Today’s briefing on a De Minimis exemption for Bitcoin was a great success. Our panel delivered a strong, data forward case for De Minimis relief.
Coinbase presented new stats showing that a De Minimis exemption would bring administrative relief by saving millions of unnecessary forms being sent to the IRS.
Thank you again to @karacalvert , @janessalopez__ and @wmongan for participating and all the staffers who joined. We’ll keep everyone updated as legislation progresses.
@brian_armstrong@TFTC21 I have sources that say otherwise, not you personally but your team and/or lobbyists. Will you commit to walk away from the market structure bill if it doesn’t include the de minimis exemption for bitcoin like you did stablecoin yield?
here's an implication of the insight around deflation alluded to in the quote tweet that is relatively easy to wrap your head around (the core is a bit more involved and we are tinkering with how to present it):
take as your starting assumption that you do in fact need inflation to "stimulate the economy": that extending artificial credit to entrepreneurs spurs them to make investments they wouldn't otherwise be suitably incentivised to make, growing the economy to the benefit of all, and that the increase in the money supply this requires is net worth it because otherwise this growth wouldn't have happened.
okay, so what is the point of these investments and what are the consequences? well, any investment creates capital that enhances labour productivity and allows us to create more outputs with the same or fewer inputs. if you don't achieve this, you aren't "investing" in the first place, you are larping, consuming capital.
"more outputs with the same or fewer inputs" implies prices going down as the successful "investors" lower prices, take market share, and on their new and improved cost structure, still boost their own returns.
you could imagine this logic being strung together along the following lines: yes, the money supply went up and your share of total purchasing power went down, but our productive capacity went up by *more* so it was all worth it.
that's in terms of the aggregate of money and capital. what about in terms of prices?
more money is chasing goods on the market, putting upwards pressure on prices, but there are more goods on the market than there is more money, so the net effect is still that prices fall.
if you follow this logic you cannot fail to recognize that this *cannot fail to be true*. if prices stay flat, the investment triggered by artificial credit has achieved nothing. if prices go up, it has been a net negative: you could even argue this provides a diagnostic test of "capital misallocation".
so to get to the punchline, even if you take the illiterate Keynesian trope of "stimulating thecomony" seriously, you can still reason logically about what evidence would need to exist to justify the actions it recommends.
and if you do that, you find that it NEVER EVER EXISTS IN ECONOMIC REALITY. all the fiat keynesian stimulus in the world has only ever caused prices to go up. it has never, not once in recorded history, caused a provable improvement in capital allocation (the proof being price deflation, per the logic just outlined).
what happens instead is the following sleight of hand: they present the above logic but tactically switch out "money supply" and "price level" as what they mean by "inflation" when the argument would otherwise collapse on itself. it goes like this:
"we need inflation to stimulate economic growth. people invest with the new money and GDP goes up. prices also go up, but that's okay because we need inflation to stimulate economic growth."
see what they did there? they tricked you into missing that even if you believe their batshit crazy premises, just for the sake of argument, their logic is still demonstrably unsound.
in summary:
price inflation following money supply inflation is *proof* that the money supply inflation triggered capital misallocation. by an asinine measure like "GDP", "the economy" "grew", but prices going up is incontrovertible evidence that your purchasing power has been stolen from by more than this "growth".
if their argument made any sense, you would still expect price deflation. but it doesn't, so you don't.
My strongest possible recommendation on food:
Vote with your wallet.
Support restaurants that source to your standards. Scan the labels of processed food and don’t buy stuff with added sugar. Purchase from local farmers. Spend more money on food.
Farmers are nimble and will grow what we buy. Processed food companies will change ingredients if we stop buying the current ones (and are).
The administration has accomplished more on food reform in six months than at any point in American history - this admin is fighting to fix our broken incentives harder than any other admin in history. We are winning.
But the simple truth is that - despite a market that is in many ways dysfunctional - the greatest force for change will come from the market and consumers voting with their wallet. This consumer awakening also fuels policy reform.
This ad cost us ~$100 in tokens across Claude/ChatGPT/Veo3 + 20 hours of labor.
It has over 1.2m+ impressions in less than 48 hours and our followers on X went from 2.8k to 7k over the same period.
AI applied to storytelling is a powerful tool for companies.
Congressman Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) has proposed a ban on dual citizenship for lawmakers.
He took ZERO dollars in bribery from the Jewish terrorist organization @AIPAC
Trump says he will personally lead the charge on primarying Thomas Massie.
We stand with Massie 🇺🇸
I’m not voting for the Continuing Resolution budget (cut-copy-paste omnibus) this week. Why would I vote to continue the waste fraud and abuse DOGE has found?
We were told the CR in December would get us to March when we would fight.
Here we are in March, punting again!
WTFO
5 years ago I hated @RepThomasMassie for voting against COVID stimulus checks under Trump but since then I've come to see that he is genuinely one of kind. Government probably wouldn't work if everyone was as principled as him but we should at least have one in the peoples House
@KyleSeraphin@RepThomasMassie Not only a waste of energy but a deeply misguided tactical error.
@RepThomasMassie represents everything Trump claims to be and fails to deliver on. Only highlighting how many promises he hasn’t kept.
Parents who say DST is better please know that sleep is when your kids’ brain actually undergoes the dramatic plasticity of prior day/s learning & also when whole body growth occurs. DST = less sleep & REM sleep especially- which is vital.
Bringing this truck to the US may be a necessary move by the Trump admin as it re-shores manufacturing and tries to build back the middle class.
Business owners being able to buy a $10k truck instead of one for $120k would be massive for businesses. https://t.co/p7bGXpxalC