Along The Cosmic Shoreline.

$8 billion a day.

“It’s the first thing I read every day.” — Brigadier General (retired) Russ Howard, founding director of The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

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1. The United States borrowed $1.1 trillion in the first five months of fiscal year 2025, including $307 billion in February, according to the latest Monthly Treasury Statement from the Treasury Department. Roughly speaking, that’s $8 billion a day. (Source: fiscal.treasury.gov)

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2. Senate Republicans are planning tax reductions that go well beyond an extension of President Trump’s expiring tax cuts. On the menu: Reviving lapsed business tax breaks, expanding the child tax credit, loosening the cap on the state and local tax deduction and incorporating Trump’s ideas for eliminating taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security benefits, said Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R., Idaho), who ticked through a list of ideas Wednesday that could easily top $5 trillion or more over a decade. On top of that, Crapo said, senators have submitted about 200 additional tax ideas to him, such as an expanded low-income housing tax credit, changes to the Opportunity Zone program for investments in low-income areas and further cuts in the estate tax. The final bill won’t include all of those proposals, Crapo said, but some will get in. (Source: wsj.com)

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3. D-Wave is the latest quantum computing company to say it has achieved “quantum supremacy,” better known as the ability to solve a problem with a quantum computer that can’t be done with a traditional computer. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company published a paper in the scientific journal Science on Wednesday, which outlines how it accomplished a materials simulation that it says is beyond the reach of today’s traditional, or classical computers, which store and process information using binary digits, or bits. “This, in some sense, is the holy grail for quantum computing,” said Alan Baratz, chief executive of D-Wave. The news marks the most recent salvo in the war among both tech giants and startups to establish quantum supremacy—and therefore the value of quantum computers—that has been going since at least 2019, when Google said it had achieved the milestone. (Source: wsj.com)