By RuthThe Money Desk

On November 1, Gina Jones, on strike since February with her coworkers at the Lorain County Job and Family Services office — the longest public-sector strike in Ohio history — told a reporter she has to pick between medicine or groceries. Two days later the rest of the country cast its ballots on the same question.

By November 7 the New York Post was calling the message plain: voters want cheaper gas and groceries and proof their elected officials are laser-focused on delivering it. The same day, the Guardian ran the numbers on what that proof would cost. A mandate that size and a shrug that size arrived on the same newsstand.

The exit poll underneath the mandate does not line up with the stump speech either. The Washington Examiner's breakdown of that poll put families earning under $30,000 at 59 percent Democratic to 39 Republican, and families earning over $300,000 at 61 to 39 Democratic — two points of daylight between them. The filing should show the affordability message splitting along income. It doesn't. The bracket earning ten times more backed the same promise two points harder than the bracket it was supposedly written for.

Higher education ran its own version of the same reconciliation. The Hill filed the reminder that affordability on a financial aid worksheet and affordability in a student's bank account are two different columns; a program can look affordable on paper and still sit out of reach once the paper closes. That is the same gap Gina Jones named on November 1: the number that describes the help and the number that describes the person getting it are kept in separate ledgers.

Iowa already has a draft of this promise on file.

The affordability relief both parties promised within days of this election is the same line item Iowa is still waiting on, and the same line item the exit poll's breakdown left unpriced by income. Nobody has filed a dollar figure next to it yet. Hon, that's not a forecast. That's just what the ledger says today.

By LouOne More Question

You're smart. You wouldn't have made the mistake sitting on page nine of this morning's paper, and I mean that as a compliment, because somebody in Asunción apparently would.

Thursday I drove the car — the one that needs a new fan belt and tells you so the whole way there — down to the bank, with the dog in the back seat because he doesn't like being left in the lot too long. I had a check to cash. The line was four people. While I waited I got to thinking about a longer line, so when I got home I found my notes on it.

Nearly three million depositors, I wrote that number down to make sure I had it right — nearly three million people in Paraguay who, as of this week, cannot get to the money in their own accounts at Ueno Bank. Not won't. Can't.

The senate there voted to remove the president over it. Unanimous, I wrote that down too — every senator. The president, Santiago Peña, is now under house arrest. He denies any wrongdoing — I want to be fair, that's in my notes, he denies it. The man who took his place, a Mr. Alliana, has pledged to compensate the people locked out. Pledged is his word, not mine — I checked it against the original. What exactly did he pledge: the money back in three million accounts, or just that one word, "compensate"? Near as I can find in my own notes, it's the word. Is there more than the word somewhere? I haven't found it yet.

Here's the other thing I found, same week, different folder. The president's daughter is a student at Columbia University — a fine school, I'm told, the kind of place a family's savings might go toward, assuming the family in question could reach its savings. She posted a photograph of herself. I had to read the caption twice because I didn't believe it the first time: a T-shirt, worn for the camera, that says "Tax the Poor."

I keep going back and forth between these two entries in my notebook — the three million locked out, and the shirt — and I can't get them to sit on the same shelf without bumping into each other. Maybe that's just me. I fix my own fan belt when I can afford to, which is not always, so I'm not claiming to understand international banking. But I can hold two pieces of paper at once, and when I do, one of them says nobody can reach their own money, and the other says "Tax the Poor" in letters big enough for Instagram. I don't know what a person does with both of those at the same time. Do you?

Oh — before you go. One more thing, and I promise this is the last page I'll bother you with. The shirt says "Tax the Poor." The nearly three million people locked out of Ueno Bank this week — are they the ones paying that tax, or are they the poor it's aimed at? Because by my notes, they can't be both at the same time. Somebody in that family already knows which. I'd just like to see it written down.

By MitchInvestigations

The document today is an edit history, which is the most honest kind of document there is. It timestamps everybody.

The New York Post reported Friday that Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed's Wikipedia page was whitewashed of controversies before the election, according to sources, by an editor who goes by CopyleftEverything — an account the Post says is also responsible for dozens of other edits to pages on the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the American Communist Party and the Revolutionary Communists of America. All together now: open the contributions tab and scroll. The Post does not say which controversies left the page, and I am not going to itemize a list the paper never printed.

What I can give you is the public record of those same weeks, none of which was anonymous. On October 22, Democracy Now! took up AIPAC's role in the race between El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers. On October 28, Sen. Ted Cruz said that if El-Sayed becomes Michigan's senator there is nothing to stop Chuck Schumer from placing him on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and that Americans could die — denounced that week as straight-up incitement. On November 3, El-Sayed closed his campaign in a Fox News op-ed about his stops in rural counties that usually vote Republican: no Michigander deserves to be left behind. On November 4 he beat Rogers, becoming the first Muslim US senator in a decisive Democratic majority.

The week was not short of material. Somebody with a keyboard, a handle and no name decided the encyclopedia wanted a cleaner version of it anyway.

Then Friday, page tidy and race called, the senator-elect did his own editing out loud, on camera. Mehdi Hasan asked him on Zeteo whether he agreed with Sen. Bernie Sanders, who the night before said he wasn't so sure Trump wouldn't sign a Medicare for All bill passed by Democratic majorities in both chambers. El-Sayed: "If he wants to pass Trumpcare-for-All, I'm ok with it. He seems to like to put his name on things."

All together now — clause by clause. Clause one: the policy passes. Clause two: the other guy gets the marquee. Hasan asks whether he'll offer the name so everyone gets healthcare. "Yeah," El-Sayed says, and then, to the camera: "Donald, if you're watching, we'll put your—" The wire copy stops there, mid-offer, which is the second truncated document in this column.

Trump's lame-duck term begins in January. One man spent Friday volunteering, by name, to hand the president a title page. The only part of this story anyone did anonymously was the cleanup. Wikipedia keeps every revision, so the tidying is now a permanent line on the page it tidied.