SB 8608: National Housing Trust Fund Expansion Act (Passed)

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Can't the Senate motion to waive paygo rules? It'd be nice if bills had a rough idea on what they would cost before hand instead of blindly raising rates in the future but it's not like this is a serious tax hike.

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What Mr R leaves out from his numbers is the context that I believe shows this is a mainstream proposal. Irl, Republican Senators Ron Johnson and Mike Crapo proposed an amendment that would increase funding for the trust fund to $3.75 billion, this is similar to that though admittedly somewhat greater(I do consider myself more left-wing than Ron Johnson and Mike Crapo). link As I've explained, this would be a worthwhile increase and this program serves an important mission in providing affordable housing. Furthermore, $5 billion isn't that much in the grand scheme of the wider budget, and given the original funding for this is rather small, using percentages does not tell you everything. This program is good value for money-better than most, and Senators can rest assured this is not some crazy tax and spend pie in the sky liberal thinking here but an eminnently reasonable, mainstream and affordable proposal.

Those Republican Senators support that because it is fundamentally a corporate welfare handout that benefits the rich.

That's a pretty spicy hottake right there. Can you explain how it has any basis in reality?

I'm looking into this specific issue now but that's often how politics in DC work, and after the Great Recession (which was caused in part by Bill Clinton making it too easy to give out loans to people who couldn't even pay them back), I'm wary about anything any corporate sellout trying to propose something that sounds good, seeing IRL it screwed my state over bigly.

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Some background info:

https://nlihc.org/issues/nhtf

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/hr3221

https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/HFSC_NLIHC_Testimony_12_21_2018.pdf

From the testimony linked above...,

You must be logged in to read this quote.

(I can't quote more to avoid copyvio)

My take is this may not be corporate welfare in the worst sense but I'm weary of attempts to block grant stuff to the states when a Republican IRL proposed such after Bill Clinton being the jerk that he was signed a bill in 1996 to do block grant welfare to the states, considering Republicans control most state governments and thus in a position to do whatever their donors want. But in this game, it may not be as bad of an idea since no one here takes corporate PAC money to play a fake election game (although in this case we'd give money to the regions).

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^Yea, I know, don't get me started on outsourcing and Grahm-Leach-Bliley, ect but I didn't include it in the original post because I didn't want to get off on a tangent too much especially since it is late at night and I need to head to bed. I'll rant about those when we get to bills to address those issues

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So, just to be sure here, are we okay with block granting money to the regions?

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What is the status/progress on this one, Pericles?

Like with the other one where I asked the same of Lech, I would prefer to have regular posted updates so we can see the progress and thereby judge estimated completion and assist with completion. Also could thus allow for us to determine if we need to proceed with this at a later time.

This bill I haven’t heard anyone discuss outside of this thread so AFAIK there haven’t been any efforts to modify this.

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What modifications were you expecting? I think we probably should wait for an analysis on this as to whether it passes Paygo, but I wasn't planning on changing the text of the bill.

I wasn't expecting anything per se, but Yankee seemed to imply he was. Honestly, this bill is pretty simple and we just need to decide whether it's worth the money or not.

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Good to see our attendance has improved.