Super Mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

23 - 30 minutes

MAGA stands with the people of San Francisco against the woke menace of the Kansas City Chiefs!

In other news, we’re maybe using CRISPR to treat rare inflammatory diseases, we’ve had an incredible breakthrough from the Vesuvius Project and can now read some fresh ancient scrolls, the MTA in New York City figured out how to stop wasting money on oversized stations, and NYC building permits are way up.

Evil Socrates: So which side of the Hamiltonian Tariffs Were Good vs A Drag do you fall on given the nature of the early American economy and the lack of income tax. We know how you feel about prospective modern ones but I was left wondering your view on the open historical debate.

I thought about this a lot while working on One Billion Americans (a time when the Hamilton musical was all the craze), because I think it’s important to contextualize the role of tariffs within the larger debate about the future of the country. If you trust the economic historians, during the early republic the United States was poorer on average than the UK (which was reaping the fruits of industrialization and being at the nexus of global trade) but already richer than most of Europe just based on being an agricultural society with plenty of land.

I think it’s completely non-crazy, given the relevant policy choices, to believe that the country should just be happy with that. Enjoy the abundant land, enjoy the farming, export agricultural commodities, and import manufactured goods.

That’s not a “tariff policy,” though it has implications for tariffs. It’s a theory of what the new country should be like — a natural resource exporter that free-rides on foreign technology, has minimal needs for fiscal revenue, and sees the tariff as a narrow tax policy question. In the truly extreme quietest form of that vision, you might not even pursue westward expansion. After all, the 13 original colonies were plenty big and almost entirely rural as of 1790. But for a variety of reasons, both ideological and practical, no major faction in American politics genuinely pursued that vision. You had anti-immigrant politics starting in the 1840s, but the entire founding generation was bought-in on the idea that the country benefitted from more people arriving. They were less worried about dividing up a fixed pot of land than they were about the advantages of settling the frontier.

From within that context, what eventually prevailed as a national development strategy was the Hamilton / John Quincy Adams / Henry Clay / Abraham Lincoln notion of an industrializing country with high levels of immigration, relatively high tariffs, and aggressive subsidies for both transportation infrastructure and public education — both in the form of “common schools” and land grant universities.

I think that was clearly the superior American political tradition.

But what does this actually tell us about the tariff policy debate? Douglas Irwin says that Hamilton’s tariffs were set too low to be true protectionist measures, that he was trying to maximize revenue, and that’s a somewhat more boring debate. I personally favor progressive taxes, but it’s not clear to me that there were a lot of progressive tax options available to policymakers at that time, given limited state capacity. I also think that given the early republic’s level of economic development, a tax on imports was probably a lot more progressive than it is today (poor people would’ve mostly just been consuming food and shelter). Even today, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a European-style system of consumption taxes to fund universal services, as long as the services are good. The big difference is that given today’s global economy, a broad tariff is a force for de-industrialization in a way that wouldn’t have been true in Hamilton’s time.

James Schapiro: What has to happen to hype up Andy Beshear in advance of 2028? I think it’s worryingly likely that he falls victim to the same outcome as Steve Bullock, where we have a great potential candidate but too many people simply have never heard of him.

At the end of the day, what it takes is you and me.

I did not, personally, spend any time in the 2020 cycle hyping up Steve Bullock, which in retrospect I should have done. If we suffer the misfortunate of a second Trump presidency, I resolve to use my platform — which is not the biggest in the world, but also not the smallest — to hype up Andy Beshear. Most of you have platforms that are smaller than mine, but they are not zero. You can post about Andy Beshear. You can email other columnists about Andy Beshear. The one upside to the “hollow” state of American political parties is that people really can just make stuff happen.

Something I think back to from time to time is this brief item I wrote in February 2021 about NYC mayoral candidate Kathryn Garcia:

    Right now Garcia is stuck in a kind of low-name-recognition bubble where she’s low in the polls, so she doesn’t get coverage, so nobody knows she exists, so she stays low in the polls. But if you live in New York, consider telling a pollster you’ll vote for her. If you’re enthusiastic about urban reform, consider throwing her a little money and maybe getting a story about her fundraising written. Post something on Facebook or Twitter or forward this note to a friend. The low name ID trap is very real but also very escapable, and I think it’d be huge for east coast housing politics for someone like this to get buzz.

In the end, Kathryn Garcia didn’t win. But she came really close! And, by the end, she was certainly not in the low-recognition bubble.

Sharty: What culture's cuisine will (or if you prefer, should) be the next one to go mainstream in American dining? I swear I'd cancel a single-staircase infill apartment with relaxed window requirements if I could get some dang Ecuadorian around here.

As a DC guy, I think I need to represent for Ethiopian cuisine. It’s tasty. It’s also, as best I can tell, a cuisine that is still hard to find in many reasonably large American cities. And because injera is so central to the Ethiopian dining experience, it’s also really well-suited to “pay someone else to cook it for you” as a business model — most people don’t have teff lying around the house, and, as I understand it, you need specialized equipment to make the bread.

KN: There's been a lot of attention paid (and rightly so) to the "science of reading" and what look to be significant policy and pedagogical shifts in that content area. I've seen less focus on math, even though - according to the international PISA 2022 results - the US is now below average, and significantly underperforming compared to other OECD countries. See here.

Why has math gotten much less attention than reading? A clear difference in approaches to reading (whole language vs. phonics) that's not as obvious in math approaches? The general public's discomfort with math compared to reading? Something else?

The “bad” reason for this disproportionate attention to literacy versus math education is that the people who shape the discourse are reading and writing enthusiasts, while the math people are (optimistically) working in engineering or (perhaps more realistically) quantitative finance.

The “good” reason is that I think we do, in fact, more or less know how to teach all kids to read. To the extent that it doesn’t happen, that’s a failure of our pedagogical model (“science of reading” stuff) or a broader failure of public administration (kids don’t actually attend school or have decent nutrition and shelter). Math is harder, because to the best of my understanding, the central failing of math education in the United States is that the teachers themselves (on average) aren’t good enough at math. Now, obviously, you don’t need to be a math genius to understand fractions — that’s why fractions are taught in elementary school — but to teach fractions effectively, it’s very helpful to actually be really fluent in mathematical concepts and mathematical reasoning and to be the kind of person who has completed math classes in college.

This immediately gets you into the perennial education policy problem of scale.

There are a lot of teachers in the United States of America, and precisely because quantitative skills are valuable in the labor market, it is very challenging to recruit huge numbers of new people into K-12 teaching. Back when women had very limited career opportunities, there was a large implicit subsidy to the school system in terms of the human capital of the teaching workforce. That’s gone now. If math education were better, you’d have a larger population of math-literate people to draw from to become teachers, but that’s a slow process. So I don’t think we should despair or never talk about math education — it relates to the fundamentals of teacher licensure, of compensation, and of other big questions about education policy — but it’s less given to a punchy “here’s how to fix it” takeaway.

David Muccigrosso: What if communism isn’t dead, but just in a sort of “hiding and biding” phase like Early Christianity — patiently picking up converts before it makes a triumphant comeback? Do you see any parallels here?

I find this very unlikely. I know there’s a strand of right-wing analysis that sees contemporary left identity politics as “cultural Marxism,” but I see the situation as, if anything, closer to the opposite — it’s not just that left cultural politics isn’t Marxist, increasingly even the people who say they’re socialists are broadly uninterested in material analysis of problems.

If you wanted to do a “hiding and biding” analysis, what I would look to is anarchism.

A hundred years ago, anarchism was a reasonably big deal in global politics, with anarchist assassinations making waves all around the world. Then came World War I, which through a flukey series of events led to the Bolshevik Revolution, which in turn led to communism outcompeting anarchism as the radical left position. with “revisionist” Marxist social democratic parties anchoring the moderate left. But the sequence of events that led to Lenin taking power in the Soviet Union didn’t particularly have anything to do with the specific content of Marx’s ideas, and of course, ultimately, the USSR didn’t make it as a power.

Contemporary trends on the far-left generally strike me as having more spiritual DNA in common with anarchism than with socialism. It’s notable, for example, that the Soviet Union charged fares on its mass transit systems and presumably punished fare beaters. The modern far-left, by contrast, is very uncomfortable with the idea of enforcing rules and coercing people in a way that’s at odds with a traditional understanding of crafting state-run enterprises and robust public services, but that fits well with the idea that “property is theft.” Just smashing the system is also more in line with various strains of eco-doomerism and degrowth than is the 20th century notion that socialist economies would be more prosperous than capitalist ones. When you see people throwing paint at the great works of art, they are nominally engaged in environmental activism, but they’re very much not asking us to price pollution externalities. They are anarchists, engaged in “propaganda of the deed” — at roughly the same time we’ve seen racial justice movements shift away from Rustin-style social democracy to the idea that there shouldn’t be police departments.

drosophilist: I'll repeat my question from this morning's thread: Is there any way for the US to bribe/pressure/convince Egypt to open the Rafah crossing and let Palestinian children, women, the injured, and the elderly into the Sinai Peninsula, where NGOs could set up tents for them with food and medical care? That way Israel could go on fighting Hamas without quite such a horrendous toll in innocent civilians. Is this feasible? What would it take? Offer the Egyptian President an all-expenses trip to see Taylor Swift in concert? How can we make it worth their (the Egyptian government's) while?

In a more typical situation, “Palestinian refugees should be allowed to flee” would be considered the pro-Palestinian stance, and given the level of pro-Palestinian sentiment around the world, that should make it possible to organize a campaign to pressure Egypt to do this.

But of course, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a normal situation, and the understanding all throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds is that Egypt is doing the right thing by keeping Palestinians trapped in Gaza. To let them flee would be to facilitate or even legitimize the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population, and it’s therefore unacceptable. Given that political understanding, I don’t think it’s feasible to pressure Egypt to do it.

Personally, I do understand the logic of the Arab nationalist stance on this. But I note that it is not the logic that the international community applies to any other refugee situation or attempted ethnic cleansing in the world. That being said, I do think that for a diaspora Jew like myself to spend time advocating for this solution really would look to many relevant stakeholders like an effort to legitimize Israeli ethnic cleansing, so I think it’s counterproductive for me to talk about it. I’ve toyed with writing the column, but I don’t think it works as political advocacy in a Weberian sense.

I would ask non-Jews who are exercised about the situation in Gaza to search their souls a little bit on this topic, and try to at least reach more intellectual clarity as to whether their emotional investment is in the Palestinian national cause or in the Palestinians as human beings.

Nicholas Decker: Do there exist topics on which you have views, but you decline to express them for fear of public opprobrium?

I love public opprobrium, so no. But per the above, part of my middle aged turn is that it now seems to me that it’s important to be thoughtful about what kind of interventions in the public discourse are likely to be constructive.

Now, I actually think that a lot of center-left commentators are much too conflict-averse precisely out of a desire to be constructive. As I said in my article about Wes Moore’s housing proposals, part of my role in the ecosystem is to be the “bad cop” who’s willing to make trouble on certain topics. But nonetheless, I have tried to mature out of the role of pure provocateur.

Max Power: What are the merits of the new Republican/Trump talking point that Biden already has the authority to “close the border” and, assuming the merits on this are weak, how do Democrats use the Republican's change of position to their political advantage and/or find a way to salvage a policy win?

The Trump administration’s position was that they had the authority under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act to refuse to consider asylum claims. But when they did this, the 9th Circuit issued an injunction against them in the case of East Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Trump, and then Biden withdrew the rule before litigation was completed.

Biden certainly could try to redo this (and Trump presumably will if he wins,) and he even might eventually prevail at the Supreme Court. But all we know for sure is that if he re-imposed the Trump rule, it would be immediately blocked in district court and then the injunction would be upheld by the 9th Circuit. Then they’d litigate for a while, and federal courts are slow. So even though “Biden should just close the border” sounds like it’s calling for something simpler than new legislation, it’s actually a much slower path than congress passing a law that — like Lankford-Murphy — has a clear legislative trigger for blocking new asylum claims. Biden issued a more moderate executive order trying to restrict asylum eligibility last spring that is still being litigated and is nowhere near the Supreme Court.

The other major advantage of passing a law, from the restrictionist standpoint, is that there’s no force field on the border. To apprehend, detain, and deport people requires actual resources. Trump is not a big “follow the law” guy, so there’s no telling what he will try to do in the absence of new legislation and new money — I could imagine anything from a full-bore constitutional crisis to a lot of ineffectual tweets — but as a formal question of the law, if congress wants a rapid change in the border situation, they need to legislate it.

David Watson: Regarding the CA Senate primary: There's an argument that voting for the Republican in March sets up a Schiff vs Republican match in November which Schiff, a generic vanilla Democrat, could win easily. A Schiff vs Porter match-up would suck up millions of dollars that could otherwise go to other Democrats and still end up with one Democratic senator.

So what do you think, should I vote for a Republican in the primary? Do you think one of the other Democrats is significantly better?

In the most recent poll I’ve seen, Schiff is clearly in the lead at 25 percent, followed by Katie Porter (a progressive Dem) and Steve Garvey (a Republican) at 15 percent each. This is a state with a “top-two” voting system, and Schiff wants to face Garvey in the second round because this is a 63-34 Biden state and he’ll easily crush a Republican. At the same time, 34 is a much larger number than fifteen, so Schiff is currently airing contrast ads with Garvey whose purpose is actually to make sure Republicans all remember to come to the polls and vote for Garvey so that he beats Porter.

A thought that I’ve heard from California politicos is that if it ends up being Schiff vs Porter in the second round, it’s possible that Republicans will vote en masse for the further-left Porter, because Schiff is more of a high-profile bad guy in the MAGA Cinematic Universe. Note that back in 2018, when Dianne Feinstein was challenged from the left by Kevin de Leon, he wound up getting a lot of votes from Republicans just because they knew Feinstein’s name and had no idea who de Leon was.

The upshot of all of this is that if you are genuinely indifferent between Schiff and Porter, I do think you should vote for Garvey in the first round. That maximizes the chances that this turns into a nothing race that doesn’t drain resources or generate ill will. The interesting question is whether you should vote for Garvey if you prefer Schiff, or should you just work vote Schiff. At the margin, a vote for Garvey actually helps Schiff more than a vote for Schiff does. But obviously if Schiff voters vote in droves for Garvey, then it’ll end up being a Porter-Garvey race and Porter will win.

John E: I've been thinking about 9/11 and how of our recent presidents, George W. Bush was likely the worst of them possible to be president in that specific moment. In contrast, Bush Sr. seems like he might have been the best person for that particular moment. Much more cognizant of the limitations of US power and helping us to avoid getting sucked into the "War on Terror" that wasted so many lives, time, and resources.

Hypothetical time — you can rearrange the presidents over the last 50 years to serve different time periods. Major events still occur as they did in real history. What's your selection?

    Reagan: 1981-1989

    Carter: 1989-1993

    Obama: 1993-2001

    Bush Sr.: 2001-2005

    Biden: 2005-2013

    Bush Jr.: 2013-2020

    Clinton: 2021-2024

It’s hard to know how to think about this hypothetical, because to a large extent I don’t really think these differences are about the individual human beings. Like if you just looked at Joe Biden’s record in the Senate, you would assume his governing philosophy would be to the right of the Obama administration. He’s actually been to Obama’s left (except on Israel) because the actual situation is that he was a senator pre-Obama and he was president post-Obama, and the overall trajectory of the Democratic Party over the past 25 years has been to shift leftward.

But I am frequently struck that the Biden administration’s approach to economic policy has been really finely optimized for the problems of 2009. I think Bidenomics has worked out pretty well, but if you could transport it back in time to the beginning of the Obama presidency, we could have achieved dramatically better results. And at the same time, the economic situation of 2021-2024 would have benefitted from more Obama-esque technocratic zeal and neoliberalism.

Kareem: Travel advice time: My wife and I are planning to go to Maine in the summer. We’ve never been* but we both love forested mountain views (we’ve had some lovely trips to Central PA) and cute towns; also she loves the beach and I love seafood. We expect to be there for 7-10 days, during which I expect we will be working remotely 2-3 days and completely on vacation the rest of the time. As an experienced Maine vacationer, do you have a suggested itinerary for newbies?

(For reference: We don’t have children or pets, feel that hiking is more like a side dish to accentuate a good vacation than a main course, and are coming from Philadelphia. Also, it must be the summer for schedule reasons.)

If I were you, I would fly from Philadelphia to Portland and spend your remote work days in town there just casually enjoying some ocean views and the local dining scene. Depending on how long you want your trip to be, you could spend an action day or two here doing pure tourism. Then, I’d get up early one morning and drive to Popham Beach State Park, and continue up the coast later that day to some lodgings in the Ellsworth / Mount Desert Island area. From whatever your base of operations around there is, check out Acadia National Park for a few days, visit the Schoodic Peninsula, maybe book a boat tour if something like that sounds appealing. Then you can fly home from Bangor.

There’s plenty of other good stuff in Maine, but I do think Portland and Acadia are the two highlights and it’s feasible to hit them both up in a single trip.

But that’s my envisioning a pretty chill vacation. If you like the idea of extensive road-tripping and frequently switching lodgings, it’s certainly possible to make shorter visits to those two destinations and push further downeast. I’ve only once in my life done the trek to Machias, Lubec (home of the easternmost point in the United States), and the FDR historical site on Campobello Island (which is technically in Canada), but it was definitely interesting.

“Hiking as side dish” is definitely where I’m at, and Acadia is a fantastic spot for it — low-key treks that feature the best scenery on the east coast. I spent a good deal of time in non-coastal Maine (Baxter State Park, the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, the St. Croix River) when I was in a kid doing overnight camping trips as part of my summer camp. There are a lot of great spots for that kind of thing, but it’s really for the hiking enthusiast, whereas Acadia is just a fun hang.

Avery James: Who is the best center-left policy expert on Medicare?

Traditionally, I would have said Henry Aaron at Brookings, but I think he is retired at this point and not actively commenting on news events. Loren Adler, who’s now at Brookings after previous stints at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the Bipartisan Policy Center might be the right answer, or he might not be left enough to qualify.

Obviously the health care status quo in the United States is a huge outlier in international terms, which creates the unusual situation that lots of people who don’t think of themselves as particularly radical or left-wing also favor (at least in principle) dramatic changes to the fundamental structure of the system. That in turn makes it a little hard to know exactly who qualifies for this role.

Ezra: Is Bukele's landslide victory meaningful, or is it like when Putin wins an election in Russia? If it is meaningful, what are the lessons for other Latin American countries and/or the US?

As with most middle-income countries, there are a lot of issues one could raise with the state of El Salvador’s democratic institutions, but it’s a totally different situation than a consolidated dictatorship like Russia. If you look at the situation in El Salvador, crime was a huge problem before Bukele’s election and his anti-gang crackdown has, by all accounts, worked to dramatically reduce violence. Under the circumstances, of course he’d win a landslide re-election. What I do find troubling is it does seem that he broke the rules to make himself eligible to run for a second term. That’s bad! He should have passed the baton to a successor and political ally.

What continues to confound me about American coverage of Bukele is the reporting I’ve seen never offers much detail about exactly how he made this work.

If you read about the situation in Ecuador, it’s not like nobody ever thought of the idea of throwing criminals in prison. The problem is that prison gangs ended up running the prisons. Mexico has had many cycles of “getting tough” over the years, and it’s ended up with notoriously corrupt police forces. Which is just to say that the whys and hows of creating effective state institutions are a nontrivial problem all on their own. Right here in the United States we’ve struggled over the years with corruption in our Customs and Border Patrol agents. I’d like to know more about what has specifically occurred in El Salvador that avoided those outcomes.