The draft Bill for upcoming $2.x trillion stimulus package [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The draft Bill for upcoming $2.x trillion stimulus package [pdf]

majorityleader.gov

I guess this will go down as the biggest heist in the history. It's 1404 pages long and likely co-authored by lobbyists. I'm honestly worried for the future of the country.

Few random things when I glanced:

- $25,000,000 pay raise for Congress

- $35,000,000 for The Kennedy Performing Arts Center

- Howard University gets a $13,000,000

- $500,000,000 for the Institute of Museum and Library Services

- Pandemic relief for aviation workers, $40,000,000,000

the deficit was already insane before the crisis arrived. Now, we're gonna be reaching new levels.

The deficit, forget the deficit. That's just a number.

What matters is how money (and the deficit) is allocated as percentages across the economy. And my guess is that this package will further tilt the percentage towards those that shouldn't have a bigger slice. Think Boeing.

Never let a good crisis go to waste, I guess.

Here are two twitter threads (sorry) with more pork-barrelling:

https://twitter.com/rachelbovard/status/1242116258834845710

https://twitter.com/Oilfield_Rando/status/124223296654328217...

This is congress's way of negotiating.

There's a high likelihood that we see a resurgence of COVID-19 this fall right around the same time that the general election is supposed to take place. Not including measures to ensure election integrity would be malpractice on the part of any who cares about the validity of the election.

Also, let's be clear about "pork-barreling" here: Mitch McConnell tried twice to force through a bill that would have included a $500 billion slush-fund to be doled out by the Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, with no functional oversight.

But God forbid we get early voting and vote by mail this fall.

This is to be expected at this point. I do wonder what the exact differences between this draft and the other draft that everyone fussed about.

It's an indirect form of financial stimulus, though the vehicles they chose are quite odd.

Should have been 4 bullet points:

1) The Federal government should create and fund a National Health Organization for single payer universal healthcare for all citizens.

2) Workers affected by job loss due to covid-19 will receive 1:1 income replacement without affecting benefits for 6 months or until employment is reinstated.

3) The Federal government will assist and fund efforts for all states to complete a shutdown limiting movements and tracking suspected cases of covid-19 during and after complete testing.

4) No Federal money is to be spent on corporate bailouts. Low interest loans are available to those companies in exchange for agreement on how money will be spent.

Complex problems require simple solutions. Even your bullet points are trying to do too much. Creating a single payer system is great, but creating it overnight would be a nightmare. "Affected by job loss due to COVID-19" requires some assessment and oversight. "Agreement on how money will be spent" requires negotiation. All of this takes time, which is also the limiting factor right now.

2 bullet points:

* Everyone gets a check for $X,000

* Unemployment benefits go up 50% for 6 months

Just cut everyone a check now and raise taxes later if you need to. Adjust it for cost of living by state or county if you want to, but don't means test because it'll never be perfect.

Some businesses will fail. Others will borrow at close to 0% to survive the crunch. Let them apply as needed.

It's not perfect, but it's something everyone can understand without all the pork.

Also very worrisome is the section titled "TEMPORARY BAN ON STOCK BUYBACKS" which prohibits stock buybacks for a paltry 120 days after the end of the Covid-19 emergency period. Clearly tokenism at it's best.

Buried in here there is a nice bit about expanding access to Vote-By-Mail, so that's nice. I know the democratic party has been pushing for this to be mandatory and un-burdened by extra rules for a while:

""" If an individual in a State is eligible to cast a vote in an election for Federal office, the State may not impose any additional conditions or requirements on the eligibility of the individual to cast the vote in such election by absentee ballot by mail """

Wait, are bills always typeset like this? It's no wonder it's 1000 pages, there are only ~150 words per page. This would fit in 300 pages if it was book-set (and that doesn't seem like too much to ask everyone to read before voting.)

It's almost like this is designed to be frustrating to read, with narrow lines, split words and extra whitespace. Lovely.

It also has an .xml extension. For some reason, I always imagined someone writing bills in Microsoft Word.

Now I'm curious. I assume they used typewriters before XML, and and writing before that. Anyone know how the length of the bills have changed over time, and how that maps to different technologies?

This document was probably written in WordPerfect which is popular in the legal profession due to the typesetting options. It stores its documents in XML format.

This is how legal documents are always written. It's a convention that goes back to the typewriter days which never changed.

I don’t believe this is the draft bill for the stimulus. This is a bill in the House of Representatives, whereas a different bill is in the Senate and my understanding was that the Senate Bill is the basis of ongoing negotiation.

"Making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2020, and for other purposes."

That last part is all you need to know about how much pork is in there.

As it stands, bailouts will reward the most risky investors and speculators, while passive investors, retirees, and taxpayers will end up bailing out these risk takers. Thus, for the finance sector, the Fed provides elasticity: fungible rules around banking, investing, taxation, and bailouts when things go bad. For the rest of the economy, and individuals, we get discipline: massive losses, austerity and cuts to social programs and public infrastructure, moralizing our individual failures as people, and continual indebtedness.

Lemon socialism is a pejorative term for a form of government intervention in which government subsidies go to weak or failing firms (lemons; see Lemon law), with the effective result that the government (and thus the taxpayer) absorbs part or all of the recipient’s losses. The term derives from the conception that in socialism the government may nationalize a company’s profits while leaving the company to pay its own losses, while in lemon socialism the company is allowed to keep its profits but its losses are shifted to the taxpayer.

So the imbalance: Why does the Fed continually save the financial industry every 10 years, but not any other industry? Why does the Fed create and spend 1.5T dollars to purchase worthless and arcane financial instruments, but never spend on public goods like housing, student education, public infrastructure

>Why does the Fed create and spend 1.5T dollars to purchase worthless and arcane financial instruments, but never spend on public goods like housing, student education, public infrastructure

Because Fed is not Government, plain and simple, and has no mandate to do so. If you want spend on public goods, you need to elect people who will spend on public goods.

This is the democrats house bill, not the GOP senate bill.

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