Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of November 29

This is the US's 770th mass shooting and the 28th school shooting in 2021 alone.

Update: Michigan shooting suspect’s parents charged with involuntary manslaughter

The gun was an early Christmas gift from his parents: a semiautomatic 9-millimeter Sig Sauer handgun. “My new beauty,” Ethan Crumbley, 15, called it.

The day after Thanksgiving, he and his father had gone together to a Michigan gun shop to buy it. He and his mother spent a day testing out the gun, which was stored unlocked in the parents’ bedroom. On Monday, when a teacher reported seeing their son searching online for ammunition, his mother did not seem alarmed.

“LOL I’m not mad at you,” Jennifer Crumbley texted her son. “You have to learn not to get caught.”

A day later, the authorities say the teenager fatally shot four classmates in the halls of Oxford High School in suburban Detroit, using the handgun his parents had bought for him.

On Friday, Karen D. McDonald, the Oakland County prosecutor, laid out those and other chilling details as she took the rare step of filing involuntary manslaughter charges against the accused gunman’s parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley.

Ms. McDonald said the Crumbleys were culpable in the year’s deadliest school shooting because they had allowed their son access to a handgun while ignoring glaring warnings that he was on the brink of violence.

The Economic Outlook: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Could there be imminent risks to the U.S. economy from too much federal debt?

We think the Federal Reserve will wait until at least 2023 to start increasing the fed funds rate. If realized, this should keep a firm lid on short-term federal borrowing costs.

But a continued rise in real interest rates, should it occur, would put increasing pressure on the federal budget, as both new debt and maturing debt that needed to be rolled over was financed at increasingly higher rates.

But if real rates kept rising over the long run, and particularly if higher real rates were not matched by higher real potential GDP growth, the negative impact on public finances would compound amid the long-term budget deficits that emanate from federal tax revenue growth not keeping up with spending on mandatory spending programs like Social Security and Medicare.

A swing of just one percentage point in real interest rates over this time horizon changes the debt-to-GDP ratio in 2050 by more than 50 percentage points, all else equal (Figure 8).

Rather than viewing the long-term fiscal outlook in the United States as a “wolf at the door” problem, we think of it as more of a “termites in the foundation” challenge that could put downward pressure on the potential growth of the U.S. economy if left unchecked over the long run. If public investment is curtailed or fiscal policy is kept tight during recessions due to high public debt levels, then there could be negative long-term repercussions on the U.S. economy.

in 2013, Ben Bernanke made comments regarding an end to QE that caused what’s now colloquially referred to as “the taper tantrum”. The U.S. 10-year yield jumped by over 1% in a matter of months. This is an even greater risk now, as the Fed is set to own a larger proportion of Treasuries and other segments of the market relative to that period.