Thread by @rohangrey

It's tempting in these moments to interpreting something like "reducing price tag from $2.3T to $1.7T" in the way you might a scene from a movie where two people are haggling over the price of a rare item, or one of them providing a service the other needs to complete a quest etc

https://twitter.com/elwasson/status/1395808138213957634

But that's not what's going on here. We're talking about $600bn of investments, of projects, of money going to particular communities for particular needs, hard-won through years of organizing and advocacy, just vanishing up in smoke as a token of compromise to a hostile enemy.

In a movie, someone who wanted $20, and who is offered $5, and who settles on $10, still gets $10. And maybe they even overvalued their initial bid precisely to get to this number.

That's not how the budget works. A thousand programs or communities in need of that $600bn dont

get to take solace in the knowledge that some other communities or programs are still going to get their money. And of course, the amounts being requested here are rarely so over-estimated that they can meaningfully function when cut by 25% in the opening gambit.

It's a great

example where the use of budget numbers as a proxy for actual values - especially massive numbers in the trillions that we have no personal frame of reference for - function to turn the real violence and pain of austerity into an accounting game.

Forget about the lead in the

water, forget about the crumbling roads, forget about the underfunded legal and health and housing services organizations. We have a budget to balance! Hell, let's even make it a game! Just make sure not to feature all the ppl you hurt every time you play

brookings.edu/events/can-you…

S/O to @ddayen who I just noticed made the same point, much more pithily, already.

https://twitter.com/ddayen/status/1395809393275408385