[theropost]

It kinda just depends on the agenda, one source says it’s nothing, another says it’s a trillion, and that huge gap usually means someone’s trying to push something, like tougher laws or justify some policy shift. Half the time it feels like the facts don’t even matter, just the story they wanna sell.

[Spivak]

Half is being generous. Too much damn policy takes the form: I want policy action X for reason A, but people would be pissed if I said that's why, so I worked backwards to fabricate problem B which I will pretend to be deeply passionate about and plausibly has solution X.

It's god damn maddening. At least one side effect of the new GOP is they're partially dropping the pretense of needing B so we can at least not talk past one another sometimes.