SUNDER THE SKY

Paraphrasing the English journalist and philosopher G. K. Chesterton, New Testament scholar N.T. Wright wrote: The purpose of an open mind… is like the purpose of an open mouth: that it might be shut again on something solid. Yes, we must be free to ask questions. But when we hear a good answer we must be prepared to recognize it as such, and not be so keen on keeping all the questions open that we shy away from an answer because we so like having an open mind. That is the way to intellectual, as well as spiritual, starvation. So much for the Cult of the Open Mind, which in its purest essence is nothing more than the admission that one has lived a life without learning a thing or arriving at a conclusion. In one form or another, I hear people suggest that an “open mind” is somehow superior to possessing an opinion or embracing a principle. The only times that’s true, in my view, are when an opinion or a principle is knee-jerk, poorly considered, illogical, untrue, or unfounded.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Debt Management, the U.S. government is just five years away from the point where every new dollar it borrows from the public will go toward funding interest payments on the national debt. Negative Borrowing Deficit  That is the main takeaway from the Debt Management Office’s Fiscal Year 2019 Q1 Report , which featured the Office of Management and Budget’s latest projection of the U.S. government’s borrowing from the public, shown in the chart below: ZeroHedge explains the significance of what the chart shows as the Primary Deficit, indicated as the blue portion of the bars in the chart, swings from positive to negative beginning in 2024: As part of today’s Treasury Presentation to the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee , there is a chart showing the Office Of Debt Management’s forecast for annual US debt issuance, broken down between its three component uses of funds: Primary Deficit, Net Interest Expense, and “Other.” T