
The draft Bill for upcoming $2.x trillion stimulus package [pdf] - guru4consulting
https://www.majorityleader.gov/sites/democraticwhip.house.gov/files/COVIDSUPP3_xml.pdf
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guru4consulting
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

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

[https://twitter.com/rachelbovard/status/1242116258834845710](https://twitter.com/rachelbovard/status/1242116258834845710)

[https://twitter.com/Oilfield_Rando/status/124223296654328217...](https://twitter.com/Oilfield_Rando/status/1242232966543282176)

~~~
aaronbrethorst
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.

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bengotow
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 """

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bengotow
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.

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Robelius
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?

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robjan
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.

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eksu
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.

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mysterydip
"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.

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0xADADA
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

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nopriorarrests
>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.

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Talyen42
This is the democrats house bill, not the GOP senate bill.

