Ho hum, Factcheck.org finds that the Republican Israel-funding bill doesn’t actually offset its cost with budget cuts as advertised. You already know the reason: cutting the increase in IRS funding actually results in considerably less revenue coming in and therefore larger deficits. Whatever happened to spending money to make money? Indeed, our Congressional Budget Office says the bill would actually increase the deficit by about twice as big as the bill’s size. Still, Republicans have a total hard-on for protecting rich folks from getting audited: I wonder why. And dig Mike Johnson’s rhetorical hostage-taking: “I think if you put this to the American people and they weigh the two needs, I think they’re going to say standing with Israel and protecting the innocent over there is in our national interest and is a more immediate need than IRS agents.” What would the people say if he’d made them choose between Israel and corporate welfare handouts? Of course we’ll never know, because he’ll never ask, because he’s evil.
David Swanson claims that our military has trained over 30% of all mass shooters in America, and though finding a military background for 40 of 127 mass shooters doesn’t complete the picture, I’m inclined to agree – it’s a lot easier to kill a lot of people when you’ve been trained to kill a lot of people, after all. Also, our “liberal” media don’t face this problem any better than they face police brutality: “statistically, virtually all veterans are not mass shooters. But that can hardly be the reason for not a single news article ever mentioning that mass shooters are very disproportionately likely to be veterans. After all, statistically, virtually all males, mentally ill people, domestic abusers, Nazi-sympathizers, loners, and gun-purchasers are also not mass-shooters. Yet articles on those topics proliferate like NRA campaign bribes.” We’d respond to this news, I would hope, by maybe not getting into so many Iraq-type wars in the future, since those wars send so many shells of people home.
Economist Hal Singer, who says he supports the Biden Administration’s “economic policies generally,” still explains the many ways it’s failed working families. Chiefly, he reminds us that higher Fed interest rates mean higher credit card interest rates (21 percent, up from 16 about a year and a half ago), higher student loan interest rates (almost six percent, about double what it was three years ago), and higher mortgages (almost eight percent now, when three percent loans were plentiful as late as 2020). What could Mr. Biden have done instead? Use the “bully pulpit” to shame corporate “greedflation” practitioners, or impose price controls, or have our government manufacture products like insulin, or go after price-gougers more aggressively (and appoint judges who don’t have their head up their ass about such things, I could add). So, a lot of wasted opportunity, there. It’s just Joe Biden’s dumb luck (and ours!) that our Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and Republicans can’t govern their way out of a paper bag.