Israeli PM Netanyahu: I have decided to add another 350 billion shekels to the defense budget over the coming decade. A large portion of that will go to the Air Force. As part of this effort, we will also build a broad, Israeli-made munitions industry, our own weapons, which will reduce our dependence on procurement from abroad.

How clever of Japan: use cheerful anime art to sell missile buildup as a bright economic future. Blaming China as its top strategic excuse, Tokyo jacks defense budget to 2% GDP while dodging wartime reflection. Cutesy illustrations can’t mask aggressive rearmament plans.

Elon Musk is now the world’s first trillionaire. To put that into perspective, Forbes stacked his fortune up against a variety of economic measures from the size of the defense budget to the cost of milk. Read more: Illustration: Macy Sinreich for Forbes; Images: Detry26, Pornchai Samrhubsuk, AndyL, DNY59, Sakchai Vongsasiripat, Nico Soro, Glow Images, Michael Burrell, Olekcii Mach, Jetcityimage via Getty Images

If you were born in 1968 you turn 64 in 2032. You’ve paid into Social Security every single paycheck for over 40 years. You were promised it would be there. Social Security is projected to be insolvent by 2033. That’s not a maybe. That’s the government’s own estimate. Congress borrowed from the fund for decades. Never paid it back. Now the people who spent it are debating how to tell the people who earned it that it’s gone. Meanwhile we just approved another $800,000,000,000 defense budget. Found that money immediately. No debate. No delay. But your retirement check that you paid for your entire working life? That’s a budget problem. The government didn’t run out of money. They ran out of interest in protecting yours.

Buried Alive for Eight Years, In the World's Most Surveilled Nation, No One Came. She was a teenager when she vanished. She surfaced more than thirty years later with cigarette burns on her neck, no idea how old she was, and no record that the state had ever known she existed. Wang Xiaohong was abducted from Inner Mongolia and sold to an aging man in the mountains of Sichuan's Daliangshan. For eight and a half years he locked her in a basement and forced her to be his "wife." A single small window sat high on the wall. Her food came through an iron slot, like a prison cell. When she resisted, he pressed lit cigarettes into her arms and throat, scars she still carries. She freed herself. One night her captor came home drunk; she shoved him inside, bolted the door, and ran over one mountain after another. What followed was not rescue but more punishment, odd jobs in Xi'an, a marriage in Henan that turned violent, another escape, then more than a decade pasting shipping labels in a Guangdong workshop, "living one day at a time." She had no ID the entire time. The state that scans every face at every train station never once noticed she was gone. Her family found her in August 2026, not through police, but through a volunteer group and a delivery driver who recognized her from an online video. Her cousin drove more than 2,000 kilometers to bring her home. Beijing pours vast sums into "stability maintenance," by some estimates rivaling its defense budget. Cameras blanket every street; algorithms log every citizen. Yet the trafficking of women and children still flourishes, tearing thousands of families apart. In 2022, the "chained woman" of Xuzhou, shackled by the neck, mother of eight, forced the question this case revives: how does a regime that sees everything miss this? Many Chinese no longer believe it's an accident. A government funded by their taxes, they say, does not protect them, and too often, local officials profit from the very networks they are paid to destroy. She survived. The system that failed her never blinked. ACI — Aric Chen | Insights

You have been given the same advice your whole life, and it is good advice. You cannot beat the market. Do not try. Buy a little of everything, hold it for 30 years, and do not flinch when it falls. It is true. It is also advice given, in part, by 535 people who quietly do not have to take it. In the last week of February 2020, you were told to stay calm. The market was sliding, the virus was still a rumor with a foreign name, and every steady voice said hold the line and think long term. Most of us did. We watched the retirement accounts fall and we held, because holding was the discipline and the discipline was right. That same week, senators of both parties who had sat in a closed briefing on the coming pandemic sold. Millions of dollars in stock, in the days before the drop. The Justice Department opened an investigation and closed it without a single charge. The rules held, because no one had broken them. It was not one strange month six years ago. Last year, 140 members of Congress made more than 14,000 trades worth about $720 million. They do not trade at random. The members who sit on the committees that write the defense budget trade defense contractors. The members who write Medicare and Medicaid policy trade the health insurers who live on those programs. The firms whose fortunes they shape are the firms they own. There is a law meant to stop this. It is called the STOCK Act, and when a member files a trade late, the penalty is $200. Not $200,000. $200, and even that is often waived. In all the years the law has existed, no member of Congress has ever been criminally prosecuted under it. I am not saying this to make you hate them. Hatred is cheap and it fixes nothing. I am saying it because of what we are usually handed to be angry about instead. We are pointed at the neighbor with the stimulus check, the family in line with an EBT card, the student asking to have a loan forgiven. We are taught to look sideways and down, at people who have less than we do, and to believe they are the reason the arithmetic no longer works. The edge that actually moved the money was never standing beside you in that line. It sat in a room you were not allowed to enter. Let me be careful, because this is the part that matters. There is nothing wrong with being rich. A person who starts a company, carries the risk, and builds and sells the thing is the country working as promised, and we should want more of them, not fewer. The objection here is narrow. It is a portfolio built out of a security clearance. An advantage that arrives with the seat instead of the work. We know it can be fixed, because it has been. When two Federal Reserve officials were found trading through the same 2020 crisis they were managing, they were gone within weeks, and the Fed barred its officials from trading individual stocks at all. An institution decided its credibility was worth more than its portfolios. Congress looked at the same conflict this month. The House passed a bill to ban the practice and gave it the name you wanted to hear. It lets every member keep the stock they already hold. It lets them keep buying more with the dividends. It exempts the presidency and the vice presidency. Half of Congress owns individual stock, and under this ban, half of Congress keeps it. Meanwhile the one retirement plan they manage on your behalf, the one you pay into with every paycheck, is set to fall short in 2032, 6 years from now, and to cut benefits by about 22 percent when it does. They have known for 30 years. They have not agreed on a repair. They have been more attentive to their own. They will hear the next briefing before you do. We can keep score of which party's list is longer. Or we can notice that both lists exist, and that the only person in this story who was told to hold was the one who could not afford to lose. He held. He was told that was the honest thing to do. It was.