aacj

March 13 2025

Senate GOP tax cuts; Immigration grows metro areas; Trump’s gamble on downturn; AI thinks like us; Russia rejects 30d ceasefire, seeks lasting peace

Greg Loving

13 Mar 2025 • 7 min read

A Russian soldier walks along a ruined street in the Kursk region’s Malaya Loknya settlement, which was recently retaken by Moscow’s forces © via REUTERS

Senate GOP Pushes Tax Cuts Beyond Trump’s Plan, Eyeing $5 Trillion Package

Census: Immigration Boosts Growth in America’s Biggest Metro Areas

Trump’s Political Gamble: Will Americans Endure Downturn for Reindustrialization?

Hinton: AI Thinks Like Us, Could Soon Surpass Human Minds

BREAKING…Russia Rejects Temporary Ukraine Ceasefire, Seeks Lasting Peace Deal

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1. Senate GOP Pushes Tax Cuts Beyond Trump’s Plan, Eyeing $5 Trillion Package

Senate Republicans are planning tax reductions that go well beyond an extension of President Trump’s expiring tax cuts. On the menu: Reviving lapsed business tax breaks, expanding the child tax credit, loosening the cap on the state and local tax deduction and incorporating Trump’s ideas for eliminating taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security benefits, said Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R., Idaho), who ticked through a list of ideas Wednesday that could easily top $5 trillion or more over a decade. On top of that, Crapo said, senators have submitted about 200 additional tax ideas to him, such as an expanded low-income housing tax credit, changes to the Opportunity Zone program for investments in low-income areas and further cuts in the estate tax. The final bill won’t include all of those proposals, Crapo said, but some will get in. Finance Committee Republicans are scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House on Thursday as talks heat up on the tax-and-spending bill that will carry the bulk of the president’s legislative agenda in the unified Republican government. Their House counterparts on the Ways and Means Committee have been hashing out their bill in closed-door sessions this week. The House and Senate, both controlled by Republicans, must agree twice to maneuver the bill through Congress without Democratic votes. First, they have to settle on a fiscal framework and then they have to write the detailed legislation. They have been stuck for months on that first step. In February, the House set its framework, calling for at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over a decade and $4 trillion to $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, plus money for border security and national defense. The Senate is moving much more slowly, and it could be weeks before there is a House-Senate deal on a framework.
Source: WSJ

2. Census: Immigration Boosts Growth in America’s Biggest Metro Areas

It turns out, America’s biggest metro areas aren’t shrinking—at least for now. New Census Bureau estimates released Thursday show that the New York and Chicago metro areas grew in each of the past two years ended in June. The Los Angeles area expanded in the 12 months ended in June. These regions are all still smaller than before the Covid-19 pandemic, but not by as much as previously thought. The big difference? The Census Bureau recently changed its estimates of the immigrant population, significantly boosting totals for recent years. In the year ended in June, most growth occurred in metro areas, where 86% of the population lives. No component contributed more to population growth than immigrants, who made up 84% of the metro gain of 3.2 million. Rising immigration in big metro areas that had been shrinking helped offset both a net loss of people moving to other parts of the country and low birthrates.
Source: WSJ

3. Trump’s Political Gamble: Will Americans Endure Downturn for Reindustrialization?

President Trump’s simultaneous trade wars with Canada, Mexico, China and the European Union amount to a huge economic and political gamble: that Americans will endure months or years of economic pain in return for the distant hope of re-industrializing the American heartland. It is enormously risky. In recent days, Mr. Trump has acknowledged, despite all his confident campaign predictions that “we are going to boom like we have never boomed before,” that the United States may be headed into a recession, fueled by his economic agenda. But in public and private he has been arguing that “a little disturbance” in the economy and the markets is a small price to pay for bringing manufacturing jobs back to America. His closest political partners are doubling down on the strategy. “President Trump’s economic policies are simple,” Vice President JD Vance wrote on social media on Monday. “If you invest in and create jobs in America, you’ll be rewarded. We’ll lower regulations and reduce taxes. But if you build outside of the United States, you’re on your own.”

Editors note: there’s no strong case, for or against, that we’re headed for a recession. See my comment Tuesday about being wary of economic forecasts.
Source: NYT

4. Hinton: AI Thinks Like Us, Could Soon Surpass Human Minds

Geoffrey Hinton is one of the “godfathers” of artificial intelligence, critical in the development of deep learning, backpropagation and much more. In 2024 he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics in recognition of his immense contributions to the field of computer science. Not bad for someone who started his career with the aim of understanding the human brain. Despite his role in its creation, though, Professor Hinton has been surprised by the rapid development of the technology. He’s now convinced that artificial neural networks can think, reason and understand the world in a way that could eventually be superior to our own brains.

Hinton: “What that tells us is (artificial neural networks are) even more like us than we thought. So most people have a completely wrong model of what memory is. They think of memory as like a file on a computer. You put the file somewhere, and then when you want it back, you go fetch it. That’s not how memory works in people at all. You don’t store any strings of words in your head. It feels like you do. But even if you know a poem, it’s not stored as strings of words. What you have is just you change the connection strings between neurons and when you want to recall something, what you do is you generate it. You make it up. Now, if it happened recently, you generate something that’s quite like what actually happened. But if it were something that happened ten years ago and you just make up something that seems plausible to you because that’s what a memory is, it’s just something that seems plausible to you. There’s no difference between the bits you made up that are actually false and the bits you made up that actually true. As far as you’re concerned, the equally plausible psychologist would call it confabulation. People do that all the time. Well, I think they do. I just made that up, but I think they do. Chat bots are a bit worse than us at present. We often notice when we’re doing it. Chat bots will get better at noticing when they’re doing. In fact, the recent chat bots do reasoning things like deep seek and the latest versions of the open AI chat bots when they’re answering a question. They can produce strings of words that are then thinking, and then they can reflect on those strings of words to help get the right answer and notice when it’s said things that are wrong. Once it starts doing that, it will be able to notice the inconsistencies in what it said. So it must have been confabulation. So they’re getting to the stage when they’re going to be as good as people at noticing when they’re making it up.”
Source: The Economist

5. BREAKING…Russia Rejects Temporary Ukraine Ceasefire, Seeks Lasting Peace Deal

Russia does not want a temporary ceasefire in Ukraine and is pushing for a long-term peace settlement that will take into account its interests and concerns, a senior aide to Vladimir Putin has said. Yuri Ushakov, the Russian president’s foreign policy adviser, told state television on Thursday that the 30-day ceasefire proposed after talks between the US and Ukraine was “nothing other than a temporary breather for Ukrainian troops”. Ushkov said that Moscow “expects the US will take into account Russia’s positions in further work together”, according to state media.
Source: FT