Fox News:
President Trump is requesting that nearly $6 billion be made available for the Harvey recovery process.Does that figure sound almost like a bad tv ad? "For the low, low price of $5.95 billion, you get all this hurricane recovery! Order now, and we will throw in a set of Ginsu steak knives, normally worth $19.95! Yours for free!"
The administration urged Congress on Thursday to approve and provide $5.95 billion for the initial response and recovery efforts related to the devastating hurricane affecting parts of Texas and Louisiana, Axios reported.
But is that how much it will actually cost?
CNN:
The only thing known for certain about the cost of Hurricane Harvey is that it's one of the most expensive natural disasters in the nation's history. It might even be the most expensive.
...Moody's estimates that property losses will total between $45 billion to $65 billion, while economic losses will add $6 billion to $10 billion. A $75 billion price tag would make it the second most costly natural disaster. Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which currently ranks second, caused $73 billion in damage when adjusted into today's dollars.
...Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said in an interview with CNBC that he expects there will be "a high proportion of uninsured losses to insured losses, compared to most events."So the big $6 billion Trump was asking for in the Fox News story?
"It has a real effect. It destroys wealth. If there's $150 billion or something of uninsured losses, that's real wealth," Buffett said.
If approved by Congress, $5.5 billion would go to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for its disaster relief operations and $450 million to the Small Business Administration to assist affected businesses.So when you are thinking government "charity" actually helps, it does, but only the least amount possible.
By the way, there is one more side effect to this deal:
To access the funding, the U.S. debt limit would have to be increased – a move that would aim at lowering the risk of default, Bloomberg Politics reported.In other news today...
A separate official told the news site that the White House was looking to extend the limit long enough to move back the threat of default until Congress is able to draft a budget for the full federal fiscal year.
Gizmodo:
The story in the New York Times this week was unsettling: The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid of one of its teams of scholars, the Open Markets group. New America had warned its leader Barry Lynn that he was “imperiling the institution,” the Times reported, after he and his group had repeatedly criticized Google, a major funder of the think tank, for its market dominance.Read the rest of the story here.
The criticism of Google had culminated in Lynn posting a statement to the think tank’s website “applauding” the European Commission’s decision to slap the company with a record-breaking $2.7 billion fine for privileging its price-comparison service over others in search results. That post was briefly taken down, then republished. Soon afterward, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the head of New America, told Lynn that his group had to leave the foundation for failing to abide by “institutional norms of transparency and collegiality.”
Google denied any role in Lynn’s firing, and Slaughter tweeted that the “facts are largely right, but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong.” Despite the conflicting story lines, the underlying premise felt familiar to me: Six years ago, I was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Google’s monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. In my case, the post stayed unpublished.
If this is true, then Google has some issues for which they need to answer. Frankly, this goes against the old Google motto, "Don't be evil", or even the newer "Do the right thing".
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