Today's line — the budget fightWe go where the math goes
The fight over which programs to cut is a fight over the small money.
By mid-morning the country has agreed what this week means, and the agreement is usually too tidy. Read it to the last line and the proportions invert.
Washington now pays more to service its debt than it spends on the entire military. Interest crossed defense in 2024, and in 2025 it went past a trillion dollars for the first time in the country's history.
So the argument over which programs get trimmed is an argument over the small money. The biggest bill in the budget is the interest itself — and the easy way to shrink it, cheap money while prices keep rising, comes out of your savings account rather than theirs.
National defense — every branch, base and program$916B
Net interest on the debt$1.0T
One dollar in every eight the federal government spent last year went to interest. Not a program. Not a war. Rent on money already borrowed.
✓ Sourced. CBO Monthly Budget Review, FY2025 final. Corporate receipts, FY2024 Treasury. Same figures both parties are quoting.
The move
Same numbers the whole country has. Arranged until the story changes shape.
This isn't a hot take operation. It's arithmetic, done in public, on the story everyone has already finished thinking about.
01 — The tidy agreement
Everyone knows what it means by mid-morning
That consensus arrives fast, travels further than the facts do, and is usually a little too neat to survive contact with the last paragraph. The moment the country agrees is the moment we start reading.
02 — The line that doesn't fit
The comparison, or the buried number
Sometimes the figure everyone fears is a tenth of the one sitting right next to it. Sometimes the winner and the loser turn out to be the same people, twice. Not opinion — the arithmetic, shown, so you can check it.
03 — No party owns it
It calls its own side, at the same volume
Right-of-center instinct, independent spine. When our side is running the easy story, you'll read it here first, and it'll be said to your face rather than muttered. That's the whole value of the thing.
The chart that reset the story
In 2024 the interest passed the military. Then it passed a trillion.
For most of living memory, defense was the big scary line and interest was a footnote. Those two lines crossed, and almost nobody changed the way they argue about the budget.
Net interest vs. national defense
National defenseNet interest
What changed. Not the borrowing alone — the price of it. Rates went from near zero to the highest in two decades, and every maturing bill had to be rolled over at the new price. The debt didn't have to grow for the bill to explode. It just had to be refinanced.
Why it matters to you. Interest is the one line that can't be legislated away, cut in committee, or waived. It has no constituency to defend it and no lobby to protect it, because it isn't a program. It's rent.
✓ Sourced. Net interest: Treasury Monthly Statement and CBO Monthly Budget Review (FY2025 final — net interest surpassed $1 trillion for the first time). National defense: budget function 050 outlays, FY2025 $916B. Figures 2015–2019 are OMB historical tables and should be re-checked against the current release before publication.
Guess first
Three questions. Most people miss at least one.
Guessing before you see the answer is the point. The gap between what you assumed and what the number says is the whole newsletter, in miniature.
Question 1 of 3
Which is bigger?
Federal outlays, most recent full fiscal year.
The interest. And it isn't close any more.
National defense$916B
Net interest on the debt$1.0T
Most people pick defense, because defense is the thing anyone ever argues about. Interest crossed it in 2024 and went past a trillion in 2025 — the first time in the country's history.
✓ CBO Monthly Budget Review, FY2025 final
Which is bigger?
Fiscal year 2024, the last year with complete figures on both sides.
The interest — by two thirds again.
All corporate income tax collected$530B
Net interest on the debt$882B
We pay more to lenders than we collect from every corporation in the country combined. That comparison flatters neither party, which is probably why neither one makes it.
✓ Treasury Monthly Statement, FY2024
Which is bigger?
Fiscal year 2024. This one has a twist in it.
The deficit — but look at the ratio.
The federal deficit$1.83T
Net interest on the debt$882B
Interest alone was roughly half the deficit. Put another way: nearly half of what the country borrowed last year, it borrowed in order to pay for borrowing. That is the sentence the whole budget argument is missing.
It answers to no party. That costs something, and it's worth it.
Plenty of outlets will tell you what you already think, in a slightly angrier voice. The arithmetic doesn't care who's in the White House, and neither does this.
When the left runs the easy story
"It pays for itself" is doing a lot of work in that sentence
A program can be worth funding and still cost what it costs. The scoring window is doing the arguing, not the policy.
When the right runs it
The deficit hawk who only flies when the other team is in office
Both parties have added to this. The chart doesn't have an asterisk for the years our side ran it, and neither will we.
When both do
The winner and the loser turn out to be the same people. Twice.
A tariff that protects the plant and raises the price of everything made inside it. Both sides claim the first half and skip the second.
Right-of-center instinct, independent spine. When our own side is running the easy story, you'll read it here — and it will be said to your face.
Corrections run in full, at the top, in the next issue — never quietly edited into the archive. The standards we hold ourselves to are written down and public.
Four moves, and the fourth is the one nobody else makes.
Not So FastNo. 412
The small money
The tidy version
By ten this morning it was settled: this is a spending fight, one side wants cuts, the other side wants them somewhere else, and the number in every headline is the same one — $61 billion.
The line that doesn't fit
Nobody put that figure next to the one directly above it in the same table. Here they are together:
The cuts under debate$61B
National defense, all of it$916B
Net interest on the debt$1,000B+
The arithmetic
The entire fight is six per cent of the interest bill. If both sides got everything they wanted and the cuts held for a decade, the savings would be swallowed by a single percentage point of movement in rates.
That isn't an argument for or against the cuts. It's the scale of the thing everyone spent the week shouting about.
Who it actually lands on
The cheapest way out of an interest bill is cheap money while prices keep rising. That works beautifully for anyone holding a large fixed-rate debt — chiefly the government.
It works badly for anyone holding cash. Which is to say: the saver pays. Our side has been quieter about that than it should be.
Not so fast.
1
Start where the country already landed
Not with our opinion. With the consensus, stated fairly and at full strength — because a version you've bent to make easy to knock down isn't worth knocking down.
2
Put the number next to the number
The signature move. Two figures from the same table that nobody thought to print in the same paragraph. This is where the story changes shape.
3
Show the arithmetic, don't assert it
Divide it out on the page so you can check it. If the sum is wrong you should be able to catch us without leaving the email.
4
Say who it lands on — including us
Every arrangement has a winner and a payer. Naming the payer is where most commentary stops short, usually right before it would have to say something inconvenient about its own team.
Hover or tap a note to see the part of the issue it's describing.
The longer reads
When the argument needs more than a paragraph.
The pieces worth sitting down for. Every figure sourced, every division shown.
A read that takes the story everyone has already agreed on and turns it over — usually with a comparison or a buried figure that changes the shape of it. Not a hot take, and not a link roundup. Arithmetic, done in public, on the thing you already read about this morning.
Is this a conservative newsletter?
The instinct is right-of-center and there's no point pretending otherwise. The spine is independent, which is a different thing entirely.
In practice that means it goes where the argument goes. When the right is running an easy story — and it does — that gets said here at the same volume as when the left does. If you want a publication that only ever aims one direction, there are hundreds, and they're cheaper to produce.
Where do the numbers come from?
Primary sources wherever they exist: the Treasury's Monthly Statement, CBO's Monthly Budget Review and baseline projections, OMB historical tables, BLS and BEA releases. Every figure carries its source in the issue, and the arithmetic is shown on the page rather than asserted.
If a number comes from a think tank or an advocacy shop rather than a primary source, that gets labelled too — including when they're on our side.
What happens when you get something wrong?
It runs at the top of the next issue, in full, stated plainly, with what the correct figure is and how the error happened. Nothing gets quietly edited in the archive to make the record look better than it was. The editorial standards spell out exactly how that works.
Isn't "interest is bigger than defense" just a talking point?
It's a talking point that happens to be true, which is the most useful kind. Net interest surpassed national defense outlays in fiscal 2024 and passed a trillion dollars in fiscal 2025 — both from CBO and Treasury, both checkable in an afternoon.
What it isn't is a conclusion. It doesn't tell you whether to cut, tax, grow, or inflate your way out. It tells you that the argument currently being had is not the argument the numbers are having. That's the whole point of the comparison.
Why fiscal years instead of calendar years?
Because the federal government keeps its books that way — the fiscal year runs October through September. Mixing calendar and fiscal figures is one of the most common ways a budget comparison goes quietly wrong, so everything here is labelled with which one it is.
Do you take advertising? Do you sell anything?
The read is free. Some issues carry an ad, and it's labelled as an ad. Nobody buys coverage, nobody sees an issue before it goes out, and no advertiser has ever been given a heads-up about a piece that mentions them. If that ever changes you'll be told, not left to notice.
What happens to my email address?
It goes into the mailing platform and nowhere else. Never sold, never rented, never traded to a campaign, a committee, or a list broker — which in this category is worth saying out loud. One click unsubscribes you for good.
Can I use your charts?
Yes, with attribution and a link. Quote a passage, republish a chart, argue with it in public. The underlying figures are all public data — the only thing that belongs to us is the arrangement, and the arrangement travels better than it hides.
Are the numbers on this page current?
Every figure carries its fiscal year and its source. Budget data revises, so if you're reading this a while after it was published, check the source line before you quote it at someone. We'd rather you caught us than trusted us.
Subscribe
The read that makes you sit up.
Free. It answers to no party. And when your own side is running the easy story, it'll say so to your face.
You're in.
The next one comes to this address. Check your inbox for a single confirmation — it's the only thing you'll get that isn't a read.
No spam, no list swaps, no campaign committee gets your address. What we do with it →
The biggest line in the budget is the one nobody is debating
8 min read · The longer reads
For most of the last forty years, the frightening number in the federal budget was defense. It was the one that got argued about on television, the one both parties could describe in a sentence, the one with a constituency and a lobby and a set of very well-paid people whose job was to defend it.
In fiscal 2024, a different line went past it. In fiscal 2025, that line went past a trillion dollars — the first time in the history of the country. And the argument about the budget carried on almost exactly as it had before.
Net interest on the debt, FY2025$1,000B+
National defense, all of it, FY2025$916B
The gap~$85B
Sources: CBO Monthly Budget Review, FY2025 final. National defense = budget function 050 outlays, $868B DoD plus $48B defense-related activity at other agencies.
What actually changed
Not the borrowing, or not only the borrowing. The price of it.
Federal debt is not a mortgage taken out once at a fixed rate in 1998. It is a rolling stock of bills, notes and bonds, constantly maturing and constantly being refinanced. When rates went from near zero to the highest level in two decades, every piece of that stock that came due had to be replaced at the new price.
Which means the interest bill can explode without the country borrowing an extra dollar. It only has to roll over what it already owes.
The debt didn't have to grow for the bill to detonate. It just had to be refinanced.
Net interest ran $345 billion in fiscal 2020. Four years later it was $882 billion. A year after that it was over a trillion. Nothing in that trajectory required a new program, a new war, or a new entitlement.
Why it doesn't get argued about
Because there is nothing to argue about, in the only sense Washington understands the word.
A program can be cut, means-tested, block-granted, sunset, or moved to a different committee. Interest can be done exactly none of those things. It is not authorized annually. It has no administrator to haul in front of a subcommittee. Nobody's district depends on it and nobody's donor benefits from a hearing about it.
It is, in the most literal sense, rent — the price of continuing to occupy a position you took out in the past. And rent does not negotiate.
So the fight goes on over the lines that can be fought over, which are the discretionary ones, which are the small ones. A typical appropriations skirmish moves tens of billions. The interest line moved more than a hundred billion in a single year without anyone voting on it.
The part that should bother you regardless of party
There are four ways out of an interest bill this size, and only four. Grow faster than the debt. Tax more. Spend less. Or make the money cheaper while prices rise, so the debt shrinks in real terms without anyone having to vote for anything.
The first is the one everybody says they want and nobody controls. The second and third are the ones that get argued about, at a scale roughly a tenth of the problem. The fourth is the one that requires no legislation, no floor vote and no press conference — and it is paid for, quietly, by anyone holding cash, a fixed pension, or a savings account.
Figures cited are from Treasury and CBO and carry the fiscal year they belong to. Budget data revises; check the source before you quote it at someone. Subscribe free →
Your money
Cheap money is a tax. You're the one paying it.
9 min read · The longer reads
There is a way to shrink a national debt that requires no spending cuts, no tax increases, no floor votes and no press conference. It has been used before, it worked, and almost nobody who benefits from it will describe it out loud.
Economists call it financial repression. What it means in practice: hold interest rates below the rate of inflation for long enough, and the real value of the debt erodes on its own.
The arithmetic, shown
Say you're holding $100,000 in savings earning 2 per cent, and prices are rising at 5 per cent.
Your balance after a year, nominal$102,000
What that buys, in last year's prices$97,143
What you actually lost$2,857
Illustrative. Your statement shows a gain of $2,000; your purchasing power fell by nearly $3,000.
No line item was cut. Nobody voted. Your statement even shows a gain. And somebody, on the other side of that ledger, is better off by roughly the amount you're worse off — because every debt is somebody's asset.
Now run the same arithmetic on a borrower holding $36 trillion at a fixed rate while prices rise 5 per cent. The relief is enormous, automatic, and entirely invisible in the budget documents.
This isn't a theory
It's roughly how the United States dealt with the debt it came out of the Second World War carrying. Federal debt stood at well over 100 per cent of GDP in 1946. By the mid-1970s it was down around a quarter of it.
Very little of that was paid off in the way a household pays off a loan. Growth did a great deal of the work. And a long stretch of interest rates held below inflation did much of the rest — which is to say a generation of savers and bondholders quietly absorbed it.
Every dollar of debt relief comes from somewhere. When it doesn't come from a tax or a cut, it comes from a saver.
Why nobody campaigns on it
Because it is the only fiscal policy in existence with no vote attached, and therefore no fingerprints.
A tax increase has a sponsor and a roll call. A spending cut has a constituency that shows up angry. Negative real returns have a mechanism so diffuse that the person paying can't name what happened to him. He knows only that things feel more expensive than they used to and that his savings don't stretch the way they did. He will typically blame something else, and he will usually be encouraged to.
It is also, in fairness, the least brutal option available. A country that inflates gently is not a country that defaults or slashes pensions overnight. That case is real and it deserves to be stated at full strength rather than sneered at.
Where our own side goes quiet
There is a habit on the right of treating loose money as a technical matter for the Fed while treating spending as the moral question. That is backwards, or at least badly incomplete.
A dollar of relief obtained by holding rates under inflation is a transfer, exactly like a tax is a transfer. It moves purchasing power from people holding cash to people holding debt. It happens to be highly convenient for whoever is running the government at the time — which is to say, at various points, for us.
If you believe the deficit is a moral problem, the mechanism that quietly deflates it at the expense of savers is a moral problem too. You don't get to be furious about one and technical about the other.
Not so fast.
Nothing here is investment advice — see the disclaimer. The illustration uses round numbers to show the mechanism, not to forecast a rate. Subscribe free →
Both sides claim it
The winner and the loser are the same people. Twice.
7 min read · The longer reads
Here is a story you have read a hundred times, told by both parties, in opposite directions, using the same facts.
A tariff goes on imported steel. The domestic mill that was losing orders stops losing them. Shifts come back. A town that had been quietly emptying out gets a year or two of breathing room. That is real, it is measurable, and anyone who waves it away has never watched a plant close.
That's where one side stops telling the story.
The second half
Steel is not mostly consumed by people. It is consumed by other manufacturers — the ones making appliances, farm equipment, cars, buildings, pipe. Their input cost rises. Some of that gets absorbed, some gets passed to the customer, and some shows up as an order that never gets placed and a hire that never happens.
The catch is that a great many of those downstream workers live in the same kind of town as the mill worker. Often the same town.
The man protected in the first paragraph is, in the fourth, paying more for the truck he needs for work.
That's where the other side stops telling it — usually right before it would have to concede that the first half happened at all.
Why both halves are true
Because a tariff isn't a policy that either works or doesn't. It is a transfer with a direction. It moves money from consumers and downstream producers toward protected upstream producers, and it charges a fee for the trip.
Whether that transfer is worth making is a genuine argument with serious people on both sides. There are real reasons a country might pay a premium to keep the capacity to make its own steel, and "the model says it's inefficient" is not a complete answer to a nation that would like to be able to build a ship.
But it is a transfer, and transfers have a payer. The dishonesty isn't in supporting tariffs or opposing them. It's in presenting one as a policy with only beneficiaries.
How to read the next one
Three questions, and they work on every version of this story regardless of who's telling it.
Who is upstream and who is downstream? Protection helps upstream and charges downstream, nearly always.
How many people are on each side? The protected group is usually smaller, more visible, and better organised. The paying group is usually larger, more scattered, and doesn't know it's paying.
Is anyone in both groups? Startlingly often, yes. That's when the winner and the loser are the same people, twice — and it's the case neither party will make, because it doesn't fit in a rally line.
Not so fast.
This is a piece about how to read the argument, not a verdict on tariffs. Both are available in abundance elsewhere. Subscribe free →
Our side, this time
When our own side runs the easy story
7 min read · The longer reads
If you want to know how seriously a party takes the deficit, don't read the platform. Check who holds the White House.
The pattern is not subtle and it does not belong to one side. Deficit concern rises sharply among the party out of power and falls just as sharply when that party takes over. It has done this reliably for decades, through administrations of both kinds, and the numbers underneath it barely notice the change in rhetoric.
The chart has no asterisk
Debt rose substantially under the last several presidents, of both parties. It rose through tax cuts and it rose through spending, it rose through wars and it rose through a pandemic, and the great majority of it was authorised with votes from people who would later describe the result as somebody else's doing.
You can argue about the shares. Reasonable people do, and the accounting genuinely is contested — you can attribute a tax cut's cost over ten years or over one, you can count pandemic aid as an emergency or as spending, and where you land changes the picture. What you cannot do is produce a version in which one team was fiscally serious for the whole period.
The line goes up under both. It has no asterisk for the years our side ran it, and neither will we.
The three moves to watch for on the right
Waste, fraud and abuse. Real, worth pursuing, and nowhere near the size of the problem. When the entire discretionary conversation is a rounding error against the interest line, "eliminate waste" is not a plan. It's a way of sounding serious about arithmetic without doing any.
Growth will handle it. Sometimes growth does handle it — the late 1990s happened. But "the tax cut pays for itself" is a claim with a number attached, and the number can be checked. When it's asserted rather than shown, that's a tell, and it's a tell no matter which party is doing the asserting.
The Fed is a technical matter. This one is the quietest and the most consequential. Loose money is a transfer from savers to debtors, and the largest debtor in the world is the federal government. A movement that says it speaks for people with savings accounts should have a great deal more to say about that than it does.
Why this belongs here
Because a publication that only ever points one direction is a publication you can predict, and you don't need to read things you can predict.
The instinct here is right-of-center and there's no use pretending otherwise. But the point of an independent spine is that it holds up under pressure from your own side, which is the only direction the pressure actually comes from. Anyone can be brave about the other team.
Not so fast.
If you think a specific claim here is wrong, send the figure and the source and it runs as a correction. How corrections work →
How to read a number
Four ways to read the same number, and why they disagree
8 min read · The longer reads
Take a single figure — net interest on the federal debt, now over a trillion dollars a year — and put it through four entirely honest treatments. You get four different stories. Nobody has lied in any of them.
This is the most useful thing you can learn about reading political numbers, because the choice of treatment is usually made before the argument starts, and it usually decides it.
1. Nominal
Over $1 trillion. The largest interest bill in the history of the United States, by a wide margin, and a record.
What it's good for: scale you can feel. Where it misleads: in an economy with any inflation and any growth, nominal figures set records constantly. The word "record" is doing almost no work. More on that here.
2. Inflation-adjusted
Convert to constant dollars and the increase is smaller, though still steep. A dollar in 2020 and a dollar in 2025 are not the same dollar, and comparing them without saying so is one of the most common ways a budget argument goes wrong.
What it's good for: comparing across time honestly. Where it misleads: the choice of deflator matters, and reasonable people pick different ones.
3. Share of GDP
Interest is running somewhere just over 3 per cent of GDP — around the record set back in 1991, which surprises almost everybody.
What it's good for: capacity. A big number in a bigger economy is a different problem from the same number in a smaller one. Where it misleads: it can make almost anything look manageable, and it's the favourite framing of whoever is currently defending the status quo — which, over a long enough period, is everybody.
4. Per household
Spread across roughly 132 million American households, a trillion dollars is on the order of $7,600 per household, per year — before a single program is funded.
What it's good for: making an abstraction land. Where it misleads: households don't pay equal shares of anything, and the figure implies a bill that nobody actually receives. It is the most emotionally powerful of the four and the least literally true.
What to do with this
Notice which one is being used, and ask what the other three would say.
When someone reaches for per-household, they want you alarmed. When someone reaches for share of GDP, they want you calm. When someone reaches for nominal and calls it a record, they want a headline. All four are honest and all four are chosen.
The number rarely lies. The denominator is where the argument is hiding.
Here, the practice is to give at least two, and to say which one is being leaned on. If a figure ever appears here in only one form and it matters, that's a fair thing to write in about.
Not so fast.
Household count from the Census Bureau; GDP share from CBO. Round numbers are round on purpose. Subscribe free →
How to read a number
Why "record high" almost always is
5 min read · The longer reads
Federal spending hits a record high. Corporate profits hit a record high. Consumer debt hits a record high. Tax receipts hit a record high.
All four of those headlines are true most years, and none of them tells you anything on its own.
The mechanism
An economy that grows a few per cent a year, with a couple of per cent of inflation on top, produces nominal aggregates that rise by something like five per cent annually. A series rising five per cent a year sets a record every single year, more or less by construction.
So "record high" in nominal dollars isn't news about the thing. It's news about arithmetic.
A figure growing 5% a year, starting at 100Year 1: 100
Year 5: 122
Year 10: 155
Number of record highs set10 of 10
Nothing unusual has happened in any of those years.
The three tests
When you meet a record high, ask three things before you feel anything about it.
Is it real or nominal? If nobody adjusted for inflation, a third of the story may just be prices.
Is it per person? A country with more people in it will set records in almost every total. Population growth is not a policy failure.
What is it a share of? Spending as a share of GDP, debt as a share of the economy, profit as a share of revenue. Shares are where genuine records live, and they're much rarer.
Apply those to any "record" headline and most of them deflate on contact. The ones that survive are the ones worth your attention — and there are some. Net interest as a share of GDP is near its 1991 record, and that one is a real record by a real measure.
Why this gets used
Not always cynically. Nominal figures are what the source documents report, they require no methodological choices, and nobody can accuse you of picking a convenient deflator.
But it's also the easiest true sentence available, and both parties reach for it in exactly the years it flatters them. Watch for the same outlet using nominal figures when it wants alarm and shares of GDP when it wants calm, in the same week, about different topics.
Not so fast.
A good general rule: if a figure has no denominator attached, somebody made a choice for you. Subscribe free →
How we work
Editorial standards & corrections
Last updated: 15 August 2026
A publication built on arithmetic is only worth reading if you can check it. These are the rules this one holds itself to, written down so you can hold us to them too.
Sourcing
Primary sources first: the Treasury's Monthly Statement, CBO's Monthly Budget Review and baseline projections, OMB historical tables, BLS and BEA releases, and the text of legislation rather than a summary of it.
Every figure carries the fiscal or calendar year it belongs to, and says which. Mixing the two is one of the most common ways a budget comparison goes quietly wrong.
When a figure comes from a think tank, an advocacy organisation or a trade body rather than a primary source, that is stated — including when the organisation is one we agree with.
Arithmetic is shown, not asserted. If a claim rests on a division, the division appears on the page so you can redo it.
Fairness
The consensus position is stated at full strength before it is argued with. A version bent to be easy to knock down isn't worth knocking down.
Where the underlying accounting is genuinely contested — the cost attribution of a tax cut, the classification of emergency spending — that is said, rather than the most convenient version being presented as settled.
The same standard applies in both directions. An easy story from the right gets the same treatment as an easy story from the left, at the same volume.
Corrections
Errors are corrected at the top of the next issue, in full, stating what was wrong, what the correct figure is, and how the mistake happened.
Archived issues are not quietly edited to make the record look better than it was. Where an archived piece is corrected, the correction is appended and dated, and the original text stays visible.
To report an error, write to editor@notsofastnews.com with the figure and, if you have it, the source. Corrections are not a favour you're doing us; they're the product working.
Independence
No political party, campaign, committee, PAC or candidate has any editorial input, advance sight of an issue, or financial relationship with this publication.
Advertising is labelled as advertising. Advertisers do not see issues before publication and are never given notice of coverage that mentions them.
Where a link earns a commission, that is disclosed in the issue containing it.
Any personal financial interest relevant to a piece is disclosed within that piece.
What we don't do
We don't run anonymous sourcing for figures that exist in public data. We don't republish a chart without checking the underlying series ourselves. We don't use "studies show" without saying which study. And we don't describe a projection as a fact — a CBO baseline is a projection under stated assumptions, and those assumptions get named.
Not So Fast publishes a free email newsletter at notsofastnews.com. This explains what is collected, why, and what you can ask to have done about it.
What is collected
Your email address, and any name you choose to provide, when you subscribe.
Email engagement data — whether an issue was opened, whether a link was clicked — collected by our email service provider.
Basic technical data from your visit to this site, such as approximate region and device type, in aggregate.
How it is used
To send you the newsletter, keep it out of spam folders, and understand which pieces are worth writing again. No advertising profile is built about you, and no attempt is made to identify you across other websites.
What is never done with it
Your address is not sold, rented, traded, or shared with any political party, campaign, committee, PAC, list broker, or data cooperative. In this category that is worth stating explicitly rather than leaving to inference. It is not appended to voter files and it is not matched against any external dataset.
Who processes it
Subscriptions are handled by our email service provider, which stores your address on our behalf under its own privacy terms. Site hosting is provided by Netlify.
Your choices
Every issue carries a one-click unsubscribe that works immediately. You may also ask to see what is held about you, correct it, or delete it entirely, by writing to editor@notsofastnews.com. Depending on where you live you may have additional rights under US state privacy laws, the GDPR or the UK GDPR; those requests are honoured regardless of where you are writing from.
Retention
Your address is kept while you are subscribed, and for a short period afterwards so that an unsubscribe stays honoured. Then it is deleted.
Children
This newsletter is intended for adults. Data is not knowingly collected from anyone under 16.
By using notsofastnews.com or subscribing to the newsletter, you agree to these terms. If you do not, please do not use the site.
What is provided
A free email newsletter of commentary and analysis, plus this website. It may be changed, paused, or discontinued at any time.
Commentary, not advice
Everything here is opinion and analysis. Nothing is financial, investment, tax, legal or accounting advice, and nothing here creates a professional relationship of any kind. See the Disclaimer.
Accuracy and revision
Figures are sourced and dated at the time of writing. Government budget data is routinely revised, and projections are projections. No warranty is given that any figure remains current, and you should check the cited source before relying on or republishing a number.
Your use of the site
Do not attempt to disrupt the site, scrape it at volume, or use it to send unsolicited email. Do not republish issues wholesale.
Quoting and reuse
Quoting a passage or reproducing a chart with clear attribution and a link is expressly permitted and encouraged. The underlying figures are public data; what belongs to us is the writing and the arrangement.
Third-party links and advertising
Issues may link elsewhere and may contain advertising or affiliate links, which are disclosed. No responsibility is taken for content on linked sites.
Liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, no liability is accepted for any loss arising from your use of the site or the newsletter, or from reliance on any figure or analysis published here. The service is provided "as is".
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of [STATE], United States. Publisher: confirm before launch.
Not So Fast publishes opinion, commentary and analysis of public policy and public data. It is journalism and argument, not professional advice of any kind.
Not financial or investment advice
Nothing published here is investment, financial, tax, retirement or legal advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, currency or asset. Discussion of interest rates, inflation, savings or debt is analysis of public policy, not guidance about your money. Decisions about your finances should be taken with a qualified adviser who knows your circumstances.
Figures, sources and revision
Figures are drawn from public sources and dated at the time of writing. Federal budget data is revised, sometimes substantially, and CBO baselines are projections under stated assumptions rather than forecasts of what will happen. Where a figure is a projection, that is said. Check the cited source before relying on any number published here.
Political independence
This publication is not affiliated with, endorsed by, funded by, or coordinated with any political party, campaign, candidate, political action committee, or advocacy organisation. Nothing published here is authorised by any candidate or candidate's committee. Views expressed are those of the author.
Advertising and affiliate disclosure
Some issues carry advertising, which is labelled. Some links may earn a commission at no additional cost to you, and are disclosed in the issue containing them. Payment never buys coverage, favourable or otherwise.
Corrections
Errors are corrected at the top of the following issue and never quietly edited out of the archive. See the editorial standards.