“What constitutes an emergency? According to Congress’ new spending package, research equipment and facilities for the National Science Foundation is an emergency. So are the 2024 Democratic National Committee convention and the Republican National Committee convention. So is NASA space exploration.
By classifying all these line items as emergencies, Congress can get hundreds of millions of taxpayer funding for them with reduced oversight.”
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“According to a January report from the Cato Institute, Congress has approved over $12 trillion in spending for emergencies over the past three decades, making up around 1 in 10 federal budget dollars spent—more than both Medicaid and veterans programs combined.”
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“”Congress has complete discretion in designating spending for emergencies because what qualifies as an emergency is subject to interpretation,” Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett wrote in Cato’s report. While the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has laid out several criteria that emergency spending is supposed to meet, Boccia and Lett note that “the current process lacks a mechanism to evaluate whether an emergency provision meets the OMB’s test, which means that anything can count as emergency spending.”
Once spending gets earmarked as an emergency, it isn’t subjected to typical caps on discretionary spending, allowing Congress to rack up costs with little accountability. “Unfortunately, over the course of the last 30-some years, Congress took what was designed to be a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ escape valve, and they’ve turned it into a major source of funding for federal activity,” David Ditch, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, tells Reason.”It’s just a way for [Congress] to avoid fiscal consequences. And that’s part of how we got where we are.””
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“Cato’s report highlights some particularly egregious examples of this exact phenomenon, including $600 million earmarked for replacing aircraft used in weather forecasting, $347 million for prison construction and detention costs, and $278 million to speed up the building process for a single research center.
“To me, the original sin in all of this is too many members of Congress don’t care at all about where the money comes from, all they care about is getting as much money out the door that they can take credit for,” says Ditch. “They’re more concerned with their next reelection than they are with the nation’s trajectory 20 and 30 years down the line.””
“Every year, women and girls from Southeast Asia move to China, sometimes by force or coercion, to marry Chinese men, care for them, and bear children. While many migrate voluntarily, knowing that they are to be married, an unknown number of women from countries including Cambodia, Myanmar (also known as Burma), Indonesia, and Vietnam are deceived or trapped in their situations. Similarly, although some women are happy in their marriages, others are exposed to violence, sexual abuse, and forced labor.
China’s historical one-child policy (which formally ended in 2016), coupled with a cultural preference for sons, has led to a gender imbalance there, which is one reason for this migration. The country had about 35 million more males than females, according to the 2020 census. Moreover, arranged marriages are common, creating the opportunity for exploitation. Men looking for foreign brides tend to be poorer by Chinese standards yet may pay brokers or matchmakers several thousand dollars—and sometimes more than U.S. $40,000, according to researchers. The expectation for men to marry and produce a son is one reason for the dramatic increase in bride prices. The many men who are unable to find wives in China often face social pressures and a degree of public sympathy, as do their families, which contributes to normalizing the process of paying for brides.”
“Europeans comprised 10 percent, or slightly more than 4.7 million, of the 46.2 million immigrants living in the United States in 2022, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data. Europeans represent the third-largest region-origin immigrant group after those from the Americas (52 percent) and Asia (31 percent). Recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has sparked new movements to the United States, with Ukrainians and Russians alike seeking refuge and opportunity. This trend highlights how geopolitical events continue to influence migration patterns.
Europeans are more likely than other immigrants to have strong English skills and to be naturalized U.S. citizens. Compared to immigrants overall and the U.S. born, European immigrants are more likely to hold a bachelor’s degree and have a higher income. European immigrants also tend to be considerably older than the overall foreign- and native-born populations. While most Europeans who became lawful permanent residents (LPRs, also known as green-card holders) in fiscal year (FY) 2022 did so through family reunification channels, nearly one-third were sponsored by U.S. employers.”
“the actual report concludes exactly the opposite: “The more rural the county, the lower the county rate of sending insurrectionists” to the January 6 Capitol riot. Moreover, when a peer-reviewed article in the journal Political Behavior compared rural and non-rural beliefs on whether politically motivated violence is a valid means for pursuing political change, it revealed that rural Americans are actually less supportive of political violence.”
“Despite failing to enact blanket student loan forgiveness, Joe Biden has still managed to forgive more than $130 billion in federal student loans since taking office in 2021—and due to a series of Education Department rule changes, even more loans are set to be forgiven in the coming years.”
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“Under the REPAYE plan, previously the most popular IDR plan, borrowers were required to make regular monthly payments of 10 percent of their discretionary income (calculated as earnings above 150 percent of the federal poverty rate) for 20 years in order to receive forgiveness. But in 2022, Biden announced the Education Department would replace the REPAYE plan.
In its place, the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan is a significantly more generous alternative, only requiring monthly payments of 5 percent of borrowers’ discretionary income (now calculated as earnings above 225 percent of the federal poverty rate), with forgiveness after just 10 years for balances less than $12,000. Late or incomplete payments would still count during the required repayment period, unlike under the REPAYE plan.”
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“In all, the new IDR plan is estimated to cost taxpayers nearly as much as Biden’s original attempt at forgiving $475 billion over the next decade (blanket forgiveness was estimated to cost up to $519 billion). While Biden claimed that his recent forgiveness would help swaths of Americans “buy a home start a business even start a family,” it certainly isn’t typical taxpayers—the majority of whom do not have the benefits of a college degree, or the student loans to match—who will end up benefiting.”
“Under current law, the payroll tax that funds Social Security is capped so that, for this year, only the first $168,600 in earnings are subject to it.
Raising that cap—or eliminating it—is frequently discussed as one possible solution to Social Security’s approaching insolvency. That seems to be the idea that Biden was gesturing towards in his speech.
On its face, this isn’t necessarily the worst idea. The cap is completely arbitrary, so there’s no principled reason why all earnings shouldn’t be treated equally. And there’s no doubt that raising the cap would generate more revenue to help keep Social Security afloat. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that applying payroll taxes to higher income levels could raise $1 trillion in revenues over a 10-year period (though the amount of revenue would depend on how the cap was altered, and whether benefits increased as well).”
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“raising or eliminating the payroll tax gap doesn’t come close to solving the long-term Social Security shortfall. It might generate $1 trillion over 10 years, which is a lot of money, but it doesn’t come close to the $2.8 trillion deficit the program is expected to run over the next decade.
“Eliminating the tax cap would either raise benefits as well (reducing the proposals’ savings), or—if the accompanying benefits are canceled—turn Social Security into a true welfare program by delinking contributions and benefits,” writes Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former Senate budget staffer, in a recent piece debunking some common myths about Social Security reform. “Moreover, eliminating the cap would not bring permanent solvency or avert the need for benefit changes….The system would return to deficits by 2029. Lawmakers would still need to reform benefit levels and the eligibility age.””
“Higher rents and home prices are a natural consequence of local and state zoning laws, labyrinthine approval processes, federal restrictions on mortgage financing, and environmental reporting laws, to name a few.
All these laws limit the supply of new housing, which drives up the price for any given level of demand. That’s a diagnosis the Biden administration itself has endorsed in various housing briefs and “action plans.”
Despite that insight, the president’s proposals to subsidize home buying will, all else equal, increase demand while leaving supply constraints in place. That will only raise prices further.”