS FED INDEPENDENCE IN FIRST QUESTIONS ABOUT DOJ INQUIRY

In January, Powell announced that the Justice Department was investigating him, and that the central bank recently received grand jury subpoenas related to testimony he gave to the Senate last year about renovation cost overruns at the Fed headquarters building in Washington.

Powell tied the blame squarely to Trump’s crusade for lower rates and said the inquiry was simply a pretext to pressure him on monetary policy. The extraordinary accusation sparked some concern even from some congressional Republicans.

Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, threatened to block any of Trump’s Fed nominees until the legal matter concludes. Tillis reiterated that the threat still holds after Warsh’s nomination, but called Warsh a “qualified nominee with a deep understanding of monetary policy.”

Who is Warsh?

Warsh has experience at the Fed, but is a bit of an outsider in the sense that he hasn’t been a public policymaker for over a decade. Still, the Stanford and Harvard Law School graduate was a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors during the Great Recession and has long been a prominent figure in finance and economics. …

The real population bomb to come? Social Security’s looming bankruptcy
This isn't complicated—it's willpower.

Throughout President Donald Trump‘s second, nonconsecutive term, pundits across the political spectrum have warned that the economy is on the cusp of mass job losses. They have cited everything from the demonstrable downward pressure on the labor market from tariffs to Trump’s orders for the Federal Reserve, an independent body, to immediately slash the federal funds rate.

But as the nation hits a dangerous economic inflection point, its long-predicted future demographic crisis will not be that we have too many people for too few jobs, as is often warned about. But rather too few people will be available to work at all.

Democrats like to blame the nation’s demographic decline on Trump’s immigration policy. Yet so long as the White House remains focused on deporting illegal immigrants, especially with an emphasis on the criminal illegal immigrants and welfare queens who are overwhelmingly a net-negative on Uncle Sam’s balance sheet, the enforcement of already extant immigration law is not the problem.

Over the year starting July 1, 2024, the Census Bureau found that the nation’s population only increased by 1.8 million people, or 0.5%. That’s about half as fast as it averaged 20 years ago. The core cause is, and always has been, the birth dearth of the last decade.

The birth dearth is a consequence of collapsing marriage rates. While fertility among married women has held roughly constant over the last three decades, it has fallen off among unmarried women. And because fewer young people are getting married, the overall fertility rate has crumbled. This means that whereas the annual rate of the population’s natural increase due to births minus deaths was steady from the end of the baby boom until the 21st century, it began a precipitous decline around the Great Recession.

Now, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that American deaths will outpace births by 2030, meaning that, absent immigration, the population will begin to shrink in four years. Even accounting for the CBO’s immigration assumptions, which lie somewhere in the average between former President Joe Biden’s open borders and White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller’s dream to obliterate legal immigration, the number of seniors age 65 or older is slated to increase an average 1.6% per year for the next decade, while the number of people younger than 25 years old will decrease by 0.8% annually.

In other words, we have an increasing rate of retirees aging …

Trump signs minibus spending bill with $6.5 billion in earmarks
Same show, different day.

President Donald Trump recently signed $174.7 billion spending legislation. The White House said little upon signing the Commerce, Justice, Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment Appropriations Act, 2026.

The move, however, signaled its support for Congress on the long-titled bill in a Jan. 7 statement.

“The Administration urges every Member of Congress to support this fiscally responsible bill, which is a win for the American taxpayer,” it said.

Trump’s budget team highlighted the legislation’s provisions to achieve “energy dominance” and to “reduce violent crime, root out fraud in Government programs, and address the past weaponization of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Republican lawmakers claimed victory with the bill’s enactment during a low-key signing ceremony at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

“This is another major win for the American people that implements President Trump’s America First agenda,” Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) declared. “We are dismantling the drug trafficking networks that have tried to poison our communities for profit. At the same time, we are reviving our coal communities and setting the stage for energy independence.”

Democrats also found a lot to like in the legislation. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said, “This package makes meaningful investments to bring down costs for utility bills and provides substantial funding for clean energy. It makes our communities safer by increasing funding for Violence Against Women Act and other public safety grants.”

The House passed the bill by a vote of 397 to 28, and the Senate supported it 82 to 15. Democrats supplied 206 votes in the House and 35 votes in the Senate.

Left unmentioned in any of these cheerful official statements was that the minibus legislation carries 3,030 community project funding grants, also known as earmarks, according to the National Taxpayers Union. This may be a large reason why Democrats and Republicans were able to come together to support the bill.

Many of the earmarks will fund infrastructure repair or replacement. The statute’s Interior and Environment section has hundreds of line items for upgrading sewer lines and drinking water systems. Similarly, the Energy and Water Development will use federal funds for energy development projects and for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects to improve shipping ports and channels.

The law’s Commerce, Justice, …

A deputy chief of Russian military intelligence was shot and wounded in Moscow
Every delay has consequences.

MOSCOW (AP) — A deputy chief of Russian military intelligence was shot and wounded in Moscow on Friday in an attack that follows a series of assassinations of senior military officers that Russia has blamed on Ukraine.

Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev, 64 was shot several time by an unidentified assailant at an apartment building in Moscow’s northwest and hospitalized, Investigative Committee spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko said in a statement.

Petrenko didn’t say who could be behind the attack on Alekseyev, who has served as the first deputy head of Russia’s military intelligence since 2011. He was decorated with the Hero of Russia medal for his role in Moscow’s military campaign in Syria and in June 2023 was filmed speaking to mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin when his Wagner Group seized the military headquarters in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don during his botched mutiny.

The shooting came a day after Russian, Ukrainian and U.S. negotiators wrapped up two days of talks in Abu Dhabi aimed at ending the nearly four-year conflict in Ukraine. The Russian delegation was led by the military intelligence chief, Adm. Igor Kostyukov.

President Vladimir Putin was informed about the attack, said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who added that law enforcement agencies need to step up protection of senior military officers during the conflict in Ukraine.

Since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine nearly four years ago, Russian authorities have blamed Kyiv for several assassinations of military officers and public figures in Russia. Ukraine has claimed responsibility for some of them. It has not yet commented on the shooting of Alekseyev.

In December, a car bomb killed Lt. Gen. Fanil Sarvarov, head of the Operational Training Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces’ General Staff.

In April, another senior Russian military officer, Lt. Gen. Yaroslav Moskalik, a deputy head of the main operational department in the General Staff, was killed by an explosive device placed in his car parked near his apartment building just outside Moscow. A suspected perpetrator was quickly arrested.

US-RUSSIA NUCLEAR TREATY TO EXPIRE AS ATTENTION TURNS TO CHINA’S EXPANDING ARSENAL

Days after Moskalik’s killing, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he received a report from the head of Ukraine’s foreign intelligence agency on the “liquidation” of top Russian military figures, adding that “justice inevitably comes” although he didn’t mention Moskalik’s name.

In December 2024, …