Monthly Archives: September 2026

Expand the Child Tax Credit

Tax Parents Less. Do Not Put Them on the Dole. N.B. This follows "A Parent is Not a Vendor." If policy can pay a parent for being a parent, it can pay a person for being a person. That is the sentence the Vance draft cannot survive. A future Democratic administration will not need to love stay-at-home marriage. It will keep the payee and delete the adjectives. It will call the marriage gate discriminatory, relax the hours test, raise the income cap, and tell Congress the Child Care and Development Fund is oversubscribed, which it will be. Ro Khanna already wrote…

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A Parent is Not a Vendor

Do Not Put Parents on the CCDF Ledger A stay-at-home parent is not a vendor. A Clinton-era work pot is not a family stipend. Do the family work in the tax code. The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would let some married stay-at-home parents collect money from the Child Care and Development Fund. Vice President JD Vance has made the idea a priority. The draft invents a new category called "parent-based child care." One spouse works at least thirty-five hours a week. The other stays home with the child. The family meets the income test. The check, about nine…

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Trump’s Strategic Patience

Time Is No Longer on Tehran’s Side Strategic patience is not passivity. It is a Navy that answers fire with arithmetic, a Treasury that maps every node that pays the IRGC, and a map that is quietly making the Strait of Hormuz optional. N.B. This follows “The Art of the Hammer” (June 2026). The memorandum was a pause with a clock. The clock ran out. See also the statecraft file and prior Kharg Island notes. It has been a couple of months since I last wrote about Iran. That was not neglect. It was the interval the story required. In June,…

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Positive Labor Day Numbers

Labor Day, and the Slope Changed The official story finally faces the same direction as the policy. Labor Day is the weekend America sets aside to praise work and then talk about anything else. This year the holiday has a plot. The government spent Friday morning describing a country that no longer looks like the one it described from 2021 to 2024. The border is not a monthly spectacle. The foreign-born population is not still climbing like a flood gauge. The job market did not fall through the floor when the inflow stopped. That is not atmosphere. That is the official…

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Compute and Creaturehood

Data Centers Have Neighbors Compute will find a home. The only live civic question is whether the neighbors are treated as creatures or as throughput. I have never believed a tool decides a people. I said that when the argument went to orbit. I will say it again with the argument on the ground. The demand for compute is not a zoning category. It is load. It will clear. It will clear on a brownfield with its own generation, on a river that still has surplus power, behind a posted payment in lieu of taxes, in the next county that wants…

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