The United States government continued to spend like a couple with dual incomes and no kids, resulting in a federal deficit that added up to $1.8 trillion last fiscal year, according to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office. It’s the biggest annual deficit in three years and a sign that lawmakers have largely ignored the widening budget gap ahead of pivotal tax decisions coming in 2025.

The nearly $2 trillion annual deficit was fueled by greater spending on programs for older Americans and higher interest payments. The US spent $950 billion on its IOUs last fiscal year—a 34% spike from the previous year and more than the Pentagon’s entire budget, per the Washington Post.

The timing is off: Deficits tend to widen during wars, recessions, and most recently, pandemics, when the government spends big to prop up the economy. That the US is running a deficit this big when the economy is kicking butt, as it is now, worries budget hawks who claim government spending is out of control.

How it started / how it’s going:

• During the economic boom times of the early ’90s, federal debt was one-third of US GDP.
• Fast-forward to 2027 and debt is projected to top 106% of GDP, which would be a new record.

When will the deficit come down?

Probably not anytime soon. Both presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, rarely mention narrowing the deficit and have put forward spending-heavy economic proposals that, if enacted, would add trillions more to the $35.7 trillion national debt, a nonpartisan organization found. In a report released Monday, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated that:

• President Trump’s plans would add up to $15 trillion to the US debt pile.
• VP Harris’s plans would add just over half that—as much as $8 trillion.

Looking ahead…next year, many elements of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts will expire, presenting an opportunity to raise much-needed government revenue. But Trump has pledged to extend those cuts, while Harris said she would not raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000. Meanwhile, the US is running up the red ink.—NF

Hurricane Milton to hit Florida tonight as millions told to flee. The strongest storm in the Gulf of Mexico since 2005 is expected to make landfall tonight in the Tampa Bay area, where experts warn the storm surge could reach 15 feet. Nearly 6 million Floridians across 11 counties in coastal and low-lying areas are under mandatory or voluntary evacuation orders. More than 1,500 flights have been canceled as of Tuesday. Milton, still a Category 5 as of this morning, is likely to weaken into a Category 3 before it lands, but experts warn it will have devastating effects. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said that debris left from Hurricane Helene two weeks ago could be picked up by Milton and used as a “weapon.”

SCOTUS likely to uphold Biden’s rules on “ghost guns.” In what would be a win for gun safety advocates and the Biden administration, a majority of Supreme Court justices signaled yesterday that they’re open to supporting federal restrictions on untraceable ghost guns, which can be ordered online and assembled with homemade kits. The rules, imposed in 2022, regulate ghost gun kits like regular guns, requiring sellers to mark products with serial numbers and buyers to pass background checks. Lawyers for pro-gun groups argued that the rules are an overreach and that gun kits are primarily aimed at “hobbyists,” but the court appeared more receptive to the government’s argument that they allow criminals to circumvent gun laws.

TikTok sued by 14 states for being intentionally addictive to kids. A bipartisan group of more than a dozen attorneys general filed separate lawsuits against TikTok yesterday, alleging that the popular social media company harmed young people’s mental health by getting them hooked on the app’s addictive algorithm and infinite scroll design. A TikTok spokesperson called the allegations “inaccurate and misleading” and said the company is committed to protecting teens. The lawsuits are the latest in an avalanche of legal trouble for TikTok, following a federal lawsuit and a proposed bill that could see it banned in the US. Dozens of states filed a similar lawsuit against Instagram owner Meta last year.—AE

Imagine if Dr. Frankenstein got a gold medal for pulling the lever on his eight-foot friend. That might be how machine-learning guru Geoffrey Hinton felt yesterday when he was named a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for work starting in the 1980s on the technology that he now wants to be reined in.

“I’m flabbergasted,” he told the Nobel committee over the phone from a “cheap hotel” in California, adding that he’d probably cancel an MRI appointment he had scheduled for later in the day. Hinton shares the accolade and $1 million prize with fellow tech pioneer John Hopfield, whose work underpinned Hinton’s research on neural networks, which in turn props up artificial intelligence like ChatGPT.

But…both scientists have raised the alarm on AI:

• Hinton, who’s often called the godfather of AI, quit Google last spring after 10+ years, saying he partly regretted his life’s work and urging Big Tech to slow down and assess AI risks. He said yesterday that he still worries about “systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control.”
• Hopfield signed early petitions calling for more regulation and has compared AI to viruses or nuclear power because of the massive potential to help or hurt civilization.

Hinton still uses GPT-4: He asks his godson everything. He said, “I don’t totally trust it because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything, it’s a not-very-good expert. And that’s very useful.”—ML

Spirit Halloween heard your jokes and decided it’s going to stick around for a few more months and then pack up suddenly and disappear into the night. The retailer, famous for snapping up empty storefronts in strip malls, is opening Spirit Christmas locations this year in hopes of dominating yet another holiday with its traveling carnival of a business strategy.

The first Spirit Christmas will open on October 18 in New Jersey, followed by nine more locations across the Northeast. The stores will be set up at a mix of former Spirit Halloween spots and other empty storefronts:

• The retailer said stores will sell stocking stuffers, inflatables, decor, apparel, and we’re guessing the equivalent of its Halloween counterpart’s iconic “opened box of fake lashes.”
• You can already book a time slot to meet Santa and take a free photo with him at all Christmas locations.

Spirit has conquered spooky season. The pop-up retailer, owned by Spencer Gifts, said it opened a record 1,525 Halloween stores in the US and Canada this year. But now the company wants to snag some of the record $964 billion that US shoppers spent during last year’s holiday season.—MM

If your lesser cousin took 10% of all your stuff, you’d probably be upset, too. Pickleball, aka “tennis but smaller, easier, and with more annoying sounds,” has commandeered 10% of the tennis courts in the US, according to the US Tennis Association. One standard tennis court can be easily converted into up to four pickleball courts, making the vegetable-named newcomer an attractive investment for private clubs. This is a problem for tennis, which has increased in popularity since the pandemic (though not as quickly as pickleball) and needs its own court space. The USTA estimates there will be 24.5 million tennis players this year and 35 million by 2035—but not if it continues to lose real estate to Big Pickle.—AE