“Democrats are reportedly considering a one-year extension of the expanded child tax credit, which pays parents $3,000 annually for every child (and an extra $600 for kids under age 6) and is paid out as a refund even for families that owe no federal taxes. Previously, Biden’s plan called for a five-year extension of the child tax credit. As I wrote in September, the five-year extension was a budget gimmick designed to make the tax credit appear to be roughly $700 billion less expensive than it otherwise would be within the standard 10-year budget window. In short, Democrats were signalling that the expanded child tax credit would be permanent, but they were only accounting for half of what it would actually cost to make it permanent.
A one-year extension would be mashing that same “gimmick” button even harder.
In a similar way, Democrats are also reportedly considering a shorter-than-planned extension of the expanded Obamacare subsidies made available during the pandemic. Instead of being extended permanently, those provisions would technically expire after three years—even though everyone knows they are likely to be extended past that sunset date.
“These proposals don’t actually shrink the package; they just shorten it,” says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonprofit that advocates for balanced budgets. The CRFB estimates that the twin “blatant budget gimmicks” involving the child tax credit and Obamacare subsidies could hide between $1.5 trillion and $2.4 trillion in future spending, depending on other trade-offs in the final package. Even if the final bill is $1.9 trillion and requires no new borrowing on paper, the CRFB warns that the actual price tag could be as much as $4 trillion with much of the hidden cost financed by adding to the deficit.”
“Rising costs of entitlement programs and the interest on the debt itself are the primary reasons why the debt will keep growing. In other words, even cutting a lot of discretionary spending would have little effect on the debt at this point.
The guilty parties are, well, both parties. It was fitting that the debt hit the symbolic $1 trillion figure during Reagan’s presidency, as the Gipper ignored his own warning. Republicans have spent much of the past 40 years venerating Reagan as an icon of conservative values, including supposedly limited government. And while his successors ran up far larger amounts on the nation’s credit card, Reagan saw the government surpass not only the $1 trillion debt threshold but also the $2 trillion threshold.”
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“The guiding principle for today’s Democratic Party is the idea that debt doesn’t really matter if interest rates remain low. So long as the cost of servicing the federal debt stays below 2 percent, policymakers should not be restrained by the “traditional idea of a cyclically balanced budget,” Larry Summers, Clinton’s treasury secretary, and former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman argued in an influential paper published last year.
But the past 40 years would suggest that lawmakers have almost never been restrained by the idea of balanced budgets—a few brief interludes of fiscal sanity notwithstanding.
It took nearly two centuries for America to accumulate $1 trillion in public debt. It took 40 years to increase that amount 28 times over. If we refuse to address the breakneck speed at which America spends money it doesn’t have, how long until Clinton’s warning is realized, and that debt deals with us?
“If legislators were determined to “save lives, period, whatever it costs,” they would set the speed limit at 5 miles per hour, or perhaps ban automobiles altogether, which would prevent nearly 40,000 traffic-related deaths every year. Those policies seem reasonable only if you ignore the countervailing costs. In public policy, economist Thomas Sowell famously observed, there are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs.
“Logically,” Bourne writes, “there must be some negative consequences of government lockdowns, and some point at which they might become self-defeating.” To figure out when that might be, policy makers needed to estimate the public health payoff from lockdowns and compare it to the harm they caused.
Contrary to Cuomo’s framing of the issue, this is not a matter of weighing “the economic cost” of maintaining lockdowns against “the human cost” of lifting them, as if those categories were mutually exclusive. Even in life-and-death terms, lockdowns had a downside, since they plausibly contributed to a spike in drug-related deaths, discouraged potentially lifesaving medical care, and inflicted financial and psychological distress, neither of which is good for your health. And as Bourne emphasizes, “economic welfare” goes beyond household finances or GDP, encompassing everything people value.”
“As when Haugen first came forward—providing information that formed the basis of a series of Wall Street Journal reports—the real takeaway is that Facebook has been struggling to attract the young users it wants, faces robust competition, and generates apoplectic denunciation from mainstream journalists mostly because they resent the social media giant for shaking up the news industry.
There are, to be clear, some decent reasons in here to criticize Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The Washington Post reports that he was intimately involved with the company’s decision to comply with the Vietnamese government’s demand for greater censorship of political dissidents. Though even then, it’s debatable what Zuckerberg should do when authoritarian governments demand content moderation. Should Facebook pull out of Vietnam, depriving the country of the site entirely? Is a censored version of Facebook worse than no Facebook at all?”
“Over the last year and a half, thousands of low-risk inmates were given the chance to serve the remainder of their sentences on home confinement. The move was meant to curb coronavirus transmission rates in overcrowded prisons. But the trial period has been viewed as a successful tactic beyond that of a COVID mitigation measure; of the approximately 4,500 released due to COVID, just three have reoffended, two of whom committed nonviolent crimes, according to Michael Carvajal, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).”
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“The average annual price for a prisoner at home is $13,000; for an inmate at a correctional institution, it is almost 3 times higher at $37,500.”
“Over his 17 years on the job — including eight as the union president of the Fraternal Order of Police in South Florida — 49 people have complained about him to Internal Affairs as he amassed 19 official use-of-force incidents, $600,000 in lawsuit settlements and a book’s worth of terrible headlines related to his record and his racially inflammatory social media posts, many of which attacked alleged victims of police violence.
Yet Ortiz has repeatedly beaten back attempts to discipline him. He returned to work in March from a yearlong paid suspension during which state and federal investigators examined whether he “engaged in a pattern of abuse and bias against minorities, particularly African Americans … [and] has been known for cyber-stalking and doxing civilians who question his authority or file complaints against him.” The investigation was launched after three Miami police sergeants accused him of abusing his position and said the department had repeatedly botched investigations into him.
But investigators concluded their hands were tied because 13 of the 19 use-of-force complaints were beyond the five-year statute of limitations, and the others lacked enough hard evidence beyond the assertions of the alleged victims. The findings underscored a truism in many urban police departments: The most troublesome cops are so insulated by protective union contracts and laws passed by politicians who are eager to advertise their law-and-order bona fides that removing them is nearly impossible — even when their own colleagues are witnesses against them.”
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“As a police officer with an encyclopedic knowledge of labor law and grievance procedures, Ortiz shielded himself over the years with the extensive protections woven into the local union’s collective bargaining agreement and Florida’s “Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights,” a police-friendly law that passed decades ago and has been continuously beefed up with bipartisan support. He has also availed himself of a controversial judicial doctrine, called qualified immunity, which shields police from certain forms of liability.
Among the special provisions that have made policing Florida’s police so difficult is a rule in the bill of rights that says all investigations must be wrapped up in 180 days. Critics say the rule is a vehicle for sympathetic colleagues to protect an officer simply by dragging their feet. In its review of Ortiz, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement reported that between 2013 and 2018 seven citizen complaints against him were voided because the department failed to finish investigating within the prescribed time limit.
An even more significant obstacle in the bill of rights is a rule that officers must be shown all evidence against them before they are interviewed about complaints — a right that isn’t afforded to civilians and that flies in the face of normal investigative techniques. It allows officers to tailor their responses to the evidence, avoid being caught in lies and even, says former Miami police chief Art Acevedo, “interfere with the investigation or retaliate” against witnesses.”
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“Ortiz’s record stands out sharply compared with those of his peers. The 49 citizen complaints against him are 2½ times more than the combined complaints against the department’s four other captains. Those other captains also have a combined 16 use of force incidents on their records, three fewer than the 19 on Ortiz’s record.”
“Gadgets are particularly vulnerable to shortages because they include many different components. Consider all the parts that go into a PlayStation 5 or a new laptop, including their chips, outer shells, and screens. Many of these components require their own specialized manufacturing facilities, which are typically in different factories and often in different countries. For a device to be delivered on time, all of these parts need to be made in sync. Right now, that’s not happening.”
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“Demand for these components has run up against efforts to contain Covid-19 in the countries where the production and assembly of many goods actually take place. Amid a recent delta variant outbreak and nationwide lockdown in Malaysia, the government designated electronics manufacturers critical businesses so that production could continue. In May, Vietnam directed vaccines directly to factory workers, while urging smartphone manufacturers working in the country, like Samsung, to do the same. (Vietnam’s Covid-19 challenges haven’t gone away: This past weekend, tens of thousands of workers fled the country’s commercial center after the government, which is still struggling to access vaccines, lifted pandemic lockdown restrictions.)”
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““What will happen is that a phone will be delayed because they’re waiting on their plastic supplier, and the plastic supplier is waiting on the ingredient,” Penfield, the Syracuse professor, said. “It just takes one supplier — and it could be the base ingredient supplier — to fully screw up your supply chain.””
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“All these problems mean that consumers are seeing rising prices and shipping delays for a wide range of products. So those looking ahead to the holiday shopping season might want to get an early start, and not just on consumer electronics.”