Red Wing Daily: December 12, 2024
"the more you know..."
State
Gambling - NIL trade-off? As Saracen Casino’s Marketing Officer Carlton Saffa pushes hard for NIL (name, image, likeness) “for every school in the state developed” by the “Arkansas casinos” so Saracen can promote a new game, the National Council on Problem Gaming says sports gambling leads to “lower consumer credit scores, higher credit card debt and less household savings.”
That’s some serious tax legislation: State Rep. David Ray and Senator Jonathan Dismang have filed the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2025” (HB1065) that would “remove the cap on increases to the standard deduction and individual income tax tables due to inflation” and “tie increases of the standard deduction and individual income tax tables to a regional index of the Consumer Price Index.” Visit Arkansas 1st News for more about upcoming bills as the Legislature gears up for its January 13 start date.
A busy General Session: Speaking of the upcoming 95th General Assembly, Senate Pro Tempore Bart Hester recently previewed “several topics that he believes will require significant funding and policy decisions, including prisons, Medicaid and education” as well as “higher education funding and priorities, the state’s housing crisis and the need for more highway and infrastructure spending.” (VIDEO)
Everyone wants some of the money: Grant Wynne, son of late state Supreme Court Justice Robin Wynne, has asked state regulators for approval to purchase a medical marijuana dispensary in El Dorado.
National
The newly elected Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, warned his Republican senators to expect five-day work weeks for the first 100 days of President Trump’s new term, and will move to no longer hold Senate votes open indefinitely waiting on senators to vote, actions designed to make the Senate more efficient in implementing Trump’s sweeping policy promises early in 2025. The Senate is expected to use reconciliation to address border, defense, energy, and tax policies.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the law requiring ByteDance to either sell TikTok or be banned in the U.S. Barring a successful appeal, the law takes effect January 19, the day before President Trump’s inauguration.
Tech
Careful with the chatbots: AI startup WotNot inadvertently left open “a huge Google Cloud Storage bucket, found freely accessible on the internet and containing a treasure trove of personal information” such as passport data, medical records (diagnoses, treatments, test results, etc.) that should be private, and employment history / resume information. What can you do to protect yourself from this sort of exposure of your personal data? Check “where your data is going before providing companies with sensitive personal information,” and “don’t send sensitive data to a chatbot, but ask for a safe company email address instead.”
Questionable Quotes
We don’t need to pay the debt down. We don’t need to balance the budget.
We just need the economy to grow faster than the debt.
And that’s not happening
Fed Chief Jerome Powell said it last week while warning against our unsustainable debt load.
