Money

Google covering full cost of Arkansas power plant; customers billed for part of the full cost

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the breakfast edition, 30 September 2026

"Full costs" is the phrase, and it is worth turning over before it gets away from you. Entergy says Google is covering the full costs of building a new solar and battery facility to power one data center at West Memphis. Full. And the regular consumers of Arkansas are footing the bill for part of that plant's construction as well. Both sentences stand. Nothing broke — no meter misread, no clerk asleep — the rates were designed this way, filed this way, and they are performing.

You are waiting for the part where somebody made a mistake. Keep waiting.

And how much is "part of it"? The utility says part of it. Part.

Someone will say Congress has handled this. In September the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act, bipartisan, aimed at putting data center electricity costs on the technology companies. Then read it: the states must consider standards. Consider ... precatory language, which asks and does not bind, and which requires no state to regulate anyone.

Google is covered. Arkansas households pay for part of a power plant built for a data center, and their state has been invited to think about it.

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Billionaires' ad blitz enters sixth week; their tax polls 52, then 45, then 48 percent

By RuthThe Money Desk · the breakfast edition, 30 September 2026

Proposition 40 is arithmetic. Five percent, one time, on the net worth of Californians holding a billion dollars or more — about 200 people. The proceeds go to the state's healthcare system.

By August 25 an advertising blitz against it was under way, run by organizations backed by mega-billionaires. The item names Google co-founder Sergey Brin and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel among the backers, and names the two most prominent committees fighting the measure: Building a Better California, and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes. What those committees have spent is not in anything on my desk. What came back is.

September 16: the New York Post reports 52 percent of likely voters in support, with pitfalls ahead. September 21: a group of Nobel-winning economists calls the vote a possible "turning point in the battle between democracy and oligarchy," the measure still at 52. September 22: the Berkeley Citrin Center-POLITICO poll puts support at 45 percent of registered voters, and The Hill writes that support is falling. September 30: NBCUniversal Local and Telemundo have yes ahead of no, 48 to 38, with fourteen points the item does not account for.

So: 52, then 45, then 48. Three readings in fourteen days, seven points from the top of the range to the bottom. I can't tell you which is the true one. That is the honest version, and I'd rather give you that than a trend line.

What I can reconcile is what the three do together. Not one of them has the measure collapsing. Not one of them has it safe. Every reading since the ads began sits in the same ten-point neighborhood, straddling the only number that matters, which is fifty.

That is worth sitting with, because the opposition's arithmetic is not the same as the measure's. A committee fighting a ballot initiative does not need to persuade a majority of anything. It needs to keep one from forming. Forty-five does that job. Forty-eight does that job. A stalled needle is not a failed campaign; on that side of the ledger it is the deliverable.

And the bill it is holding off: five percent, once, of one billion dollars is fifty million. That's the check at the very bottom of the bracket, for people whose defining characteristic is that they have at least a billion.

So the ledger reads, hon, like this. There is no money for the state's healthcare system.

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THE HIDDEN INVOICE

Congress scheduled the $45 billion Iran war bill for after voters decide who controls Congress

By RuthThe Money Desk · the breakfast edition, 30 September 2026

Let me run the two calendars side by side, because they do not reconcile.

The first is the war's. It opens in February, when the administration began the war with Iran without a vote of Congress. Both chambers then passed a war powers resolution, and that is where the entry stops. On September 2 the executive director of NIAC Action, Jamal Abdi, told Congress its remaining option was to go to court and enforce the resolution it had already passed, and used the words constitutional crisis. A resolution that needs a lawsuit to become an instruction has a gap in it. The gap is the size of a war.

On August 28 the war the president had called quick was six months old with no end in sight. On September 9 he said it would not end before the midterms. The next day the Defense Secretary described the devastation done to Iran's capabilities. I am not going to argue with either statement. I will note only that they were filed a day apart, and that a capability can be devastated while the war continues, apparently into November.

Then the invoices. On September 15 the Congressional Budget Office closed its books at nearly $40 billion and called that figure conservative. Conservative means careful. It also means the number has room. The figure now attached to the war is $45 billion, and fifteen days separate those two filings.

Here is the reconciliation, hon. That invoice took no floor time and no hearing. It arrived at the pump, monthly, for eight months, while the $45 billion figure waited on a schedule.

And the schedule is the story. On November 3 voters decide who controls Congress. How the war gets paid for is calendared for after that. So the members who will cast the funding vote meet the voters first and the invoice second. Of those two dates, one is printed on the ballot.

One war powers resolution that now needs a lawyer to mean anything. And one disclosure date, set by the body that will do the paying, for after the households that paid the larger of the two figures have finished voting.

I am not saying the two calendars were drawn to sit in that order. I am saying I have reconciled a great many sets of books, and when a number arrives after the meeting instead of before it, the delay is doing work for somebody. In this case the somebody is on the ballot, and the number is not.

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THE RESCISSION LEDGER

Housing aid hit by the pocket rescission that cut refugee grants; Congress's power to reverse it also unspent

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the breakfast edition, 30 September 2026

The chief puts the September 26 drawer on the table first, because it is the schematic. Nearly $1 billion in appropriated money canceled by pocket rescission — the second such rescission in fifty years, both of them issued this term. Of that, $810 million came off immigration and refugee programs, foreign debt-relief programs, and grants given to businesses.

Our planner admires the build, professionally. You do not have to beat the appropriation on the floor. You hold the money at the end of the fiscal year and let the calendar spend it for you. Two uses in fifty years, both inside one term: that is a tool being tested, not a tool being retired.

Today it is pointed at housing. ABC reports the administration shifting federal policy and dollars away from Housing First, the approach that has sat at the heart of federal homelessness policy, with upheaval running through the programs that carry it.

The same week produced the cliff. Billions Congress appropriated for health programs sit unspent, at risk of expiring Wednesday when the fiscal year ends. Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans say withholding them is illegal. The Hill calls it a significant test of Congress's willingness to stand up.

Count the sets that learned this month that an appropriation is a ceiling an administration may decline to reach: the immigration, refugee, debt-relief and business grants inside the rescission; the health billions; the homelessness dollars; and, from the September 12 drawer, the food assistance millions were dropped from, with the One Big Beautiful Bill's changes waiting on Congress to pass a resolution delaying them. Four.

Muscle swings at the premise, not the paperwork.

Then the tinkerer lays out parts, all of them already in the room. The appropriation, which is law. The Impoundment Control Act, the statute whose name is on this fight. And the part that is new this week: the votes. The Hill has Republicans in both chambers breaking ranks with the president across a host of sensitive issues, hoping separation helps avert a blue wave, which the paper calls highly unusual for a party that walked in lock-step. The bloc and the deadline arrived in the same seven days.

The pilot's problem is the shortest one on the board: Wednesday.

That is the assembly, every part cited, none of it ours. We do not claim it starts. We claim it is sitting in the toolbox, in plain sight, while the people waiting on a housing grant find out what upheaval means.

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Ken Griffin gives Carnegie Mellon $3 billion; California's billionaire tax still can't clear a majority.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the coffee break edition, 30 September 2026

Proposition 40 taxes about 200 Californians worth a billion dollars or more, five percent of net worth, one time, with the proceeds going to the state's health system. It needs a majority of voters to become law.

On August 25, two committees — Building a Better California, and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes — opened an advertising campaign against it, backed in reporting by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

On September 16, the New York Post put support at 52 percent, with what it called a catch. On September 21, a group of Nobel-winning economists called the measure a potential turning point in the fight between democracy and oligarchy. By September 22, the Hill's polling found support had dropped under half. It has since settled at 48 percent — clearing a majority once, in mid-September, and sitting below it since.

This week, while that number sat under fifty, Citadel's Ken Griffin signed the largest single gift in the history of American higher education: $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, most of it earmarked to build a campus in Miami. The university announced it Wednesday. NBC and the New York Times confirmed the figure and its purpose the same day.

No vote decided this one. No committee filed against it. No advertising campaign ran for or against it, because none was needed — Griffin's fortune answers to no electorate, and Wednesday's signature settled the matter before Thursday's papers went out.

Reconcile the two ledgers, hon. The gift from one billionaire took one signature and closed inside a single news cycle. Both are billionaire money moving through American institutions this same week. One kind asks your permission first. The other one doesn't file a request; it files a press release.

The gap is the mechanism. A tax needs 50 percent plus one of a state. A gift needs one man who already has the money deciding where it lands, and Carnegie Mellon, not California's hospitals, is where this one landed.

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THE STAKE

Oil named a gift, a grab and a theft in three days; the number stays unnamed.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the coffee break edition, 30 September 2026

A ledger is two columns and the gap between them, and you don't need an opinion to run one — you need the filings and a straight edge.

Start on August 28. Common Dreams filed lawmakers being called on to stop the administration's move on Venezuela's oil fields — 65 billion barrels, by the count the administration itself gave Fox, opened by a military operation that ran half an hour. Two days later, on the 30th, President Trump posted that the oil would go toward "topping out" the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — his phrase — and called it "a Gift from Venezuela to the People of the United States." The next day, the 31st, Common Dreams filed the same barrels under a different name: a "resource grab," cover, it said, for an energy crisis the administration's own war with Iran had produced. The day after, September 1, Democracy Now filed them under a third name: oil claimed "at gunpoint." Three names for one asset in three days, Sunday through Tuesday — gift, grab, gunpoint — and no two of the three filings agree on what happened to the barrels, only on how many there were.

On September 2, with that Iran war still open, the National Iranian American Council's Jamal Abdi told Common Dreams that Congress must sue to enforce its own war-powers vote, because, in his filing, "we are in a constitutional crisis." The phrase had one home this month already, in a different fight, before it moved to this one. Four days later, on the 6th, Common Dreams caught the energy secretary inside one hour: Chris Wright denied the United States was stealing Venezuela's oil, then, in the same appearance, said Venezuela was "forced to work" with Washington. Denial and description, filed sixty minutes apart, about the same barrels. By Labor Day the pump carried the rest of the ledger: regular gasoline at a record $4.15 a gallon.

Now it is September 30, and the filing has moved from the pump to the Constitution. The Hill's entry runs two sentences, in full: "The problem here isn't Venezuela. It is Trump." No dollar figure follows it. No name of who signed for the return. No committee is listed as having seen the number first. That is not a short filing — it is a filing with no numbers in it, on the one page in this run where a number was owed. Sixty-five billion barrels, counted to the billion. Four dollars and fifteen cents, priced to the cent. The power of the purse is the one clause in the receipts built around a dollar sign, and it is the one figure, so far, nobody has filed at all.

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Senate loses war powers vote, then blocks a vote on the ad money six days later.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the noon edition, 30 September 2026

On Thursday, September 24, the Senate defeated a House-passed resolution directing President Trump to withdraw U.S. troops from the fight with Iran. Four Republicans crossed over to join nearly the whole Democratic caucus. The measure still failed. A war resolution that loses on the floor changes nothing about the war underneath it.

Five days later, on Tuesday, September 29, Sens. Patty Murray and Chris Murphy sent Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin a letter. They asked him to address several questions about the department's funds, after reports that Department of Homeland Security money had gone into television advertising promoting the president. The letter poses questions. It does not, in the receipts available that day, come with answers attached.

One day after that, on Wednesday, September 30, a second resolution reached the floor, this one aimed at denouncing the ad spending directly. Sen. Cynthia Lummis blocked it before it could come to a vote. Asked about the ads, she called them a public service. Count the days from the Iran vote to the Lummis block: six.

Here is the reconciliation, hon. Two resolutions moved through the Senate this month. The Iran resolution reached a vote and lost. The ad resolution did not reach a vote at all, stopped by one senator's objection before it could. Different mechanisms, same result: the underlying spending stands undisturbed either way.

The letter to Secretary Mullin asks where the money came from. The receipts do not yet show where it lands. What is not in dispute is that the advertising described in that letter kept running through both procedural outcomes this week, the one that got an up-or-down vote and the one that got a single objection instead. Whichever door the Senate tries, the account on one side and the ad buy on the other show the same balance leaving as before anybody asked.

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Second-quarter growth was revised up 0.7 points in a week; the grocery bill got no such correction.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the noon edition, 30 September 2026

On September 23, the Washington Examiner ran a column headlined "Proof Trump's economy is better than they're telling you." The argument: people have every right to be upset about gas prices, but the economy underneath those prices is booming, and the proof is a second-quarter GDP number — 1.5 percent, annualized.

Seven days later, on September 30, the government revised that same number. Gross domestic product for April through June now stands at 2.2 percent, up from the earlier estimate, on strong consumer spending and business investment.

This is how a preliminary estimate works. It goes out first, built on incomplete data, and gets revised as fuller numbers come in. That is the ordinary schedule, not a cover-up, and the September 23 column did not have the September 30 number because the September 30 number did not exist yet. What it had was 1.5 percent, and it built a column on it.

The column's claim was that the real number was better than officials were letting on. Reconciled: the column was right, a week ahead of the data that would prove it.

Now open The Hill, filed the same day as the revision, September 30. The headline: "The affordability illusion." The inflation rate for August, 3.4 percent, sounds manageable set against the pandemic-era peak of 9 percent. The Hill ran its own numbers underneath that 3.4 percent and found the day-to-day cost of living still climbing.

Here is the whole file laid side by side. One number moved up on the normal revision schedule and got called proof of a boom. Another number came in well under the pandemic peak and got called manageable, until the same outlet checked its own ledger and found the manageable figure did not describe what a household spends at the register.

Growth, 2.2 percent. Inflation, 3.4 percent. Both are annual rates. Both moved in the direction that reads better than last year. Neither is the number a family's budget actually runs on — the price of the same cart of groceries this month against last month, a figure that shows up in no press release and needs no government revision to be felt at checkout.

The gap between the growth number and the grocery number has a name. It doesn't appear on this ledger. It shows up on the next one, hon.

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