National Debt over Four Times Greater than Reported, Accounting Group Says
The U.S. Treasury says the national debt is roughly $39 trillion, but a nonpartisan accounting group estimates that the true number is $170.3 trillion.
Unlike the Treasury’s calculations, Truth in Accounting included all of the federal government’s unfunded obligations in its debt assessment, including unfunded promises like Social Security and Medicare benefits.
COMMENTARY
Commentary: China Dominates the World’s Critical Minerals Production
Critical minerals are mined all over the world but the majority of the supply ends up passing through China. For a broad range of key metals and minerals, China is either the largest miner, the dominant refiner, or both. This is true for rare earths, lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel, and many other metals and minerals that are essential to defense, energy and high-tech applications. It is less about where ores are dug out of the ground and more about where they are turned into usable components. In other words, Chinese processing plants are essentially the gatekeepers of global supply.
Australia and South America host much of the world’s lithium, while Congo supplies the lion’s share of cobalt and copper. But the rocks themselves can’t become a battery or magnet without intensive downstream processing and refining. China built those downstream industries at scale over decades through state support and investment. The result is clear — China has effectively monopolized refining for most critical minerals while the rest of the world depends on it for much-needed supply. China is listed as the dominant refiner for 19 of 20 minerals analyzed by the IEA in their Global Critical Minerals Outlook for 2025, making up roughly 70% of the global processing capacity overall.
ENTERTAINMENT & LIFESTYLE
Music Spotlight: Stefanie Joyce
Stefanie Joyce is a genre-defying artist whose music lives at the intersection of country, indie rock, and western noir—think Patsy Cline meets David Lynch. She was born in Chicago and raised in Vancouver, Canada. But she now lives in Nashville permanently. However, how she got here is as unique as any artist I’ve featured.
Joyce started out aspiring to be a professional ballerina. She was bullied terribly in middle school, and ballet was an escape from it. She stated, “Dance is similar to singing. It's just doing something with your body to music instead of your mouth. And it's funny because even in ballet, like I was drawn to the stories of the old ballets like Swan Lake and Giselle for all these ghost stories of these haunted women. I've always been really drawn to that archetype of female pain, which has transmuted into something beautiful through art.”
Trending This Week
