Quote:The Fox News host Laura Ingraham last week asked House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy about an idea that has gained some steam on the right, as conservatives have vented at large tech companies they accuse of bias. Ingraham told McCarthy, a California Republican leading the charge against Silicon Valley, that "there is another interesting idea beyond antitrust." "Consider Facebook and Twitter and so forth like a public utility, and thus they could be regulated like a public utility," she said. The point, she said, is that the companies like Facebook are "the town square." "And even though it is a private company, it dominates speech, dominates advertising ... so we have to treat a different way," she said. In response, McCarthy said he thought "Congress is going to look at everything from the perspective of how powerful they have become."

Quote:Here’s one more indicator, if anyone needs one, that House Republicans’ newfound fiscal responsibility isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: Their debt ceiling demands include a proposal that will balloon the debt — and by much more than previously understood. A key provision of the GOP’s proposed Limit, Save, Grow Act would rescind most of the $80 billion in additional funding the IRS received in the Inflation Reduction Act to tackle high-end tax evasion. The Congressional Budget Office calculates this move would increase the deficit by more than $100 billion over the course of the next decade.

The reality is even more dire. In new work, we estimate how much additional revenue the IRS is likely to collect as a result of the extra funding and, conversely, how much revenue would be lost if House Republicans’ proposal became law. We conclude, very conservatively, that the additional funding would shrink the tax gap (the difference between taxes owed and taxes collected) by nearly $500 billion over the next 10 years — and about $1.5 trillion over the course of the next two decades. Without this funding, federal budget deficits would increase by approximately this amount.