Welcome to Thursday, February 10th, snowboarders and skiers...

The U.S. national debt surpassed $30 trillion for the first time ever.

The national debt is a term that refers to how much the U.S. government owes its creditors, who effectively lend money to the government when it runs a budget deficit (e.g. spending exceeds tax revenue) by purchasing debt instruments such as Treasury bonds that earn interest over time. 

The federal government currently has a structural budget deficit due to growth in mandatory spending on programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, federal discretionary spending spiked to provide economic relief to the American public and impacted businesses, which resulted in record-setting deficits of more than $3.1 trillion in FY2020 and $2.8 trillion in FY2021. 

Are you concerned about the national debt?

Five Times Politics Overshadowed Sports at the Olympics

The U.S. has been sending athletes to the Olympics since 1896, and on several occasions, global and domestic politics overshadowed the sporting side of the Games. This year’s Winter Olympics hosted by the People’s Republic of China in Beijing will be another such occasion. The U.S., Great Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Lithuania, Estonia, Kosovo, and India are undertaking a diplomatic boycott of the Games in which athletes will participate but no dignitaries associated with those governments will attend due to the human rights abuses of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 

With the Olympics now underway in Beijing, we’ve recapped five other times when politics trumped sports at the Olympics.

Learn about more past Olympic boycotts here.

U.S. Added 467K Jobs in January, Well Above Economists’ Expectations

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently released its jobs report for January, which found the economy added 467,000 jobs and the unemployment rate increased slightly by 0.1 percentage point to 4.0% as more people looked for work.

With January’s gains, the U.S. economy has recovered about 87% of jobs lost since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Roughly 2.9 million jobs are left to be regained to reach the pre-pandemic employment level. The labor force participation rate was 62.2% in January, a slight increase month-over-month as the number of job-seekers increased, but still below the February 2020 level of 63.4%.

Jobs Report Sector Breakdown

• Leisure and hospitality employment grew by 151,000 jobs in January
• Retail employment rose by 61,000 in January as notable growth occurred in general merchandise stores

Read the rest of the breakdown here.

How do you feel about the state of the job market?

All the Memes Fit to Post

And, In The End...

On this date in 1870, the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) was founded in New York City.

Philadelphia or Miyokos that baked good for National Cream Cheese Brownie Day,

—Josh Herman

Talk to us via email at editorial [at] causes.com. And don’t forget to keep in touch @Causes.