Deficit Is Surging as Candidates Look to Spend Freely

In this bizarre election cycle, the problem of increasing federal budget deficits has received little attention. But Greg Valliere of Horizon Investments brought it to light in a research note Wednesday titled, "A Forgotten Issue Suddenly Returns."

Valliere was among the first Washington analysts to point out that the deficit started shrinking over four years ago. Now he's early to point out the positive trend has reversed.

#USImmigrationLaw: 5 Facts About Illegal Immigration Laws

While it comes as no surprise to recent immigrants, the United States has rather strict immigration laws. For undocumented immigrants, also called "illegal immigrants" or "illegal aliens," the legal system can be scary. Below are five important facts about...

Carmelo Anthony Preaches Unity Following Gold Medal Victory

Carmelo Anthony started to tear up as he reflected on his Olympic career on Sunday. The U.S. men's basketball team had just beaten Serbia, 96-66, to win Anthony his third gold medal, an unmatched achievement in men's Olympic basketball, and the weight of the moment started to overwhelm him. 

“I know this is the end,” Anthony said. “This is it for me.” 

Carmelo Anthony: CAPTAIN AMERICA FOREVER pic.twitter.com/hBvI4RATT8

- Rob Perez (@WorId_Wide_Wob) August 21, 2016

There had been vast interest in how Anthony would responds to winning gold after he authored a July op-ed in the The Guardian in which he said he hoped to use the Olympic stage to make a statement following the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. “This is a chance to do something meaningful before an audience of billions,” he wrote at the time, leading many to wonder aloud what he might do.

But on Sunday, Anthony's message was one of unity. 

“Despite everything that is going right now in our country, we've got to be united,” he said. “America will be great again, I believe that. We got a lot of work to do, but it's one step at a time.”

After Anthony's comment, the U.S. men's basketball team approached the podium with their arms interlocked, a clear extension of Anthony's call for unity. 

Anthony has become one of the most politically outspoken American athletes in recent years. In July, the same day Anthony published his Guardian op-ed, the New York Knicks star stood alongside NBA superstars LeBron James, Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade at the 2016 ESPY Awards, who, together, asked for the country to take a committed stance against gun violence and unnecessary force on the part of police officers.  

“The problems are not new. The violence is not new. And the racial divide definitely is not new,” Anthony said. “But the urgency to create change is at an all-time high.”

Olympians John Carlos and Tommie Smith, whose decision to raise their fists at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics remains one of the most iconic moments in Olympics history, have supported Anthony in his recent activism. “He is direct, very direct. And there is truth in [being] direct because there is purpose,” Carlos has said. 

Questions will remain about whether the International Olympic Committee's rules scared the team away from a more overtly political statement. The IOC explicitly states in its Olympic Charter that political statements of any sort are not allowed at the games and may result in disqualification. Soon after Carlos and Smith raised their fists, the International Olympic Committee booted the pair from the games and Team USA suspended them. 

“I know about that rule,” Anthony told The Undefeated before the Rio Olympics. “We had a rule talk about the do's and the don'ts. What you can do and what you can't do. I know the basics of what I want to do and what I don't want to do.”

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Chris Christie's Transportation Record Is a Bigger Disaster Than Bridgegate

What a fiasco. Six years after New Jersey Governor Chris Christie killed the ARC transit tunnel under the Hudson so he could avoid raising the gas tax, the jig is up. The state has run out of transportation funding anyway.

Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

NJ's Transportation Trust Fund dried up a month ago, bringing a halt to basic infrastructure projects all over the state. Raiding major transit projects, it turns out, is not a sustainable way to fund a transportation system.

But even now, with their backs against the wall, state legislative leaders and reputed Donald Trump manservant Christie are coming up empty, reports Janna Chernetz at Network blog Mobilizing the Region:

It's been one month since the TTF dried up, and the Garden State is still without transportation funding - or even a foreseeable solution. The past six weeks have been rather rocky for the governor and the state's legislative leaders:

• June 23 – The Senate and Assembly TTF reauthorization bills are considered and passed out of committees.


• June 28 – Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto changes the Assembly's gas tax proposal in a secret midnight meeting with the governor. That version later passes the full Assembly.


• June 30 – Senate President Stephen Sweeney refuses to advance the Assembly proposal, and the fiscal year ends without a resolution to TTF crisis. The TTF officially goes bankrupt, and Christie signs an executive order halting all TTF-funded projects.

• July 22 – Sweeney and Prieto announce a joint plan to renew the TTF.


• July 29 – The Senate Budget Committee considers and passes the Sweeney-Prieto revised plan.


• August 1 – The Senate once again delays a vote on the TTF bill after failing to garner enough votes to guarantee a veto override.

Governor Christie has been - and remains - the biggest obstruction to a solution with his unmerited opposition to a gas tax increase that isn't coupled with unrelated tax cuts. (Where was the call for tax cuts when NJ Transit voted to raise fares last summer?) And this irrational insistence on “tax fairness” has resulted in a complete stalemate in Trenton. It's ironic really, because the purpose of the Transportation Trust Fund, when it was established in 1984, was to remove transportation from the political process.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Denver Urbanism makes the case for “transportation variety” in cities. Streets.mn reports that the departure of a suburban county from a regional transit organization puts plans for bus rapid transit in jeopardy. And Mobility Lab explains how Arlington County transportation engineers were treated to a tour of local bike infrastructure - an exercise everyone hopes will improve road design for cyclists.

Donald Trump Goes After Grieving Mother Of Killed American Soldier

Donald Trump responded to the moving speeches of the father of an American hero at the Democratic National Convention by questioning why his wife stood at his side but did not speak. 

The remarks were clearly intended to question whether the couple's Islamic faith precluded her from speaking so publicly.

Khizr Khan, whose son, Army Capt. Humayun S.M. Khan was killed in Iraq in 2004, gave one of the most stirring speeches of the convention when he questioned what sacrifices Trump had made for his country. Khan's wife, Ghazala, appeared beside him at the lectern but did not speak.

Trump suggested in two separate interviews that Ghazala Khan had been blocked from speaking.

“I'd like to hear his wife say something,” Trump told The New York Times in an interview published Friday. 

“If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me,” he said in an interview with ABC on Saturday.

A visibly shaken Ghazala Khan spoke at length about her son during an interview with MSNBC on Friday. She said she had to work to keep her composure onstage at the DNC because she is still grief-stricken.

“[I] was very nervous, because I cannot see my son's picture, I cannot even come in the room where his pictures are,” she said of her appearance at the DNC.

She also recounted her last conversation, on Mother's Day. “'Be safe, and don't become hero for me, just be my son, come back as a son,'” she recalled, fighting back tears. “He came back as a hero.”

Trump's Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton paid tribute to Ghazala Khan for speaking about her grief so publicly.

 “I was very moved to see Ghazala Khan stand bravely and with dignity in support of her son on Thursday night,” Clinton said in a statement to ABC News. “And I was very moved to hear her speak last night, bravely and with dignity, about her son's life and the ultimate sacrifice he made for his country.”

The founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America defended the Khan family, after Trump claimed he had made sacrifices of his own, without actually naming any. Trump went on to boast of business successes and made charity work claims.

“For anyone to compare his 'sacrifice' to a Gold Star family member is insulting, foolish and ignorant,” said IAVA CEO Paul Rieckhoff in a statement to ABC News. “Especially someone who has never served himself and has no children serving.”

Editor's note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar,rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

67 Congress Members Tell Feds: Measure the Movement of People, Not Cars

If U.S. DOT doesn't change its proposed congestion metric, 50 people riding in a bus will count as much as one person in an SUV. Image: Transportation for America

The federal government hands states about $40 billion a year for transportation, money they can basically spend however they want. The result in many places is a lot of expensive, traffic-inducing highways that get clogged with cars soon after they're finished. Can measuring the effect of all this spending lead to better decisions?

U.S. DOT is developing a metric to assess how well states address congestion. This is a minefield - if the new congestion rule only measures the movement of cars, it's going to entrench 60 years of failed transportation policy. Unfortunately, the first draft of the DOT rule left a lot to be desired.

Reformers have been pushing the agency to revise the rule so it takes a broader, multi-modal view of congestion. Stephen Lee Davis at Transportation for America reports 19 senators and 48 U.S. representatives have written a letter to U.S. DOT [PDF] demanding a healthier approach.

The Congress members write:

If we focus, as this proposed rule does, on keeping traffic moving at high speeds at all times of day on all types of roads and streets, then the result is easy to predict: states and MPOs will prioritize investments to increase average speeds for cars, at the expense of goals to provide safe, reliable, environmentally sensitive, multi-modal transportation options for all users of the transportation system, despite those goals being stated in federal statute. This singular focus on moving vehicles undermines the progress this Administration has made on multi-modal planning and investments through the TIGER program. Encouraging faster speeds on roadways undermines the safety of roads for all users, as well as the economic vitality of our communities.

The excessive congestion performance measure should be amended to assess people hours of delay and not just vehicles. This change is critical to account for the many non-single occupancy vehicle users, including transit bus riders and bicyclists and pedestrians traveling along the corridor, which provide critical congestion relief and could be undercounted or even penalized under this measure.

The letter also insists that U.S. DOT require state and regional transportation agencies to assess the impact of projects on greenhouse gas emissions.

U.S. DOT is currently accepting comments about the rule change. You can weigh in and help promote a better policy.

Elsewhere on the Network today: The Transport Politic offers a side-by-side comparison of the Republican and Democratic transportation platforms. Bike Portland highlights a study that found streetcar tracks cause a large number of cyclist injuries in Toronto. And The Fifth Square wants Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney to enforce parking rules on South Broad year round, like the city is during the DNC.

A 50-Year-Old Cartoon Satirizing Car Culture Still Rings True Today

If aliens came to Earth, who would they assume is in control - people or cars? Cars, of course. That's the premise of this 50-year-old animation dug up by Alex Ihnen at NextSTL.

It's worth noting, says Ihnen, that the piece was made by Canadians:

It tells the story of aliens viewing earth and concluding that the automobile is the dominant species on the planet. It's a biting commentary, and the culture that produced it is the same that prevented highways from decimating Vancouver, and other Canadian cities to the extent of their American counterparts. It's hard to imagine an American equivalent, though even locally around the same time we were well [aware] of the negative impacts of the automobile [Mass Transit as a Regional Priority – St. Louis 1965].

Ihnen also posts this summary from the National Film Board of Canada:

This animated short proposes what many earthlings have long feared - that the automobile has inherited the planet. When life on Earth is portrayed as one long, unending conga-line of cars, a crew of extra-terrestrial visitors understandably assume they are the dominant race. While humans, on the other hand, are merely parasites. An Oscar® nominee, this film serves as an entertaining case study.

Make sure to watch til the end - the best satire is in the final minute.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Green City Blue Lake explains how two influential conservative thinkers envisioned Cleveland as a model transit city. And Bike Portland weighs in on Pokémon Go, calling it “a boon for bicycling.”