Search Results: all we do is argue

The Georgia State Election Board voted on Friday to force counties to hand-count all ballots cast on Election Day, a move critics say could significantly delay the reporting of results in the battleground state and inject chaos into the post-election period.

The new rule, which passed on a 3-2 vote, runs counter to extensive legal advice from the top election official and law enforcement officials in the state. A nonpartisan collective of local election officials had also objected to the change.

The new rule is the latest in a stream of right-wing election policies passed by the State Election Board over the past few months. The board has come under increasing pressure from critics already concerned that it has been rewriting the rules of the game in a key swing state to favor former President Donald J. Trump. Last month, the board granted local officials new power over certifying the election, which opponents say could potentially disrupt the process if Mr. Trump loses in November.

The new rule to require hand counting in addition to a machine count, critics argue, could introduce errors and confusion into the process and potential disrupt the custody of ballots.

Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a series of proposals to help entrepreneurs create small businesses. Like President Joe Biden, she and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, argue that small businesses and entrepreneurs are the “engines of our economy.” In a statement today, they noted that “small businesses employ half of all private-sector workers in America—creating 70 percent of net new jobs since 2019—and do trillions of dollars of business every year.”

The Biden administration has boasted of the record number of new businesses created since Biden and Harris took office. There have been 19 million new business applications in that time. Harris said she and Walz are setting a goal of 25 million new business applications in their first term. Their plan, they say, is to “kickstart…more young, small, and innovative firms.”

To make this happen, they propose raising the deduction for startup expenses from its current level of $5,000 to $50,000, noting that the average amount a new business spends to get set up in its first year of operation is $40,000. They also propose funding a network of new and existing “federal, state, local, and private incubators and small business innovation hubs” that will make it easier for small business and local suppliers to get technical assistance, funding, customers, and so on.

In her statement about economic policy, Harris called out Trump for supporting “himself and the biggest corporations” and noted that sixteen Nobel laureates have said that Trump’s policies would ignite inflation and trigger a recession by mid-2025. That recession, economists project, would cost more than 3 million jobs, explode the deficit, and raise costs. Harris pointed out that Project 2025 would cut funding for the Small Business Administration and make it harder for small businesses to get access to money.