“The program works like this: Registered voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, or Wisconsin — all swing states that could go for either Vice President Kamala Harris or Trump come Election Day — can sign the petition, which claims to be a “Petition in Favor of Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms” until Monday, October 21, which happens to be the voter registration deadline in Pennsylvania.
The petition is being circulated by Musk’s America PAC, which has taken over much of Trump’s ground operation in key swing states. Musk has made Pennsylvania a particular focus of his personal outreach, hosting events there, including one on Sunday where he handed a woman in a Trump-Vance shirt a giant $1 million check.
Though the petition does not require signers to be registered Republicans, the focus on the First and Second Amendments does seem to appeal to potential Trump voters who fear Democrats will take away their gun rights and who subscribe to Musk’s idea of “free speech.” The net effect, then, is that Musk is promising $1 million a day to a program aimed at getting pro-Trump voters registered in swing states.
Because his contest is only open to registered voters, there may be a case for it to be understood as an illegal financial incentive to get people to register to vote, as Public Citizen’s complaint alleges. One issue Musk faces, said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, is that what constitutes payment for voting-related activity has been broadly interpreted in the past.
“This could involve anything of value,” Becker said. The law “has been applied to things like Ben & Jerry’s offering everyone who has an ‘I Voted’ sticker an ice cream cone on Election Day. They received a cease-and-desist letter and changed [the promotion to give] everyone a free ice cream cone on Election Day.”
There is some ambiguity in Musk’s promotion, compared to what Ben & Jerry’s offered, however. The uncertainty arises from the fact that Musk’s PAC is asking people to sign a petition for the chance to win $1 million, not explicitly rewarding them for registering to vote.
Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government Program, told Vox that the issue at hand really comes down to whether entering a specific group of people in a lottery if they sign a petition counts as paying people to register to vote.”
“So far, most solutions to this housing crisis have focused on subsidizing prospective buyers. But what if there were a way to make housing cheaper at every step of the process: cheaper to build, cheaper to buy, and still affordable for the next resident?
In San Bernardino, a sunny California city located about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, a first-of-its-kind experiment is underway to test these ideas on a single plot of land. Think of it as an affordable housing policy trifecta: three different strategies to bring down housing costs — all at once.
The first innovation is to streamline manufacturing. About 90 percent of homes are built on the land they rest on, but in San Bernardino, manufacturers assembled a modest house — 1,462 square feet, three bedrooms — in a factory before transporting it to its final destination on Ramona Avenue.
The existence of a new moderately sized single-family house is itself a coup when most new homes far exceed 2,000 square feet. Back in the 1940s, nearly 70 percent of new homes were 1,400 square feet or less. Today, that number hovers around 10 percent because rising land and construction costs — along with arduous permitting regulations and a preference for larger projects from lenders and investors — have made smaller homes nearly impossible to build using traditional production techniques.
In the case of San Bernardino, not only are smaller houses less expensive for residents, but factory manufacturing further lowers the price by allowing developers to complete projects more quickly. Manufactured homes cost 45 percent less per square foot than their “site-built” counterparts, according to Freddie Mac.
The second innovation is an 800-square-foot accessory dwelling unit (ADU) located on the same plot of land, about 20 feet away from the house. The matching cream-colored unit provides two more bedrooms and bathrooms to another family, below market rate. In other words, the ADU increases affordable housing without requiring additional land, making more efficient use of the space.
The third innovation: the land itself is owned by a local affordable housing development group, which is using a community land trust to ensure that both the manufactured house and the ADU remain reasonably priced for generations. The community land trust, in effect, limits how much the homeowners could ever resell the property for when they’re ready to move on.
Dora Davila, a 42-year-old medical lab technician born and raised in San Bernardino, recently moved with her three children to the new manufactured home on Ramona Avenue. Her family had been living in an apartment, and despite months of searching, could find no houses available that were affordable.
“We were looking at mobile home parks but, the thing is, none of them had a yard and I wanted space for my kids,” she said.”
We need to build more housing to keep the cost of housing down. Localities prevent building because they don’t like it for a variety of reasons. The states and the country need to get localities to allow building so there is enough housing for the country. Or else, too many localities refuse to build for the narrow local interest of some of their current residents.
“By sending unconditional monthly checks of up to $300 per child to the nation’s poorest families — including those with little to no income who had typically been excluded from such programs — the “child allowance” lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty who would’ve otherwise been left behind.
Arguments against such programs that give unconditional cash usually assert that it’ll drive low-income people to quit their jobs, ultimately harming the economy. But research found little to no drop in employment rates as a result of the expanded CTC. Yet despite a flurry of support from prominent economists and recipients alike, politicians failed to reach an agreement to make the temporary expansion permanent, and Congress let it expire at the end of 2021.”
…
“a new working paper from Elizabeth Ananat and Irwin Garfinkel, two economists at Columbia University. Expanding on work they first published in 2022, their research surveys long-run cash and quasi-cash transfer programs (like food stamps) in the US in an effort to predict the overall effects of a child allowance over the very long run. Instead of the grim and jobless future forecast by expanded CTC critics, they find that a future shaped by a permanent child allowance is well worth the investment.
Ananat and Garfinkel found that the total long-run benefits to society of making a child allowance permanent outweigh the costs by nearly 10 to 1.”
…
“Their promise of a 10 to 1 return is, frankly, massive. For every $100 or so billion the child allowance would cost the government each year, society would reap additional long-term benefits of about $929 billion. Those dollars represent benefits like improved child and parent health and longevity, higher future earnings for children, and reduced crime and health care costs. There would be an effect from the small dip in employment that their calculations predict, and a resulting decrease in tax revenue — but it would amount to just $2.4 billion. That’s a drop in a bucket overflowing with almost a trillion dollars in benefits.
But the nuances of such long-term returns can be difficult to convey. “A little bit shows up in the first few years in the form of reduced [child abuse and neglect], reduced hospitalizations, and those sorts of things,” said Ananat. “But most of it doesn’t show up until the kids grow up. So that requires a very patient type of investor.””