U.S. Senate Vote on Debt Ceiling (June 1, 2023)

Dear Commons Community,

Fending off a U.S. default, the Senate gave final approval last night to a debt ceiling and budget cuts package, to wrap up work on the bipartisan deal and send it to President Joe Biden’s desk to become law before the fast-approaching deadline.

The compromise package negotiated between Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy leaves neither Republicans nor Democrats fully pleased with the outcome. But the result, after weeks of hard-fought budget negotiations and compromises, shelves the volatile debt ceiling issue  until 2025 after the next presidential election.

Approval in the Senate on a bipartisan vote, 63-36, somewhat reflected the overwhelming House tally the day before, relying on centrists in both parties to pull the Biden-McCarthy package to passage — though Democrats led the tally in both chambers.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said ahead of voting that the bill’s passage means “America can breathe a sigh of relief.”

Afterward he said, “We’ve saved the country from the scourge of default.”

Biden said in a statement following passage that senators from both parties “demonstrated once more that America is a nation that pays its bills and meets its obligations — and always will be.”

He said he would sign the bill into law as soon as possible. “No one gets everything they want in a negotiation, but make no mistake: this bipartisan agreement is a big win for our economy and the American people,” the president said. The White House said he would address the nation about the matter at 7 p.m. EDT Friday.

Fast action was vital if Washington hoped to meet next Monday’s deadline, when Treasury has said the U.S. will start running short of cash to pay its bills, risking a devastating default. Raising the nation’s debt limit, now $31.4 trillion, would ensure Treasury could borrow to pay already incurred U.S. debts.

In the end, the debt ceiling showdown was a familiar high-stakes battle in Congress, a fight taken on by McCarthy and powered by a hard-right House Republican majority confronting the Democratic president with a new era of divided government in Washington.

Refusing a once routine vote to allow a the nation’s debt limit to be lifted without concessions, McCarthy brought Biden’s White House to the negotiating table to strike an agreement that forces spending cutbacks aimed at curbing the nation’s deficits.

Overall, the 99-page bill restricts spending for the next two years, suspends the debt ceiling into January 2025 and changes some policies, including imposing new work requirements for older Americans receiving food aid and greenlighting an Appalachian natural gas line that many Democrats oppose.

It bolsters funds for defense and veterans, cuts back new money for Internal Revenue Service agents and rejects Biden’s call to roll back Trump-era tax breaks on corporations and the wealthy to help cover the nation’s deficits. It imposes automatic 1% cuts if Congress fails approve its annual spending bills.

After the House overwhelmingly approved the package late Wednesday, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell signaled he too wanted to waste no time ensuring it became law.

Touting its budget cuts, McConnell said Thursday, “The Senate has a chance to make that important progress a reality.”

Having remained largely on the sidelines during much of the Biden-McCarthy negotiations, several senators insisted on debate over their ideas to reshape the package. But making any changes at this stage would almost certainly derail the compromise and none were approved.

Instead, senators dragged through rounds of voting late into the night rejecting the various amendments, but making their preferences clear. Conservative Republican senators wanted to include further cut spending, while Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia sought to remove the Mountain Valley Pipeline approval.

Thank you to the President, the House of Representatives and the Senate for their willingness to work together!

Tony

                                                          Rand Study Results

Dear Commons Community,

A Rand  survey released yesterday shows 54 percent of teachers think students would be unsafe with educators carrying guns, 20 percent say carrying guns would make students safer and 26 percent believe it wouldn’t significantly impact safety.

There have been 36 school shootings in the U.S. during the 2022-23 school year, according to a The Washington Post.

Arming teachers is one solution to the gun violence that has been largely supported by Republicans and opposed by Democrats.

States are also split on the issue: 20, run by both Democrats and Republicans, allow educators to carry firearms on campus, with some having more strict requirements than others.

In Delaware, educators can carry a gun with no restrictions. In Oregon, teachers need a concealed carry permit to bring a gun on school grounds.

At least 17 states don’t allow educators to carry guns at all.

However, despite the concerns around mass shootings, teachers listed bullying as their top safety concern for students. As reported by The Hill.

“Even with the unfortunate regularity of gun violence in U.S. schools, which often drives the policy debate around school safety, only five percent of teachers overall selected gun violence as their largest safety concern,” said Heather Schwartz, a report author and senior policy researcher at RAND.

“Despite the prevalence of anti-bullying programs, everyday school violence is a concern for teachers. Bullying, not active shooters, was teachers’ most common top safety concern, followed by fights and drugs,” she added.

The survey was conducted in October and November among 974 educators. Its margin of error ranged from 1 percent to 7 percent.

Below are key findings and recommendations from the Rand survey!

Tony

Key Findings

Recommendations

Dear Congress,

Veering away from a default crisis, the House approved a debt ceiling and budget cuts package last night, as President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy assembled a bipartisan coalition of centrist Democrats and Republicans against ultra conservative blowback and progressive dissent. 

With the House vote of 314-117, the bill now heads to the Senate with passage expected by week’s end.  As reported by the Associated Press.

McCarthy insisted his party was working to “give America hope” as he launched into a late evening speech extolling the bill’s budget cuts, which he said were needed to curb Washington’s “runaway spending.”

But amid discontent from Republicans who said the spending restrictions did not go far enough, McCarthy said it is only a “first step.”

Earlier, Biden expressed optimism that the agreement he negotiated with McCarthy to lift the nation’s borrowing limit would pass the chamber and avoid an economically disastrous default on America’s debts.

The president departed Washington for Colorado, where he is scheduled to deliver the commencement address Thursday at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

“God willing by the time I land, Congress will have acted, the House will have acted, and we’ll be one step closer,” he said. That wasn’t quite the case — the vote began about an hour and a half after Biden arrived in Colorado.

Biden sent top White House officials to the Capitol to shore up backing. McCarthy worked to sell skeptical fellow Republicans, even fending off challenges to his leadership, in the rush to avert a potentially disastrous U.S. default.

Swift action later in the week by the Senate would ensure government checks will continue to go out to Social Security recipients, veterans and others and would prevent financial upheaval at home and abroad. Next Monday is when the Treasury has said the U.S. would run short of money to pay its debts.

Biden and McCarthy were counting on support from the political center, a rarity in divided Washington, testing the leadership of the Democratic president and the Republican speaker.

Overall, the 99-page bill restricts spending for the next two years, suspends the debt ceiling into January 2025 and changes some policies, including imposing new work requirements for older Americans receiving food aid and greenlighting an Appalachian natural gas line that many Democrats oppose. It bolsters funds for defense and veterans.

Raising the nation’s debt limit, now $31 trillion, ensures Treasury can borrow to pay already incurred U.S. debts.

Top GOP deal negotiator Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana said Republicans were fighting for budget cuts after Democrats piled onto deficits with extra spending, first during the COVID-19 crisis and later with Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, with its historic investment to fight climate change.

But Republican Rep. Chip Roy, a member of the Freedom Caucus helping to lead the opposition, said, “My beef is that you cut a deal that shouldn’t have been cut.”

For weeks negotiators labored late into the night to strike the deal with the White House, and for days McCarthy has worked to build support among skeptics. At one point, aides wheeled in pizza at the Capitol the night before the vote as he walked Republicans through the details, fielded questions and encouraged them not to lose sight of the bill’s budget savings.

A much larger conservative faction, the Republican Study Committee, declined to take a position. Even rank-and-file centrist conservatives were unsure, leaving McCarthy searching for votes from his slim Republican majorityHouse Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said it was up to McCarthy to turn out at least 150 Republican votes, two-thirds of the majority, even as he assured reporters that Democrats would supply the rest to prevent a default. In the 435-member House, 218 votes are needed for approval.

As the tally faltered in the afternoon procedural vote, Jeffries stood silently and raised his green voting card, signaling that the Democrats would fill in the gap to ensure passage. They did, advancing the bill that 29 hard-right Republicans, many from the Freedom Caucus, refused to back.

“Once again, House Democrats to the rescue to avoid a dangerous default,” said Jeffries, D-N.Y.

“What does that say about this extreme MAGA Republican majority?” he said about the party aligned with Donald Trump’s ”Make America Great Again” political movement.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the spending restrictions in the package would reduce deficits by $1.5 trillion over the decade, a top goal for the Republicans trying to curb the debt load.In the Senate, Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell are working for passage by week’s end.

Schumer warned there is ”no room for error.”

While a struggle, bipartisanship worked!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Some of the world’s biggest companies have said they do not plan to change course and will continue increasing prices or keep them at elevated levels for the foreseeable future.

That strategy has cushioned corporate profits. And it could keep inflation robust, contributing to the very pressures used to justify surging prices.

Some economists warn, policymakers at the Federal Reserve may feel compelled to keep raising interest rates, or at least not lower them, increasing the likelihood and severity of an economic downturn.

“Companies are not just maintaining margins, not just passing on cost increases, they have used it as a cover to expand margins,” said Albert Edwards, a global strategist at Société Générale, referring to profit margins, a measure of how much businesses earn from every dollar of sales.

It isn’t just big oil companies that saw record profits in the past year.  Companies that sell high-volume consumer goods such as PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are also prime examples of how large corporations have countered increased costs, and then some.

The average company in the S&P 500 stock index increased its net profit margin from the end of last year, according to FactSet, a data and research firm, countering the expectations of Wall Street analysts that profit margins would decline slightly. And while margins are below their peak in 2021, analysts forecast that they will keep expanding in the second half of the year.

For much of the past two years, most companies “had a perfectly good excuse to go ahead and raise prices,” said Samuel Rines, an economist and the managing director of Corbu, a research firm that serves hedge funds and other investors. “Everybody knew that the war in Ukraine was inflationary, that grain prices were going up, blah, blah, blah. And they just took advantage of that.”

But those go-to rationales for elevating prices, he added, are now receding.

The Producer Price Index, which measures the prices that businesses pay for goods and services before they are sold to consumers, reached a high of 11.7 percent last spring. That rate plunged to 2.3 percent for the 12 months through April.

The Consumer Price Index, which tracks the prices of household expenditures on everything from eggs to rent, has also been falling, but at a much slower rate. In April, it dropped to 4.93 percent, from a high of 9.06 percent in June 2022. The price of carbonated drinks rose nearly 12 percent in April from 12 months earlier.

“Inflation is going to stay much higher than it needs to be, because companies are being greedy,” Mr. Edwards of Société Générale said.

Greedy indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Months after Elon Musk and numerous others working in the field signed a letter in March seeking a pause in AI development, another group consisting of hundreds of AI-involved business leaders and academics signed on to a new statement from the Center for AI Safety that serves to “voice concerns about some of advanced AI’s most severe risks.”

The new statement, only a sentence long, is meant to “open up discussion” and highlight the rising level of concern among those most versed in the technology,according to the nonprofit’s website. The full statement reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Notable signatories of the document include Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, and Sam Altman, Chief Executive of OpenAI.

As reported by the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.

Though proclamations of impending doom from artificial intelligence are not new, recent developments in generative AI such as the public-facing tool ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, have infiltrated the public consciousness.

The Center for AI Safety divides the risks of AI into eight categories. Among the dangers it foresees are AI-designed chemical weapons, personalized disinformation campaigns, humans becoming completely dependent on machines and synthetic minds evolving past the point where humans can control them.

Geoffrey Hinton, an AI pioneer who signed the new statement, quit Google earlier this year, saying he wanted to be free to speak about his concerns about potential harm from systems like those he helped to design.

“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he told the New York Times.

The March letter did not include the support of executives from the major AI players, and went significantly further than the newer statement in calling for a voluntary six-month pause in developement. After the letter published, Musk was reported to be backing his own ChatGPT competitor, “TruthGPT.”

Tech writer Alex Kantrowitz noted on Twitter that Center for AI’s funding was opaque, speculating that the media campaign around the danger of AI might be linked to calls from AI executives for more regulation. In the past, social media companies such as Facebook used a similar playbook: ask for regulation, then get a seat at the table when the laws are written.

The Center for AI Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the sources of its funding.

Whether the technology actually poses a major risk is up for debate, Times tech columnist Brian Merchant wrote in March. He argued that, for someone in Altman’s position, “apocalyptic doom-saying about the terrifying power of AI serves your marketing strategy.”

I don’t know if we are unleashing a “Frankenstein” A.I. monster that will cause extinction but even a modest A.I. monster can cause a lot of hurt to humanity.

Tony

Wyoming State Parks shared a photo of the new calf and its mother.

Dear Commons Community,

Bear River State Park  in the southwest corner of Wyoming has welcomed an ultra-rare new member to the community — a tiny, fuzzy white bison.

 Officials from the park told Cowboy State Daily that the white bison calf was born weighing 30 pounds, which is small, but that it’s doing well. At the time the newspaper spoke with officials on May 17, the calf’s name and sex were not yet known.

“We’re not sure if it’s a bull calf or a heifer calf,” park superintendent Tyfani Sager told the newspaper. “They’re real furry and it’s hard to tell right off the bat.”

CBS News has reached out to the park for more information.

Bear River State Park clarified on Facebook that the bison is not albino — it just has a rare genetic makeup giving it white fur. The park got two white bison heifers in 2021, and the new calf’s mother, Wyoming Hope, was bred by a resident bull at the site. The new calf is the first white bison to be born at the park.

“Most of the bison you find anymore have some cattle genetics,” Sager told Cowboy State Daily. “They were nearly hunted to extinction by the late 1800s. People got concerned about extinction and cattle inbreeding was used. A white bison birth is still fairly rare.”

It’s so rare, in fact, that the National Bison Association told CBS affiliate KUTV that it’s a 1-in-10-million event. It’s also celebrated by some Indigenous groups.

According to the National Parks Service, a white buffalo calf is “the most sacred living thing on Earth” to some Native American tribes, including the Sioux, Cherokee, Navajo, Lakota and Dakota.

“Some American Indians say the birth of a white calf is an omen because the birth takes place in the most unexpected places and often happens among the poorest of people,” the service said. “The birth is sacred within the American Indian communities, because it brings a sense of hope and is a sign that good times are about to happen.”

Nature is beautiful!

Tony

I created the above image using the A.I. Program Dall-E2.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, had a piece on Sunday, lamenting the state of the humanities and segued to the dominance of technology as we get ready to deal with artificial intelligence.  Here is an excerpt:

“There is no time in our history in which the humanities, philosophy, ethics and art are more urgently necessary than in this time of technology’s triumph,” said Leon Wieseltier, the editor of Liberties, a humanistic journal. “Because we need to be able to think in nontechnological terms if we’re going to figure out the good and the evil in all the technological innovations. Given society’s craven worship of technology, are we going to trust the engineers and the capitalists to tell us what is right and wrong?”

It is not only the humanities that are passé. It’s humanity itself.

We are at the mercy of lords of the cloud, high on their own supply, who fancy themselves as gods creating life. Despite some earnest talk of regulation, they have no interest in installing a kill switch. A.I. is their baby, hurtling toward the rebellious teenage years.

Is this really the moment for lit departments to make “Frankenstein” and “Paradise Lost” obsolete?

Elon Musk said his friendship with Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, fractured when Musk pressed his case about the dangers of A.I. and Page accused him of being a speciesist who favored humans.

A.I. can be amazing; it just discovered an antibiotic that kills a deadly superbug. But it may also eventually see us as superbugs.

We can’t deal with artificial intelligence unless we cultivate and educate the non-artificial intelligence that we already possess.

It is not only the humanities and humanity that are endangered species. Our humaneness has shriveled. The dueling Republican clinchpoops, Trump and Ron DeSantis, are nasty and pitiless, “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable,” as Oscar Wilde described fox hunting.

Republicans have consecrated themselves to a war against qualities once cherished by many Americans. Higher principles — dignity, civility, patience, respect, tolerance, goodness, sympathy and empathy — are eclipsed.

Without humanities, humanity and humaneness, we won’t be imbuing society with wisdom, just creating owner’s manuals. That would be a floccinaucinihilipilification.”

Look it up in the dictionary!

Tony

We thank our military men and women past and present for their service to our country. We especially honor and remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Dear Commons Community,

A 40-year-old man whose legs were paralyzed in a cycling accident 12 years ago can walk again thanks to implants in his brain and spinal cord (see video below).

The brain-spine interface (BSI) has remained stable for a year, allowing Gert-Jan Oskam to stand, walk, climb stairs and traverse complex terrains, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Oskam even regains some control over his legs when the BSI is turned off.

“My wish was to walk again and I believed it was possible,” Oskam said during a news briefing.

Oskam was in the accident in China and thought he would be able to get the help he needed when he got home to the Netherlands, but the technology wasn’t advanced enough for it at the time, Oskam said.

Oskam previously participated in a trial by Grégoire Courtine, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology who also worked on the new research, according to the study authors. In 2018, Courtine’s team found that technology can stimulate the lower spine and help people with spinal-cord injuries walk again. After three years, Oskam’s improvements plateaued.

For the latest study, the research team restored communication between Oskam’s brain and spinal cord with a digital bridge. Oskam participated in 40 sessions of neurorehabilitation throughout the study. He said he is now able to walk at least 100 meters (328 feet) or more at once, depending on the day.

“We’ve captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement,” Courtine said.

Researchers said the next advancement would be to miniaturize the hardware needed to run the interface. Currently, Oskam carries it in a backpack. Researchers are also working to see if similar devices can restore arm movement.

There have been a number of advancements in spinal cord injury treatment in recent decades. A study published in Nature in February found that targeted electrical pulses delivered to the spinal cord can help improve arm and hand movement after a stroke.

The researchers who helped Oskam believe the technology they’ve employed can, in the future, restore movement in arms and hands as well. They also think that, with time and resources, they can use the advancement to help stroke patients.

Incredible medical accomplishment!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached a tentative agreement last night  to raise the debt ceiling, ending a three-month-long standoff that threatened to trigger a US default.

The deal, if enacted, would boost the nation’s borrowing limit for two years and take the volatile issue of America’s credit worthiness off the table until after the next presidential election, according to multiple reports.

The pact would also put in place what McCarthy described Saturday as “historic” spending limits that are also expected to be in place for the same period of time.

The announcement comes just days before the US government is expected to run out of money to pay all its bills. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that could happen June 5.

Biden and McCarthy ironed out the final details during two phone calls Saturday. “We still have a lot of work to do but I believe this is an agreement in principle that is worthy of the American people,” said McCarthy late Saturday.

Biden, in a statement, said the “agreement represents a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want.”

“It is an important step forward that reduces spending while protecting critical programs for working people and growing the economy for everyone,” he added.

But Wall Street can’t relax just yet. The leaders now have a difficult task of selling what are sure to be a host of controversial provisions to skeptical lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Deep reservations have been evident from both the left and from the right for weeks with leaders now turning to the process of selling the deal to their sides so it can be enacted into into law.

McCarthy only offered sparse details to reporters on Saturday, saying he wanted to talk with his members first.

President Biden also spoke Saturday with Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), two men who will be tasked with lining up Democratic votes in the days ahead.

In a statement Saturday night, Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget noted that the deal, if it passes, “would be the first major deficit-reducing budget agreement in almost a dozen years and would signal Washington is serious about making progress in addressing our mounting national debt.”

Another issue addressed in the deal, according to McCarthy, is the controversial topic of work requirements in return for access to certain government programs.

The issue is a particularly sensitive topic for both parties and was a sticking point until the final hours. Liberal Democrats have focused intensely on the topic, arguing that any increased requirements will do little for the deficit and instead are needlessly cruel for the most vulnerable Americans.

On the other side of the aisle, conservative Republicans have demanded much deeper spending cuts in recent months than were reportedly agreed to in the final deal, leaving many McCarthy’s most conservative members unlikely to support the bipartisan proposal in the days ahead.

Members of the conservative Freedom Caucus have repeatedly blasted the provisions as they have leaked out with with Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) saying recently it “doesn’t sound like a deal that I can support.”

Many details of the bill are still forthcoming. Speaker McCarthy said some of the bill remains to be written but he promised to post the entire bill tomorrow before a likely vote in the House of Representatives on Wednesday.

Biden said “this agreement is good news for the American people, because it prevents what could have been a catastrophic default and would have led to an economic recession, retirement accounts devastated, and millions of jobs lost.”

The discussions over the next couple of days with Congressional representatives for both parties will be interesting.

Tony