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Richard McGahey's avatar

The Senate version of the Big Beautiful Bill is essentially the same as the House--deep regressive tax cuts for the wealthy, severe cuts in essential program spending, and trillions more in borrowing. I blogged about this in Forbes, press coverage saying there are big differences between House and Senate are misleading and normalizing this awful bill.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardmcgahey/2025/06/16/republicans-unbelievable-unity-not-division-on-big-beautiful-bill/

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David E Lewis's avatar

Slightly, but not totally off topic:

On the subject of volatility, have you read today's FT Alphaville article "The era of sudden shocks - revisited"? (link below)

There's a great graph showing "Standard deviation of annual US GDP growth per capita, 20 year time window" which depicts the rise of US GDP volatility from 1871 (the creation of the German Empire State) through to 1945 (the end of WW2) within an 1820-2020 frame.

Presumably, when GDP itself is very volatile, the internal, normally correlated measurements, suffer from declining R².

Economic forecasting is likely to become more and more difficult the more the great powers of the world are competing. And they are doing that.

https://on.ft.com/45rB8tu

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Richard's avatar

"SALT cut. Interestingly, while there are House members from states fighting to raise this cap, there are no Senators from those states"

Just a reminder about how partisan this is. There are no republican Senators from those states. There are democrats, but they don't count for this.

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Jared Bernstein's avatar

Right--I meant no Rs. Fixed, thnx.

Apologize once again for all the typos, but it is proof that I'm not using AI!

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Richard's avatar

I'd much rather have your commentary with typos than no typos and much delayed commentary.

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