Baby Incentives

Plus: New Jersey mysteries, cigarettes for homeless people, and more...

Child tax credit battles: Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) is pitching the idea of raising the child tax credit from $2,000 per child to $5,000 per child and allowing parents to take advantage of such credit not only once the child is born but also retroactively for the year prior when the mother was pregnant.

This plan would reportedly cost $2 trillion to $3 trillion over the next 10 years, per Bloomberg. But tax credits are simply allowing people to keep more of their earnings, instead of the government being entitled to taking them. The problem is when tax revenue shrinks yet government spending doesn't keep pace, we deepen the deficit hole we're already in.

Interestingly, Hawley "wants to apply the credit to payroll taxes, allowing even Americans who do not make enough to pay income taxes to access bigger refunds," notes Axios. This plan, which has also been endorsed by incoming Vice President J.D. Vance, has found plenty of supporters on the right and represents a possible shift by conservatives toward more explicitly pro-family policy.

What has been happening in New Jersey? About a month ago, residents of New Jersey started noticing substantial numbers of drones—as many as 10 or 15 at once!—hovering in the skies above them.

driving through new jersey pic.twitter.com/ns9pIB4tUP

— Kevin Finnerty (@timeimmemorial_) December 12, 2024

"It's unnerving when you walk out your door, and this is what you see," one Morristown resident told The New York Times. "Federal officials have said that there is no evidence that the sightings pose a threat to public safety, or that a majority of them are even drones," the same Times article clarified. "Many of the sightings have actually proved to be manned aircraft mistaken as drones, according to officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I." But there hasn't been a lot of information given as to what exactly is happening, and why it's happening now, leaving a lot of residents scared and irked.

One angle worth considering, while we await more information about what the hell is happening, is that we're actually more vulnerable to aerial attack than we realize and that, regardless of whether these are drones flown by foreign adversaries, the future involves such threats (and we're nowhere near ready for it).

Noah Smith writes in his Substack Noahpinion:

The basic idea here is that because drones are cheap to make in large numbers and hard to detect, they can easily penetrate peacetime air defenses that would easily catch and intercept manned aircraft. This means that every city and town and neighborhood is now vulnerable to approach by drones—we're just not going to put radars, electronic warfare devices, and point defense cannons on every city block in the country. If drones want to get close to you, they can.

People in New Jersey are panicking because this fact is just now sinking in.

Smith writes that "this is already a reality for Ukrainians living in the war-torn city of Kherson" where "Russians are using drones to hunt civilians." He cites the Financial Times: "When clouds gather, rain pours and winds sweep through this southern Ukrainian city, locals take their cue to run errands—sensing a pause, at least temporarily, in the terror that has filled their skies. Kherson's civilians have been, since midsummer, the target of an experiment without precedent in modern European warfare: a concerted Russian campaign to empty a city by stalking its residents with attack drones." The piece continues:

The killer machines, sometimes by the swarm, hover above homes, buzz into buildings and chase people down streets in their cars, riding bicycles or simply on foot. The targets are not soldiers, or tanks, but civilian life…Since mid-July, Kherson and its neighbouring villages along the western side of the Dnipro river have suffered more than 9,500 attacks with small drones, killing at least 37 people and injuring hundreds more.

New Jersey is facing nothing of the sort. But there's something absolutely disturbing about the fact that we would be wholly unprepared for such an attack and that, in the meantime, our government officials don't see fit to tell us much of anything.

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Scenes from New York: "The New York City Campaign Finance Board voted to withhold as much as $4.3 million in matching funds from Mayor Eric Adams, as he faces federal corruption charges focused on his fund-raising practices," reports The New York Times. You simply must enjoy the sheer delusion that's leading Adams to run for reelection; it probably won't go well, but his confidence is refreshing!

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QUICK HITS

• "A federal government department denies any involvement in the city of Yellowknife's handing out cigarettes as an incentive among the mostly Indigenous homeless population to participate in a Point-in-Time (PiT) count," reports Canada's National Post.
• A good question:

I think things in San Francisco are finally turning around, but has anyone written the definitive account of how 2014-2024 was basically a lost decade for the city? It was showered with fabulous amounts of wealth, and has surprisingly little to show for it.

— M. Nolan Gray (@mnolangray) December 16, 2024

• Big news in the world of fertility treatments:

This is neglected news more people should see.

Traditional egg maturation requires women to do about two weeks of hormonal stimulation.

With this new method, you only need about three days, and about 80% of required injections are no longer needed, making IVF safer and easier. https://t.co/yL96PJYdUB

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) December 16, 2024

• A teenager opened fire at a Christian school in Wisconsin, killing at least two people and injuring six before committing suicide.
• A federal jury in Nevada awarded $34 million to a woman for a wrongful conviction; the woman, Kirstin Blaise Lobato, had spent nearly 16 years in prison for a murder she did not commit. The full story is absolutely wild.
• How Donald Trump's tariffs helped northern Vietnam
• "For the furthest extremes of the American left, it doesn't matter that Luigi [Mangione] was a Huberman-loving center-right thinkboi hollowed out by pain and drugs, tragically lost to demons," writes Mike Solana at Pirate Wires. "Marxists have reshaped him into a folk hero, with songs of class war amplified across every corner of the social internet."
• "Interestingly, there's possibly some sign that young people are using less social media in general than in 2022," writes Noah Smith of recent Pew Research data on social media use for teens. "That might correspond to the end of the pandemic and the resumption of real-life interaction, or it might be a response to the general realization that public social media platforms are toxic and unhealthy. Note that the only significant gains in the last 2 years came from WhatsApp, which is a small-group chat service rather than a public platform." Teens are apparently using both Facebook and X way less than they used to.
• Vaccine revisionism is no match for Community Notes:

I fully believe vaccines cause Autism.

It's another example of crimes against humanity.

And innocent babies, children, and their families are the victims. https://t.co/uR4T1kEsoX

— Marjorie Taylor Greene ???????? (@mtgreenee) December 16, 2024