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This may be more obvious than I think, but this week's votes on a continuing resolution to keep the government going past Friday's debt ceiling deadline until September are a kind of confession of failure on the part of House Republicans, and Speaker Mike Johnson in particular, retreating from the effort to use reconciliation rules to put through the huge package of tax cuts and spending cuts they passed on February 25 for fiscal year 2025. Never mind, said Johnson: Elon and Donald can do it, or something like it.

But Johnson said those cuts would be reserved for legislation to fund the government in fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1.

"We will actually be able to change the way this is done and incorporate all the extraordinary savings that DOGE is uncovering through fraud, waste and abuse, the other revenues that President Trump is bringing about because of his policies," Johnson told the Fox News program "Sunday Morning Futures."

Although as you know DOGE hasn't uncovered any fraud, waste, or abuse at all that they're able to publicly identify, and their own estimate of how much money they've managed to save so far—$105 billion—would be pretty pathetic as an attack on a $2 trillion deficit, if it were accurate, which it clearly isn't anywhere near. While the revenue that President Trump is "bringing about because of his policies" means tariffs, and it's pretty hard to estimate, what with Trump changing his mind up to three or four times in a given day (just announced he's doubling the tariffs on steel and aluminum he's landing on Canada on Wednesday, from 25% to 50%), but the best guesses seem to make it around $120 billion a year, which also isn't much, though the rise in consumer prices it will bring on, focused on the areas of electronics and clothing, motor vehicles and food, will cost us around $1600-$2000 a year per household. Not only a tax on Americans, whatever Trump may imagine, but a very regressive tax, mostly felt by those with lower incomes (the lower your income, the higher the proportion of it that you end up spending on stuff like food and clothing, or really anything).

Back of the Envelope: So-Called Stimulus

 

Yeah, I know, Tax Foundation. Still, this is back of the envelope, meant to just develop suggestions, 

If the total cost is $174 billion that's a total of 290 million income tax filers and minor children receiving payments at $600 each (at $2000 each the price tag would be $580 billion, which is a lot).

The size of the average payments gives you an idea of how many children per adult: around one for every two adults in the range up to the 90th percentile (1 adult plus 1/2 kid = $900), one for four adults in the 90% to 95% range, and none over that (obviously a function of the age of the tax filer—the more money you make, the more likely any kids you have will be grown). 

Thus around 200 million tax filers total, and 90 million children; 100 million of the adults over the $40,000 median individual income, and 100 million beneath it; and 40 million adults, with their 20 million kids, in the 60th to 80th income percentiles, in the something like $50K-to-$75K range, plus 15 million adults and 5 million kids in the 80th to 95th (getting payments because they belong to a household where one spouse earns under $75K and the other one earns more), that's 80 million souls who are really pretty well off, many of them technically rich, accounting for $48 billion of the total stimulus-check bill, while $126 million goes more or less where it belongs. 

Or almost twice as much money being spent on "stimulus" for people earning more than $50,000 a year, quite a number of them much more, as is being spent on rent relief for the desperate. 

Or more than four times as much as is being spent on emergency SNAP benefits for the food insecure. 

This is not right, when the economy doesn't need a stimulus anyway, but rather relief in the months it will take to conquer Covid-19. And as I say it increases wealth inequality, since those of us who don't need it can invest it, while for those who do need it, it's money they don't even get to spend, for the landlord or the credit card. If you raise the amount to $2000 that's three times as nice for those under the median, and I don't mind, I don't freak out over deficits, but the effect on those over the median is three times as pernicious (your $149K two-kid family is surely putting their $8,000 in a college fund or playing with shares—it's far too much to spend in restaurants, far too little to buy a boat or remodel the kitchen, and you can't spend it on travel, so it ends up making them wealthier).

And don't start telling me how important it is that it shouldn't be means-tested, because it is means-tested, with the $75K cutoff. It's just set at the wrong level. Social Security and Medicare are means-determined too, by the way, contrary to what your Yangist friends tell you, at the front end, by the progressive pricing of the premiums as a percentage of your wages, and of course will be still more so when we raise the cap on how much the rich have to pay, and a good thing too.

For the present matter, it would be better to use a more targeted technique, like federal payments bringing up essential workers' income to a minimum $25/hour and other minimum-wage workers to $18. And Canadian-style unemployment payments to people kept home by childcare needs. Save the free money fot the upper middle class for when there's some business they can spend it on/

I suspect Democrats insisting on this provision, it they're thinking about it at all, are either thinking about it in the dumbest Yang-gang sense in terms of how much fun it would be if they themselves got a big check in the mail, or else in the same way Mitch McConnell does, as a way of buying votes. It's not good policy, and any vote-buying effect will be gone by November 2022. I'll try to stop talking about it now, because I know it's out of step with the Democratic conversation, and the party will do what it has to do, but I wanted to put these numbers together to get a sense of what the issue really is and why it bothers me.

Today Donald Trump Became Anti-President

 

Ali Mohammed Hafedh Kinani at 9, in 2007, when he was murdered by the Blackwater goons Trump pardoned last night, via The Nation.

No, really, it's as if he's not even part of the executive branch any more, after Congress passed that "stimulus" with overwhelming, veto-proof majorities, and he responded:

"I'm asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2000, or $4000 per couple," Trump said in a video released on Twitter. "I'm also asking Congress to immediately get rid of the wasteful and unnecessary items in this legislation or to send me a suitable bill."

He refused to have anything to do with the job for seven months, turning negotiations over to Steven Mnuchin, and now that the job is done he doesn't like how it came out. Not that he's threatening to veto the monster omnibus bill and shut down the government next week (this is actually possible, even though Congress has the votes to overturn a veto, because so many members have already gone home for Christmas). He may just allow it to become law without him, in ten days, delaying the checks, or he may end up signing it after all.

(Or conceivably Democrats could try to coopt the idea and force consideration of a revised bill upping the "stimulus" payments as he suggested, which is a level they'd wanted from the start, though I'd hope they won't obey his other demands on those "wasteful and unnecessary items", to zero out the foreign aid budget and to cancel funding for a couple of museum projects that fail to be centered around white men, the Smithsonian Museum of the American Latino and the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum; and even if Trump was willing to accept the result, it's not likely the Senate would be, and given the existence of, you know, Christmas and a shutdown deadline, it's not a great moment for this kind of game.)

But he's just denying he's involved in it in any way. As Steve M notes, Stephen Bannon is showing up in the Oval Office, along with Peter Navarro, and Mike Flynn, and Sydney Powell, and the inevitable Stephen Miller, and all these nihilists are telling him he's not the government. He's asking the waiter to take it back, as if he's only a customer in this crappy restaurant, or demanding to speak to the manager. He's not the manager.

Meanwhile, in the Palace

W.W. Denslow, "Dorothy and the Giant Head". from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).

Struck by this tweet:

Trump Plans Expulsion of Russian Envoys Over U.K. Attack, Sources Say https://t.co/bdUMdBVU5P

— Ming Nethery (@MingGao26) March 24, 2018

Really? What sources?

two people familiar with the matter said on Saturday.

Trump agreed with the recommendation of advisers and the expulsions are likely to be announced on Monday, the people said, though they cautioned that Trump’s decision may not be final. Trump is prepared to act but wants to be sure European allies will take similar steps against Russia before doing so, aides said....

It's not rocket science

Amalie Atkins, Girl in reeds with bolex, chromogenic print, 20 x 30”, 2010, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

So apparently there was a pretty promising-looking Ebola vaccine around for ten years, 100% effective in monkeys, but no money for testing it in humans:

“There’s never been a big market for Ebola vaccines,” said Thomas W. Geisbert, an Ebola expert here at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and one of the developers of the vaccine that worked so well in monkeys. “So big pharma, who are they going to sell it to?” Dr. Geisbert added: “It takes a crisis sometimes to get people talking. ‘Ok. We’ve got to do something here.' ”

If only there were some kind of super-organization that could dispose of the necessary billions for doing stuff like that without having to worry about profits and screaming shareholders!

The vaccine was actually produced, in Winnipeg by the Public Health Agency of Canada. The Canadian government patented it, and 800 to 1,000 vials of the vaccine were produced. In 2010, it licensed the vaccine, known as VSV-EBOV, to NewLink Genetics, in Ames, Iowa.

The Canadian government donated the existing vials to the World Health Organization, and safety tests of the vaccine in healthy volunteers have already begun.

Yeah, exactly! You could call it "Canada"!

Maud, says here Medicare comes from the Government!

Holiday collage by the Chicago Imagist Don Baum. From Archives of American Art Blog.

I haven't seen much response to yesterday's Times report about the poor but conservative and their dependence on government money, but it's pretty extraordinary reading. It's not your Tea Party clowns who really think Medicare isn't a government program, it's people [jump]