After a too-short hiatus, fear-mongering about the debt is back in a big way. TIME magazine is so worried that they’ve taken it upon themselves to not only put out an entire series to remind people that they must still fear the debt boogeyman, but have also allowed the headline story to center on long-debunked ramblings about the glories of the gold standard. There is so much wrong in the headline story that it would take a treatise to correct, but let’s just focus on a couple of easy things.

First: $13,903,107,629,266 (the size of the federal government’s debt)—that’s a big number. But context, one of many things lacking in this article, is also important. $18,164,800,000,000 is a larger number, and one that happens to be U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP). As was highlighted in our recent piece on Donald Trump, what matters is the size of public debt relative to the size of the economy. For further context, Greek debt at its recent peak was 175 percent of Greek GDP. That’s a level that the Congressional Budget Office baseline doesn’t even have the U.S. government hitting in three decades. And even Greek debt had to be combined with screaming policy incompetence among European Union policymakers to spark an economic crisis. Finally, if we believe that the confidence fairy may tolerate a couple of years of deficits but will come roaring back to punish us because of sustained debt levels, then it’s worth noting that Japan, where debt currently sits at 123 percent of GDP, has had a debt-to-GDP ratio of over 80 percent since 2004—with no signs yet of creditors fleeing.

Since the author of the TIME article, James Grant, is determined to analogize between government debt and personal debt, we should point out a couple of quick things. First, even for a person, a debt that is less than 80 percent of their annual income is far from ruinous. Lots of Americans would, for example, rejoice if their outstanding mortgage was less than 80 percent of their annual salary. Second, lots of people have debts—mortgages, auto loans, student loans—and yet have substantial net worth because they also own assets. Both of these insights apply to the government, maybe even more forcefully. For example, many people with mortgages less than 80 percent of their annual income would consider themselves in a good financial place. But people really do have to pay off their mortgage in full someday. Governments—entities that never die—don’t. So, the burden of an 80-percent-of-income debt is much, much less pressing to a government than a person. The government also owns assets. Lots of them. And these estimates of assets don’t even include the biggest one: the power to tax.

There are economically coherent arguments about why the United States should address projected future deficits before too long. They’re not hugely convincing to us, but they do exist. But they’re not in the new TIME magazine cover story.

40,000 Verizon workers are currently on strike across the country after the company and labor unions failed to reach a new contract agreement last year. Verizon has reaped over $39 billion in profits over the last three years, and its CEO rakes in 200 times more per year than the average Verizon worker. Despite this clear sign of prosperity, Verizon refuses to let its employees share these gains. Instead, Verizon wants to severely cut health care coverage, slash benefits for injured and retired workers, and outsource work to low-wage contractors overseas. As the daughter of a striking Verizon worker and as a union member myself, I know that workers do not decide lightly to go on strike. Strikes are disruptive and stressful, and create financial strain for workers and their families. But they are necessary when large corporations refuse to give working people a fair share of the profits they help create, and Verizon workers have been without a contract for ten months.

By going on strike, the Verizon workers are using one of the few tools workers have left in today’s economy to claim their fair share of economic growth. They are also pushing back against the rigged rules of the economy that privilege capital owners and corporate managers. I stand in solidarity with my mother and thousands of her fellow union members as they fight for a fair contract. Their call for job security, protected benefits, and improved working conditions is emblematic of larger trends affecting working people across America. Their strike is also an example of how important it is for working people to have the right to stand together and negotiate collectively for fair wages and benefits and safe working conditions. Unfortunately, this right has been severely eroded over the fifty years by policy choices made on behalf of those with the most wealth and power—and this erosion has directly contributed to stagnating wages for the vast majority of workers.

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A trial court in Wisconsin has ruled that the state’s new law banning union contracts that make every employee the union represents pay his fair share of the costs of representation is unconstitutional.

The union plaintiffs and the court took a fairly novel approach to this issue and ruled on grounds I had never considered: compelling a union to represent non-dues-paying free riders (as the law does) means the state is taking the union members’ dues and forcing them to spend it on free riders without any compensation by the state. It’s an unconstitutional taking without just compensation, in violation of Article 1, section 13 of the Wisconsin constitution. A similar argument under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was made by Judge Diane Wood, dissenting in Sweeney v. Pence, 767 F3d 654, 683-84 (7th Cir 2014), where the majority upheld Indiana’s identical law.

The state requires unions to represent every member of the bargaining unit fairly and equally, so the union can’t avoid spending from its treasury when a non-dues-payer demands that the union take his grievance, in a situation where it would take a union member’s grievance. That representation can involve arbitration fees and the costs of a lawyer, which can easily exceed $10,000. The state imposes this burden on the union for the “public purpose [of] making the business climate in the state more favorable,” but it offers the union no compensation at all. The court rejected the notion that giving the union exclusive bargaining rights was sufficient compensation: “The proposition that winning an election is sufficient compensation and that all subsequent work must be done for free does not make any more sense than the proposition that there is a free lunch.”

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Over the weekend, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump insisted that he could eliminate the national debt, which currently stands at around $19 trillion, “over a period of eight years.” Upon hearing this, most people would think that Trump planned to cut spending or hike taxes. However, Trump plans to cut taxes, which suggests that he had to be proposing enormous spending cuts. If spending cuts began rapidly enough to fulfill Trump’s promise of eliminating our $19 trillion debt, the “very massive recession” that is currently just another of Trump’s fantasies would become a very real possibility.

Trump, however, has something else in mind besides (or at least in addition to) spending cuts as a strategy for eliminating our national debt. Trump’s plan is a relatively new twist in D.C. policy debates: selling government assets.

This plan, while truly stupid, is a useful reminder about how limited and silly our budget deficit debates are in D.C. While it has received plenty of deserved scorn, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that about half of the ridiculousness of Trump’s overall debt plan actually just mimics pretty conventional D.C. budget wisdom. The other half brings a new kind of ridiculousness to the table, but these new proposals come with a grain of useful insight embedded in them. First, though, it will help to examine the conventional ridiculous featured in Trump’s plan.

First, there is the $19 trillion debt number that Trump references. Anybody who tells you the national debt is $19 trillion is simply fear-mongering. This $19 trillion number is the gross national debt, which includes debt issued to government accounts (in practice, this means debt held by the Social Security Trust Fund). According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), this debt “does not directly affect the economy and has no net effect on the budget.” What matters for future taxpayers is the net debt (i.e., the debt held by the public), which CBO’s most recent measure puts at about $13 trillion in 2015. $13 trillion should be a big-enough number to sound scary, but D.C. budget fear-mongers can never resist going for the even higher (though irrelevant) $19 trillion.

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Yesterday, Zack Beauchamp updated a piece he had written a while back that claimed Bernie Sanders’ trade agenda could prove ruinous to the world’s poorest people. I think Beauchamp really overstates this, for a couple of reasons.

First, only an expansive reading of some of Sanders’ rhetorical excesses would lead one to think he would pursue policies that radically restricted the access to U.S. markets currently enjoyed by our poorer trading partners’ exports. It is not an uncommon reaction to criticisms of today’s global trade regime to assume that this market access would clearly be significantly reduced if this status quo were overturned, but that’s far from obvious.

Second, the evidence marshalled on behalf of trade liberalization’s positive benefits for development is entirely about the benefits of unilateral, domestic liberalization. That is, the benefits a country gains from cutting its own tariffs, and not about the ease of access that they have to the U.S. market. This evidence is completely silent on the benefits of access to the U.S. market. Economic theory teaches that the benefits of unilateral liberalization completely dwarf those of market access, and there is not much evidence to suggest that this theory is wrong.

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A rule requiring investment advisors to act in the best interest of clients saving for retirement was released today despite a six-year campaign to weaken or kill it. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez and his staff deserve enormous credit for persevering.

The financial services industry made the usual claim that the rule would hurt the people it was supposed to help—essentially, that investors are better off with bad advice than no advice. It also told Congress the rule would be unduly burdensome, while assuring investors there was nothing to worry about, as Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Elijah Cummings pointed out.

Let’s hope the financial industry was lying to investors, not Congress, because the rule should have an impact on its bottom line. The only problem is that it doesn’t go far enough. A financial advisor can now be sued for recommending a higher-cost mutual fund over a similar but lower-cost fund without disclosing that he or she is working on commission—a practice that was perfectly legal until today. But the rule doesn’t require that he or she provide information about low-cost index funds and similar investments, even though the original draft rule pointed out that the prevailing view in the academic literature was that such a passive investment strategy was optimal.

It’s unlikely that investors could successfully sue advisors simply for steering them to higher-cost asset classes, as long as the investments are generally considered suitable for people saving for retirement (mutual funds or annuities, for example, and not shares in racehorses). But the mutual fund and insurance industries succeeded in having this spelled out in the final rule and eliminating a safe harbor for broker-dealers offering “high-quality low-fee products… calibrated to track the overall performance of financial markets.” The list of other changes is worth reading and perhaps worrying about, though they may matter little in practice and simply allow the administration to demonstrate its responsiveness while giving lobbyists something to show for their expensive efforts.

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The Department of Labor (DOL) is about to release a final rule that will require overtime pay for millions of salaried employees who currently can be required to work long hours for no more pay than they receive for a 40-hour week. This will give them either more money or more time with their families or for themselves.

But the overtime rule naturally makes some employers unhappy, since they can currently get 60 hours of work from many employees for only 40 hours of pay. Even some non-profit human service providers, which for the most part are not even covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), oppose DOL’s updated rule. This might be because they don’t understand the law, but that misunderstanding hasn’t stopped them from paying for and publishing the first of what will likely be a wave of spurious reports and cost estimates of the new rule.

An association of community providers serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (the American Network of Community Options and Resources, or ANCOR) commissioned a “study” by a company called Avalere to estimate the impact of the proposed overtime rule on its member agencies. Sadly, Avalere’s report is little more than a collection of baseless assumptions adding up to an absurd result. Neither the survey questions, nor the actual responses, nor the response rate were included in Avalere’s report.

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Yesterday, the Treasury Department took laudable regulatory action to discourage corporate inversions, a tax evasion maneuver where U.S. multinational corporations merge with much smaller foreign corporations in order to move the corporation, on paper, to a lower-tax country. As Treasury Secretary Jack Lew notes, “After an inversion, many of these companies continue to take advantage of the benefits of being based in the United States—including our rule of law, skilled workforce, infrastructure, and research and development capabilities—all while shifting a greater tax burden to other businesses and American families.”

The new Treasury rules make it harder for companies to access some of the tax benefits of corporate inversions. If the shareholders of the old U.S. parent company end up owning more than 60 percent of the new merged foreign company, then many tax benefits obtained by inverting will be clawed back by Treasury. Today’s rule changes strengthen this provision by excluding the stock of the foreign company attributable to assets acquired from an American company in the three previous years. The upshot is that the ability of foreign companies to engage in serial inverting is reduced.

To see how this works, consider the recent example of Pfizer’s proposed inversion with Allergen. In 2014, Treasury issued a Notice to limit the tax breaks associated with an inversion to companies whose original shareholders owned less than 60 percent of the new merged foreign firm. Pfizer therefore structured its inversion so that its current shareholders would own 56 percent of the newly merged foreign company. However, Allergen is a serial inverter, being the result of numerous mergers with American companies over the past 3 years. With the new regulatory guidance, it looks likely that the Pfizer-Allergen inversion will no longer meet the appropriate threshold. The new regulatory action means that foreign firms cannot simply use a string of acquisitions to increase their size and avoid inversion thresholds.

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The plans to raise the minimum wage to $15 in California and New York are ambitious and welcome at a time when the eroding value of the federal minimum wage means more and more working families can afford less and less. California’s minimum wage would reach $15 in 2023 for all employees and in 2022 for those in firms with more than twenty-five employees. New York’s plan would raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2018 in New York City and by 2022 in the City’s suburbs and on Long Island. The minimum wage upstate would rise to at least $12.50, with the possibility of then going higher. These increases are significantly larger in scope than what has been typical of recent federal and state minimum wage hikes. Furthermore, both proposals would raise the wage floor to levels relative to the wages of typical workers that have not been the norm for at least three decades.

The fact that these proposals are outside the bounds of recent experience does not automatically make them ill-conceived. Moving beyond the timidity of most recent minimum wage hikes is exactly what is needed if we are to undo decades of falling wages and deteriorating living standards for the lowest-paid third of America’s workforce.

The Berkeley Labor Center estimates that 5.6 million workers—or the entire bottom third of the California workforce—would benefit from the California increase (excluding those already helped by various city initiatives). EPI’s analysis estimates that 3.2 million workers, or 37 percent of the New York workforce, would benefited from a statewide increase to $15, although the number affected by the current proposal would be less, given the smaller wage hike in the upstate region.

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