State of the Union (on Stimulants)

Plus: Illegal immigrants at Whole Foods, AI predicting homelessness, Chinese espionage, and more…

LIZ WOLFE

Overall, the speech seemed like a campaign event in more ways than one. Biden repeatedly called out “my predecessor” without criticizing Trump by name, and brought up issues like January 6, as well as Republicans’ inability to pass legislation. Biden said Trump’s “bowing down” to Vladimir Putin is “outrageous,” as well as “dangerous” and “unacceptable” (paired with a call for more Ukraine funding, natch). There was a fair amount of heckling in the chamber throughout, and Biden himself was feisty and confrontational. The decorum of previous addresses was conspicuously absent last night. (And Biden’s opponent resorted to, uh, predictably juvenile artistic rebuttals.)

As for actual substance, Biden spent a fair chunk of time “proposing temporary tax credits of $400 a month to compensate for high mortgage rates and the end of title insurance fees for federally backed mortgages,” per Reason‘s Christian Britschgi. The White House circulated more info about this plan, which would “increas[e] the number of tax credits available for low-income housing developers” and create “a $20 billion competitive grant program that would directly fund affordable apartments.” All of these are odd, expensive fixes for the actual problem, which is low housing supply that could be fixed by zoning reform and reducing the political power of NIMBY activists.

“Under current law, the payroll tax that funds Social Security is capped so that, for this year, only the first $168,600 in earnings are subject to it,” writes Reason‘s Eric Boehm. “Raising that cap—or eliminating it—is frequently discussed as one possible solution to Social Security’s approaching insolvency. That seems to be the idea that Biden was gesturing towards in his speech.” But this solution, clothed in eat-the-rich rhetoric, would not come anywhere close to fixing the actual Social Security funding issues and would involve a massive tax increase on the many people who make more than $168,600 in earnings.

“Too many corporations raise prices to pad their profits charging more for less,” said Biden at one point, referring to what he calls “shrinkflation” and calling out candy bars and bags of chips as an example of this. “The snack companies think you won’t notice if … same size bag, put fewer chips in it,” he added. Not only is this comically unserious, but it’s also insulting to Americans struggling with inflation and high grocery costs—no amount of blameshifting should distract from the fact that COVID-era stimulus spending (from both presidents) led to inflation, which has led to interest rate hikes to tame that inflation, which has thankfully not created a severe recession but has certainly led to a lot of budgetary pain for normal Americans.

Proportionate response: “If you ban TikTok, I will kill myself,” one constituent caller told a House GOP office, according to Politico. Right now, members of the House are weighing moving forward on legislation that could possibly result in a TikTok ban for U.S. users within the next six months.

TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The legislation, which advanced out of committee with an impressively unanimous vote, “creates a narrow process to let the executive branch prohibit access to an app owned by a foreign adversary if it poses a threat to national security,” per the Associated Press, in addition to forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok so it can continue to be accessible to American users.

“If you actually read the bill, it’s not a ban. It’s a divestiture,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wis.), cosponsor of the TikTok bill, told Politico. In fact, the decision is “squarely in the hands of TikTok to sever their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.” If the U.S. version is sold to a non-Chinese company, “TikTok will continue to survive.

Scenes from New York:

QUICK HITS

• All about Opill, the first over-the-counter birth control pill that the Food and Drug Administration has approved.
• “A congressional probe of Chinese-built cargo cranes deployed at ports throughout the U.S. has found communications equipment that doesn’t appear to support normal operations, fueling concerns that the foreign machines may pose a covert national-security risk,” reports Wall Street Journal. “The installed components in some cases include cellular modems, according to congressional aides and documents, that could be remotely accessed.”
• Preliminary data out of Los Angeles suggests that AI is 3.5 times better than social workers at predicting who will become homeless.
• God bless Hawaii: land of poke bowls, hula girls, and the appropriate amount of political disillusionment.

• British author J.K. Rowling has been reported to the police for misgendering a trans person. Her thread about free speech is incredible, and ends with this delightful nugget:

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