My Weekly Reading for February 23, 2025
By Ted Galen Carpenter, Antiwar.com, February 17, 2025.
Excerpts:
A recent example of U.S. meddling in the internal affairs of another democratic country appears to have taken place in the Republic of Georgia. According to Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili, USAID spent $41.7 million to support its preferred candidates in the country’s recent parliamentary elections. Adjusted for the size of Georgia’s population, such an expenditure in the United States would amount to $3.78 billion.
And:
When COVID Authoritarianism Met Border AuthoritarianismThat outcome apparently was intolerable to Romania’s political establishment and its supporters in the EU and the United States. They viewed Georgescu as especially unacceptable, since he openly criticized NATOand opposed continuing to aid Ukraine. The country’s election commission nullified the voting results and rescheduled the first round balloting for May 4, 2025. Commissioners charged that, wait for it… Russia had illegally tampered with the election. Moscow’s horrid offense was its alleged support of a TikTok campaign that seemed to benefit Georgescu. Tangible evidence regarding Russian involvement was noticeably absent. Despite the lack of evidence, U.S. and EU officials denounced Russia and praised the Romanian government for trashing the election.
Eugene Doyle, a reporter for New Zealand’s Solidarity.com, noted the menacing significance of this episode. “To save democracy, the US and the European elites appear to have found it necessary to destroy democracy. For the first time ever an election was overturned in an EU/NATO country. Ever.” Doyle also cites evidence that Russia was not even the likely culprit. The TikTok effort apparently originated with a botched PNL scheme to siphon off votes to Georgescu from other mainstream competitors.
by Fiona Harrigan, Reason, March 2025.
Excerpts:
In late 2021, Charlotte Bellis, an unmarried journalist from New Zealand, found herself pregnant while working in Qatar, a country where that status carries the risk of jail time or deportation. A doctor advised her to get married or get out of the country. But New Zealand, which at that point still was taking drastic measures to limit the spread of COVID-19, allowed its citizens to come home only if they secured lottery-allocated spots in a government-run quarantine program. Bellis applied but was unsuccessful. Desperate, she turned to the Taliban.
The Islamic fundamentalist group said yes. Bellis made her way to Afghanistan, where she had worked and where her boyfriend was based. “When the Taliban offers you—a pregnant, unmarried woman—safe haven, you know your situation is messed up,” she wrote in The New Zealand Herald in January 2022.
And:
Immigrants Used Less Welfare than Native-Born Americans in 2022Travel restrictions, which all of the 194 World Health Organization (WHO) member states deployed against COVID-19, may seem like a sensible pandemic response. It is easy to forget that the WHO had long viewed such measures as ineffective and counterproductive. Beyond doing little to stop contagion, travel restrictions can stop critical personnel and equipment from crossing borders. They also can foster secrecy. After South African scientists discovered the new, fast-spreading omicron COVID-19 variant in November 2021, many countries responded by imposing travel bans on South Africa and its neighbors. A government might conclude that transparency is not worth the economic damage of canceled flights and vacations.
by Alex Nowrasteh and Jerome Famularo, Cato at Liberty, February 18, 2025.
Excerpts:
Congress is currently debating whether to spend about $175 billion on deportations to avoid future payments like the $650 million that Congress spent on shelter and other services for migrants last year. Poorly spending $650 million last year doesn’t justify spending 269 times as much to avoid similarly relatively small costs when Congress could just decide not to spend the money on migrant shelter and services in the first place.
The better policy would instead end noncitizen access to welfare and entitlement benefits, which could save over $109 billion in the first year.
And:
Social Security’s Insolvency Is Driven by Benefits for the Living, Not Fraud by the DeadWe find that all immigrants consumed 21 percent less welfare and entitlement benefits than native-born Americans on a per capita basis in 2022, based on data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Immigrants were 14.3 percent of the US population and consumed just 11.9 percent of all means-tested welfare and entitlement benefits that year.
The biggest myth in the debate over immigrant welfare use is that noncitizens — which includes illegal immigrants and those lawfully present on various temporary visas and green cards — disproportionately consume welfare. That is not the case. Noncitizen immigrants consumed 54 percent less welfare than native-born Americans. Noncitizens were 7.3 percent of the population and consumed just 3.5 percent of all welfare and entitlement benefits. In total, noncitizens consumed $109.4 billion in benefits in 2022.
However, naturalized immigrants consumed 17 percent more welfare than native-born Americans because they are an older population—they consumed 7 times as much Social Security and 4.3 times as much Medicare as noncitizens on a per capita basis. Naturalized immigrants were 7 percent of the population and consumed 8.4 percent of welfare benefits.
by Eric Boehm, Reason, February 19, 2025.
Excerpts:
Elon Musk claims that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has uncovered “the biggest fraud in history” within the Social Security Administration: Payments to millions of Americans who have likely been dead for a long time.
That claim seems to be based on a faulty understanding of Social Security data on Musk’s part. More to the point: Social Security’s fiscal problems aren’t the result of fraudulent payments to people who are already dead. It is not benefits for the dead, but rather payments to the living that are driving the program toward insolvency.
And:
Murrow ‘risked his career to confront demagogic Joe McCarthy’? HardlyThe crucial question, however, is whether Social Security’s lack of “death information” about those people means they are still receiving benefits.
The vast majority are not. According to the inspector general’s report, 98 percent of them (18.4 million) “are not currently receiving” Social Security payments. That’s because those 18.4 million people “have not had earnings reported to SSA in the past 50 years,” the inspector general notes. “The fact that these individuals were age 100 or older, had no earnings in the past 50 years, and received no SSA payments indicates they are deceased.”
Another way to know that those payments aren’t being made is to simply look at the annual cost of Social Security. Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects at the Tax Foundation, crunched some of those figures in a post on X. In short, if Social Security was paying benefits to all those obviously deceased people, the program would be spending about $1 trillion more every year than it already is.
by W. Joseph Campbell, Media Myth Alert, July 1, 2017.
Excerpts:
The notion that Murrow’s career hung in the balance in taking on the bullying senator from Wisconsin was promoted in Good Night, and Good Luck, an overwrought cinematic account of the Murrow-McCarthy confrontation. But in reality, the risks to Murrow were scant by time he took on McCarthy in 1954.
And:
That’s because, as I write, Murrow “was very late in confronting McCarthy” and “did so only after other journalists had challenged the senator and his tactics for months, even years.”
These journalists included the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, who called out McCarthy’s exaggerations almost as soon as the senator began hurling accusations of communists infiltration of the State Department. That was in February 1950 — years before Murrow’s program on McCarthy.
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