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In one month, my new book will be in folks' hands. "Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census" tells the story of what it takes to produce democracy's data - and how hard it was to do this in 2020 during a pandemic and while struggling with what I call "Jenga politics" (when various forces keep taking out planks and putting more pressure on top). It's an ethnography, a love letter to civil servants, and a warning to us all about how brittle our democratic project is. It's also a reminder that we can fight for our democracy. It's also a reflection on how the legitimacy of high-stakes data stems from the social fabric that surrounds it, not any inherent property of the data. (Hint: data politics are not just a concern for the census... they also concern our AI future.)

This book is over 10 years in the making. I really really really hope I can convince you to buy a copy. Or to ask your library to order a copy so you can check it out! (Pretty please with a cherry on top!)

The national debt of the United States just crossed $40 trillion.

That number is so large that it risks becoming meaningless. But consider this: the federal government did not reach $30 trillion in debt until January 2022. It added the next $10 trillion in just four and a half years. As of August 18, the Treasury reported gross federal debt of approximately $40.05 trillion—$32.27 trillion held by the public and another $7.78 trillion owed within the government itself.

The conventional debate over our fiscal catastrophe is familiar. Democrats blame Republican tax cuts. Republicans blame Democratic spending. Budget experts correctly point to Social Security, Medicare, defense spending, pandemic relief, and now the staggering cost of servicing the debt itself.

But there is another cause of our fiscal predicament that almost no one in Washington is willing to discuss: the federal government spends enormous sums of money on things the Constitution never authorized it to fund.

The chart below tells a remarkable story. At the founding, the federal debt was below 40% of the nation’s economic output, largely the legacy of the Revolutionary War. Successive administrations paid it down. After the War of 1812, it rose again and then fell. By 1835, President Andrew Jackson’s administration had essentially extinguished the national debt.

On this episode of What’s the Point?, Richard Denniss explains how the crossbench works and the politics of deal-making in federal parliament.

This episode was recorded on Friday 21 August.

More Fool Me: How the gas industry tricked Australia by Richard Denniss, the latest Vantage Point essay from Australia Institute Press, is available now.

Use the code ‘FOOLME’ on a four-edition Vantage Point subscription to receive a free copy of Richard’s book, Econobabble.

Read more on The Point.

Host: Richard Denniss, co-Chief Executive Officer, the Australia Institute // @richarddenniss

Host: Anna Chang, Managing Editor, The Point // @annachang

Show notes:

Climate Integrity Summit 2026, the Australia Institute

National Gambling Toll, the Australia Institute

It also questions the RBA’s apparent obsession with keeping wages low.

The research by Chief Economist Greg Jericho has found that using the Reserve Bank’s own predictions, it will take workers until 2037 to get back to where they were at the end of the COVID pandemic.

The analysis highlights the RBA’s repeated warnings about the dangers of wage growth, even though wages are stagnant, yet prices and corporate profits are soaring.

It also reiterates that it’s profits to blame for surging inflation, not consumer spending, even though consumers have been punished for inflation with repeated interest rate rises.

The analysis reveals that governments are also to blame for stalling wages, with many imposing unfair and unnecessary caps on public service wages, blatantly offering pay rises below inflation.

“People understand that, in very broad terms, the Reserve Bank has put up interest rates in response to high inflation,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute.

“But what many don’t realise is that the RBA seems to be obsessed with keeping wages down.

“In a recent meeting, Michele Bullock warned of ‘higher wage increases that will feed through into business’.

“What makes that comment even more extraordinary, is that it came immediately after the worst quarter of wage growth in four and a half years.

Australian renters are giving up weeks of their working year to cover rising rents, with lower paid workers losing the equivalent of their entire annual leave entitlement. 

Everybody’s Home’s 2026 Priced Out report analysed rental affordability for Australians earning between $40,000 and $130,000 per year across capital cities and regional areas.

The report shows:

Consider a simple question. The Biden Administration imported somewhere between six and ten million immigrants into the United States illegally. Do you think President AOC or President Newsom, if given the chance starting in January 2029, would let in fewer than Biden or more?

The American people don’t need a detailed policy briefing to answer that question. Amnesty and mass immigration are key features of expanding the Democratic Party coalition. Its ideology and electoral math, along with a vast government-contractor apparatus that supports the party, entrench a quasi-legal parallel rights regime.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Minneapolis, conventional GOP analysis holds that a combination of unsurvivable headlines and business interests demanding labor flexibility will pull the Republican Party back toward accommodation. That calculation may hold for another few months in Washington, or even survive until the midterms. It will not survive beyond then.

The accommodationist wing of the Republican Party sees immigration as the kind of disagreement that can be settled with a clever compromise, new labels, or a schedule of fines and penalties offered to voters who were promised the opposite in 2024, and who will bear the consequences of continued wage stagnation.

On October 23, 1956, students gathered at the foot of Sandor Petofi’s statue in Budapest and read his poem “Rise, Magyar!” made famous in the democratic revolution of 1848. Workers, and even soldiers, soon joined the students. The demonstrators took over the state-run radio station and the Communist Party offices and toppled a huge statue of Stalin, dragging it through the streets. Rebellion spread throughout the country. The demonstrators—now Freedom Fighters—held Soviet occupation forces at bay for several days.

On November 1, the Hungarian Prime Minister announced that Hungary would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. At dawn, November 4, the Soviets launched a major invasion of Hungary, in an offensive involving tens of thousands of additional troops, air and artillery assaults, and 6,000 tanks. A heroic resistance was crushed in less than a week.

The last free Hungarian radio broadcast spent its final hours repeating the Gettysburg Address in seven languages, followed by an S.O.S. Over 20,000 Hungarians were tried and sentenced for participation in the uprising, hundreds receiving the death sentence. An estimated 200,000 Hungarians—of a population of nine million—became refugees. Forty-seven thousand came to the United States. Hungary became a member of NATO on March 12, 1999.

Call for Papers: The 17^th AIPEN Workshop: Political Economy in a World of Transitions: Is Another World Possible?

Monash University, 4-5 February 2027

Widespread use of the word “meritocracy” may only be possible in the world it describes. British sociologist and former Labour Party official Michael Young coined the term in a 1958 satire as a sly alternative to aristocracy, clumsily mixing Latin (mereo: to deserve) with Greek (kratos: power, rule). Young’s friend, a classicist, warned he would be “laughed to scorn” for employing such a barbarism. Her caution was, sadly, optimistic.

Nonetheless, meritocracy’s advocates have attempted to supply it with a noble lineage. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio and former presidential candidate, is convinced the 20th-century term is central to the American experiment going back to 1776. Palantir’s Jordan Chandler Hirsch likewise argues that America was “born meritorious,” defining meritocracy as when government and society operate through objective measures of “quality and talent, open competition based on fair play, and ruthless disinterest in any other factor.”

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The bipartisan US-backed genocide in Gaza exposed the corruption of the political system in the United States and the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party, which claims to represent working people. Rather than recognizing this fact and shifting its stances to better represent its voting base, the Democratic Party establishment is attacking candidates who run on progressive platforms and is setting the stage for another Republican victory.

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Elinor discuss another quarter of no “wage-price spiral”, plus the passage of massive NDIS cuts and gambling legislation through parliament.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 20 August 2026.

If this episode raised issues for you, you can call the National Gambling Helpline on 1800 858 858 for free, professional and confidential support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Or visit Gambling Help Online at www.gamblinghelponline.org.au.

If you or anyone you know needs help, you can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or online at www.lifeline.org.au.

More Fool Me: How the gas industry tricked Australia by Richard Denniss, the latest Vantage Point essay from Australia Institute Press, is available now. Use the code ‘FOOLME’ on a four-edition Vantage Point subscription to receive a free copy of Richard’s book, Econobabble.

Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute // @grogsgamut

Introduction

Because we use it every day, most people assume that they know how money works. The truth is that money is a strange invention: the way it works today is neither natural nor inevitable, but the product of particular choices that could have been made differently. Like other complex technical systems, the design of our monetary system has profound consequences for our politics and collective well-being.

In Against Money (2026, Chicago University Press), economists Josh W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev unpack misleading depictions of money, often found in the business press and introductory economics courses, which collapse the complex and deeply political story of money, credit, and debt into a simple narrative that obscures the laws and institutions that make up modern monetary systems. They argue that money is not a neutral ledger of real exchange values, but a powerful and malleable technology for coordinating the activities of market actors, making possible the complex economic coordination on which modern economies depend.

The American Mind Podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Groypers, Grifters, and the GOP: Florida’s Primary Election | The American Mind Podcast

Florida is conducting a primary election to pick Governor Ron DeSantis’s conservative successor. President Trump’s choice, Representative Byron Donalds, leads in the polls. Opposing him, political newcomer James Fishback leads a young, online centric and anti-Israel platform. Meanwhile, the Left coalition continues its reckoning with Woke, reordering to capture populist, pro-Gaza, and anticapitalist energy. Plus, backlash against Big Tech: data centers, Flock cameras, and more!

Everybody’s Home is calling on politicians to stop amplifying misleading claims that changes to investor tax breaks will push up rents, warning that the scare campaign risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The national housing campaign said changes to negative gearing arrangements, which will not change for existing landlords, should not be used to justify higher rents. Repeated claims that rents will inevitably rise are creating a permission structure for landlords to charge renters more.

The campaign was responding to cherry-picked figures and quotes from the National Australia Bank and Ray White property, which were both walked back.

Everybody’s Home spokesperson Maiy Azize said: “Politicians should not be misleading landlords and renters about these reforms.

“Existing landlords shouldn’t use investor tax break reform as an excuse to put up the rent. But every time politicians repeat the claim that rents will rise, or it gets reported as an inevitable consequence of reform, it creates an expectation that renters can be charged more.

“Rents were rising long before these reforms. They rose while negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount were fully in place. Renters have been told rents must rise when interest rates go up, and when they go down. Now they are being told rents must rise because tax breaks are being wound back.

Thirty-two Cubans died when American forces entered Caracas on January 3, 2026, to capture Nicolás Maduro. Cuba and Venezuela are more than a thousand miles apart. Why were Cubans dying in defense of Maduro? How did a small Caribbean island become so deeply invested in the survival of another country’s dictatorship?

To answer those questions, we have to go back nearly seven decades to a revolution that promised liberation but spent a lifetime exporting authoritarianism and reshaping the politics of an entire hemisphere.

From the moment he seized power in 1959, Fidel Castro knew that the survival of his revolution depended on its spreading throughout South America. In the years that followed, Havana trained Marxist guerrillas across Latin America, dispatched troops to fight Soviet proxy wars in Africa, supported Syria in its war against Israel, and embedded intelligence officers inside allied dictatorships. Today, it’s widely reported that Cuban nationals are fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine.

Dr Richard Denniss, Australia Institute co-CEO and author of More Fool Me: How the gas industry tricked Australia, joins Ebony Bennett to discuss why Australia gives away gas to multinational corporations and why similarly dud deals could happen with Big Tech and other industries if we don’t learn lessons from the past.

This episode was recorded on Tuesday 18 August.

More Fool Me: How the gas industry tricked Australia by Richard Denniss, the latest edition in the Vantage Point series, is available now.

Use the code ‘FOOLME’ on a four-edition Vantage Point subscription to receive a free copy of Richard’s book, Econobabble.

Guest: Richard Denniss, co-Chief Executive Officer, the Australia Institute // @richarddenniss

Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebonybennett

Show notes:

Someday this will be an obituary. Or rather, a son-of-a-bitchuary. But not yet.

It is considered rude to speak ill of the dead. But is it rude to speak ill of the undead? That is the question surrounding Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, missing since June and rumored to be deceased. His staff will not respond to inquiries.

When a Senator dies, the US government lowers the flag. On June 20, I passed a construction crane swinging above a flag swallowed by storm clouds, rendering its pole invisible. The flag floated in the fog: half there, half gone. This is how the US government is honoring its first Ghost Senator, Mitch McConnell.

This article is read by Eunice Wong. You can find her work at www.eunicewong.actor.

Text originally published August 17, 2026.

The Dead

 — Author: Chris Hedges — Monday 17th August 2026

More…

Here's Some Random Stuff Banned in 19th-Century Nashville

 — Author: Betsy Phillips — Monday 17th August 2026

Throwing long bullets, flying kites and other things the Nashville government didn't want us to do in 1850

More…

USS Lincoln exposes fundamental flaw at the heart of Australian defence policy

 — Organisation: The Australia Institute — Monday 17th August 2026

On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Angus Blackman discuss concerning reports about conditions on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, the impact of the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID, and the speculation over whether Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will seek the Democratic presidential nomination.

This episode was recorded Friday 14 August.

If you or anyone you know needs help, you can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or online at www.lifeline.org.au.

Get your tickets for the Melbourne launch of More Fool Me: how the gas industry tricked Australia by Richard Denniss at Cinema Nova in Melbourne on Tuesday 25 August.

Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis

Host: Angus Blackman, Executive Producer, the Australia Institute // @AngusRB

Show notes:

New Game, New Rules by Allan Behm, Australia Institute Press (August 2026)

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How Canadians Can Fight Back Against Alberta Separatism

 — Publication: Perspectives Journal — Monday 17th August 2026

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and the United Conservative Party government opened the barn door to calls for separation from the Canadian federation among their electoral base. While Premier Smith now claims that she is trying to close that door, the separatism horse has already bolted.

The separatist movement in Alberta leverages internal perceptions that Eastern Canada and the federal government do not respect or support Albertans. Western alienation has been a guiding cause for this frustration for decades – propelled by policies like the National Energy Program (which is still a major talking point with conservative Albertans today).

While separatism was not necessarily a major part of alienation sentiment at that time, it has since been emboldened by right-wing influences from the United States and Brexit. Unfortunately, the forces behind Alberta separatism have many allies in today’s UCP government.

Premier Smith called a referendum on several questions for October 19, 2026, including the question: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?”

More…

Making Americans Healthier Again

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Monday 17th August 2026

A little over a year ago, General Mills, maker of Trix and Lucky Charms, promised to pull synthetic dyes from all its U.S. cereals and school foods by the summer of 2026, and from its whole retail line by the end of 2027. Kraft Heinz made the same pledge days earlier, while Nestlé USA, Conagra, and Tyson followed with similar commitments.

Nobody forced them. They read the room.

The room had changed because of one man: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Secretary of Health and Human Services has transformed how Americans think and talk about health policy. For years, Washington rightly worried about access to affordable care, especially in troubled federal programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Kennedy took on a bigger task: making Americans healthier.

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Light touch regulation has failed, it’s time to break up the big four

 — Organisation: The Australia Institute — Monday 17th August 2026

In recent years, a series of scandals have exposed serious ethical and governance failures in the big four consulting and accounting firms.

These include PwC’s tax leaks scandal in 2023 and KPMG’s audit whistleblowing scandal this year.

“ Conflicts of interest are baked into the big four by virtue of their structure, engendering an exploitative and unethical culture,” said Josh Bornstein, Director of Corporate Regulation at The Australia Institute.

“A structural problem demands a structural solution. Breaking up the big four will dramatically reduce the incidence of conflicts of interest and misconduct.”

The submission to Treasury’s inquiry into the regulation of accounting, auditing, and consulting firms in Australia also argues that the big four are poorly regulated and should be governed to the same standard as corporations.

“The big consulting firms look and act like companies, albeit badly behaved companies. It’s time to tax and regulate them like companies”.

“ When big business is out of control and causing harm, voters expect their politicians to step in and say enough is enough, not just work around the edges.

“Breaking up the big consulting firms is the only way to restore trust and prevent future scandals.”

More…