Back in the USA mailbag

www.slowboring.com

Back in the USA mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

24 - 30 minutes

Vacation was lovely but it is nice to be back home enjoying all that America has to offer — primarily ice water, vented driers, and spicy food. And of course some spicy takes to complement it all.

dysphemistic treadmil: Does it make it harder for you to recruit guest essayists when your commenters are so ill-mannered and horrible to them?

Sadly, I don’t have access to the counterfactual universe where y’all are nicer, so I can’t say for sure.

Rustbeltjacobin: Let’s say you hit the lottery. Not the “start a blog in 1999” lottery that you did hit, but some unspecified windfall made it so you no longer had to concern yourself with making a living from your endeavors. What project would you do then?

Probably something very similar to what I’m doing now, just without the subscriptions.

If the jackpot was really enormous and I had enough money to start giving out grants, I’d probably try to do more stuff in the YIMBY space.

Jake Mulcahy: What do you think of the macro debate behind the race between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in the UK? Broadly, Sunak believes that deficit reduction now can cool inflation quite a bit and worries about a sharp rise in debt service costs if fiscal policy isn’t tightened.

Truss OTOH sees Britain’s chronic productivity growth as a much greater problem than inflation and thinks a planned rise in corporation tax would dent it further. She also thinks the inflationary impulse of payroll and fuel tax cuts would be muted, and has hinted at some vague form of financial repression to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio.

I don’t know a lot about Sunak’s platform, but Truss’ diagnosis seems broadly wrong to me. The point of low corporate taxes is to make your country more attractive as a net destination for global capital flows, which lowers local interest rates and spurs investment. Current U.K. interest rates are already pretty low, and more to the point, the Bank of England is deliberately raising them to cool inflation. If you’re worried about the impact of higher rates on the investment climate in the U.K. (which seems reasonable), the way to address that is with deficit reduction to reduce the need for monetary tightening. If you do what Truss is suggesting, you’re going to end up with higher rates, not lower.

More broadly, in contrast to Italy’s complicated and hard-to-fix economic problems, I think the U.K.’s economic problems are really simple to diagnose — it’s housing, housing, and housing with incredible unmet demand for housing in London and the Southeast due to a brutal planning regime.

What the U.K. needs to do is first and foremost liberalize housebuilding and, secondarily, improve intercity transportation between London and other centers. Everything else in British politics is a distraction.

Zirkafett: What’s your top summer fiction recommendation?

I really enjoyed Elif Batuman’s “Either/Or.” But this is a book about a Harvard student in the 1990s, complete with detailed descriptions of the UNIX email system we used at the time. Her protagonist is assigned to live in DeWolf Street overflow housing as a sophomore just like I was and applies to write for Let’s Go Russia and gets rejected just like I was. I’m not sure how appealing it would be to someone who hasn’t had this very specific personal biography, but personally, I loved it.

Thomas L. Hutcheson: What does Matt think about Arnold Kling's concept of “enabler” of woke-ism, whether or not he agrees that he is one?

I’m not sure I really believe in “woke-ism” as a real or useful concept, though it is absolutely true that people can be enablers of an ideological or political movement without subscribing to its tenets.

To me, the most clear-cut example of this happening on the left comes from a different corner of the issue landscape entirely: climate change. Joe Biden will every once in a while slip the idea that climate change is an “existential threat” into his rhetoric on the issue. Now there really are people who, wrongly, believe that climate change is likely to bring about the extinction of the human species. They tend to advocate for really extreme climate policies and tactics that would make sense if climate change were genuinely an existential threat but that don’t make sense in the real world, where climate is a serious problem but not genuinely existential. And if you look at Biden’s actual climate policies, I think they are generally very sensible and reflect a sound assessment of the issue. But on this level of broad rhetoric, Biden (like a lot of progressives) is kind of casually enabling a much more extreme view than the view he actually holds.

And I do think this kind of enabling ends up confusing people. Climate change really is a serious problem and there genuinely are bad actors peddling absurd denialism and lobbying for dirty energy interests. So if you hear a debate that’s polarized between denialism and “existential threat,” it’s natural to start thinking the existential threat view is correct and then become puzzled as to why Biden doesn’t try to immediately halt all fossil fuel production in a last-ditch effort to ward off extinction. The reason he doesn’t do that is he (rightly) thinks this would fail cost-benefit scrutiny. But the reason it fails cost-benefit scrutiny is that the downside of three to four degrees of warming, though large, is not “all of humanity goes extinct.”

David H: As you say, it's great for DC if it does all the things you recommended in Monday's column, and for the people who live there. But what are the impacts on the larger region if the central city achieves that kind of upzoning? Not that DC has to worry about it, since unlike say Charlotte or Austin they don't have to worry about a state legislature interfering just for spite. But even if DC grows to a million by 2035, that's an extra quarter million people in a region of (depending on which metro stat you prefer) 5-10 million. Do you project spillover effects into the inner suburbs, or does it end up not mattering much unless Fairfax and MontCo make big changes as well?

The regional consequences of broad D.C. upzoning seem unpredictable to me.

At one extreme, you could say that if Fairfax County were to become the suburb of a bigger and richer central city, demand for Fairfax living would only go even higher. At the other extreme, you could posit there is a fixed quantity of people who want to live in the D.C. metro area, so growth in the core city comes at the expense of suburban demand. The truth is obviously somewhere between the two, where some suburban communities would see demand rise as a result of core city growth and others would see demand fall.

But on balance, I think the impact would be to divert growth not from other parts of the D.C. metro area but from other large metro areas. Some people who in Real World 2025 will end up moving to the suburbs of Atlanta, Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas would instead move to the suburbs of D.C. in the YIMBYtopia version of 2025.

Alex Newkirk: What is political capital actually? Is it fungible across issues? Can it be wasted?

It’s a pretty confused metaphor. Normally when we decide to get fancy and start calling money “capital,” we’re trying to call attention to the fact that if you invest your capital wisely, you earn a return and thus have more capital than you started with. A person who starts out very rich and is reasonably prudent with his money can both live comfortably off his capital income and also reinvest enough of it to continually get richer.

Politics is much more like consumption than investment. You win an election and you start with hopefully a good amount of political support in Congress and among the public. Then as you start doing things, the tendency is to alienate or disappoint people and end up with less support — it’s like spending down a stack of cash. The hope is that you spend it on stuff that’s good and useful rather than stuff that’s pointless. But it’s not really “capital” that’s going to earn returns.

James: You argue that proportional representation would be good for America. It seems to me that the biggest problem with proportional representation in America is that it would lead to the creation of one or more Black political parties. This would be bad for everyone, including Black people, because it would prevent Black politicians from gaining power in mainstream politics. Barack Obama's political career would be impossible, for example, and in an earlier era the Civil Rights movement would have been delayed as White political parties would not have been competing for Black voters. This is not a problem in most European countries because most European countries do not have any demographic group that is really analogous to Black Americans, but it is a problem in Israel where proportional representation has allowed the Jewish political parties to collude informally to exclude the Arab parties from power for decades. Any thoughts on this?

I think this is an overreading of the Israeli situation.

Here’s another example. In Finland, there is a Swedish-speaking minority. Its members generally vote for the Swedish People’s Party (SFP), which tends to get around 5 percent of Finnish MPs. The SFP focuses pretty narrowly on a handful of issues related to the status of the Swedish language and doesn’t really take a strong view on other topics, other than being pro-EU. That makes them a useful addition to pretty much any potential coalition, so they’re almost always in government as junior partners.

In the real world United States, northern Black voters somewhat surprisingly realigned and backed FDR’s reelection in 1936 despite his bad record on civil rights issues because New Deal relief was so important to the African American population. FDR won landslide reelections in 1940 and 1944, but the Black vote was actively contested in the 1948 election (part of the reason Harry Truman desegregated the military), and Eisenhower made real and partially successful efforts to court Black voters in his two campaigns. By 1960, Kennedy and Nixon were both trying to have it both ways, vying for both the Black vote and the southern white vote. It’s a very murky and ideologically confused situation, but multiple pieces of civil rights legislation (not just the big Civil Rights Act of 1964, but its more modest predecessors in 1957 and 1960) emerge from this dynamic.

In a counterfactual PR United States, I think you’d see the same basic dynamic, except instead of Kennedy and Nixon courting Black voters directly, they’d be courting the Black Party as a coalition partner. The Black Party’s weakness would be that it would hold fewer seats in parliament than the Dixiecrat Party. But its strength would be that by 1960, most northern whites clearly favored Civil Rights and found the Dixiecrats to be fairly politically toxic. So ultimately Lyndon Johnson might be the man to break the logjam, leading a small group of southern white moderates into a coalition with northern liberals and the Black Party to pass civil rights legislation, enfranchising southern African Americans, and thereby trying to grow the coalition. Then later you’d see the backlash — the Dixiecrats would give up on re-imposing segregation but return to power as junior partners in the Nixon coalition.

Doug Orleans: Do you consider yourself a feminist?

Reader email1: I initially discovered Matt's writing through the feminist blogosphere, probably via a Pandagon connection. At that time, my sense was that Matt was pretty closely connected to the feminist conversation. I would imagine that Matt still considers himself a feminist (?) but it's not really part of his personal brand anymore! Internet feminism has changed a lot since the mid-aughts, I know. But I would personally be very interested in hearing from Matt about his current relationship to feminism. I would also be really interested to see him engage with some of the interesting stuff coming out of feminist philosophy, e.g. Amia Srinivasan's work.

I do consider myself a feminist. In college, I was fortunate to take courses with the feminist philosophers Melissa Barry and Ti-Grace Atkinson and was introduced to the work of Susan Moller Okin, whose books influenced my thinking and who I got to meet when she was lecturing on “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”

I guess to the extent that I’ve disengaged a bit from some of the internet debates around these topics, it’s largely because I don’t think the world necessarily needs a man jumping in to explain how feminism ought to work. Part of this is my sense that there are actually plenty of early- and mid-career women doing good journalism and my role should mostly be to promote them. It’s not a coincidence that all but one of the paid freelance pieces on Slow Boring have been written by women or that a majority of Weeds interview guests were women or that we launched Slow Boring Book Club with a woman’s book. It always struck me as kind of non-classy to lampshade this with giant “I AM DOING THIS FOR FEMINIST REASONS” text, but maybe I should say that more clearly?

But if I were to offer my two cents on one feminist-adjacent controversy that I have strong feelings about, I think it was a big mistake to so strongly echo Hillary Clinton’s assertion that misogyny was the key factor in her 2016 defeat. I understand where that came from. And I don’t deny that as a woman in the public eye, she faced misogynistic criticism, but I think this kind of salted the earth against other women in politics. But I think the electability case for Amy Klobuchar was really strong, and I wish I’d seen more people asserting that women can (and should!) be popular and win elections.

Charles Herrig: Do you think the internet has increased or decreased the value of original art pieces?

Has the fact that everyone is able to see any Van Gogh, at any time, anywhere on earth, decreased the value of the originals, by making it unnecessary to see them in person? Or has it increased the value, by making more people interested in them?

I’m not sure I’m convinced that the internet has made a big difference here. Pre-internet, we saw lots of prints of Van Gogh paintings all over the place, and I was familiar with the work of Paul Cézanne from my mom’s book of reproductions of Cézanne paintings.

Walter Benjamin’s classic 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” considers the practical and theoretical implications of the rise of widely available prints and reproductions in books, and it’s a classic for a reason. And I think that correctly dates the relevant hinge point to around a century ago, with the change from mechanical to digital reproduction being relatively minor compared to the rise of mechanical reproduction in the first place.

JC: In your post on Monday, you suggested several measures that YIMBYs should offer in DC to make YIMBYism there more politically feasible-modest inclusionary zoning measures, making parking passes permanent and letting low income neighborhoods opt out. Are there equivalent political compromises the open borders folks should offer on immigration?

My sense of YIMBY/NIMBY issues is that most people’s concerns about YIMBYism are genuinely practical in nature — worries about parking and traffic and property values — and so the upside to addressing those practical concerns is potentially large.

My sense of immigration issues is that this is mostly not the case, and opposition is grounded in a sincere preference for homogeneity and stasis more than any specific practical issue. People’s aesthetic preferences just vary. After two weeks in Italy, I was excited to have a burrito for dinner one night and then ramen for lunch the next because I take routine access to a broad variety of cuisines for granted. Italy is more homogenous than the United States and has less of that. But within Italy, Rome is much more diverse and cosmopolitan than Montalcino, just as D.C. is more diverse and cosmopolitan than Blue Hill, Maine. People who grow up in rural areas and are annoyed by the homogeneity tend to end up leaving, so in rural areas in particular you have electorates that are very hostile to immigration and aren’t going to be talked out of it with charts and graphs.

Still, I do think it’s worth trying to be pragmatic about this simply because the gains from immigration are so large.

The big one where I think we could do better is on the fiscal consequences of immigration. The gains to immigrants themselves are so large that it should be easy to design a system that essentially guarantees immigration is a good deal for the public budget, which isn’t always the case under the current system.

What’s tougher are the “cultural” concerns that people have about immigrants from this place or that. Here’s where I do advocate for just trying to push folks to get to yes. Donald Trump infamously remarked that he wanted more immigrants from Norway instead of from “shithole countries.” So can we work with that? Why not create a special category of unlimited visas for Norwegians? My guess is very few Norwegians want to emigrate to the United States. But if they want to come and Trump wants them to come, why not let them? How about open borders with Canada? The Bahamas is full of English-speaking Christians. Maybe if you’re Bahamian under 45, finished high school, and can pass a criminal background check, you should be able to move to the U.S. if you want. Throw in the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean. I dunno. These are not my cultural hangups, so I can’t really speak to what would satisfy those who have them.

The point is that those of us who favor expanded immigration should be open to expanding it on whatever terms are acceptable to those who are more skeptical. What we should insist on, though, is that we want expansion — add Norwegians to the mix, don’t swap someone else out.

Wigan: Why, when it comes to some sports, are women athletes paid as much, or more than men (I'm thinking Tennis, Figure Skating and Volleyball) but in other sports it's not even close (WNBA vs NBA)? There's also a 3rd category of sports where very few competitors are women, but the females are paid just as well (Nascar and Danica Patrick, MMA and Ronda Roussey, Chess...).

Obviously the single most important factor is audience demand, but I think there are probably some other layers or intersections with current cultural-political arguments ( gender pay-gap, trans athletes, fairness, gender roles, etc..), that leave space for additional takes on why that is or what “should be.”

I don’t think there’s a singular correct explanation for all this. In tennis, I think the root issue is that the sport is somewhat unusual in having professionals and random amateurs play on courts that are the exact same size. The result is that, I think, the pro men overmatch the equipment — like if you were watching Steph Curry shoot threes on a high school court — and the women’s games are more fun. With figure skating, I think the whole sport is seen as “unmanly” (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you have more out gay men in this sport than in others), so there’s a tilt toward celebrating women.

Gymnastics is a bit odd because unlike in most sports, being tall is a disadvantage and the men and women don’t use the same apparatus. At the other end of the spectrum, basketball is a really tough comp for women because being tall is extremely important.

The main thing to remember in terms of big-picture political and cultural arguments is that these are all games that were devised by humans in order to be fun to participate in and watch. In some sports, the pros play on the same court as amateurs (tennis) while in others (basketball) they don’t. In some sports (soccer) the pros play with basically the same equipment as amateurs whereas in other sports (baseball) they don’t. But it’s not like it would be against the laws of nature for MLB to allow aluminum bats or for the NBA to put the three-point line closer. The people in charge have just decided that would be less fun. When the WTA is deciding who should and shouldn’t be allowed to participate in women’s tennis competitions, their only real obligation is to try to maximize audience and sponsor interest in the tour. If people want to see trans women playing against cisgender women, that’s fine. If they don’t want to see that, then that’s also fine.

Barry: You talk a lot about “The Groups”, but I don’t see a lot of journalism out there exploring and explaining who they are, where they fundraise from, and how they exert influence. Why is this such an under-covered part of the way American politics works?

Unfortunately, the nature of the nonprofit-verse is that it is deliberately opaque.

Take the intense interest of Americans for Financial Reform in using financial regulation as a tool to tackle climate change. What I can tell you for sure is that when AFR was originally spun up in 2009 to advocate for stronger bank regulations in the wake of the financial crisis, this was not on their radar. What I have heard is that once it became clear that the Trump administration wasn’t going to push hard for the Dodd-Frank repeal, the progressive donor community largely lost interest in this topic. That left AFR sort of casting about for other angles. The climate advocacy world, meanwhile, has tons of money. So finreg groups got pumped-up with climate money to do what’s really climate advocacy. That’s what I’ve heard at any rate. But I can’t prove it because there’s very little transparency about these financial flows, and also because “so-and-so is a climate funder and not a financial regulation funder” is itself a judgment call and not a legal category or anything.

Another thing that makes this hard is that the funders themselves tend to be disingenuous about the influence they wield. In a January 2022 piece defending the world of progressive philanthropy, for example, former Democracy Alliance chief Gara LaMarche flatly denies that anyone at DA pushed progressive groups to endorse defunding the police. But in a June 2020 blog post, he personally endorsed the defund police movement. Now does that mean he was ordering the recipients of DA money to embrace the defund movement? No. But was there pressure? I think there was. But it’s hard to prove. And what would proof look like anyway? Nobody is going to be so uncouth as to write down a memo that says “embrace the Current Thing or else your grant next year will shrink.”

As for why The Groups matter, I think there are a few means of influence:

    It makes your life easier as a journalist to just kind of pretend that Group X has a real constituency and membership and that quoting its leaders in your stories is adding a valuable perspective. That makes the task of article assembling easier and gives The Groups some real influence over the media.

    The Groups provide a steady source of employment, so being on their good side is a hedge against the highly cyclical nature of campaign employment and the reality that the number of jobs available in Congress or the executive branch varies over time.

    Elizabeth Warren’s successful stigmatization of private sector work as a corrupting revolving door has made people even more dependent on staying in the good graces of the nonprofit advocacy community — not only because the nonprofits provide “clean” employment, but because they can semi-arbitrarily declare that Jonathan Kanter’s private sector work isn’t disqualifying even though private sector work done by someone they dislike would have been disqualifying. 

This should probably be a full article down the road. But I’d also say that Varys’ riddle about power is relevant here — one reason The Groups are influential is that other people treat them as influential.

Paul G: How should the US approach the apparent inevitability of a nuclear-armed Iran? Perhaps we'd promise massive retaliation in kind if Iran were ever to use nuclear weapons against the US or our allies. The idea of going to (conventional) war to prevent Iran from getting the bomb, as Walter Russell Mead suggests in the WSJ today, seems crazy to me. The known downside is that we'd be less engaged and have diminished influence in the Middle East, which seems like not the worst thing to me. A risk would be that Israel and perhaps Saudi Arabia would try to bounce us into military action by staging their own operation. I think we'd need to be clear that they couldn't rely on direct US support. I must be missing something here, because I can't see that that Iran acquiring the means to ensure its annihilation results in a strategic crisis for the US.

The best way to address this was Obama’s JCPOA. Unfortunately, opposition to that from the Republican Party, the Gulf States, and Israel led to its demise, and I’m not surprised it was impossible for Biden to revive it — after all, why would Iran make a deal with us when the next GOP administration would tear it up?

Given that, I don’t really think we should do anything at all about a nuclear-armed Iran. Obviously if Iran were to attack us, we should respond massively. But Iran going nuclear is literally a direct consequence of the policy course that the Saudis, Emiratis, and Israelis favored, and now you have Mead and others saying we should fight a war on their behalf. I think that’s crazy. The purpose of the U.S.-Saudi relationship is that the Saudis are supposed to stabilize world oil prices in the event of a crisis with Russia. They’ve totally failed to uphold their side of the bargain and we should not do anything at all to help them vis-a-vis Iran unless their behavior changes.

The way forward on health care

www.slowboring.com

The way forward on health care

Matthew Yglesias

10 - 13 minutes

After being a bit provocative in Tuesday’s post by saying the U.S. health care system has some unappreciated virtues, I want to loop back to my very normal lib opinion that the enormous number of uninsured people in the United States is a huge problem.

Indeed, I think Democrats have erred by placing less emphasis on this issue after saving the Affordable Care Act, a big political success for them in the 2018 election cycle. Polling from Gallup shows that a substantial majority of Americans believe that making sure everyone has health insurance should be the government’s responsibility, and Democrats have a consistent trust edge on health care. It’s bad when the health care conversation gets hijacked by activists demanding Democrats run on a Medicare for All platform, because giant tax increases and big changes to the status quo scare voters. But Democrats shouldn’t abandon the issue. The high-level M4A pitch that “health care should be a right” polls well as an abstraction, and the trick is to roll out incremental proposals that embed that value in a non-threatening way.

I believe that means first and foremost Medicaid expansion, the big unfinished business of the fight for the Affordable Care Act.

Our story starts with the weird tale of Medicaid expansion and the Affordable Care Act.

In its initial conception, Medicaid was not supposed to be a major element of the ACA. The bill’s designers really wanted to do a bipartisan bill with lots of industry support, which led to the much-discussed three-legged stool of regulatory reform, subsidy, and mandatory purchase of private insurance. But while the ACA’s architects often said they were inspired by the Dutch and Swiss systems, those systems have a crucial fourth leg — price controls — which are also used in the Singaporean system that conservatives often claim to admire. Without price controls, American health insurance is very expensive, and subsidizing it for poor people requires a lot of federal spending. Medicaid, by contrast, relies on the federal government’s massive purchasing power to obtain health care services at sub-market prices.

In other words, giving people Medicaid turns out, in most cases, to be cheaper than subsidizing the purchase of private insurance.

And because the same centrist Democrats who preferred a market-based approach also favored a deficit-reducing approach and also were skeptical of tax increases, the ACA ended up relying more and more on Medicaid expansion and less and less on the three-legged stool to drive coverage expansion. Democrats also got cold feet about imposing really tough penalties on people for non-purchase of health insurance, so the individual mandate was relatively weak and ineffectual. And because it was also very unpopular, repealing this piece of the ACA was doable for Republicans, leaving the three-legged stool with only two legs.

The upshot of this is that in terms of reducing uninsurance, the ACA was mostly a Medicaid expansion law, even though almost all of the discourse focused on the insurance exchanges.

Things were further complicated by the Supreme Court, where Justice Kagan and Chief Justice Roberts seem to have struck a deal to resolve the ACA litigation. Kagan agreed to join Roberts and the conservatives in a ruling which held that Congress’ effort to force states to expand Medicaid violated alleged federalism provisions of the constitution.1 In exchange, Roberts upheld the individual mandate. This was a totally Pyrrhic victory for Democrats who would’ve been better off with the court making the opposite trade.

The result is that many states, mostly in the South but also in Wisconsin and a few others, haven’t expanded Medicaid. Getting them to do it is the biggest and most important thing we can do to tackle uninsurance.

The best way to accomplish this by far is for Democrats to run and win “narrow target” pro-Medicaid campaigns in red areas.

That means that in a state like South Carolina, Democrats would run someone for governor who is more progressive than her opponent in the sense that she supports expanding Medicaid, but is probably way more conservative than your average Democrat on a number of other important issues. The proof of concept for this is John Bel Edwards who ran and won in Louisiana on Medicaid expansion, delivered health insurance to hundreds of thousands of low-income Louisianans, and is also pro-gun and anti-abortion.

For many progressives, this is — understandably — a hard pill to swallow. But it’s important to acknowledge that running a pro-choice candidate in Louisiana would have done nothing to protect abortion rights. Unlike in the Midwest where abortion outperforms generic partisanship, abortion rights in the Deep South are even less popular than the Democratic Party due to the presence of a reasonably large number of anti-abortion Black Democrats. But Edwards winning has given low-income women in his state access to contraceptives, obstetric care, and other health services.

There really isn’t any other great way to achieve expansion.

Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff promoted a Build Back Better provision that would have basically given an even bigger boatload of money to non-expansion states to cover the Medicaid-eligible people in the exchanges. That’s a good deal for Georgia, and in the context of what Democrats were originally hoping would be a $4 trillion spending package, it’s a pretty trivial amount of money. But given realistic fiscal constraints, it’s always going to be difficult for a sweetheart fiscal deal for red states to make it onto a Democratic priority list.

A superficially more plausible approach might be to find creative new ways to punish non-expansion states. But the Supreme Court might toss that. And a huge share of the victims of such punishment would likely be Black Democrats who didn’t vote for the anti-expansion Republicans in the first place. So Democrats need to win the races, either by running conservative pro-Medicaid Democrats or else by ditching the Democratic brand altogether and running independents on a pro-Medicaid platform. It’s not that there’s nothing useful the federal government could do, but it would probably have to be bigger.

In the context of the insane 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary, the following was considered a moderate proposal:

    Create a new “public option” for health insurance with payment rates linked to Medicare.

    Automatically enroll all newly born kids in the public option.

    Allow people who purchase health insurance on the ACA exchanges to access this public option.

    Allow companies to use the public option as their insurance provider.

This proposal is actually a sweeping change to the American health care system that was only coded as moderate because of the bizarre nature of that primary. Leftists pretended it was small time because it wasn’t Bernie Sanders’ proposal, and moderates who praised this idea when they were trying to beat Bernie Sanders in a primary forgot all about it the moment it served its purpose.

But it’s actually a good idea that left-wing Democrats should take up.

Notwithstanding the specific dynamics of the 2020 primary, it really lands in their sweet spot of taking on corporate interests (insurance companies and hospitals hate this idea) without involving politically toxic broad tax increases on the middle class. And while I don’t see any short-term prospect for getting to 50 votes with this idea, it’s a good framework for thinking about next-step reforms to the health care system. You want to try to get the payment rates for Medicaid up to the higher Medicare levels so that more providers are willing to see Medicare patients. You want to try to get the payment rates for ACA exchange plans down to the lower Medicare levels so they are less costly and you can make the premiums cheaper for patients without increasing the subsidy level. And then you want to create the possibility for employers to get out of the insurance underwriting business and simply write a check to the government so their workers get health care.

This is more likely to take the form of multiple reforms — or perhaps state-led initiatives in the more progressive states — than a single Big Bang. But the basic vision of “Medicare for More People Than Have It Now” as a series of steps toward the goal of an M4A-type system deserves more thought and support.

Then the flip side of the coin is that we need to dismantle regulatory barriers to the supply of health care.

So far we’ve been talking about lefty-type stuff — expanding and deepening public provision of health insurance.

But there are also lots of important neoliberal-type reforms we should be making to the health care system. The United States has fewer doctors per capita than Canada or any European country, largely because Congress capped the number of residency slots years ago in a misguided effort to save money. That whole exercise exemplifies why I’ve never loved the rhetoric of “health care costs.” The idea was that creating a scarcity of doctors would help contain Medicare costs because the government can’t pay for a doctor visit that doesn’t happen.

This kind of penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior has been with us for a long time. Over 40 years ago, my uncle wrote a book called “Controlling Hospital Costs: The Role of Government Regulation.” This is largely about the fashionable-in-the-1970s idea that states could reduce hospital spending by adopting Certificate of Need (CON) regulations that stopped the opening of unnecessary hospitals.

The problem here, as with the doctors, is that while creating artificial scarcity may reduce aggregate spending, it also generates higher prices.

Our system is unfortunately full of this kind of nonsense: rules that make it hard for foreign-trained doctors to move here and practice, rules that make it hard for dental hygienists to clean teeth without the supervision of a dentist, rules that unnecessarily restrict what a nurse practitioner or a pharmacist can do without the supervision of an MD, rules that unnecessarily restrict the cross-state provision of telehealth. And we ought to be working to tear it all down. Moves to reduce the price of health care services are a good idea, but we shouldn’t be trying to constrain the quantity of services consumed out of a misguided idea that spending is per se bad. It’s good for people to get health care, and we should be facilitating that both on the regulatory side and on the insurance side.

I don’t think expanding the public option or tackling supply-side reforms should be an either/or choice, and I would advocate for both options. But realistically, the legislative coalitions for the two paths look pretty different. Either approach could work, though, and would be worth pursuing. Ultimately, the goal should be to reduce people’s financial downside from getting sick and seeking care (this is what insurance is for) while also trying to improve health care by unleashing more abundance of health care services.

The Conservative Agenda Depends On Judges Being Terrible Historians

The Conservative Agenda Depends On Judges Being Terrible Historians

Read time: 6 minutes

Deeply rooted in this nation's history and traditions, since 2021

The Conservative Agenda Depends On Judges Being Terrible Historians

By giving lower court judges a task they can’t complete, the Court’s conservatives are setting themselves up as the only amateur historians who matter.

BY JACOB HAMMOND  JULY 25, 2022. 

The Supreme Court has once again started the summer by upending many Americans’ understanding of what rights are afforded to them under the Constitution. Our 50-year experiment with something resembling sex equality was dashed aside in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Our 200-year, already-rapidly-failing experiment with maybe not getting shot in public came to a screeching halt in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. Examples abound.

Already, people are hurting because of the Court’s decisions. Drafting another blog post complaining about the vacant logic the conservatives on the Court use to impose their minoritarian ideology feels, to a certain extent, like throwing a water balloon at a forest fire. But despite what the David Frenches of the world might tell you, the work of this radical Supreme Court is not done. That’s because the Court’s use of “originalism” doesn’t just compel the most conservative result in every case; it also lets the justices tee themselves up as the only people in this country capable of answering the call.

Whenever the conservatives want to dispense with a constitutional argument they view as protecting “liberal” causes, they follow a pretty straightforward playbook. First, the conservatives define their inquiry as narrowly as possible. In Vega v. Tekoh, released a few days before Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito held that your “right against compelled self-incrimination” is not at stake when a cop bullies you into testifying in violation of your Miranda rights, because the Miranda warning is not a right at all. Instead, Alito thinks Miranda is just a “prophylactic rule” used to “protect the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination.” In Dobbs, Alito concluded the Court wasn’t examining the “right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy”; it was only the more limited “right to obtain an abortion.” Narrowing constitutional questions like this serves only to help the Court skirt around any obstacle in their path to ruling how they want.

When you’re trying to look at some centuries-old documents but can’t zoom in any further on the PDF (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Next, the Court moves on to step two: Do an originalism. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District from this term, Justice Neil Gorsuch concluded that the boundaries of the Establishment Clause “must be interpreted by reference to historical practices and understandings.” In Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas concluded firearm restrictions conflicting with the “plain text” of the Second Amendment must be supported by evidence that it is “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” And of course, in Dobbs, Alito mandates that any due process protections not written out word-for-word in the Fifth Amendment be “objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”

To answer these questions, the Court conducts surveys of what they say is the relevant historical material and compares it to the modern rights at issue through “reasoning by historical analogue.” Thomas’ opinion in Bruen spends 30 pages comparing and contrasting modern gun restrictions to those enacted in 1787 by rifling through a panoply of Anglo-Saxon statutes. To support his conclusion about the history of pre-viability abortion access, Alito’s Dobbs opinion cites treatises and laws from the 13th goddamn century, when the most common way to conclusively determine you were pregnant was feeling the fetus Rockette-kick inside you.

There are layers of bullshit buried beneath this mode of analysis. For one thing, it’s a barbaric way to determine your rights. As Yale Law Professor Reva Siege remarked in an op-ed for The Washington Post, the Court’s originalist approach “excuses [the Court] from considering whether politicians’ views of gender roles, in a period when women were disenfranchised, shaped the campaign to ban abortion, which of course they did.” The expressed ideology in these cases takes the same history we as a country applaud ourselves for moving past and weaponizes it against us.

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The Supreme Court’s Hottest New Trend Is “Just Making Shit Up”

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More practically, the level of historical survey the Court conducts is just not something judges are qualified to do. Three years of law school teaches you very little, and none of it includes a crash course in the analytical methods historians use in their work. Your time as a law student isn’t much different from other academic disciplines: You pretend to read a bunch of cases, get badgered with questions every class by some decaying law professor, and take exactly one test (sometimes while hung over) at the end of the semester. Nothing about that experience trains you how to evaluate primary source documents like a historian, which is why law students make such embarrassingly bad gaffes when they try.

The Court’s myopic focus on history amplifies this problem. The more detailed the historical question, the harder it becomes to find centuries-old cases and statutes that specifically trace the lineage of some ethereal liberty to the present. Even so, every conservative justice believes themselves qualified to dig through old libraries with a kerosene torch like Nic Cage looking for morsels of evidence about the Second Amendment. No wonder every originalist opinion is met with long thinkpieces by actual historians kicking the shit out of the myriad analytical flaws.

But perhaps most crucially, this originalist framework rigs the game so conservatives only have to hear the cases and write the decisions they want. At a time when the Court is taking fewer and fewer cases, caseloads in federal courts have been skyrocketing since the 1970s. Most federal judges balance several hundred cases at a time , rotating between conducting hearings in court and researching and writing complex orders. By contrast, no single justice has written more than 40 opinions in a calendar year for the past decade, and Thomas is the only one to break 30. It’s at this moment the Supreme Court, in their dipshit wisdom, is mandating that each massively overworked federal district court conduct a thorough historical analysis for any potent constitutional claim that reaches their docket.

When you’re a judge charged with writing down all your qualifications to do history (Photo by Tom Williams-Pool/Getty Images)

Courts do not have the education, time, or resources to conduct these historical surveys adequately. The dissents in Bruen and Bremerton lay out how impossibly impractical this method of analysis is: how it “offers essentially no guidance for [government officials like] school administrators,” and “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.” In Bruen, Thomas responds that judges can rely upon the “historical record compiled by the parties.”

Attorneys, though, have no more experience cosplaying as historians than judges. Your average lawyer has no idea where to begin researching how our past restrictions on gun laws shape the present limits of the government’s authority. Thomas, by contrast, can push a big red button in his desk and force twelve sweaty Claremont Institute fellows to vomit out some shoddily researched nonsense on sodomy laws in a matter of weeks.

Therein lies the conservative justices’ trick: When the Court is deciding which cases to take, they can cherry-pick the ones they want and blame the necessity of their review on having to redo the historical “analysis” the lower court was too inexperienced and beat down to carry out. They can then use the mask of originalism to massage away any consideration of the disastrous effects of their ideology, all while complaining that the lower court hasn’t watched enough OAN to understand the Constitution. Thomas did so explicitly in Bruen, dismissing the lower court’s analysis as “inconsistent” with his preferred “historical approach.”

The Court as an institution—especially this Court as an institution—is not interested in finding the clearest, most historically accurate answer to legal questions, and wouldn’t know how even if they tried. The rigid implementation of originalism as the test for any and all constitutional questions lays bare what the conservatives are actually engaged in: the exercise of unchecked power. Until the composition of the Court changes, thanks to the framework the Court has built, the results of these exercises are only going to get worse.

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Radical Taxation - Dissent Magazine - Vanessa Williamson

www.dissentmagazine.org

Radical Taxation - Dissent Magazine

Vanessa Williamson

18 - 23 minutes

Radical Taxation

Taxes demonstrate the legitimacy of democratic control of the economy. This is what conservatives cannot accept—and what surviving climate change will require.

Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, displays a copy of the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” in 2011. (Bill O'Leary/Washington Post via Getty Images)

This spring, legislators of both parties, from Connecticut to Georgia, responded to higher energy prices with “gas tax holidays,” temporary tax reductions for consumers that provide an additional windfall to the immensely profitable fossil fuel industry at precisely the moment when we should be ending the global warming economy. Thirty-six years after Grover Norquist first introduced the “taxpayer protection pledge”—by which thousands of legislators have committed to oppose all tax increases—American policymaking remains trapped in an anti-tax paradigm that leaves us unable to cope with the crises we face.

Given that the stakes are the habitability of the planet, paradigms might seem a relatively minor concern. But conservative tax opposition can lead us to imagine barriers to climate action that are in fact no great obstacle at all. For instance, most Americans are far more willing to pay for government services, and far less thrilled by tax cuts, than is generally believed. Anti-tax thinking also, ironically, makes taxation loom excessively large in our policy imagination, as though taxes are the only power governments have over the economy.

The shortest road out of the anti-tax swamp is to face tax opposition head on. But to do so, we must grapple more seriously with what might seem like an easy question: what conservatives hate about taxes. The common but incomplete answer is that taxes can be progressive, and thereby reduce wealth concentration. But conservative tax antipathy is not simply a bulwark against a more equal distribution of wealth; it stems from a recognition that taxation, more than other economic policies that have an equal or greater redistributive capacity, rests on the principle that private property can be reassigned to public purposes—simply because public works are worthwhile.

In other words, taxes demonstrate the legitimacy of democratic control of the economy. This is what conservatives cannot accept, and what surviving climate change will require.

Anti-tax politics in the United States is often ascribed to an immutable aspect of the American character—either a laudable preference for individual effort or a childish unwillingness to pay bills. But these arguments lack an empirical foundation. In surveys, most Americans report that they are personally willing to pay more in taxes to improve education and healthcare and reduce poverty and homelessness; when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, more Republicans prefer tax increases to benefit cuts. About three-fifths of Americans say they are bothered “a lot” that corporations and the wealthy are not paying their share, compared to a third who say they are bothered “a lot” about the amount of taxes they themselves pay. Plans to tax the rich are consistently popular; they receive extremely high support from Democrats plus substantial support from working-class Republicans. Most low-income Republicans even support the estate tax once they learn it is only the very rich who pay it. Anti-tax hysteria is not a psychological condition of the American people; it is a pathology of American politics.

For at least twenty years, tax cuts have not been popular with voters. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both cut income taxes for the vast majority of Americans, but polling shows that most voters forgot about the breaks they had received long before the next election. When Hillary Clinton and John McCain each proposed a gas tax holiday in 2008, the idea was not popular with voters. The Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act fared even worse; the legislation is remarkable for having been less popular at the time of its passage than the tax increases under Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.

Conservative anti-tax rhetoric is not, therefore, tapping into some deep wellspring of popular hatred of taxation. Nonetheless, taxation remains a reliable bogeyman of the Republican Party. This winter, Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott learned this lesson the hard way when he advocated that “all Americans should pay some income tax,” a proposal that would raise taxes predominantly on the poor and working class. Scott may have thought he was safe with such a regressive plan, but he was wrong. He was immediately excoriated by Republican leadership and on Fox News for planning to raise taxes.

Scott’s heresy was suggesting that the income tax should ever be raised, under any circumstances, for anyone. Income taxes continue to abide in a special sub-basement in the lowest circle of conservative Hell. It might seem obvious why: put bluntly, income taxes could take money from rich people, and that money might be spent on poor people. The full answer is more subtle, and worth understanding if we are to have any hope of preventing civilizational collapse.

Tax policy can either buttress or undermine economic hierarchy. Usually, taxation is arranged to reinforce privilege. (The word privilège, meaning “private law,” referred to the special immunity nobles and the clergy had from paying taxes before the French Revolution.) In the United States today, the tax system heaps additional advantages onto the white and the wealthy. Income tax breaks for homeownership, health insurance, and college savings exacerbate the racial wealth gap. Grocery taxes make poor people go hungry. Still, the egalitarian potential of progressive taxation is extraordinary. For decades after the Second World War, progressive income and estate taxation kept America’s economic inequality in check. The rollback of those taxes led to our contemporary oligarchy. The last forty years of wealth concentration could have been almost entirely prevented by an annual wealth tax with a top rate of only 8 percent.

Taxes are also egalitarian to the extent that they fund the welfare state, and this, too, provokes conservative ire. Aficionados of what is commonly but dubiously termed the “free market” actually favor heavy state involvement in the economy to create what Mike Konczal calls “market dependency”: systems of law under which people must rely on markets outside of their control to acquire things that they need to survive, like housing, healthcare, and food. In the place of a welfare state, conservatives argue poverty should be mitigated through charity (ensuring that access to both market and non-market subsistence is dominated by the preferences of the wealthy) and the traditional family (a system in which care for workers and non-workers—children, the sick, the elderly—is provided by women for free). Charity and family will never eliminate poverty, and poverty ensures business owners and consumers a pool of workers too desperate to contest their meager compensation. Tax-funded public goods and entitlement programs are effective at reducing poverty and therefore threaten the domination and exploitation that poverty makes possible.

Thus anti-tax rhetoric is intended both to shield the rich from taxation and to starve government services that increase the autonomy of poor and working people. It also usefully distracts from the government’s larger role in the economy. Although conservatives treat taxation and welfare spending as uniquely dangerous interventions in an otherwise self-regulating and natural economy, the government is in fact constantly engaged in the business of wealth distribution. The three largest redistributions of wealth in American history were the direct result of government action: the seizure of the land of native people and its division among white settlers and speculators; the defense of chattel slavery; and emancipation. But we need not look at the most extreme expropriations to recognize that politicians and bureaucrats constantly make decisions that rapidly alter the distribution of enormous sums of money. Billions of dollars hang in the balance when the U.S. government determines what is legal business (like marijuana sales or stock buybacks), decides what can be owned and how (like patents or emissions credits), or protects certain owners instead of others (like who gets bailed out or how the police behave). Government intervenes in the market in the same way your skeleton intervenes in your body; it is the organizing structure, not an external force. All economic allocations, from the greatest fortunes to the deepest poverty, are political products.

What is distinct about taxation is not that it somehow changes distributional outcomes more than other economic policies, but simply that it seems to occur after an initial distribution. Taxes therefore appear to reclaim private property and deliver it to the public. But taxes are not really an “after the fact” policy; they are generally predictable and therefore affect decision-making before the tax is applied. For example, high-income taxes reduce the incentive for corporate boards to overpay executives. More fundamentally, pre-tax income and wealth are fictions, because taxes fund the state that defines and defends property rights in the first place. As the philosophers Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel point out, what most of us would earn absent taxation is nothing, because most of us would struggle to survive in a government-free state of nature.

Still, you can typically calculate how much more money you would have if for some reason you, alone, didn’t have to pay taxes on this paycheck or that purchase. Philosophers and economists can say what they will; taxes take money out of your pocket, or at least it feels like they do. In other words, taxes are unique because they remind us that private property, legitimately held, can nonetheless be redirected to public purposes.

What is more, taxes suggest that this fundamental primacy of the public interest is utterly ordinary. Where fines and forfeitures are premised on the putative misbehavior of the payer, most taxes (barring “sin” taxes) are applied on activities that are deemed respectable: legal ways of acquiring, selling, and owning. Taxes are not just both radical and boring; they are radical because they are boring. Taxes normalize the reassignment of private property to the state, and therefore wield the everyday power of the polity over the economy.

Because taxes are a daily demonstration that private gain is subordinate to the public interest, taxation becomes controversial when the scope of the public is contested—that is, when there is the potential for democratization. Taxes in America have not always been the subject of partisan vitriol; in the mid-twentieth century, federal tax policy was not a major component of the political platform of either the Democratic or the Republican Party. This period of fiscal consensus collapsed, not coincidentally, after the civil rights movement restored voting power to black people. The economic upheavals of the later twentieth century ensured that policymaking would have been complicated under any circumstances, but it is racial backlash that called into question the very project of democratic governance of the economy. In the Reagan era, as during the white supremacist reaction to Reconstruction, taxes were strategically useful to conservatives in turning working- and middle-class whites against tax-funded government spending that would benefit black people as well as whites. As anyone could guess who remembers Reagan’s dichotomy of the hard-working taxpayer and the welfare queen, anti-tax politics succeeds when it latches on to American racism in order to deem the entire endeavor of democratic government corrupt. Conservatives find taxes objectionable because they find democracy objectionable. They do not believe that the public interest, as determined by a democratic majority, should take precedence over private accumulation.

What is disheartening is that, for forty-some years, Democrats have rarely contested the Republicans’ core claim. The asymmetry here is important. Republicans design tax policies that predominantly aid the rich, but rhetorically, their antipathy is to all taxation. Democrats do not hold the opposite position. They favor taxes that fall primarily on the rich, but they do not defend taxation on principle.

Instead, Democrats are eager to insist that they will not raise your taxes. President Obama, for example, raised taxes on the rich while cutting taxes for everyone else. In his State of the Union Address, President Biden held a similar line, promising that “nobody earning less than $400,000 a year will pay an additional penny in new taxes.” Many progressive national Democrats twist themselves in knots rather than propose a broad-based tax increase. As recently as 2015, Bernie Sanders shied away from admitting his proposals would increase taxes on middle-class households. In 2019, Elizabeth Warren insisted her Medicare for All plan would not raise taxes on the middle class. This claim was strategically misguided both because it was unconvincing and because broad-based payroll taxes are among the most popular taxes Americans pay. But it was also a missed opportunity to make the affirmative case for public goods over private profit, and to defend the legitimacy of democracy in the economic sphere.

Rather than making a case for taxes, Democrats have, at best, demanded more progressive taxation. Doing so contests the inequity of Republican tax policy: good and important, but inadequate. There are any number of excellent reasons to make taxation progressive, from the mild (the rich can afford it) to the militant (the rich are only rich because they exploited the poor). My personal favorite is Thomas Paine’s: extreme wealth should be taxed away because it undermines the equality essential to the functioning of republican government. But the case for taxation is not, and should not be, simply that it is progressive. In a democracy, taxes assert the right of the people to prioritize the public welfare ahead of private accumulation. Focusing exclusively on raising taxes on the extremely wealthy studiously avoids the essential proposition that the public interest is worth paying for—and that we are all responsible for paying our share. 

In retrospect, it is obvious that the forty-year failure to defend democratic taxation would leave Democrats unprepared to defend democracy. Having for decades benefited from minoritarian institutions under the U.S. Constitution, Republicans have become increasingly willing to distort election rules to win, and to overturn election results if they lose. Democrats, on the other hand, have failed to pass legislation to ensure fair elections or make long-term material improvements in the lives of most Americans. Instead, we get gas tax holidays—an especially futile variation on the position that what middle America needs is a tax cut, and that the best government can do is to do less.

Conservative frothing over taxation serves many purposes. One is to naturalize and depoliticize “pre-tax” market distribution. In other words, an overemphasis on taxation distracts from the government’s many other powers over the distribution of wealth and the functioning of the economy. All of those powers—not just taxation—will be needed to limit the impending climate catastrophe.

Taxation on its own won’t stop climate change. Taxes are by their nature incremental, the ideal policy to help achieve steady outcomes over time, like ensuring well-funded child care or preventing wealth consolidation. A carbon tax could be a plausible solution to global warming only if it were accompanied by the time machine required to implement it fifty years ago. Today, the scale and speed of effective climate action is simply not well matched to fiscal policy solutions.

Global warming is an existential crisis and therefore requires an immediate wartime footing. War is the right metaphor, not only because it captures the scope of the endeavor and the destruction that will accompany our inaction, but because it lays out the fiscal strategy. In the face of cataclysm, you regulate, nationalize, conscript, and above all, spend . . . then you tax. Twentieth-century democracies only adopted and expanded progressive taxation once they were mobilized for a total war. And those taxes were popular, as political scientist Andrea Louise Campbell has demonstrated. In 1943, when Gallup asked Americans, most of whom had never paid federal income tax before the war, whether their taxes were fair, only 15 percent said no. (That figure is 43 percent today.)

What was it about mass warfare that made taxation—and progressive taxation—not only very popular, but possible? For one, a shared threat makes a compelling case for shared sacrifice. But I think there is more to it. We have no shortage of shared threats today, and markedly little shared sacrifice. Indeed, we have a major political party so preternaturally opposed to sharing that not even risks can be admitted to be held in common. And this is where the government actions associated with mass warfare are so important. The government’s response to war helps the citizenry recognize what is at stake; conditions become problems when we believe they can be solved. When war provokes governments to engage in massive, up-front public spending, it demonstrates what the country is capable of and allows people to choose action over denial. The result is high morale, even when difficult things are required.

By the end of the Second World War, the United States was spending 40 percent of GDP annually on the war, the equivalent of about $9 trillion a year today. I need hardly mention that our current plan to address climate change is nothing like the plan to defeat Hitler. What we are doing today is more like sending the Nazis a sternly worded letter and a blank check.

It is hard to keep faith in the power of ideas when what is so clearly needed is not talk but action. But I believe that the Herculean task ahead demands that we entirely overturn the anti-tax politics that has dominated American policymaking for my entire lifetime. That includes the misperception of Americans as unwilling to pay for public goods, the wrong-headed tactical assumption that low taxes are good politics, and the neoliberal sleight-of-hand that makes taxes appear as an exceptional interference in a natural economic order.

Ending the anti-tax era also requires recognizing that what is anathema to conservatives about taxation is not merely their economic effects but their political implications. Yes, conservatives dislike taxes because they are redistributive. But the redistribution they object to is not only from the rich to the poor. Taxes always, every day and by definition, redistribute wealth from private interests to the public. Taxes assert that private property is under the control of the polity—in a democracy, the people. This is precisely what we need to do if we are to preserve a livable planet. The principle of taxation so hated by conservatives is the principle that the common good comes first, and this is the principle for which we are fighting.

Vanessa Williamson is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

Russia’s Economy Really Is Crumbling Under Sanctions

foreignpolicy.com

Russia’s Economy Really Is Crumbling Under Sanctions

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Steven Tian

14 - 18 minutes

Five months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there remains a startling lack of understanding by many Western policymakers and commentators of the economic dimensions of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion and what it has meant for Russia’s economic positioning both domestically and globally.

Far from being ineffective or disappointing, as many have argued, international sanctions and voluntary business retreats have exerted a devastating effect over Russia’s economy. The deteriorating economy has served as a powerful if underappreciated complement to the deteriorating political landscape facing Putin.

That these misunderstandings persist is not entirely surprising given the lack of available economic data. In fact, many of the excessively sanguine Russian economic analyses, forecasts, and projections that have proliferated in recent months share a crucial methodological flaw: These analyses draw most, if not all, of their underlying evidence from periodic economic releases by the Russian government itself. Numbers released by the Kremlin have long been held to be largely if not always credible, but there are certain problems.

First, the Kremlin’s economic releases are becoming increasingly cherry-picked—partial and incomplete, selectively tossing out unfavorable metrics. The Russian government has progressively withheld an increasing number of key statistics that, prior to the war, were updated on a monthly basis, including all foreign trade data. Among these are statistics relating to exports and imports, particularly with Europe; oil and gas monthly output data; commodity export quantities; capital inflows and outflows; financial statements of major companies, which used to be released on a mandatory basis by companies themselves; central bank monetary base data; foreign direct investment data; lending and loan origination data; and other data related to the availability of credit. Even Rosaviatsiya, the federal air transport agency, abruptly ceased publishing data on airline and airport passenger volumes.

Since the Kremlin stopped releasing updated numbers, constraining the availability of economic data for researchers to draw upon, many excessively rosy economic forecasts have irrationally extrapolated economic releases from the early days of the invasion, when sanctions and the business retreat had not taken full effect. Even those favorable statistics that have been released are dubious, given the political pressure the Kremlin has exerted to corrupt statistical integrity.

Mindful of the dangers of accepting Kremlin statistics at face value, our team of experts, using private Russian-language and direct data sources including high-frequency consumer data, cross-channel checks, releases from Russia’s international trade partners, and data mining of complex shipping data, have released one of the first comprehensive economic analyses measuring Russian current economic activity five months into the invasion, with contributions from Franek Sokolowski, Michal Wyrebkowski, Mateusz Kasprowicz, Michal Boron, Yash Bhansali, and Ryan Vakil. From our analysis, it becomes clear: Business retreats and sanctions are crushing the Russian economy in the short term and the long term. Based on our research, we are able to challenge nine widely held but misleading myths about Russia’s supposed economic resilience.

Myth 1: Russia can redirect its gas exports and sell to Asia in lieu of Europe.

This is one of Putin’s favorite and most misleading talking points, doubling down on a much-hyped pivot to the east. But natural gas is not a fungible export for Russia. Less than 10 percent of Russia’s gas capacity is liquefied natural gas, so Russian gas exports remain reliant on a system of fixed pipelines carrying piped gas. The vast majority of Russia’s pipelines flow toward Europe; those pipelines, which originate in western Russia, are not connectable to a separate nascent network of pipelines that link Eastern Siberia to Asia, which contains only 10 percent of the capacity of the European pipeline network. Indeed, the 16.5 billion cubic meters of gas exported by Russia to China last year represented less than 10 percent of the 170 billion cubic meters of natural gas sent by Russia to Europe.

Long-planned Asian pipeline projects currently under construction are still years away from becoming operational, much less hastily initiated new projects, and financing of these costly gas pipeline projects also now puts Russia at a significant disadvantage.

Overall, Russia needs world markets far more than the world needs Russian supplies; Europe received 83 percent of Russian gas exports but drew only 46 percent of its own supply from Russia in 2021. With limited pipeline connectivity to Asia, more Russian gas stays in the ground; indeed, the Russian state energy company Gazprom’s published data shows production is already down more than 35 percent year-on-year this month. For all Putin’s energy blackmail of Europe, he is doing so at significant financial cost to his own coffers.

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Myth 2: Since oil is more fungible than gas, Putin can just sell more to Asia.  

Russian oil exports now also reflect Putin’s diminished economic and geopolitical clout. Recognizing that Russia has nowhere else to turn, and mindful that they have more purchasing options than Russia has buyers, China and India are driving an unprecedented approximately $35 discount on Russian Urals oil purchases, even though the historical spread has never ranged beyond $5—not even during the 2014 Crimean crisis—and at times Russian oil has actually sold at a premium to Brent and WTI oil. Furthermore, it takes Russian oil tankers an average of 35 days to reach East Asia, versus two to seven days to reach Europe, which is why historically only 39 percent of Russian oil has gone to Asia versus the 53 percent destined for Europe.

This margin pressure is felt keenly by Russia, as it remains a relatively high-cost producer relative to the other major oil producers, with some of the highest break-evens of any producing country. The Russian upstream industry has also long been reliant on Western technology, which combined with the loss of both Russia’s erstwhile primary market and Russia’s diminished economic clout leads to even the Russian energy ministry revising its projections of long-term oil output downward. There is no doubt that, as many energy experts predicted, Russia is losing its status as an energy superpower, with an irrevocable deterioration in its strategic economic positioning as an erstwhile reliable supplier of commodities.

Myth 3: Russia is making up for lost Western businesses and imports by replacing them with imports from Asia.

Imports play an important role within Russia’s domestic economy, consisting of about 20 percent of Russian GDP, and, despite Putin’s bellicose delusions of total self-sufficiency, the country needs crucial inputs, parts, and technology from hesitant trade partners. Despite some lingering supply chain leakiness, Russian imports have collapsed by over 50 percent in recent months.

China has not moved into the Russian market to the extent that many feared; in fact, according to the most recent monthly releases from the Chinese General Administration of Customs, Chinese exports to Russia plummeted by more than 50 percent from the start of the year to April, falling from over $8.1 billion monthly to $3.8 billion. Considering China exports seven times as much to the United States than Russia, it appears that even Chinese companies are more concerned about running afoul of U.S. sanctions than of losing marginal positions in the Russian market, reflecting Russia’s weak economic hand with its global trade partners.

Myth 4: Russian domestic consumption and consumer health remain strong.

Some of the sectors most dependent on international supply chains have been hit with debilitating inflation around 40-60 percent—on extremely low sales volumes. For example, foreign car sales in Russia fell by an average of 95 percent across major car companies, with sales ground to a complete halt.

Amid supply shortages, soaring prices, and fading consumer sentiment, it is hardly surprising that Russian Purchasing Managers’ Index readings—which capture how purchasing managers are viewing the economy—have plunged, particularly for new orders, alongside plunges in consumer spending and retail sales data by around 20 percent year-over-year. Other readings of high-frequency data such as e-commerce sales within Yandex and same-store traffic at retail sites across Moscow reinforce steep declines in consumer spending and sales, no matter what the Kremlin says.

Myth 5: Global businesses have not really pulled out of Russia, and business, capital, and talent flight from Russia are overstated.

Global businesses represent around 12 percent of Russia’s workforce (5 million workers), and, as a result of the business retreat, over 1,000 companies representing around 40 percent of Russia’s GDP have curtailed operations in the country, reversing three decades’ worth of foreign investment and buttressing unprecedented simultaneous capital and talent flight in a mass exodus of 500,000 individuals, many of whom are exactly the highly educated, technically skilled workers Russia cannot afford to lose. Even the mayor of Moscow has acknowledged an expected massive loss of jobs as businesses go through the process of fully exiting.

Myth 6: Putin is running a budget surplus thanks to high energy prices.

Russia is actually on pace to run a budget deficit this year equivalent to 2 percent of GDP, according to its own finance minister—one of the only times the budget has been in deficit in years, despite high energy prices—thanks to Putin’s unsustainable spending spree; on top of dramatic increases in military spending, Putin is resorting to patently unsustainable, dramatic fiscal and monetary intervention, including a laundry list of Kremlin pet projects, all of which have contributed to the money supply nearly doubling in Russia since the invasion began. Putin’s reckless spending is clearly putting Kremlin finances under strain.

Myth 7: Putin has hundreds of billions of dollars in rainy day funds, so the Kremlin’s finances are unlikely to be strained anytime soon.

The most obvious challenge facing Putin’s rainy day funds is the fact that of his around $600 billion in foreign exchange reserves, accumulated from years’ worth of oil and gas revenues, $300 billion is frozen and out of reach with allied countries across the United States, Europe, and Japan restricting access. There have been some calls to seize this $300 billion to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine.

Putin’s remaining foreign exchange reserves are decreasing at an alarming rate, by around $75 billion since the start of the war. Critics point out that official foreign exchange reserves of the central bank technically can only decrease due to international sanctions placed on the central bank, and they suggest that nonsanctioned financial institutions such as Gazprombank could still accumulate such reserves in place of the central bank. While this may be technically true, there is simultaneously no evidence to suggest that Gazprombank is actually accumulating any reserves given sizable strain on its own loan book.

Furthermore, although the finance ministry had planned to reinstate a long-standing Russian budgetary rule that surplus revenue from oil and gas sales should be channeled into the sovereign wealth fund, Putin axed this proposal as well as accompanying guidelines directing how and where the National Wealth Fund can be spent—as Finance Minister Anton Siluanov floated the idea of withdrawing funds from the National Wealth Fund equivalent to a third of the entire fund to pay for this deficit this year. If Russia is running a budget deficit requiring the drawdown of a third of its sovereign wealth fund when oil and gas revenues are still relatively strong, all signs indicate a Kremlin that may be running out of money much faster than conventionally appreciated.

Myth 8: The ruble is the world’s strongest-performing currency this year.  

One of Putin’s favorite propaganda talking points, the appreciation of the ruble is an artificial reflection of unprecedented, draconian capital control—which rank among the most restrictive of any in the world. The restrictions make it effectively impossible for any Russian to legally purchase dollars or even access a majority of their dollar deposits, while artificially inflating demand through forced purchases by major exporters—all of which remain largely in place today.

The official exchange rate is misleading, anyhow, as the ruble is, unsurprisingly, trading at dramatically diminished volumes compared to before the invasion on low liquidity. By many reports, much of this erstwhile trading has migrated to unofficial ruble black markets. Even the Bank of Russia has admitted that the exchange rate is a reflection more of government policies and a blunt expression of the country’s trade balance rather than freely tradeable liquid foreign exchange markets.

Myth 9: The implementation of sanctions and business retreats are now largely done, and no more economic pressure is needed.  

Russia’s economy has been severely damaged, but the business retreats and sanctions applied against Russia are incomplete. Even with the deterioration in Russia’s exports positioning, it continues to draw too much oil and gas revenue from the sanctions carveout, which sustains Putin’s extravagant domestic spending and obfuscates structural economic weaknesses. The Kyiv School of Economics and Yermak-McFaul International Working Group have led the way in proposing additional sanctions measures across individual sanctions, energy sanctions, and financial sanctions, led by former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and the experts Tymofiy Mylovanov, Nataliia Shapoval, and Andriy Boytsun. Looking ahead, there is no path out of economic oblivion for Russia as long as the allied countries remain unified in maintaining and increasing sanctions pressure against Russia.

Defeatist headlines arguing that Russia’s economy has bounced back are simply not factual—the facts are that, by any metric and on any level, the Russian economy is reeling, and now is not the time to step on the brakes.

La Dolce Mailbag by Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

La Dolce Mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

20 - 25 minutes

Back from Italy soon — it’s been a fantastic trip, but vacation can’t last forever.

BD Anders: Have recent developments changed your prior generous evaluation of Joe Manchin and his negotiation style?

Yes.

Genevieve: Thoughts on the degrowth interview in the New York Times yesterday? “This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession With Growth Must End.” Herman Daly is very critical of G.D.P. as a metric.

There are a lot of problems with degrowth as a movement, and I think their obsession with critiques of GDP underscores how conceptually weak degrowth is.

You can come up with a lot of contrived scenarios where GDP fails to track broader concepts of well-being. But if you look at the international correlates of GDP with almost anything, they are very strong. The only important exception to the “GDP is good” rule of thumb is that it doesn’t account for the value of leisure time. So enslaving people is bad and allowing people to retire is good even though an exclusive focus on GDP might not show that. But that’s easily captured by looking at something like “GDP per hour worked,” which doesn’t involve throwing GDP overboard as a concept.

And if you look at the things that cause GDP/hour to grow — innovation, deepening of the capital stock, productivity growth — those things are also the main long-term drivers of simple GDP growth. Conversely, if you look at the kind of harms that degrowthers worry about — shifting weather patterns wrecking agriculture, floods rendering existing capital useless, etc. — these harms absolutely show up in GDP statistics.

Ryan: Do you, Matt, think Joe Biden should run again? And, if the party decides that he should not for whatever reason how should that process look? The presidency and politics has always been tied to some ego, hard to say you can’t do the job.

I unfortunately don’t have direct access to information about Joe Biden’s well-being and mental state. He’s made his share of mistakes, but I think the odds are that if he doesn’t run for re-election, he ends up getting replaced by someone worse — so in that sense, I think he should run again. But that’s contingent on him feeling that he can do the legitimately very difficult job of running the country while also running for re-election.

Tracy Erin: Ok, last week I asked whether the irrational hate you get on Twitter is hard for her to see, but this week I am trying a different angle. I find it odd that you are the target of such intense rage on Twitter from people who are pretty well ideologically aligned with you, and while I think you earn a smidge of it by being too provocative at times, I think most of it is some kind of irrational style over substance reaction and I am wondering if you ever have a similar reaction to anyone on Twitter. When I try and understand the outrage I think about how I am probably ideologically in between Bari Weiss and Elizabeth Bruenig, but for some reason they both have a style that annoys me and makes me less open to what they are saying. Is there anyone on Twitter that bugs Matt the way that he drives a certain kind of progressive takester over the edge?

I think people you are ideologically adjacent to are more annoying than people you are deeply distant from, because you view their bad takes as influencing the persuadable. For this reason, I’m actually not going to share any secret Twitter annoyances because the people whose tweets annoy me most are people who I like and respect and it drives me crazy that they tweet dumb stuff!

That’s all a little bit different from someone like me or Liz Bruenig becoming a Twitter Hate Figure because we have come to symbolize something that people see as larger than any one person.

Jerry: Everyone seems to take "The Rise of China" as a given, but my understanding of their demographic inverted pyramid is that they've arguably peaked pre-Covid, and are in for a very bumpy ~50+ years. I'd be curious to hear Matt's take on this.

I kind of dispute the premise here. When I was working on “One Billion Americans,” I ended up delving into the debates on this, and my take was that there is very vigorous expert disagreement about the outlook for China.

I think that fundamentally, the United States can’t just count on the Chinese economy unraveling as our strategy for strategic competition. But they are not only facing a lot of demographic headwinds, Xi Jinping’s leadership seems increasingly erratic and marred by bad judgment. I don’t think I know enough about it to have an informed forecast but I’d put at least 20 percent odds on “Chinese growth stalls out and they never overtake U.S. GDP at market exchange rates,” but also at least 20 percent odds on “U.S./China per capita GDP continues to converge and China leaves us in the dust in the aggregate.”

Dave Orr: In the private sector, it's rare for old sclerotic companies to change into something dynamic and competitive — instead something new comes along and outcompetes it. In the public sector, we never shut down agencies, they just get older and sclerotic-er. How should we think about that? Should we consider rebooting agencies, creating some kind of competition, or just struggle through trying to reform them because that's the only option?

It’s not actually true that public sector agencies never shut down. The most recent big example that I can think of is that part of the Dodd-Frank overhaul of financial regulation was disbanding the Office of Thrift Supervision and parceling its responsibilities out to other agencies. I thought that was a good idea. But there’s also a negative example from the 1970s when the Atomic Energy Commission was disbanded and replaced with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with what was essentially a mandate to create a new agency that would have a structural bias against licensing new reactors.

That initiative was extremely successful at achieving its policy goal, the goal was just bad. But I think that underscores the point that agency elimination should be in the policy toolkit. The U.S. Secret Service, for example, has fucked up enough stuff at this point that Congress should look at scrapping it. The Diplomatic Security Service could handle presidential protection and the FBI could handle counterfeiting. Obviously expanding the DSS and FBI like that would require them to hire new people, and former Secret Service agents would be plausible candidates for those jobs. But they would have to apply as new candidates.

Marie Kennedy: Freddie deBoer was pretty rude about it, but he had a critique of YIMBY-ism today, namely that YIMBYs can be dismissive of the immediate needs of working class people, especially working class people of color, that can get screwed over in the short term vis a vis gentrification. And that this is anti-popularist in that it alienates would-be allies. Thoughts?

I think a lot of people want to argue that YIMBYism is wrong without actually arguing against the core proposition of YIMBYism, which is “relaxing housing regulation in order to increase supply would be an improvement on the status quo.”

From reading FDB over the years, I know he has a lot of complaints about YIMBYs, about YIMBYism, etc., etc., etc., but I can’t really tell whether or not he agrees that relaxing housing regulation in order to increase supply would be an improvement on the status quo. My view is that relaxing housing regulation in order to increase supply would be an improvement on the status quo. That’s why I’m a YIMBY and why I think YIMBYism is good. Improving things is good! It is also true that any effort to change housing supply dynamics will operate with a pretty long lag, so nobody’s short-term problems are efficaciously solved this way. There are lots of good things we could do in life to help various people in various ways, and YIMBYism has nothing to do with denying that. But I do insist that relaxing housing regulation in order to increase supply would be an improvement on the status quo, and I think this is actually a very important subject because housing is such a large share of the economy.

Brian T: The Afghanistan withdrawal seems to be correlated with a permanent decrease in Biden's approval rating, which I didn't expect. What are your thoughts on that?

Mainstream media coverage is, on average, kinder to Democratic presidents than to Republican ones. But because rank-and-file Democrats care much more about what the mainstream media says than rank-and-file Republicans do, negative media coverage (of Obama on Ebola or Biden on Afghanistan) is much more harmful to Democrats’ political standing.

But I also suspect that the real permanent political hit Biden took around that time wasn’t Afghanistan but the emergence of Delta and the ensuing series of somewhat immune-evasive variants. Biden’s coalition is a mix of vaxxed and relaxed people and Covid hawks. And ever since Delta, the hawks have been annoyed that Biden isn’t shutting down the virus, and the V&R have been annoyed that he continued clinging to various things like the airplane mask mandate. Republicans face a Covid split of their own between a V&R faction and a denialist faction. But the reduced efficacy of the vaccines — and in particular the dramatic reduction of their efficacy at blocking transmission — has reduced the tension between these groups.

I think Biden could have handled this situation better by more fully embracing the V&R worldview. But it was a genuine wedge issue that was not easy to navigate. The virus’ ability to mutate just wrecked a lot of the optimism of early 2021.

Nancy Gale: How should cities and towns in desirable vacation spots deal with second or mostly vacant homes? Clearly one answer is building more housing, but that's a long term solution to a short term crunch. Do you think it's wise to tax vacant or mostly vacant properties to discourage out of state buyers vacuuming up housing? And what about Airbnb?

Vacation homes are a fiscal bonanza to towns because they contribute to property taxes and consume very few local services. If you want to directly plow some of that bonanza into creating subsidized housing for locals, I think that’s great. And you should absolutely zone for more supply.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that if you’re worried too much of your existing housing stock is being converted to Airbnbs, that’s a good sign that you should zone for more hotels. Hotels are also a fiscal bonanza that should always be welcomed.

Eric P: Conservatives talk a lot about squishy-sounding college majors (gender studies, etc.) I don’t agree that this is an issue — I know tons of humanities majors who get lucrative jobs. The thing is that it’s almost never connected to said major, it’s just a corporate job, law, etc. I think this is fine and I think those majors can actually prepare you well for your career and life. But it begs the question - what the hell is the point of a college major anyway? Should college kids just do what interests them and but take the job at BCG or Goldman Sachs? I sort of feel bad for the Ivy League English professors...

Any good humanities course of study teaches you to read complicated documents and produce written and oral analyses of their content. That’s a totally legitimate job skill.

The legitimate concern about “soft” majors is that because the science professors have much more research funding than the English professors, the English professors need undergraduate enrollment much more than the science professors do. That means the English professors have an objective incentive to lower standards and not actually provide a rigorous cycle of teaching, learning, and assessment. That’s not inherent to the idea of studying the humanities, but it’s a feature of modern university architecture that I think needs to be taken seriously.

Nathan Kosk: Hey Matt, what do you make of the argument, made in take circles in Europe and elsewhere right now, that America is “selfishly” fighting inflation too much to the point of causing a recession for the rest of the world? The argument goes that this is primarily due to the Fed raising rates very aggressively.

Marie Kennedy: Well this is maddening. Gonna turn me into a nationalist. It’s selfish to manage our monetary policy to optimize our own economy???

I think this is downstream of the European Central Bank doing such a terrible job in the wake of the Great Recession. The narrative took hold that European domestic economies were critically influenced by the demand situation in the United States. But that was only true because the ECB wasn’t generating sufficient demand at home.

So not only do I agree with Marie that there’s nothing selfish about managing our monetary policy for domestic needs, but I think the globally optimal thing is for each central bank to manage the domestic situation correctly. The U.S. economy would have been stronger had the ECB handled things better 10 years ago. Europe would be in better shape today if the United States had started cooling demand earlier.

Avery James: There's a progressive thread doing the rounds today that made some interesting claims on demography and politics. Without getting into that thread's controversial claims, it reminded me that you tweeted a while back about how the end of the British-Protestant ethnic majority a century ago was a much more consequential majority-minority transition. I think you are correct and I also believe that shift became inevitable basically a century before that (Jackson's "victory" at New Orleans). But I would be very curious for you to expand on that point, as it seems worthwhile for more people to think about.

The basic idea here is that, as I think everyone agrees, race is a social construct and the social category of “white” is not well-defined and has never been particularly stable. It is absolutely true that if we construe people who are partially descended from immigrants from Latin America or Asia (people like me, in other words) as “non-white,” the country will soon be majority non-white. But just as Professor Boustan was saying in the book club, these immigrant groups are assimilating at a pretty rapid pace — including via intermarriage and Americanization of names — and I think ultimately “majority-minority America” is going to be a bit of a nothingburger.

By contrast, the Protestant/Catholic divide had a pretty firm conceptual basis in a world of high levels of religious affiliation.

Protestants would do things like establish a “non-denominational church” on the Harvard campus and decide they have thereby solved the problem of inclusiveness, even though to Catholics (and Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc.), the idea of a non-denominational church doesn’t make sense. Protestants decided to make alcohol illegal even though drinking wine is a religious obligation for Catholics and Jews. Today we of course dismiss fears that Catholics would put allegiance to the Pope over allegiance to the constitution as bigoted paranoia, but it really is true that there is a transnational church bureaucracy that has been in conflict with the logic of the secular nation-state for centuries.

This all worked out in the end. But I think the shift involved in the loss of Protestant domination is much more profound because “being a Protestant” is a much more real and substantial thing than “being a white person.” If you were worried in 1922 that Protestant ideas would lose influence in future America, you were correct to worry — because there actually is such a thing as Protestant ideas that can lose influence.

Trevor Austin: Is the Federation right to ban genetically modified individuals from service? Dr Bashir from DS9 and Number One from Strange New Worlds are fine officers and IIRC neither *chose* to be modified.

The introduction of this genetic modification plotline is one of my real doubts about Strange New Worlds, which I otherwise love.

Story-wise, the purpose of the Federation's ban on genetic modification is to let them tell human stories that are set in space rather than stories about future genetically modified people who due to their modification behave in very different ways from the humans we know. But it doesn’t actually make a lot of sense as a policy measure, and every time it’s foregrounded in a story it just makes you think about how it’s obviously just a plot convenience.

James B: When assessing the relative “extremism” of Trump's candidacy in the 2016, how do you account for the proposed “Muslim Ban”? That seems like a pretty extremist position to me. I can see how his anti-illegal immigration stuff could be viewed as less extreme by moderates who have a “law & order” predisposition, but there's no excusing the Muslim ban. That was the reason that my Dad, a lifelong Republican, said he would never vote for Trump. Was there simply a bunch of latent islamophobia among white working class Obama voters?

The Muslim ban was, in a sense, extreme in that many people had a strong negative reaction to it, including tons of GOP elites — Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, and other influential Republicans denounced it. That kind of thing is always politically dicey and I bet it did hurt Trump on net — it’s certainly telling that he basically walked away from it as president.

That said, when Trump did roll out his much more limited travel ban, it had majority support. I suspect that had there been a significant Islamist terror attack on U.S. soil during the Trump years, his administration might have gone in a very dark direction.

Patrick Benitez: Why aren’t suburban and rural voters or politicians more supportive of (state-level) housing deregulation targeting cities? Would seem like a good way to keep development pressure off currently low-density areas.

I’m just not sure how true this is. The California state assembly recently passed a bill reducing parking mandates, and while its main sponsors were urban Democrats, it got some Republican votes from suburban and rural areas of California. Utah did a zoning reform in 2019. What I don’t think we’ve yet seen is a serious stab at something like having the Texas state legislature preempt Austin zoning. But I’d love to sell Texas Republicans on the idea — they’d doubtless be skeptical at first, but honestly they should do it and I think they might be persuadable.

Mike: The tech sector is tanking right now. Does it come back once we're past the Fed/inflation-induced financial uncertainty, or has it been fundamentally built around a high-unemployment/low-demand world and faces more fundamental obstacles?

When interest rates go up, the value of “I might get $1 billion 10 years from now” goes down as a result of discounting. This means that a depressed, low-interest economy is very good for the valuations of speculative startups and for the general VC business model. Are we currently experiencing just a dip in that model or a structural shift? I’m not sure, but it definitely could be the latter.

I just think it’s worth saying that while the technology industry is closely associated with venture capital and speculative startups, it now also includes companies like Apple and Microsoft that are not even remotely young growth stocks. I feel very confident that making and programming computing devices is going to continue to be an important part of the economy.

Dan: You tweeted earlier today parties should choose from eight ideologies: "Radical left, social democratic, green, social liberal, market liberal, christian democratic, kinda fashy, real deal violent rightist." Looking at the European Parliament, we see this spread across seven parliamentary groups (liberals get smushed together). In this chart, it appears that the social democrats+greens and, separately, the two most conservative groups basically coinhabit the same spaces, getting us down to five.

Do you think these are roughly the five (or seven or eight) ideologies that are destined to emerge in liberal democracy? In Lee Drutman's STV America, do you think roughly the same groups would emerge?

Okay, let’s talk about European Parliament groups.

They have a hard-left group, a green group, and a social democratic group. But then they have a liberal group that contains a mix of social liberals and market liberals. And they have the European People’s Party which contains a mix of market liberals and Christian democrats, then the ECR and EFDD groups on the far right who can stand in for my “kinda fashy” group (or more politely, populist nationalists).

I don’t think it’s a law of nature that these are the only possible ideological formations. It’s just that lots of parties around the world do fit into one of those grooves, and when it happens it’s easy to characterize the party. This came up because I was complaining that Italian politics has a low level of legibility because the Five Star Movement is a key player right now, and their party doesn’t conform to this schema.

My guess about America is that we would fragment into an asymmetrical six-party system. You’d have a populist-nationalist party, a Christian party, a market liberal party, a green party (that would incorporate a lot of the constituency for a social liberal party), a labor party, and a left party. But the nationalists would be a lot bigger than the other parties.