Regular order—it lives, sort of, at least on spending measures, in the House.
The House on Thursday voted to send 12 appropriations bills to the Senate. The chamber approved four of these 2018 spending measures prior to its August recess, and the remaining eight were debated and passed as part of the broader Thursday vote. They had previously passed out of committee. This is the first time since 2004 that a House Republican majority has passed all of its individual spending bills….
Peter Rabbit, too. Because that’s better than having actual food in the stores, in the pantry, and on the table, like a free market would produce in abundance. At least according to Venezuelan strong man Nicolas Maduro, who caused the food shortage.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has introduced a “Rabbit Plan” that encourages people to start eating rabbits rather than keep them as pets in a bid to tackle the country’s food shortages.
Heads up, Bambi.
The National Park Service is handing $100,000 to UC Berkeley in a “research” grant to “to ‘honor the legacy’ of the Marxist revolutionary group the Black Panther Party.” Worse, it did so without following its usual competitive bidding process for research grant money.
This cooperative research project between the National Park Service (NPS) and the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) on the Black Panther Party (BPP) is anchored in historical methods, visual culture, and the preservation of sites and voices. The project will discover new links between the historical events concerning race that occurred in Richmond during World War II and the subsequent emergence of the BPP in the San Francisco Bay Area two decades later through research, oral history, and interpretation.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) is beating that drum, again, and has support from some Progressive-Democratic Party Senators.
The health proposal, dubbed Medicare for all, would offer the same suite of medical benefits required for some insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act and eliminate most out-of-pocket costs. Mr Sanders argues that although taxes would likely rise to support the new system, families would save money by no longer needing to purchase health coverage. The government, he says, could also secure lower prices for medical services.
These are the flip side of the 10th Amendment States Rights mantra that State government personnel are starting to tout. And that makes State governors’ and legislators’ objections to the Trump administration’s moves to clip the intrusive wings regarding investment advice to retail investors and who should be permitted/required to give it a bit ridiculous.
[T]he Obama Labor Department’s fiduciary rule requires brokers to act in the best interests of retirement savers rather than sell products that are merely suitable and potentially more lucrative for the brokers.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D, CA) thinks it’s cold blooded to view an economy in terms of dollars and sense. In particular, she thinks President Donald Trump is “heartless” for taking that perspective on an economic question.
When it comes to federal spending, one thing has become clear over the past month. Republicans and this heartless president, they think about budgets in terms of dollar signs and decimal points, but as I’ve said over and over again, budgets are moral documents. They put on paper the principles and the priorities of the nation[.]
Howard Kurtz was on the right track when he wrote that Republicans shouldn’t be surprised that President Donald Trump cut a deal with Congress’ Progressive-Democratic Party* leadership regarding our debt ceiling and financial aid for Harvey and Irma victims.
However, Kurtz’ laying the blame on House Speaker Paul Ryan (R, WI) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) is misplaced, though. Ryan did get one Obamacare compromise repeal passed in the House. McConnell did get 49 out of his 52 Senators to vote for that bill. It’s the rank and file—the party as a whole—who are failing their duty.
And another incentive for businesses to relocate.
San Francisco is looking to tax robots because they are taking rote jobs that humans do. They’re not the first to consider such a thing, but it’s still foolish. Never mind, especially with minimum wage laws pricing the unskilled and/or poorly educated out of work, that robots do the jobs more cheaply. Robots are more reliable, too, as Security guard Eric Leon noted about a security robot:
He doesn’t complain. He’s quiet. No lunch break. He’s starting exactly at 10.
A brief word. There are three speeds that are important in this world: the speed of politics, the speed of business, and the speed of national security.
The speed of politics can be useful when trying to build Congressional and Congress-White House coalitions to enact legislation of a general domestic nature. Such a speed can be useful, for instance, in developing such coalitions to enact legislation for local and national infrastructure repair and development, or for serious tax reform, or for reducing Federal spending (as opposed to reducing the rate of growth in Federal spending), or for immigration reform.
President Donald Trump’s national infrastructure plan centers on glorified seed money directed to the localities looking to improve/build out their infrastructure. The idea is that the locals know their needs best, those needs should be funded primarily locally or from within the nation’s private economic sector, and the building out will aggregate into a vastly improved national infrastructure—real bottom up development, with a little help from the Feds.
To that end, Trump is going to propose $200 billion in Federal spending be committed to a total $1 trillion infrastructure development collection of projects (OK, considerable help).