Author: Forte

Only yesterday—text of the coronavirus bills

It seems like only yesterday that I was posting links to the financial crisis legislation of 2008-9. Here we go again.

So far, we’ve had three bills to deal with the coronavirus epidemic and its economic consequences:

  • HR 7048, the “Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act” (a/k/a the “CARES Act”), March 27, 2020. Wikipedia summary, full text PDF.
  • HR 6201, the “Families First Coronavirus Response Act,” March 18, 2020. Wikipedia summary, full text PDF.
  • HR 6074, the “Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act,” March 3, 2020. Wikipedia summary, full text PDF.

Careful printing the CARES Act—it’s over 300 pages.

Update 5/17/20:

And then there were four:

  • HR 266, the “Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act,” April 24, 2020, full text PDF.

update 6/8/20:

  • HR 7010, the “Paycheck Protection Program Flexibility Act,” June 5, 2020, full text PDF.

UpdaTE 3/15/21

  • HR 1319, the “American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, March 11, 2021, full text PDF.

Trump emergency proclamation

The proclamation is linked here.

Update 1: Headline, The New York Times, March 5, 2019:

Border at ‘Breaking Point’ as More than 76,000 Unauthorized Migrants Cross in a Month

Update 2: Reasons President Obama gave in February 2016 for continuing the national emergency on Cuba that was declared by President Clinton in 1996:

Whereas the Cuban economy is in a relatively weak state, contributing to an outflow of its nationals towards the United States and neighboring countries;

Whereas the overarching objective of U.S. policy is stability in the region, and the outflow of Cuban nationals may have a destabilizing effect on the United States and its neighboring countries;

Whereas it is United States policy that a mass migration from Cuba would endanger the security of the United States by posing a disturbance or threatened disturbance of the international relations of the United States…

The number of Cuban immigrants to the US in 2016 was 43,000. That’s the full year, not a single month. Surprisingly, most of them came via Costa Rica to Mexico, crossing the border at Laredo, Texas!

“Big” vs. BIG

At National Review Online, Kevin Williamson writes:

One of the things about Big Business that provokes skepticism and hostility is just plain bigness, the sometimes incomprehensible scale of modern multinational enterprises.

Well, there is “Big” and there is BIG. Compare these two enterprises:

  • Microsoft: 2018 revenue = $110 billion
  • U.S. Government: 2018 revenue = $3,340 billion (that’s $3.34 trillion)

So government is 30 times larger than one of the world’s tech giants. Another way to look at it is that Microsoft amounts to 3.3% of the government.

If “Big” business warrants skepticism and hostility because of its incomprehensible scale, why should BIG government be perceived as so beneficent?

Writing to think things through

I need to bicker with a language not because language is unsuitable or because I fear I may be unfit for it, but because I find myself saying what I think I wanted to say after, not before, having said it. Nothing could seem more dislocated. You do not write an outline first and then spill your words on paper; you write because you cannot write an outline. You write the way you do because the other kind of writing is unavailable to you. You write unnaturally not only because you do not have a natural language, but also because writing and thinking have become unnatural acts.

To parody Michelangelo, you do not chip away at marble in order to bring out a hitherto undisclosed statue; testing the marble, hiding its imperfections, covering up mistaken chisel marks is the statue.

You write not after you’ve thought things through; you write to think things through. You chisel in order to imagine what you might have chiseled with better eyes in a better world.

—André Aciman, Parallax.