Good news! The Senate has voted 68-32 to pass a $250 billion welfare bill. How did this bipartisan miracle happen?
- It's a corporate welfare bill, not a bill to benefit regular people.
- It's an immense hodgepodge of pet anti-China proposals that have been buzzing around Congress for years. Finally the timing was right to bundle them all together into an immense anti-China act.
- It's mostly not funded. That's left up to future Congresses.
This just goes to show that Congress can get things done. The lesson for President Biden's infrastructure bill is:
- Sell it as a bill to benefit corporations, which it is, actually.
- Make sure there's a ton of pet programs in it, something for everyone. I imagine this is already taken care of.
- Fund about 10% of it and leave the rest for future Congresses.
- AND MOST IMPORTANT, make sure to invent an "infrastructure war" with China in which we are getting our capitalist butts kicked.
See how easy it is when you just apply the right marketing? I don't understand why so many presidents have such a hard time with politics.
the devil is in the details, but from high level articles i've see so far $81 billion for the National Science Foundation and $16.9 billion for the Department of Energy for R&D sound like positives.
Not really. The money to the NSF is tightly controlled and outside of the traditional grant process. There also are a bunch of conditions on it. Which all combine to make it less of true science research and more along the lines of corporate welfare.
No doubt infrastructure war with China is something we can all get behind, especially if the military is called "infrastructure" (I suspect Moscow Mitch will sign on to the egregious definition-inflation in this case) but I would guess this is really a "politicians-need-a-response-when-their-constituents-ask-about-China-poisoning-us welfare bill.
For what it's worth, in this morning's newsletter from the NYT, D. Leonhardt noted the following. "The current version would spend almost $250 billion over five years, some of it on other items, and probably lift annual federal R and D spending by only 0.05 percent and 0.2 percent of GDP." (Earlier in the newsletter he says in the 60s we hit a peak on R and D spending of 2% of GDP. We're currently at 0.65%, and China is currently at 1.30% -- the highest in the world, he says.)
Total dollars on R&D are more informative than fraction of GDP. The 2% of GDP spent on R&D in the '60s is probably less inflation adjusted dollars than the 0.65% being spent now. US GDP remains about 50% larger than China's, so the gap in actual R&D spending between the two countries is real, but quite a bit smaller than the gap in spending as percentage of GDP.
Wait a minnit . . . . . have we always been at war with East Asia?
:Princess Bride
Yup, and they've been winning. But the elites didn't acknowledge it.
Oh, the elites absolutely acknowledge that they themselves are winning.
But then China will make a million dollar donation to some gun group, and ...
$38 billion for the semiconductor industry. It was just last year Intel used it's tax cut windfall on a $10 billion stock buyback.
It would probably be helpful to feed someone like Tom Cotton some "leaked" info designed to send him spiraling off about China. Then reluctantly accede to his demands.