Harvard came in last in nationwide free speech rankings by FIRE. It seems the "freedom" Harvard is defending now is their freedom to suppress free speech. What a shame!
"The efforts of the Trump Administration to eliminate DEI root and branch from Northwestern and other similarly-afflicted schools appear to be the only viable way to restore American values to institutions of “higher” education in America."
Many of us have tried to warn our institutions and been treated similarly by universities and professional societies. At some point the only way these organizations is by flushing of the Augean stables. I fully support Trump's efforts to root out the rot in academia....even if it requires not only defunding academic institutions, revoking their tax exempt status and barring their admission of foreign students/faculty, but even outright nationalization and replacement of the entire faculty in some instances.
Seizing private universities would probably happen only after Trump crowned himself and executed the Supreme Court. Ending public funding would be just fine.
Perhaps...it depends on their transgressions. Aiding and abetting antisemitism and racial discrimination are serious crimes that even private organizations must be held accountable to. An organization that engages in repeated criminal conduct that fails to reform could well be shut down or seized as a business operating as a mafia front or supporting a terrorist organization could be. Universities are not independent states within a federation much as they wish to believe otherwise.
Anti-Semitism is not illegal. Racist beliefs are not illegal. Racial discrimination is only illegal if it targets protected minorities. Prejudice towards men or Asians is legal. Hating Jews and promoting genocide is legal. That is why all the German Nazi propaganda is printed here (Germany does not have our laws protecting speech).
Harvard could be closed, but it could not be nationalized without tearing up the Constitution. Living in a free society means you must live with those who hold opinions that you do not like. That is the point. Trump would be wise to stop pushing for more government and to instead push for less of it, starting with reduced spending. Canceling and non-renewing contracts with the beltway bandits would be a good start, but shockingly, DOGE has not done that. They cut Federal jobs, and I bet you that new contracts will go out to have those workers' jobs done by private contractors at three times the price. Check out the cost of housing in Washington, DC. That is not possible in a community full of Federal employees, but contractors making $300k to $1m, they can afford it. This is what Republicans and Democrats both call "government efficiency." Of course, it costs far more this way, but everyone gets to brag while handing billons in contracts off to their buddies.
No doubt party operatives will end up with lucrative jobs at Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed or EDS.
Reducing the federal workforce and getting rid of government agencies reduces the size of government. Defunding academia is also a big way to reduce the size of government. Trump has not taken over any university. He has merely stated that universities not in compliance with federal antidiscrimination laws will not receive federal funds and is telling those in violation what steps they must take to continue receiving federal funds. That is all completely within his authority. None of these universities has a right to tax exempt status, federal funds or international students. Trump is following the Constitution in this matter. The universities, are not. If you doubt this...remember how the universities in the segregationist South were integrated by the federal government. History has already ruled on this subject.
You are demonstrably incorrect. One needs to reduce expenditure, not payroll. Reductions in force that are replaced with contractors often costs MORE. I spent some time as a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton. I know the games so many contractors play (Booz is actually one of the better ones--there are many beltway bandits that literally put "butts in seats" in the industry vocabulary).
I am not worried about university research funding. Short-term changes are not significant. substantial changes to essential Federal agencies scares me. In the long-run it will be expensive and weaken the country. Trump should close the Departments of Education and Commerce, transferring essential functions to other agencies. That makes sense. Random, poorly thought-out reductions in force do not benefit anyone, other than future companies that will win contracts to complete each agency's mission. Trump's moronic complaints about the Fed are another example of his incompetence and lack of basic knowledge. Those who backed him made a mistake. He is unfit to hold the office of president. His first term did not have these damaging actions. He acted like a buffoon, but so did Biden. The country can survive a foolish, ineffective president. What will damage us is an active incompetent president.
We are in for high inflation and low growth if any of Trump's moronic statements become fact (see how he "calculated" his tariffs for an example of utter idiocy). Universities are the least of our worries. We have too many of them anyway. As I stated before, Trump cannot "take over" private institutions, but he is free to block federal funds or launch witch hunts to try to deny their tax-exempt status. I assume from your last comment you now agree with me on that.
The purpose of reducing the federal pay roll is not to save money from their salaries, but to stop the massive meddling in the affairs of the nation that these employees do in the name of their agencies. Rule making is the biggest drag of all on our economy with most of these rules having little to no benefit to the country. His approach would be more organized and clear if he was not fighting a bureaucracy and activist judges impeding every common sense move. Barring local judges from making nationwide injunctions would ease the transition that Trump is going to effect. As for university research, sucking off the federal teet has thoroughly corrupted the teaching mission of universities. Those universities that want to espouse anti-American and pro-Palestinian terrorist views are free to do so....but not while receiving federal funds as tax exempt institutions. The so called "private" institutions must refuse those benefits if they want to claim their "speech" rights and, let's be blunt, are still subject to enforcement of federal law. Like the Mardi Gras Krewe's I mentioned that refuse to integrate. They still exist and can get together in private venues to complain about the loss of the good ole days of the antebellum South...but their ability to do what such Krewe's do is essentially over. Universities that won't do their duty by civil rights laws will just become private think tanks without the ability to even bring in foreign students. The faculty at those universities have some decisions to make. If they want access to federal funds, they must pressure their universities to change or seek employment at universities that comply with federal regulations. Since there aren't massive numbers of jobs lying around....many of these faculty members careers will end. I have no problem with this as university faculty love to preen about how they are the university...so long as doing anything to keep the university ethical isn't required. As Gandalf said to the Trolls in the Hobbit...Let the Dawn Take You All!
Example: In New Orleans some Mardi Gras Krewes (private organizations) refused to integrate. These organizations still exist...but are not permitted to run their parades making their continued existence moot.
Your example perfectly explains the foolish, counter-productive actions our Federal government too often makes. No one benefits from such regulation. We would all be better off with a smaller Federal government that only regulated what it must, instead of randomly inventing problems and programs to employ and enrich their friends and relatives. It makes no sense to stop Federal oversight on voting in the former confederate states, then prevent crews from rolling. This is a perfect example of how the US government has declined in quality and its ability to accomplish tasks. We should be regulating away frivolous lawsuits and the entire system of social change via the judiciary. We should be reducing government spending and sustainably increasing government revenue. These are possible, but instead we hysterically lash out everywhere without strategy or even decency. Trump was elected as a Republican, but he behaves like a Progressive with different goals. We do not need to replace activist leftwing nuts with activist right-wing nuts. We need to remove activists and nullify their influence, ideally via tort and other type of reform.
This is an excellent essay. It is long past time for the faculty and senior administrators and trustees at our preeminent institutions to realize that the old model, which they embraced for decades, is failing. People are rejecting it. It never really made much sense, but its shortcomings are becoming more and more obvious.
I might make a small comment about the essay. As pointed out, woke ideology claims that speech is violence; not just "fighting words", as traditionally defined legally, but literal, actual violence. However, wokeism also proclaims that violence is another form of speech and must be protected as such.
This is particularly true when it is the violence engaged in by groups like Antifa or BLM or 'Just Stop Oil' or assorted "Kill All The Jews" organizations. This flavor of violence is sanctioned and defended and celebrated and promoted by our elites. Violence in service of some position the elites do not favor, like restricting immigration to legal channels with vetting, would be met with shock and horror and pearl-clutching. However, violence on behalf of terrorists who have been deported is welcomed and applauded.
So by attacking language, and redefining everything, the issues are muddied and muddled. Of course, universities should be leading the charge against this, but instead they appear to be fomenting this nonsense.
This kind of malarkey has various effects on STEM, most of them negative. Effectively making truth ambiguous or even illegal, and deriding evidence, reason, the scientific method, data and so on, in an effort to bolster the underpinnings of this ridiculous culture movement is very toxic to STEM. We will pay a heavy price for this if it is not stopped.
I composed a letter to Stat News I haven't sent. The topic was that if Stat wants to help th Ivies the framing by Harvard, Columbia, etc. that this "attack on science" is about "free speech on campus" must be challenged. Why not send it? I have some papers in review. I don't need to add becoming a lightning rod for cancelation to that.
Unfortunately, Elon Musk and DOGE are playing into their hands. The key problem is that Elon has degenerated so much from drug use, particularly ketamine, that he is incapable of learning.
He doesn't understand the monetary system. He cannot comprehend that the government's debt is the private sector's net equity and this renders his mission from God" to cut $1 trillion from spending farcical. Watching him babble about "magic computers" without the capacity to think, "Huh. This has been happening for over 80 years? "
I talked to Elon in the past. The guy blundering around now? This one is like watching a friend drool and poop his pants live in an interview.
It is amazing how no one can explain how international trade works to Trump. We have the global currency, so we must run current account deficits in order for other countries to have dollars to trade with. This is a sign of American strength, not weakness. The president does not have a single economically literate person around him? It is embarrassing. If the USD falls, then our interest rates are going to skyrocket. So long as that idiot is president I am keeping all my savings in gold.
The interest rate we pay is entirely voluntary. It is not up to anyone else. The USA does not borrow from anyone else. Our high interest rates are based on the quite insane theory from over 100 years ago that suppressing wages by forcing people out of work, controls inflation. That's why the Fed raised interest rates.
This idea that wages are the only source of inflation was stupid when it was developed, and it is even more stupid now. Wages are rarely the primary source of inflation, and when they are? In the modern world, this is an incentive to use robots.
We will never see that robot future as long as we force people out of work and into dire, grinding poverty or homelessness every time there is a supply crunch. Even if wages were THE cause of inflation, the way to compete with that today is with robots. This is done in Japan.
Japan has the opposite algorithm. Japan lowers interest rates whenever the unemployment rate RISES above 2%. This has led to Japan implementing more robotics than other nations.
Inflation always and everywhere is a monetary issue. When there is too much money, interest rates are high. When there is too little, interest rates are low. That is basic math. There is no debate. No modern economist has ever claimed that wages have anything to do with interest rates or inflation. That is nonsense.
Regarding Japan, they have a very different system than the US. The world is not sucking yen notes out of Japan. No one has yen under their mattresses in Vietnam or Burma or Ecuador. The US has a unique situation in that we externalize most of the cost of insane public spending. If that external demand for dollar assets goes away, inflation shall increase. That is an iron law. The US will need to balance budgets or accept high inflation. Trump's idiotic tariffs can only hurt the US.
We should be finding a way to remove China from our supply chains, but Trump has prevented that. I would have never predicted that he could be worse than Biden, but the moron proved that he knows nothing about economics.
Except that this idea that inflation is strictly a monetary issue conflicts with empirical data. When money is available, this allows prices to rise, but only when there is a reason for prices to rise: a supply crunch, or a monopoly or collusion allows vendors/suppliers to raise prices. Otherwise, it sits because people like to have a cushion. The Friedman "Helicopter money" idea has been debunked.
Read macroeconomics. Yes, that nonsense is economics and Fed canon.
The structural reason for the US trade deficit is that since Bretton-Woods, the USD has been the required intermediary for settlement of international trade, whether with the USA or any other nation. This is why the USA can run an increasing trade deficit, and the more international trade occurs, the more our deficit grows. We are forced to export dollars. If we recorded our dollar exports with trade balance, we would see that it was on average even. As long as this situation exists, we cannot balance trade. Petrodollar is a big part of that.
We do not otherwise externalize our debt. Instead, we are forced to create extra money for other nations to use. $15-16 trillion is currently in Eurodollar markets, and $21 trillion is in the USA. That's where our $37 trillion national debt is. We are being forced to pay the interest on that debt that is used by other nations to finance themselves through trade surplus.
Your second and third paragraphs are correct. Your last paragraph is misguided. Your first paragraph, well, lets just say your macro professor might be disappointed.
Also, no one ever debunked helicopter money. Anyone claiming COVID payments were an example and that they can model supply shocks and net them out has way more confidence in his/her modeling prowess than anyone deserves.
The item that I think is most important, and that I might be able to influence you on, is that you use the word "force" with regards to the US, and that is not the right term. No one is forcing Americans to buy mountains of useless stuff. We CHOOSE to finance world trade, and this greatly benefits us.
In addition, I strongly recommend that you never waste time reading anything with the word "petrodollar" in it. They are all bad and promote poor thinking. You have some good thoughts here, but you might want to take an advanced macro class. A monetary class might be better, and it can be useful if you have any interest in finance or anything related to rates products (boring but well-paid work I might add). You only need calculus linear algebra, so do not let course requirements scare you (I swear econ professors get off on that).
Also, your figures are all over the place. Eurodollar markets are private, then you compare this to US Federal debt, and then you add them together. That is wrong. Very wrong. Eurodollar markets are private USD-denominated accounts. You can add those to US private capital (bank deposits, time deposits, money markets, perhaps corporate paper,...), not adding that to US sovereign debt is not okay. US Treasuries in China are not Eurodollar accounts. Chinese USD accounts in Hong Kong are, along with USD accounts for any other entity.
Yes, Eurodollars markets are private, just as all the $21 trillion that is in the USA is private. The public debt is spent into the private sector economy. That is how government spending works. The net positive equity of the private sector is equal to the public debt. That is where the public debt goes. The public debt exists because the government spent it, and the private sector received those funds.
The point is that by looking at the markets for dollars you can tell where the national debt is.
You say that the Trump administration attacks are “the only viable way to restore American values to institutions of ‘higher’ education in America.” Government repression is not a viable way to restore freedom to campuses. Government bans on DEI programs would only replicate–on a much bigger scale, with much more repressive and destructive methods–the very same censorship that you’re decrying when it’s done in the name of DEI. NU will always make mistakes; but trusting any government to control private colleges and dictate the correct ideas is a far worse mistake.
Even if the Trump officials shared your views about supporting free speech (and they don’t), it’s not enough to have “good” goals or motives–we need to have the right methods, and we cannot create free universities using repressive methods.
The alternative to censorship by DEI advocates is not censorship of DEI advocates. The alternative to censorship is a free university that protects everyone’s free expression and seeks to encourage debates and discussions.
The very smart people at Harvard (and presumably at NU) don’t seem to remember that the Supreme Court has already told them that discriminating on the basis of race is unconstitutional and yet they have apparently decided to continue to do so. I hope the Feds drop the hammer on them.
Harvard came in last in nationwide free speech rankings by FIRE. It seems the "freedom" Harvard is defending now is their freedom to suppress free speech. What a shame!
they don't just want the freedom to suppress political speech they don't like, they want taxpayers to fund it.
"The efforts of the Trump Administration to eliminate DEI root and branch from Northwestern and other similarly-afflicted schools appear to be the only viable way to restore American values to institutions of “higher” education in America."
Yes. Cheers!
Many of us have tried to warn our institutions and been treated similarly by universities and professional societies. At some point the only way these organizations is by flushing of the Augean stables. I fully support Trump's efforts to root out the rot in academia....even if it requires not only defunding academic institutions, revoking their tax exempt status and barring their admission of foreign students/faculty, but even outright nationalization and replacement of the entire faculty in some instances.
Seizing private universities would probably happen only after Trump crowned himself and executed the Supreme Court. Ending public funding would be just fine.
Perhaps...it depends on their transgressions. Aiding and abetting antisemitism and racial discrimination are serious crimes that even private organizations must be held accountable to. An organization that engages in repeated criminal conduct that fails to reform could well be shut down or seized as a business operating as a mafia front or supporting a terrorist organization could be. Universities are not independent states within a federation much as they wish to believe otherwise.
Anti-Semitism is not illegal. Racist beliefs are not illegal. Racial discrimination is only illegal if it targets protected minorities. Prejudice towards men or Asians is legal. Hating Jews and promoting genocide is legal. That is why all the German Nazi propaganda is printed here (Germany does not have our laws protecting speech).
Harvard could be closed, but it could not be nationalized without tearing up the Constitution. Living in a free society means you must live with those who hold opinions that you do not like. That is the point. Trump would be wise to stop pushing for more government and to instead push for less of it, starting with reduced spending. Canceling and non-renewing contracts with the beltway bandits would be a good start, but shockingly, DOGE has not done that. They cut Federal jobs, and I bet you that new contracts will go out to have those workers' jobs done by private contractors at three times the price. Check out the cost of housing in Washington, DC. That is not possible in a community full of Federal employees, but contractors making $300k to $1m, they can afford it. This is what Republicans and Democrats both call "government efficiency." Of course, it costs far more this way, but everyone gets to brag while handing billons in contracts off to their buddies.
No doubt party operatives will end up with lucrative jobs at Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed or EDS.
Reducing the federal workforce and getting rid of government agencies reduces the size of government. Defunding academia is also a big way to reduce the size of government. Trump has not taken over any university. He has merely stated that universities not in compliance with federal antidiscrimination laws will not receive federal funds and is telling those in violation what steps they must take to continue receiving federal funds. That is all completely within his authority. None of these universities has a right to tax exempt status, federal funds or international students. Trump is following the Constitution in this matter. The universities, are not. If you doubt this...remember how the universities in the segregationist South were integrated by the federal government. History has already ruled on this subject.
You are demonstrably incorrect. One needs to reduce expenditure, not payroll. Reductions in force that are replaced with contractors often costs MORE. I spent some time as a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton. I know the games so many contractors play (Booz is actually one of the better ones--there are many beltway bandits that literally put "butts in seats" in the industry vocabulary).
I am not worried about university research funding. Short-term changes are not significant. substantial changes to essential Federal agencies scares me. In the long-run it will be expensive and weaken the country. Trump should close the Departments of Education and Commerce, transferring essential functions to other agencies. That makes sense. Random, poorly thought-out reductions in force do not benefit anyone, other than future companies that will win contracts to complete each agency's mission. Trump's moronic complaints about the Fed are another example of his incompetence and lack of basic knowledge. Those who backed him made a mistake. He is unfit to hold the office of president. His first term did not have these damaging actions. He acted like a buffoon, but so did Biden. The country can survive a foolish, ineffective president. What will damage us is an active incompetent president.
We are in for high inflation and low growth if any of Trump's moronic statements become fact (see how he "calculated" his tariffs for an example of utter idiocy). Universities are the least of our worries. We have too many of them anyway. As I stated before, Trump cannot "take over" private institutions, but he is free to block federal funds or launch witch hunts to try to deny their tax-exempt status. I assume from your last comment you now agree with me on that.
The purpose of reducing the federal pay roll is not to save money from their salaries, but to stop the massive meddling in the affairs of the nation that these employees do in the name of their agencies. Rule making is the biggest drag of all on our economy with most of these rules having little to no benefit to the country. His approach would be more organized and clear if he was not fighting a bureaucracy and activist judges impeding every common sense move. Barring local judges from making nationwide injunctions would ease the transition that Trump is going to effect. As for university research, sucking off the federal teet has thoroughly corrupted the teaching mission of universities. Those universities that want to espouse anti-American and pro-Palestinian terrorist views are free to do so....but not while receiving federal funds as tax exempt institutions. The so called "private" institutions must refuse those benefits if they want to claim their "speech" rights and, let's be blunt, are still subject to enforcement of federal law. Like the Mardi Gras Krewe's I mentioned that refuse to integrate. They still exist and can get together in private venues to complain about the loss of the good ole days of the antebellum South...but their ability to do what such Krewe's do is essentially over. Universities that won't do their duty by civil rights laws will just become private think tanks without the ability to even bring in foreign students. The faculty at those universities have some decisions to make. If they want access to federal funds, they must pressure their universities to change or seek employment at universities that comply with federal regulations. Since there aren't massive numbers of jobs lying around....many of these faculty members careers will end. I have no problem with this as university faculty love to preen about how they are the university...so long as doing anything to keep the university ethical isn't required. As Gandalf said to the Trolls in the Hobbit...Let the Dawn Take You All!
Example: In New Orleans some Mardi Gras Krewes (private organizations) refused to integrate. These organizations still exist...but are not permitted to run their parades making their continued existence moot.
Your example perfectly explains the foolish, counter-productive actions our Federal government too often makes. No one benefits from such regulation. We would all be better off with a smaller Federal government that only regulated what it must, instead of randomly inventing problems and programs to employ and enrich their friends and relatives. It makes no sense to stop Federal oversight on voting in the former confederate states, then prevent crews from rolling. This is a perfect example of how the US government has declined in quality and its ability to accomplish tasks. We should be regulating away frivolous lawsuits and the entire system of social change via the judiciary. We should be reducing government spending and sustainably increasing government revenue. These are possible, but instead we hysterically lash out everywhere without strategy or even decency. Trump was elected as a Republican, but he behaves like a Progressive with different goals. We do not need to replace activist leftwing nuts with activist right-wing nuts. We need to remove activists and nullify their influence, ideally via tort and other type of reform.
Keep up the good fight.
Where are the names of the cancellers? These cancellations were executed by persons not institutions. Their cowardice should be memorialized.
Very sorry to hear this. Insanity. I went to Northwestern Law. Craziness.
This is an excellent essay. It is long past time for the faculty and senior administrators and trustees at our preeminent institutions to realize that the old model, which they embraced for decades, is failing. People are rejecting it. It never really made much sense, but its shortcomings are becoming more and more obvious.
I might make a small comment about the essay. As pointed out, woke ideology claims that speech is violence; not just "fighting words", as traditionally defined legally, but literal, actual violence. However, wokeism also proclaims that violence is another form of speech and must be protected as such.
This is particularly true when it is the violence engaged in by groups like Antifa or BLM or 'Just Stop Oil' or assorted "Kill All The Jews" organizations. This flavor of violence is sanctioned and defended and celebrated and promoted by our elites. Violence in service of some position the elites do not favor, like restricting immigration to legal channels with vetting, would be met with shock and horror and pearl-clutching. However, violence on behalf of terrorists who have been deported is welcomed and applauded.
So by attacking language, and redefining everything, the issues are muddied and muddled. Of course, universities should be leading the charge against this, but instead they appear to be fomenting this nonsense.
This kind of malarkey has various effects on STEM, most of them negative. Effectively making truth ambiguous or even illegal, and deriding evidence, reason, the scientific method, data and so on, in an effort to bolster the underpinnings of this ridiculous culture movement is very toxic to STEM. We will pay a heavy price for this if it is not stopped.
Good for you Ben.
I composed a letter to Stat News I haven't sent. The topic was that if Stat wants to help th Ivies the framing by Harvard, Columbia, etc. that this "attack on science" is about "free speech on campus" must be challenged. Why not send it? I have some papers in review. I don't need to add becoming a lightning rod for cancelation to that.
Unfortunately, Elon Musk and DOGE are playing into their hands. The key problem is that Elon has degenerated so much from drug use, particularly ketamine, that he is incapable of learning.
He doesn't understand the monetary system. He cannot comprehend that the government's debt is the private sector's net equity and this renders his mission from God" to cut $1 trillion from spending farcical. Watching him babble about "magic computers" without the capacity to think, "Huh. This has been happening for over 80 years? "
I talked to Elon in the past. The guy blundering around now? This one is like watching a friend drool and poop his pants live in an interview.
It is amazing how no one can explain how international trade works to Trump. We have the global currency, so we must run current account deficits in order for other countries to have dollars to trade with. This is a sign of American strength, not weakness. The president does not have a single economically literate person around him? It is embarrassing. If the USD falls, then our interest rates are going to skyrocket. So long as that idiot is president I am keeping all my savings in gold.
The interest rate we pay is entirely voluntary. It is not up to anyone else. The USA does not borrow from anyone else. Our high interest rates are based on the quite insane theory from over 100 years ago that suppressing wages by forcing people out of work, controls inflation. That's why the Fed raised interest rates.
This idea that wages are the only source of inflation was stupid when it was developed, and it is even more stupid now. Wages are rarely the primary source of inflation, and when they are? In the modern world, this is an incentive to use robots.
We will never see that robot future as long as we force people out of work and into dire, grinding poverty or homelessness every time there is a supply crunch. Even if wages were THE cause of inflation, the way to compete with that today is with robots. This is done in Japan.
Japan has the opposite algorithm. Japan lowers interest rates whenever the unemployment rate RISES above 2%. This has led to Japan implementing more robotics than other nations.
Inflation always and everywhere is a monetary issue. When there is too much money, interest rates are high. When there is too little, interest rates are low. That is basic math. There is no debate. No modern economist has ever claimed that wages have anything to do with interest rates or inflation. That is nonsense.
Regarding Japan, they have a very different system than the US. The world is not sucking yen notes out of Japan. No one has yen under their mattresses in Vietnam or Burma or Ecuador. The US has a unique situation in that we externalize most of the cost of insane public spending. If that external demand for dollar assets goes away, inflation shall increase. That is an iron law. The US will need to balance budgets or accept high inflation. Trump's idiotic tariffs can only hurt the US.
We should be finding a way to remove China from our supply chains, but Trump has prevented that. I would have never predicted that he could be worse than Biden, but the moron proved that he knows nothing about economics.
Except that this idea that inflation is strictly a monetary issue conflicts with empirical data. When money is available, this allows prices to rise, but only when there is a reason for prices to rise: a supply crunch, or a monopoly or collusion allows vendors/suppliers to raise prices. Otherwise, it sits because people like to have a cushion. The Friedman "Helicopter money" idea has been debunked.
Read macroeconomics. Yes, that nonsense is economics and Fed canon.
The structural reason for the US trade deficit is that since Bretton-Woods, the USD has been the required intermediary for settlement of international trade, whether with the USA or any other nation. This is why the USA can run an increasing trade deficit, and the more international trade occurs, the more our deficit grows. We are forced to export dollars. If we recorded our dollar exports with trade balance, we would see that it was on average even. As long as this situation exists, we cannot balance trade. Petrodollar is a big part of that.
We do not otherwise externalize our debt. Instead, we are forced to create extra money for other nations to use. $15-16 trillion is currently in Eurodollar markets, and $21 trillion is in the USA. That's where our $37 trillion national debt is. We are being forced to pay the interest on that debt that is used by other nations to finance themselves through trade surplus.
Your second and third paragraphs are correct. Your last paragraph is misguided. Your first paragraph, well, lets just say your macro professor might be disappointed.
Also, no one ever debunked helicopter money. Anyone claiming COVID payments were an example and that they can model supply shocks and net them out has way more confidence in his/her modeling prowess than anyone deserves.
The item that I think is most important, and that I might be able to influence you on, is that you use the word "force" with regards to the US, and that is not the right term. No one is forcing Americans to buy mountains of useless stuff. We CHOOSE to finance world trade, and this greatly benefits us.
In addition, I strongly recommend that you never waste time reading anything with the word "petrodollar" in it. They are all bad and promote poor thinking. You have some good thoughts here, but you might want to take an advanced macro class. A monetary class might be better, and it can be useful if you have any interest in finance or anything related to rates products (boring but well-paid work I might add). You only need calculus linear algebra, so do not let course requirements scare you (I swear econ professors get off on that).
Also, your figures are all over the place. Eurodollar markets are private, then you compare this to US Federal debt, and then you add them together. That is wrong. Very wrong. Eurodollar markets are private USD-denominated accounts. You can add those to US private capital (bank deposits, time deposits, money markets, perhaps corporate paper,...), not adding that to US sovereign debt is not okay. US Treasuries in China are not Eurodollar accounts. Chinese USD accounts in Hong Kong are, along with USD accounts for any other entity.
Debunking of Helicopter Money:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevekeen/2016/04/12/dont-trust-ben-bernanke-on-helicopter-money/
Eurodollars:
Yes, Eurodollars markets are private, just as all the $21 trillion that is in the USA is private. The public debt is spent into the private sector economy. That is how government spending works. The net positive equity of the private sector is equal to the public debt. That is where the public debt goes. The public debt exists because the government spent it, and the private sector received those funds.
The point is that by looking at the markets for dollars you can tell where the national debt is.
You say that the Trump administration attacks are “the only viable way to restore American values to institutions of ‘higher’ education in America.” Government repression is not a viable way to restore freedom to campuses. Government bans on DEI programs would only replicate–on a much bigger scale, with much more repressive and destructive methods–the very same censorship that you’re decrying when it’s done in the name of DEI. NU will always make mistakes; but trusting any government to control private colleges and dictate the correct ideas is a far worse mistake.
Even if the Trump officials shared your views about supporting free speech (and they don’t), it’s not enough to have “good” goals or motives–we need to have the right methods, and we cannot create free universities using repressive methods.
The alternative to censorship by DEI advocates is not censorship of DEI advocates. The alternative to censorship is a free university that protects everyone’s free expression and seeks to encourage debates and discussions.
The very smart people at Harvard (and presumably at NU) don’t seem to remember that the Supreme Court has already told them that discriminating on the basis of race is unconstitutional and yet they have apparently decided to continue to do so. I hope the Feds drop the hammer on them.