Baby Incentives
Child tax credit battles: Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) is pitching the idea of raising the child tax credit from $2,000 per child to $5,000 per child and allowing parents to take advantage of such credit not only once the child is born but also retroactively for the year prior when the mother was pregnant.
This plan would reportedly cost $2 trillion to $3 trillion over the next 10 years, per Bloomberg. But tax credits are simply allowing people to keep more of their earnings, instead of the government being entitled to taking them. The problem is when tax revenue shrinks yet government spending doesn’t keep pace, we deepen the deficit hole we’re already in.
Interestingly, Hawley “wants to apply the credit to payroll taxes, allowing even Americans who do not make enough to pay income taxes to access bigger refunds,” notes Axios. This plan, which has also been endorsed by incoming Vice President J.D. Vance, has found plenty of supporters on the right and represents a possible shift by conservatives toward more explicitly pro-family policy.
What has been happening in New Jersey? About a month ago, residents of New Jersey started noticing substantial numbers of drones—as many as 10 or 15 at once!—hovering in the skies above them.
driving through new jersey pic.twitter.com/ns9pIB4tUP
— Kevin Finnerty (@timeimmemorial_) December 12, 2024
“It’s unnerving when you walk out your door, and this is what you see,” one Morristown resident told The New York Times. “Federal officials have said that there is no evidence that the sightings pose a threat to public safety, or that a majority of them are even drones,” the same Times article clarified. “Many of the sightings have actually proved to be manned aircraft mistaken as drones, according to officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I.” But there hasn’t been a lot of information given as to what exactly is happening, and why it’s happening now, leaving a lot of residents scared and irked.
One angle worth considering, while we await more information about what the hell is happening, is that we’re actually more vulnerable to aerial attack than we realize and that, regardless of whether these are drones flown by foreign adversaries, the future involves such threats (and we’re nowhere near ready for it).
Noah Smith writes in his Substack Noahpinion:
The basic idea here is that because drones are cheap to make in large numbers and hard to detect, they can easily penetrate peacetime air defenses that would easily catch and intercept manned aircraft. This means that every city and town and neighborhood is now vulnerable to approach by drones—we’re just not going to put radars, electronic warfare devices, and point defense cannons on every city block in the country. If drones want to get close to you, they can.
People in New Jersey are panicking because this fact is just now sinking in.
Smith writes that “this is already a reality for Ukrainians living in the war-torn city of Kherson” where “Russians are using drones to hunt civi
Article from Reason.com
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