Vox Sentences: Congress might actually fund the government for 2 whole years

Is the era of the debt ceiling crisis over?; breaking down that bacon-causes-cancer ruling; and the prepaid debit card RushCard is in big trouble.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

If this deal falls apart, please don't blame us for jinxing it

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

• It looks like Congress and the White House are close to a deal to raise the debt ceiling, and fund the government, all the way through March 2017.

  [AP / Andrew Taylor and Erica Werner]

• The Republican caucuses in the Senate and House are meeting tonight, presumably to review the proposal.

  [Politico / Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan and Burgess Everett]

• If they don't, the government's projected to exceed the debt ceiling on November 3, and run out of money on December 11.

• The budget deal would restore $80 billion in funding that would have been cut under the sequester agreements of 2011. In that respect, it's quite similar to the budget deal Paul Ryan and Patty Murray brokered in 2013.

  [New York Times / David Herzsenhorn]

• According to Politico, the deal would set a limit on how high premiums could be raised for Medicare Part B (covering doctor and outpatient services). But it would also renew existing policies that cap Medicare and hospital spending.

  [Politico / Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan and Burgess Everett]

• The deal reportedly pays for all that through sales from the strategic oil reserve, allowing telecoms to use public broadband, and changing federal crop insurance.

  [CNN / Manu Raju, Deirdre Walsh and Ted Barrett]

• The Social Security disability trust fund has also been part of the negotiations. But for the moment, there's still conflicting reporting about whether it's being cut.

• This is very good news for Paul Ryan, who gets to enjoy the first year of his (presumptive) speakership without a big spending showdown.

  [The Atlantic / Russell Berman]

• Still on the congressional to-do list: replenishing the highway trust fund and reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank.

  [The Hill / Alexander Bolton]

Processed meat definitely increases cancer risk. But only a little.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer has concluded that there is "convincing evidence" that regularly eating processed meats slightly increases your odds of getting certain kinds of cancers.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• The IARC classified processed meats as a "Group 1" carcinogen. That DOES NOT MEAN that it's just as bad for you as other carcinogens in group 1 (like cigarettes). What it means is that there's a lot of evidence indicating a link between processed meat and cancer.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• People are greatly confused about this, which makes sense: the IARC's classification scheme is really bad.

  [The Atlantic / Ed Yong]

• To actually understand how much of a risk processed meat is, you have to think about absolute risk. This Vocativ graphic explains it well: if you eat no bacon, your risk of colorectal cancer is 5 percent. If you eat 2 strips every day, it jumps to 5.8 percent.

  [Vocativ / Joshua A. Krisch]

• Needless to say, this means processed meats are not nearly as carcinogenic as cigarettes. Banning cigarettes would save about 7 times more lives than banning red meat would.

  [Cancer Research UK/ Casey Dunlop]

• If you consider enough evidence, basically everything we eat causes or prevents cancer. There's more evidence that red meat is carcinogenic than most other foods, but you could drive yourself crazy worrying too much about this.

  [Washington Post / Sarah Kliff]

• For more on the IARC's ruling, read Julia Belluz's explainer.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

The RushCard fiasco, explained

Gabriel Olsen/WireImage

• Thousands of people who use RushCard, a prepaid debit card promoted and owned by Russell Simmons, have been prevented from accessing their accounts for much of this month, causing serious financial difficulties for them and their families.

  [Jezebel / Jia Tolentino]

• Problems with RushCard started on October 10th. The company originally announced on October 19th that the glitch had been fixed; then, on October 22nd, it announced that service should be back up. But some people are still having trouble accessing their accounts.

  [Yahoo / Mandi Woodruff]

• For the users affected, this is disastrous. Many of them accessed their paychecks or other necessary funds through RushCard — and few of them have credit cards or other means of getting cash.

  [New York Times / Liz Moyer and Jessica Silver-Greenberg]

• Prepaid debit cards cater to the millions of Americans who are "unbanked" — have no bank accounts — or "underbanked": they have bank accounts, but they also use alternatives like RushCard for depositing and withdrawing money.

  [Center for American Progress / Joe Valenti]

• That's a vulnerable position, and it opens them up to mistreatment (like the monthly fees RushCard and similar cards charge people to use their own money) and misfortune, like this fiasco.

  [Time / Martha C. White]

• Now, some users are joining a class-action lawsuit against UniRush, the company that operates RushCard.

  [The Root / Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele]

• And the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the government agency created by the Dodd-Frank Act to protect consumers from stuff like this) has made it clear that his agency will keep an eye on what UniRush does next.

  [Yahoo / Mandi Woodruff]

• Several advocacy groups have called on the CFPB and other agencies to crack down on prepaid card abuse in light of the RushCard scandal, arguing essentially that it ought to be illegal for a company to keep people from accessing their own money.

  [Consumerist / Ashlee Kieler]

• But Slate's Jamelle Bouie thinks the fiasco is a good argument for a liberal-wonk wish-list item: a government-run, low-cost bank operated by the Postal Service.

  [Slate / Jamelle Bouie]

MISCELLANEOUS

This is an intense, gripping inside account of an FBI hostage negotiation from 2013 in Alabama. [WSJ / Michael M. Phillips]

• LGBT refugees from Syria typically have to wait two years to leave Turkey and be resettled. For non-LGBT refugees, it's more like 7-8 years.

  [BuzzFeed / J. Lester Feder]

• These photos from Ellis Island are a reminder that German and Danish immigrants looked extremely "foreign" once too.

  [Washington Post / Ana Swanson]

• Most celebrity charity isn't super evidence-driven, which makes Mandy Moore's embrace of effective altruism pretty notable.

  [Population Services International / Mandy Moore]

• A 1950's dairy farmer's shockingly progressive advice to his gay teenage son.

  [StoryCorps / Patrick Haggerty]

VERBATIM

"It has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me. I started off in Brooklyn. My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars." [Donald Trump via Politico / Nick Gass]

• "In the event of a medical emergency, contact Security. Do Not call 911!"

  [Amazon warehouse employee brochure, via Huffington Post / Dave Jamieson]

• "Upstairs in the presidential suite, Barbara Bush handed out to adoring donors the Jeb! bumper stickers she keeps in her walker."

  [Politico / Eli Stokols]

• "The history is what the history is. And it is disrespectful, to white people, to soften the history."

  [Ta-Nehisi Coates via The Daily Beast / Felice León]

• "In 'A History of Tunnels,' the historian Patrick Beaver writes that even as late as the mid-twentieth century it was estimated that for every mile of tunnel built one worker died."

  [New Yorker / Monte Reel]

WATCH THIS

Why Cuban cab drivers earn more than doctors [YouTube / Johnny Harris]

Vox / Johnny Harris

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