As the clock ticks toward a possible default on the national debt, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (RCalif.) and top Democrats in Washingtonas well as media allies on both sidesare locked in a staring contest over who can take the matter less seriously.
The latest development in this slow-motion train wreck was a speech McCarthy delivered Monday from the New York Stock Exchange. “Debt limit negotiations are an opportunity to examine our nation’s finances,” he said, stressing that a bill to raise the nation’s debt limit would only get through the House if it was pared with spending cuts. The House will vote on such a bill within “the coming weeks,” McCarthy promised.
So far, so good. A debt default would be an economic catastrophe for the country and should be averted at all costsbut McCarthy is right that this is a good opportunity to examine America’s out-of-control borrowing habit. Raising the debt ceiling doesn’t authorize more borrowing. It merely gives the Treasury permission to borrow funds to pay for what Congress has previously agreed to spend. But it is the moment when past congressional budgeting decisions come home to roostthe equivalent of seeing your credit card statement after a blowout vacation that you couldn’t afford. You still have to pay the bills, but it should be a wake-up call.
But while McCarthy is saying some of the right things about this situation, he still doesn’t seem to have much of a plan for what to do. Monday’s speech was devoid of specifics beyond a promise to cut spending back to last year’s levelssomething he’s been proposing since January, just weeks after the passage of a year-end omnibus bill that hiked spending across the boardand some rather vague promises about tightening work requirements for welfare programs.
Notably absent from Monday’s speech was any promise about balancing the budget in 10 years, something that had been part of the House GOP’s earlier list of demands for the debt ceiling negotiations. AsReason has previously noted, it’s pretty much impossible to make the budget balance in a decade without making serious alternations to entitlement programs including Social Security and Medicare, and McCarthy has promised not to touch those as part of the debt ceiling package.
Importantly, it remains unclear whether even this narrower list of prospective ideas can pass the GOP-controlled House. Asked in an interview on CNBC just moments after his New York speech ended, McCarthy refused to give a straight answer about whether he had enough votes for this still-murky debt ceiling package.
As Democrats were quick to point out, McCarthy’s “plan” is little more than a series of starting points for negotiations. “What we got today was not a plan,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (DN.Y.) told NBC News after McCarthy’s speech. “It was a recycled pile of the same things he’s been saying for months.”
But, well, Democrats are just recycling the same things they’ve been saying for months too. The White House has been steadfast in refusing to negotiate with House Republicans until McCarthy presents a full-fledged budget proposal like the one President Joe Biden presented on March 9. “I don’t know what we’re negotiating if I don’t know what they want, what they’re going to do,” Biden reiterated to reporters over the weekend.
This is an unserious approach too. Both McCarthy and Biden (and everyone else involved) are well aware of why Democrats want to see a full Republican budget plan before they start negotiatingand it has very little to do with the debt ceiling. Instead, Democrats will pick apart the proposal to score political points by criticizing whatever spending cuts the House GOP outlines.
Indeed, Democrats and their allies are already eager to demagogue the bare bones of what McCarthy has outlined. Liberal Substacker Matt Yglesias says it is “irresponsible for Kevin McCarthy to run around threatening to blow up the global economy in order to snatch poor people’s health care away.” At Talking Points Memo,David Kurtz is already decrying the “draconian spending cuts” that McCarthy has proposed. That’s insane, because McCarthy’s so-called plan merely calls for rolling back federal spending to the level it was at in 2022a whole four months ago.
Here’s the really crazy thing: Even if Congress did somehow manage to hold the discretionary spending level next year, overall spending would still increase. That’s because the $1.7 trillion discretionary budget is only a fraction of federal spending. Other itemslike the so-called mandatory spending on entitlements like Social Security and Medicare as well as the rapidlyincreasinginterest costsconnected to the $31 trillion national debtwill continue to grow and drive federal deficits higher.
The crux of this problem is two-fold. First, Republicans have spent the better part of the past decade completely ignoring fiscal policywhile in many cases actively chasing out members who did care about this stuff. As a result, the GOP has very little institutional sense of what a solidly conservative federal budget would actually look like. Is there any spending plan that would get the support of all 222 Republican members right now? McCarthy doesn’t seem to know.
Second, Democrats have demonstrated an utter unwillingness to acknowledge that America has a serious borrowing problem, which must be the starting point for any negotiation about the debt ceiling regardless of what other policies may or may not end up being part of the final package. They don’t need to see a full budget proposal to acknowledge things like the Congressional Budget Office’s forecast that says the federal government is on track to spend $10.5 trillion on interest payments in the next decadeand more if interest rates remain higher than expected.
Why should Republicans put forth a budget plan when they know in advance that Democrats only want to use it to paint the GOP as a party of benefit-cutting skinflints? Why should Democrats negotiate in good faith when they know quite well that Republicans only care about fiscal responsibility when a Dem is in the White House? Neither side has much to gain from doing what the other wants, so no one moves.
But the impasse created by years of poor, myopic decision making in Washington is pushing the federal government ever closer to a dangerous cliff. McCarthy and Biden need to get serious about this, and soon.
A survivor of the October 7 attacks has died, two years after his girlfriend was shot dead by Hamas gunmen at Nova Festival.
Roei Shalev, 29, has been found dead shortly after the second anniversary of the death of his 27-year-old girlfriend Mapal Adam, who was killed by Hamas gunmen when they attacked Nova Festival.
The couple had been dancing with their friend Hilly Solomon, 26, on 7 October 2023 when the sound of rocket fire drowned out the music, causing them to flee the festival grounds in their car.
As Hamas fighters closed in from all directions, the trio hid under a car, but they were spotted by gunmen and shot several times.
Image: Roei Shalev and Mapal Adam. Pic: Instagram/@roeishalev
Mr Shalev said he waited seven “agonising” hours with two bullets in his back – with his girlfriend and his friend lying dead beside him – until the Israeli army came.
A week later, his mother took her own life.
“In just one week, I lost three of the most important women to me in the world,” Mr Shalev wrote on a fundraising page for festival survivors and their families.
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“That day was the darkest I’ve ever known. In the months that followed, I struggled to cope. Flashbacks and anxiety consumed me, and sleep became a distant memory,” he added.
Now, two years after the horrifying attack, Mr Shalev was found dead in a burning car near Poleg Beach in Netanya, Israel.
Police have opened an investigation, Israeli media reports.
Shortly before his body was found, Mr Shalev had posted a note on his Instagram account, saying he “can’t go on anymore”.
“I’ve never felt such deep and burning pain and suffering in my life. It’s eating me up inside,” Mr Shavel wrote.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
EVs are great, and can unlock more transportation convenience with the ease of charging at home. But for apartment-dwellers, this can be a complicated conversation. So a nonprofit called Forth is here to help, through its Charge at Home program.
One of the main benefits of an electric vehicle is in the convenience of owning and charging the car in the place it spends most of its time. Instead of having to go out of your way to fuel it, you just park it at home, in the same place it spends at least 8 hours a day, and you leave the house every day with a full charge.
But this benefit only applies to those with a consistent parking space which they can easily install charging at. When talking about owners who live in apartment buildings, it can sometimes get more complicated.
While certain states have passed “right to charge” laws to give apartment-dwellers a solution for home charging, apartment charging is nevertheless a bit of a patchwork solution so far.
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And as a result of this, EV ownership among apartment renters lags behind that of single-family homeowners. It’s clear that apartments are holding back people from buying EVs, and that’s bad – lots of people live in apartments, and the gas those cars use pollutes the air just as much as any other.
Certain areas where EVs have hit a point of critical mass (namely, the large California cities) have pretty good EV ownership among renters, but it could still be better. And residents are clamoring more and more for easy EV charging in apartment communities.
So, Forth, a nonprofit advocating for equitable access to clean transportation, set up a program called Charge at Home, which is meant to connect renters, apartment building owners or other decisionmakers with resources to help install chargers at multifamily properties.
The site lets you select your situation – a resident or a decisionmaker for a new or existing multifamily development – and then gives you access to tools for your specific situation, whether you be a resident and developer.
There are a lot of considerations for each of these projects, so it can be helpful to have someone with experience to help you go over it all. Personally, when talking to friends about getting an EV, charging considerations are usually the thing that takes up the bulk of the conversation.
So if the toolkits are still too daunting for you, Charge at Home is offering free charging consultations for multifamily developers, owners, property managers and HOAs.
The charging consultations will last through at least April 2026 – but it wouldn’t hurt to get your requests in soon. Forth may still offer consultations afterwards, but it all depends on funding availability (the program was previously funded by the Department of Energy, which has taken a turn). Regardless, the website will remain up for people to submit questions and find information, whether or not free consultations stick around.
But at the very least, as Forth points out, whether a multifamily development is interested in having EV charging at this moment or not, any developer should think about having the infrastructure, conduit and capacity ready to go for future install of EV chargers, and should consider the needs of current residents who are likely already considering EVs today.
It’s going to be necessary to install this capacity at some point, and doing so earlier can help save money down the line, make your development more attractive to renters today, and allow more renters to make the switch to cleaner transportation which helps air quality and to reduce climate change, both of which harm everyone on the planet.
Head on over to Forth’s Charge at Home site to get access to all the above resources – and to sign up for a consultation before the end of April if you’re a multifamily developer, owner, property manager or HOA.
Update: This article has been updated to account for an extension in program availability.
Electrek’s Take
I’ve long said that the only real problem with EVs is the problem of access to consistent charging for people who don’t have their own garage. Whether this be apartment-dwellers, street-parkers or the like, the electric car charging experience is often less-than-ideal outside of single family homes, at least in North America.
There are workarounds available, like charging at work, or using Superchargers in “third places” where you often spend time, but these still aren’t optimal. The best thing is just to charge your car wherever it spends most of its time, which is your home. When you do that, EVs outshine everything in convenience.
We’ve highlighted some projects before which showed how reasonable it can be to install charging for developments. Every project is going to have its complexities, but when you see projects like this condo complex that managed to install chargers for just $405 per parking spot, all of a sudden it becomes a no-brainer not to have EV charging.
But the fact is, there just aren’t enough apartment complexes out there which have EV charging. So if Forth’s Charge At Home program can help residents or landlords with that, it can go a long way towards solving the only real problem with EVs. Click here to check it out.
The 30% federal solar tax credit is ending this year. If you’ve ever considered going solar, now’s the time to act. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
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The 38-year-old writer lost 70% of his clients to chatbots in two years.
His is one of 40 job roles that AI is fast replacing, according to conversations the Money team had with industry experts, researchers, and affected workers.
“It’s a betrayal,” says Turner, who earned six figures as a freelancer before the rise of generative AI.
“You’ve put your heart and soul into it for so long, and then you get replaced by a machine.”
He adds: “You always think ‘it’s never going to happen to me’.”
Image: Joe Turner
Around 85% of the tasks involved in Turner’s job could be performed by AI, according to research published by Microsoft in July that has gone largely unnoticed.
The tech giant’s analysis of 200,000 conversations with its Co-Pilot chatbot concluded it could complete at least 90% of the work carried out by historians and coders, 80% of salespeople and journalists, and 75% of DJs and data scientists.
Also in the top 40 most exposed jobs were customer service assistants (72%), financial advisers (69%) and product promoters (62%). Search the table below to see how your role fares…
Speaking to the Money team, senior Microsoft researcher Kiran Tomlinson insists the study “explores which job categories can productively use AI chatbots, not take away or replace jobs”.
Turner for one doesn’t buy this. “That’s what they want to market it as,” he says.
Experts we spoke with were just as sceptical of Microsoft’s optimism.
“If you were to look at these jobs in three to five years, there’s a very good chance they’ve been replaced entirely,” says an AI consultant with more than a decade of experience deploying the tech in nearly 40 companies.
“Except in areas where they are either relationship-driven or very judgmental,” they add, speaking on condition of anonymity due to their commercial relationships with a range of SMEs, multibillion-pound funds and public bodies.
“These types of jobs are by nature most likely to be replaced entirely by the tool,” agrees AI researcher Xinrong Zhu, an assistant professor at Imperial College London.
“We’re living in a world where we’re witnessing a very important turning point.”
Image: Xinrong Zhu
It’s a verdict echoing job cuts announced by major companies over the summer.
Buy now, pay later firm Klarna shrunk its headcount by 40% due to investments in AI and a hiring freeze, while boasting its chatbot was doing the work of 700 employees.
Microsoft itself said it was laying off 15,000 employees while investing £69bn in data centres to train AI models and reportedly using AI to save $500m in its call centres.
Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said he expected to “reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively”.
But don’t take this at face value, says the AI consultant. Just because AI will take jobs doesn’t mean it can right now: “I wouldn’t say AI is in a position that you can then generate layoffs immediately: What you tend to see in most businesses is hiring freezes.”
The UK hasn’t had a sharp decline in postings for the jobs most threatened by AI, but they grew four times slower than the least threatened jobs between 2019 and 2024, according to PwC’s AI jobs barometer.
“AI is being used as an excuse,” the consultant says.
“There’s a load of macroeconomic effects that are actually causing [job cuts].”
It’s the Money blog’s usual suspects: Increases to employer national insurance, the cost of hiring and the cost of energy – not an AI takeover.
But, they say, “that’s not to say it won’t happen next year.”
Some 78% of global businesses anticipate increasing their overall AI spending this fiscal year, a Deloitte survey found.
Approximately 40% of employers expect to reduce their workforce where AI can automate tasks, according to a World Economic Forum survey.
An email that changed everything
Freelancers may, then, be the canary in the coal mine.
Demand for gigs related to writing and coding fell by 21% within eight months of the release of ChatGPT, according to a study conducted last year by Zhu.
“The magnitude really surprised us,” she says.
It wouldn’t have surprised Turner.
A few months earlier, in December 2023, he received an email from a website where he’d worked for a decade.
“Do you ever use AI?” it read. “No,” he replied.
That was the last time he heard from them. Overnight, £30,000 was wiped from his annual income.
“I went on their website and I realised they had started using AI instead of me,” he says.
One by one, most of his other clients followed suit.
“It was just a complete desert,” he says of the job landscape.
If you listen to the heads of some leading AI companies, you’d be forgiven for thinking this desert is just one apocalyptic vista at the end of the working world as we know it.
Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, has warned AI could “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs”, while OpenAI boss Sam Altman said entire job categories would be “totally, totally gone”.
“They want to glorify the models,” says Dr Fabian Stephany, a Labour economist at the University of Oxford and fellow at Microsoft’s independent AI Economy Institute.
Impersonating a big tech boss, he continues: “‘Oh wow, look, if we can automate away 50,000 people, then that technology must be really tremendous – so you should be investing in our company!’
“I would advocate to have a bit of more of a cooled down, pragmatic approach.
“Think about it as a technology and look at how technology has been interacting with the labour market in the past.”
Image: Fabian Stephany
Inventions that revolutionised the workplace
Take Richard Arkwright’s invention of the Spinning Jenny in 1769, which churned out huge quantities of yarn to make cloth in some of the first factories at the start of the industrial revolution.
While putting home weavers out of a job, it increased the need for mill workers hundreds of times over, says Stephany.
Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line in 1913 had a similar impact when it reduced the time taken to make a car from 12.5 hours to 1.5 hours.
Speed lowered production costs and forecourt prices, increasing demand, sales and the number of staff hired to fulfil them.
For the same reason, the invention of the ATM in 1967 led to more bank teller jobs despite automating one of their key functions – something Microsoft was keen to point out.
“Our research shows that AI supports many tasks, particularly those involving research, writing and communication, but does not indicate it can fully perform any single occupation,” Microsoft’s Tomlinson says.
Indeed, the study shows 40 jobs where AI can perform just 10% or fewer tasks.
Tradespeople feature heavily, like painter-decorators (4%), cleaners (3%) and roofers (2%).
Surgical assistants (3%), ship engineers (5%) and nursing assistants (7%) also make the list.
But history also includes a list of the losers of technological innovation.
Replacing horses with tractors wiped 3.4 billion man hours from American farmwork annually by 1960, according to research by economic historian Professor Alan Olmstead.
Spare a thought, too, for the pinsetters once responsible for stacking bowling alleys, who were more or less eliminated by the Automatic Pinspotter unveiled in 1946.
Quantity does not mean quality, either: Arkwright’s millers faced exhausting and repetitive 13-hour shifts in extreme noise, heat and dust.
How fulfilling would working with an AI be?
“Sterile and just not interesting, uniform and bleak and surface-level and hollow” is how Turner described its work after trying AI at the request of a client.
“Cars were a solution – a car was a horse that never got tired. But if you look at AI the same way, it’s basically saying: ‘There aren’t enough rubbish books out there, we need to make more.'”
More human work, not less?
That’s not what it’s for, though, says the AI consultant.
“I don’t see an AI right now coming up with wonderful ideas for creative writing authors,” they say.
But what it’s good at is taking an author’s idea and making a first draft extremely quickly, they explain.
“Now, does that mean we have fewer authors or does that mean we have more?”
The consultant’s optimism comes from seeing AI create extra human work at some of the companies that hired them.
A landscaping firm used ChatGPT to generate personalised services to upsell to existing customers.
At a pension provider with 350,000 scheme members, AI saved “literally thousands of hours” by scanning millions of notes, PDF documents and email chains for spousal support agreements.
That might seem like work stolen from a law firm at first glance, but it likely wouldn’t have been undertaken at all without AI due to the extreme cost of manual labour, says the consultant.
The cost of starting a digital business has also shrunk dramatically, he adds, if you use AI to organise a website, workflow, marketing and employment contracts.
“You end up in a world where you could have thousands more small start-ups because the cost of failure is so much lower.”
Image: Pic: iStock
The ‘losers of technological change’
Such a positive attitude would do little to convince veteran audio producer Christian Allen, who has lost gigs worth £7,000 to AI in the past year.
“Hasn’t anyone seen Terminator, for Christ’s sake?” says Allen, 53, whose work over the past two decades has been played on major radio stations like Classic FM and Heart FM.
“I think it could very easily take over.”
AI started by depleting requests for voiceovers in company training videos, but Allen recently lost a potential radio client who instead bought the first AI advert he’s ever heard that’s good enough for broadcast.
“It was scarily good,” says Allen, who lives near Birmingham. “No one would know.”
The cost to the client? £11.99. Voice actors would expect £1,000.
“There’s no way anybody can compete.”
Image: Pic: iStock
Shifting sands forming another job desert?
Not according to Oxford’s Labour economist Fabian Stephany, who was keen to “challenge the dystopian narrative”.
“It is very rare for a new technology to completely replace an entire profession,” says Stephany.
The only exceptions are jobs defined by a single task without any complexity, like bowling alley pinsetters or the translators at the top of Microsoft’s table, he says.
There’s complexity in Allen’s job, like creating video and TV soundtracks and mixing audio, but he’s still nervous.
“The AI subscription can mix for you too, so that’s production houses everywhere – we’re no longer needed. That’s quite scary.”
He adds: “I won’t be doing this in 10 years’ time.”
Microsoft researcher Kiran Tomlinson says AI “may prove to be a useful tool for many occupations” and “the right balance lies in finding how to use the technology in a way that leverages its abilities while complementing human strengths and accounting for people’s preferences”.
In January, Sir Keir Starmer said there was “barely an aspect of our society that will remain untouched” by AI in the coming years.
The technology is mentioned at least 126 times in the government’s industrial strategy for the tech sector, focusing heavily on its potential benefits.
Insufficient attention is being paid to its disruption, says Zhu. Why is Microsoft publishing reports on job exposure, but not the government? Where is the guidance on how employers and employees should adapt?
“The government should play some important role here, and they’re not,” she says.
Recalling how laid-off steelworkers were left to fend for themselves in the 20th century, Stephany warns it is “crucial to not make the mistakes of the past again”.
Allen couldn’t agree more: “All jobs under threat of AI need to be protected. Because otherwise, how the hell do people earn money?”
The government says it is putting people “at the heart” of its AI plans.
“That includes partnerships with leading tech firms to help us deliver AI skills training to 7.5 million workers, and initiatives to bring digital skills and AI learning into classrooms and communities,” a spokesperson says.
“This will provide training to people of all ages and backgrounds and is backed by £187m.”
They say “thousands of jobs” will be created by AI Growth Zones, areas earmarked for AI data centres where the state will support big tech companies with access to power and planning.
Image: Keir Starmer announces the TechFirst programme teaching school pupils AI in June. Pic: PA
What can you do for yourself?
Workers should be concerned if they’re not trying to use AI, says the consultant.
CVs with AI skills have so far been consistently favoured by a group of 2,000 recruiters observed by Fabian Stephany in an ongoing study.
“If a worker is willing to invest in their skill set, in developing their profile, they should not be worried at all,” they say.
Almost half (45%) of global employers consider AI competency to be a core skill, according to the World Economic Forum.
LinkedIn data shows AI-related skills on member profiles rose 65% year-on-year in 2024.
Job postings on Indeed.com containing AI terms have risen by 170% since the end of June 2023 – albeit from a low starting point (1.7% to 4.6% by 31 August).
“If you’re willing to learn skills that allow you to integrate AI into the job that you’re currently doing, you will probably not only be doing fine, but you might actually have a big career boost ahead of you,” Stephany adds.
In a separate study of 10 million job vacancies in the UK, he found jobs asking for AI skills paid 23% more – a salary boost greater than that expected from a master’s degree (20%).
The best starting point is creating a free account with AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, says the AI consultant.
“Log into one of them, provide it a pretty detailed description of who you are, what you do day-to-day, both in your job and potentially in your personal life, and ask it how it can help.
“Right now, that can mean that you do your job better, which gets you promoted.”
Or maybe not.
In the past few months, writer Joe Turner has seen some clients make a sheepish return.
“I see an influx of new jobs coming in and people are now requesting no AI content at all,” he says.
Clients have found its hollow tropes and generic mannerisms carry the unmistakable mark of a “soulless machine”.
“It’s called AI, but it’s not artificial intelligence. It’s just a database of words with reasoning models,” he concludes.
“It puts the words in the right order, but at the end of the day, it means nothing.”