1) The Good News: CBO Confirms Debt Deal Reduces Biden’s Borrowing by $2.1 Trillion
That’s baby step progress. Instead of borrowing $14 trillion over the next decade or so, we will borrow closer to $12 trillion with this deal. (We know that will make our readers sleep better tonight.)
More importantly, CBO also reports as shown below that nondefense discretionary spending will indeed fall by $40 billion below last year’s level under the budget deal – IF the caps aren’t pierced.
2) The Bad News: Debt Deal May Actually Weaken Work Requirements
We warned yesterday that Biden chipped and chipped away at GOP welfare reforms until the final debt ceiling bill contained only minor changes to work requirements: nothing to Medicaid, nearly nothing on TANF (cash assistance), and only 20 hours of work required to get the food stamp benefits.
Yesterday CBO dropped a bomb on the debt deal and this one is highly disappointing. It turns out that the bill may at the end of the day weaken work requirements, increase food stamp spending $2.1 billion and add 78,000 people to the rolls. That's because the bill's new exemptions (for homeless people, veterans, and young adults who grew up in foster care) remove more people from existing work mandates than the number of people the bill's expansion of work requirements from age 50 to 54 covers.
3) Illinois Pols Kill the State’s One Teeny Weeny School Choice Program
The story of the year is that 8 to 10 states have adopted major school choice expansions this year.
Then there is woeful Illinois – which is RESTRICTING education freedom. The Illinois Invest in Kids program provides grants to about 9,000 students from low-income households to attend a private school and makes available a tax credit for individuals who donate to the program. The program’s cost is capped at $75 million a year, which is less than one-tenth of one percent of the $10.3 billion education budget just passed by the legislature.
So, of course, the Democrats killed the program – no doubt at the behest of the Chicago Teachers Union, which just elected its own lobbyist as Chicago's new mayor.
The union front group, Illinois Families for Public Schools, had the gall to explain its opposition to Invest in Kids as follows: “We shouldn’t be handing over public dollars to very weakly or completely unsupervised private schools that are discriminating and teaching low-quality curriculum.” That’s a good description of many of the public schools in the state.
So 9,000 kids, mostly minorities, will now lose their scholarships and will certainly see their lives transformed – for the worse. So much for putting kids first.
There is one small hope for the survival of Invest in Kids before its money runs out on December 31. Lawmakers could approve an extension of the program during this fall’s legislative veto session.
It’s time to turn up the heat on the hypocrites and we at The Hotline plan to do so.
4) Chart of the Day: Price at the Pump Still Much Higher Under Biden
Kamala Harris was crowing the other day about the decline in gas prices. Prices have been falling but the pain at the pump today still remains higher than at any time in Trump’s four years in office.
5) Big Brotherism in Australia Censored Dissent on Government COVID Policies
This is a scary revelation about how far government tyrants expanded during COVID.
Matt Taibbi, the investigative journalist who uncovered the Twitter files, is shining a light on how Australian media outlets have used freedom of information requests to expose how Australia’s Department of Home Affairs made 4,213 requests over three years to digital platforms to remove or restrict COVID-related commentary.
“Content-zapping requests down under came from something called the ‘Social Cohesion Division’ of the DHA’s ‘Extremism Insights and Communication’ office,” Taibbi reports. Among the posts targeted were jokes, tweets from people with literal handfuls of followers, and medical news that was either merely controversial or later proved correct. Even satirical commentary on masks was deemed too much for the fun police. In one case, a mere reply to a tweet saying “masks are useless” was considered to have contradicted “official information,” making it “potentially harmful.”
The first thing despots do when they grab power is squelch dissent. Just wait until the climate change police take charge.
Free speech will only remain free if it is fought for.
