Lawyer-brain, NECTAs, marriage penalties, and the trouble with normal. By Matthew Yglesias

Lawyer-brain, NECTAs, marriage penalties, and the trouble with normal. By Matthew Yglesias

A weekend policy potpourri

Matthew Yglesias

Jan 23

(Stefani Reynolds - Pool/Getty Images)

Hey folks, had a little extra time this week and wanted to try something a little bit different — instead of a full article, something like a little potpourri of relevant policy and politics information that’s more substantive than random tweets and available exclusively for subscribers.

I don’t know if this will be a permanent thing, but if you guys like it at all, it will at least become a sometimes thing.

So let me know what you think.

No more NECTAS?

This is extremely nerdy, but fun for people who like data and urban policy. Right before Inauguration Day, the Office of Management and Budget put out a proposed rule that would, among other things, get rid of NECTAs.

What’s a NECTA? It’s a New England City and Town Area. In most of America, most of the land consists of unincorporated areas and a lot of government functions are performed by counties. But in New England, essentially all of the land except for some uninhabited parts of Maine is part of a town or a city. County governments generally perform sheriff-and-court functions but don’t otherwise provide public services and generally speaking aren’t “important” the way they are in other parts of the country.

So traditionally outside of New England, the OMB defined metro areas (both the Metropolitan Statistical Areas and their bigger cousins, the Combined Statistical Areas) in terms of commuting patterns between counties, but inside New England they used NECTAs instead which focused on town boundaries. This had a kind of narrow logic of being more true to the lived experience of New Englanders, and it’s also more precise. But normally people want to use this kind of data to make comparisons, and since NECTAs weren’t directly comparable to MSAs or CSAs, it created a lot of pain-in-the-butt problems for researchers.

Lawyer-brain and its discontents

I’ve been thinking lately about something I’ve decided to call “lawyer-brain” though it is of course not exclusive to or universal among lawyers.

What it amounts to is the belief that things that are not courts of law should act like courts of law, where every decision is made with heavy emphasis on both adhering to precedent and setting new precedent and an extremely high priority is placed on the application of neutral principles. Courts act this way for a reason. But nowadays we often see demands that other institutions — social media companies, op-ed pages, elected officials, vaccine administrators, etc. — act like appellate judges when there’s no actual reason everything should be like a court. The bouncers at bars and clubs will normally give some kind of reason before they kick someone out, but it’s not a binding precedent and you have no right to appeal. The limiting principle is that your bar goes out of business if you can’t run it properly. Hotels have policies, which is a way of managing the staff and setting customer expectations, but the managers can also just make ad hoc exceptions if they want to.

“Check out time is at 11AM” is not a constitutional principle, and even if you write it as “Check out time is at 11AM — no exceptions,” they can still make an exception.

What economist-brain asks about Trump’s deplatforming is not “how will this precedent be used?” but “what are the incentives?” Do social media companies have strong financial incentives to be overly censorious of disfavored political views? The answer is no — if anything the incentive is to amplify non-mainstream views out of proportion to their prevalence in the population. And with the vaccine distribution, too, we ought to be thinking more about whether the relevant people are properly incentivized and less about what the rules say.

Normal is a mixed bag

I watched a fair amount of Pete Buttigieg’s confirmation hearings and it was reassuringly “normal” in exactly the sense people mean when they say they hope Joe Biden can help turn down the temperature on American politics. It’s not just that there was no Donald Trump present. The Republican senators just didn’t spend their time trying to gin up weird culture war controversies or talk about Antifa. Instead everyone from both parties asked about picayune stuff.

Roy Blunt asked Buttigieg to commit to supporting the Essential Air Service program.

Richard Blumenthal asked Buttigieg to commit to supporting the Gateway Program to increase rail capacity across the Hudson.

Deb Fischer asked him to say that the Jones Act is good.

Buttigieg (wisely for someone looking to be confirmed) said he agreed with all three of these senators. That’s extremely normal stuff. But the Essential Air Service (which subsidizes otherwise unviable air service to small airports) is bad! The Jones Act (protectionism for American shipowners that cripples the economy of Puerto Rico and hurts us during natural disasters) is bad! The Gateway Program is not bad per se, but it’s horrifically bloated and overpriced and it’s never going to get done without reform.

This is all better than Trumpian madness, but it’s a reminder that the “normal” state of American politics has its bad elements too. Kudos to Brian Schatz for mostly using his time to ask about real subjects of national significance like road safety and climate change.

How to fix marriage penalties

Scott Ruesterholz at The Federalist calls on Republicans to support a new pro-natal program that would deliver:

$5,000 per year to married parents of one kid.

$15,000 per year to married parents of two kids.

$20,000 per year to married parents of three kids.

That strikes me as odd relative to a flat per-child amount, but I think the real juice here is that it only goes to married parents. That’s understandable from a conservative point of view because conservatives want to encourage marriage. But what does this accomplish? The IRS isn't going to be able to spot-check to see if couples claiming the benefit are actually co-habiting and co-parenting. You’re just encouraging random box-checking.

The good news for people willing to spend money on pro-marriage initiatives is that the existing welfare state includes a lot of marriage penalties (see Willis Krumholtz at the Institute for Family Studies). This happens because lawmakers tend to want to phase out benefits pretty rapidly once a family becomes non-poor, and two-parent households tend to have more market income. The way to fix this is to just make the programs more generous and eliminate the penalties. My impression has been that conservatives would hate this idea because it costs money. But Ruesterholz is talking about spending a lot here, and eliminating the existing marriage penalties would be the place to start.

Filibuster and democracy

Nate Cohn is confused.

Nate Cohn 

@Nate_Cohn

There's a straightforward case for eliminating the filibuster, but this (which seems all over lefty twitter this month) isn't really one of them?:

--GOP threatens democracy 

--GOP has a structural edge in the Senate

--Save democracy by making it easier to pass laws in the Senate

January 21st 2021

108 Retweets1,054 Likes

I think you can answer this question in two ways.

One is that the welfare state is a ratchet — even in the UK where there are no veto points, the Tories don’t eliminate the NHS. It’s true that absent the filibuster, Republicans “could” go do all kinds of crazy stuff, but I don’t believe that they actually would. Note that the Affordable Care Act survived 2017 despite the GOP’s use of the reconciliation process.

The second is that the filibuster is standing in the way of adopting anti-gerrymandering reforms, and creating a statehood option for DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands. Filibuster reform does not itself create democracy, but it’s a necessary prerequisite for creating a more democratic system of government.

Leftist Twitter is kind of unhinged

Brendan O'Connor 

@_grendan

All the libs are memeing Bernie, who is now a very powerful member of the Senate, because they believe the left has been sufficiently disciplined and brought into line with the Democratic Party. Remains to be seen how correct they are.

January 21st 2021

10 Retweets137 Likes

No further comment except to say that Bernie is better than Bernie Twitter

Have a good weekend!