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View All →Spain's Debate Over Taxes and Pension Funding
Spanish policymakers are divided between raising taxes to fund pensions and public services or cutting taxes at the cost of a smaller welfare state.
Germany's AfD Speakership and the Firewall's Fracture Point
When does refusing to cooperate with an extremist party become undemocratic itself, and when does cooperating with one become the first crack in the dam?
Superpower Brinkmanship: Trump's Iran Threats and the Limits of Deterrence
Can a superpower threaten preventive annihilation without making diplomacy and international law meaningless?
Japan's 3.5% GDP Defense Spending Proposal: Security and Fiscal Tradeoffs
Japan is weighing a proposal to raise defense spending to 3.5% of GDP alongside new land-acquisition powers near military sites — a shift with implications for regional security, government budgets, and property rights.
Fed Interest Rate Increase: Monetary Tightening in a Diverging Global Context
Central banks raising rates amid political pressure and cross-border policy divergence — the macroeconomic trade-offs of monetary tightening.
The Sanders–Casar ASI Prohibition Act: Hard Limits vs. Principles-Based Governance
The Sanders–Casar Bill proposes a permanent ban on superintelligent AI development and a frontier pause pending a new federal regulator — a direct counterpoint to the G20-endorsed Carolina Principles' light-touch approach. The episode examines what each framework would mean in practice and what is at stake in choosing between them.
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Articles
View All →Spain's Debate Over Taxes and Pension Funding
Spain is having an argument about tax rates while the thing that actually determines whether pensioners eat is a question nobody at the Pacto de Toledo wants to touch: who owns the risk of living longer than the system expected. Vox wants an 85 billion euro income tax cut. The government points to a spending rule it technically passed.
Germany's AfD Speakership and the Firewall's Fracture Point
Germany keeps fighting a war on one front while losing track of which front actually matters. That's the uncomfortable thesis that emerged from our roundtable on the AfD speakership controversy, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. The panic over Tobias Rausch's election as parliamentary president in Saxony-Anhalt treats the Brandmauer as a single wall under siege.
Superpower Brinkmanship: Trump's Iran Threats and the Limits of Deterrence
There is a particular kind of threat that destroys itself the moment it succeeds in sounding credible. "We will annihilate you" is not a bigger version of "we will punish you for crossing this line." It is a different speech act entirely, and the Iran crisis has become an accidental experiment in what happens when a superpower forgets the difference. Start with the paradox at the center of our discussion.
Japan's 3.5% GDP Defense Spending Proposal: Security and Fiscal Tradeoffs
No one is going to vote on whether Japan spends 3.5% of GDP on defense. That's not a prediction — it's already how the last decade worked. The 1% cap that Takeo Miki set in 1976 was never law, just a cabinet-level convention that felt permanent until the moment it wasn't.
Research
View All →Spain's Debate Over Taxes and Pension Funding
Spain's 2021-2023 pension reforms restored full inflation indexation and raised revenue (via the MEI, higher contribution ceilings, and solidarity surcharges) enough to technically satisfy the statutory spending rule, but AIReF, the IMF, and OECD warn this formal compliance masks deeper fiscal risk, with debt projected to hit 129% of GDP by 2050 and expenditure climbing from 12.7% to 16.1% of GDP. The core dispute isn't whether ageing costs will rise, but who absorbs them: progressives and unions want financing through wealth/capital/high-income taxes to preserve adequacy and address gender/precarity gaps, while market-oriented voices (BBVA, FEDEA, Instituto Juan de Mariana) warn that payroll-tax increases erode employment and defer rather than solve the problem. Notably, this synthesis leans heavily
Germany's AfD Speakership and the Firewall's Fracture Point
Germany's AfD election to a state parliament speakership exposes a firewall that is legally voluntary (not constitutional), empirically porous (holding in ~81% of local votes while already breached federally in January 2025), and increasingly contested even among democrats: critics on left and right converge in warning that blanket exclusion can disenfranchise voters and entrench AfD's outsider appeal, while defenders insist any procedural normalization hands an extremist-classified party leverage it would use against pluralism itself. Evidence is firmer on AfD's roots in regional alienation and status loss than on whether cordon-sanitaire strategies actually curb its growth long-term, and comparative Global South cases (India, Colombia, Botswana) suggest alternative "inclusion-as-accountability" models that German discourse largely ignores. Sourcing here skews heavily toward mainstream/institutional and left-structural analysis, with market-ori
Superpower Brinkmanship: Trump's Iran Threats and the Limits of Deterrence
Trump's "maximum pressure" and annihilation rhetoric toward Iran exemplifies the gap between deterrence (preventing action) and compellence (forcing policy reversal), with evidence suggesting the campaign accelerated Iran's uranium enrichment to near-weapons-grade (182kg at 60% purity) while devastating its civilian economy, rather than securing negotiated compliance. Legal scholars and human rights organizations across the political spectrum converge on a key distinction largely lost in the rhetoric: conditional, bounded threats may constitute lawful coercive diplomacy, but unconditional threats against civilian infrastructure risk violating proportionality requirements and collapsing the line between deterrence and collective punishment. Non-Western frameworks (Chinese structural restraint, Indian strategic autonomy, ASEAN normative saturation) offer alternative models emphasizing institutional legit