Happy Thursday. According to all the smart people in the U.S., everything is fine (other than systemic 'isms, and anyone to the right of AOC)!
Kevin Drum on the three point five TRILLION dollar reconciliation bill:
Deficit spending stimulates an economy in recession, but the reconciliation bill is supposed to be fully paid for. If that's really the case, then it will have no significant effect on the economy one way or the other. It's just a collection of new programs...
A trillion in taxes here, a trillion there, easy peasy, no problemo, totally paid for. That's definitely not a giant pill to swallow.
Maybe because it's not really fully paid for. Not if you count debt. And who counts debt?
As flagged by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the reconciliation instructions for the spending bill allow for up to $1.75 trillion in borrowing.
“It is not possible to draft and score all of the expected policies prior to consideration of the budget resolution,” a Democratic memo explains. “Given that we will not have budgetary certainty for all of the expected policies prior to locking in the reconciliation instruction to the Finance Committee, the Budget Resolution will not require a specific level of revenue, outlay, or deficit amount in its reconciliation instruction.”
I guess when the Democrats say something, we have to update our textbooks, notify all the fact-checkers, and re-educate all the stubborn people, because it's as true as gravity.
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What misinformation today will be true tomorrow? Something plaguing social media is their deplatforming and censorship of people and information, which turn out to be true a short time later (meaning the approved media outlets finally said the same thing). Remember the Hunter Biden laptop story? Remember the mask reversals? Remember the other mask reversals?
YouTube suspends Rand Paul's account for COVID-19 mask misinformation
Delta variant is highly transmissible among vaccinated, but the vaccinated tend to fare better. I hope that news about faring better is true and remains true.
There is no border crisis. There is no border crisis.
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The battle for cryptocurrency control began with the failed cryptocurrency amendment. Both sides have an uphill climb:
The whole promise of DeFi is that it's not inside the system and not centralized. It’s designed to work without brokers or banks and to work without government setting the rules of the road. In other words, it’s designed to be difficult to monitor and regulate. So the fight we saw over the past week feels like little more than a trial run of a much bigger argument over what DeFi regulation should look like. It’s still not obvious that DeFi offers enough advantages to ordinary users to ever really take off. But if it does, the struggle to track, tax and regulate it will make the battle over Bitcoin miners filing 1099s look trivial.
