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Four Fridays a month, Social Security checks go out to roughly 16 million Americans. If those checks don't go out one Friday, then millions of Americans will be furious with their congressman, particularly in red states and particularly with their Republican congressman. No Fox News spin will reduce their anger. Once we realize that Republicans are holding a gun to their own head, then the goal of the debt ceiling negotiation was just Republican saving face, which Biden has provided.

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This is a smart reply from Biden: “One of the things that I heard some of you saying is why doesn't Biden say what a good deal it is? You think that's going to help get it passed? No. That's why you guys don't bargain very well.”

Once again putting the over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable trust fund babies of the DC Press Corpse where they belong.

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What if nobody is bad at math: Teaching my own kid math was a bit of a revelation. He was a Legos child. In early childhood aptitude tests (speech, hearing, comprehension etc.), what came through accidentally was that his visual/spatial ability was off the charts. Given a jumble of objects of different shapes, colors and sizes, he was able to put them together in the right place way faster than kids much older. What belongs where. What fits with what. Think multiple jigsaw puzzles, simultaneously. He hated math. I had to teach him most everything visually. Parabola? St. Louis Arch or paths taken by the birds in Angry Birds. I must've made up all kinds of nonsense but believable stories to get him to learn. He then did OK. You could tell that he excelled at anything he learnt visually or had a visual element to it (e.g. simultaneous equations solutions, Geometry, Trig. etc.). What I learnt from that and from talking to his (really good) teachers was that they are always trying to figure out which kid is good at what (though not all of them do; Math teachers are especially horrible at it). They then design exercises/homeworks/tests to include different types of strengths that the kids have. For example, you could answer question on The Alchemist by 1) writing paragraphs, 2) making models and explaining why they work 3) developing a twitter conversation 4) assembling or creating a music sequence etc. etc. It is astonishing how much extra work kids will do to demonstrate their understanding/mastery of the standards if given half a chance to do it in the way that uses their own strengths. They spend more hours and understand more deeply. All this SAT/ACT business etc. has done a lot of disservice to higher education, in that sense. They've self-selected kids who learn in one way, and perhaps one way only. Most kids who learn visually, from experience, from creating things are probably not up there in SAT/ACT score tallies. Too bad. Now think of how many sensible kids are left out of economics or leave economics because of the math that economists shovel down the students' throats, especially in grad school. There's a selection going on there, too.

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There was an interesting comment over at Talking Points Memo explaining that the Fed already has and has used the tools to defuse the debt ceiling crisis. As they did in 2008 and more recently with the SVB default, the Fed could just buy the federal debt. No one seems to have made an ideological fuss about the 2008 bailouts or the more recent ones. The Fed, it seems, has an infinite capacity to absorb debt. All they have to do is invoke quantitative easing. This suggests that there is an equation QE=MMT. The Fed can do QE because the debt involved is payable in dollars. Does this mean that the MMT people are correct, that the Fed can just create money as needed? The only real difference I've heard of seems to be that QE can be used to bail out rich people, but can't be used, as proponents of MMT would like, to benefit those not extremely rich. In computer science, people ask if P=NP. I'm asking here whether QE=MMT.

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Eugenia Chen's piece on mathophobics confirms my long held belief that three is something fundamentally flaw about the manner in which mathematics is taught in this country. My son and both grandsons, despite their intelligence, have a phobia where math is concerned. It breaks my heart.

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