Pelosi was great at what she did and knew her limits. She was one of the much-maligned boomer women who broke the glass ceiling, was tough as nails, and would’ve swallowed glass before letting anyone see weakness. We owe a lot to those women. Much respect.
And her only competition in any party in the last 50 years is really Mitch McConnell. But it’s much easier to be effective at no than to be effective at yes.
Whatever her virtues, Pelosi has to bear some of the blame for shit like that getting a non-trivial foothold in the Democratic Party (and apparently her own staff!)
I'm sure that response was born from many real experiences of sexism. It's difficult to tease apart legitimate, tough-to-hear criticism from criticisms motivated in part by misogyny, since both of those kinds of criticisms are prevalent in politics.
Frankly in this case it isn’t tough. This is so obviously a turn of phrase that I simply do not believe the staffer in question was actually acting in good faith. If they were, then they were a moron
I don't think the staffer's anger was over the specific phrase. It was over the fact that Matt thought wrote that she should step down solely based on the image she presents. And we all know that we judge the appearance of older women more harshly than men.
That example of you getting admonished by a Democratic staffer for talking “about a woman’s face” is so late 2010s. Progressive took to policing language and often times that would deliberately lie about what was said to admonish people.
The whole tactic of “I will ignore what you said and substitute in something that is rhetorically easy to attack” is trust destroying and is one reason I think the whole Progressive movement is on the back foot now.
Given the likely age of the staffer at issue, I don't think that's so much an example of ignoring what someone said and substituting in something that is rhetorically easy to attack as it is an example of a Millennial or younger individual being utterly ignorant of basic English language expressions. (I'm completely serious when I say that linguists or someone need to be studying what the Hell is going on with under-45 people's deteriorating awareness of what were not (i) high-falutin' literary references/rhetorical flourishes or (ii) hypertrendy flash-in-the-pan slang, but were everyday expressions in common usage for many decades by people of average education well within in living memory.)
Wait, you think there is deterioration here? I thought it’s completely standard for every generation to make up folk etymologies for phrases that originated when social and technological conditions were different. (And also, in this case, the folk etymology is probably right - the metaphor of a “fresh face” for a new person comes from the idea that new people tend to be young and young people tend to have faces that are “fresh” in whatever sense that is. But it’s a dead metaphor now, not a literal statement about someone’s face.)
I think there's definitely deterioration here. Because I don't think this has anything to do with folk etymologies for metaphors, but rather is about not even grasping that something *IS* a metaphor, notwithstanding widespread and long-standing use. (A Google Books search for "fresh face" in 19th Century texts turns up metaphoric usages of it going back to at least the middle of the century.)
Yup. Although I'd spend that much money on Botox and fillers if I had her wealth and had to appear on camera daily.
My favorite aspect of Pelosi's appearance was her pointy heels click-clicking through the hallway as reporters tried to ask her questions as late as 2024. I hope my gait is that good if I reach my eighties.
Are you trying to tell me that Jeffries isn't as effective as Nancy?! lol, just kidding obviously, if we had 5 more Nancy Pelosi's we'd be in good shape.
"But a “message bill” in that era didn’t mean “just ignore the Senate vote count and do the groups’ whole laundry list.” The idea of a “message bill” was to set up the message for the next election, putting Democrats’ most popular ideas on the floor and daring Republicans to block them in order to give candidates something broadly appealing to talk about."
I really wish congressional Democrats would remember this.
Pelosi stands out as a Democratic leader who really would listen to individual members and the concerns they had about needing to vote their district, while ironically presiding over the caucus at a time in which the national image alone was driving polarization and the decline of split ticket voting that allowed those members to win in the first place. I don't think Pelosi was responsible for this national shift, but it's interesting to think about how she navigated this trend.
She was also an important institutional memory at a time in which there was a lot of turnover in the caucus after the 2010 midterm and a wave of retirements after 2012 redistricting. I think she herself reflected on the cap and trade vote a lot and came down hard against the very groups that pushed the caucus to pass a bill as the final version contained a lot of provisions necessary to secure passage that the environmentalists weren't happy with. After the House voted they literally started messaging about fixing the bill in the Senate. She held a grudge on that for many years and despite the groups still managing to steer the party in their direction long term did what she could to push back in belief that climate change was a cause too important to leave just to the NGOs.
Pelosi understood that you need to iterate on top of subsequent successes. If you don't have small wins to create a foundation, you can't lay the groundwork for later wins. Her critics on the left in particular kept expecting to win the whole loaf at once.
She’s also just been so savvy. So many times she was under attack from within her own party or the right and she always came out of it. I remember in Trump v.1 when a lot of progressives were annoyed at her for some reason. She was on tv more and more and she just had great poise and some decent zingers(calling it the Trump shutdown at just the right moment to his face). Her little condescending clap to Trump at (?maybe) sotu ended up viral at a time she was getting a lot of heat and made her look like a badass. Ended up on a mug my wife got as a gift from someone. Used to love drinking from it…wonder where it went. Isn’t having Hakeem Jeffries as minority leader a sign of her sustained influence as well?
Although a big part of the issue was that John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Kerry had been writing a senate version of the bill together, that would have passed, if Deepwater Horizon didn’t show everyone the sympathetic face of endangered oil companies.
Graham claims its because Obama was doing immigration reform by executive order, or threatening to do so. I always had my doubts on if a Senate bill really could pass.
Good post but if anything Matt undersells Pelosi, whatever you think of her personally she's one of the most powerful and effective Speakers in history (and also obviously the most liberal). The only real rivals to "doing the job effectively" would be Joe Cannon who ruled the House of Reps with an iron fist in the early 20th Century or Thomas Brackett Reed the guy who basically invented the job in the late 19th century (before then the job was more like the Speaker of the House of Commons, a largely ceremonial job devoid of much real influence). And note that other Speakers who have tried to ascend to these heights have often gone full Icarus, see Jim Wright or Newt Gingrich (and Newt in many ways helped to create the modern dysfunctional Republican Party and it's obsession with institutional destruction and a means of power so he gets two Fs in my book.)
She’s the most consequential politician of the era and the greatest speaker in maybe a 100 years. His post is oddly very narrow about all that she accomplished and how incredible she was in her job is unique. Anyone who worked in Congress would agree. Matt’s post majorly undersells the most important politician in maybe 50 years
Fair, but that's because almost all of our take writers overemphasize the presidency (which is prominent and interesting) and underemphasize Congress (which is less prominent and boring) the same way few people post much about county government but it's important in all sorts of ways
While I wish she would have retired 5 or 6 years ago, I think she has been one of the finest Speakers and Congressional leaders in recent history. Thanks for your hard work, Nancy, also thanks for being a real one on China for decades, voting against the Bush wars and helping pass the ACA and understanding how to keep a caucus together to win elections. We need more like you. It's a shame that Golden is retiring, I was hoping he'd get more of a leadership role in Congress. But it sounds like his family has been through a lot...
How much better we’d be if GW Bush had managed with Democrats to put SS back on a financial footing. In 2034, give or take, SS will go insolvent. Because we raided SS surpluses to fund our government, SS will be required by law to reduce benefits by 23%.
Our gutless politicians, afraid of pissing off Americans and being primaried, will do nothing. So we will have a crisis and eventually they will pass some changes. Age of retirement, but future benefits, raise taxes, maybe get rid of the cap and means test benefits.
Changes will come. Riots happened in France when they tried to move the retirement age to 64.
If Americans want a pension, it has to be funded like a pension. We no longer have enough workers to support a scheme that takes from the young to transfer to the elderly.
My 100-year-old mother died this month, boomers will live at least to that age or more. As currently configured SS is no longer is fiscally sound. Yet, nothing will be done. It is a fantasy for many that taxing the rich will solve all our problems....It won’t, it just is schadenfreude for them.
"SS will be required by law to reduce benefits by 23%."
Oh heavens! Your portion of FICA will go from 6.2% to 7.6% - it's utter destitution for us all! The end of the republic as we know it! Whatever will become of us?!?!
The year before 2035 (or whatever the year is) the government will take in $M trillion in general tax, $N in FICA tax, and pay out $O in SS.
The next year, the government will take in M+delta, N+delta, and pay out O+delta, where each delta is what you'd normally see year-to-year.
The only thing that SSTF emptying out requires is for Congress to actually pass a law keeping benefits the same. The total inflows and outflows are essentially the same.
>Because we raided SS surpluses to fund our government, SS will be required by law to reduce benefits by 23%.<
This is completely wrong. We didn't "raid" anything. The system is working as designed: for many years the payroll tax generated surpluses (by design) which were spent on various federal priorities (by design) and the difference was kept track of via the use of intergovernmental IOUs (by design). The accumulated IOUs—the Trust Fund—was anticipated to last beyond the year 2050. The fact that it's going to be exhausted more quickly isn't because of "raiding" but mostly because of demographics (longer life expectancy and fewer babies) and economics (lower productivity growth).
In any event a couple of modest changes could keep Social Security funded indefinitely.
I'm fairly certain the only thing we need to do is just lift the cap on income to a much higher level or get rid of it entirely. I don't think that's a particularly hard sell.
> get rid of it entirely. I don't think that's a particularly hard sell
I think "biggest tax increase ever" is a pretty hard sell.
It's just going to be partially funded out of general revenue, but it's being partially funded out of general revenue right now, each time a SSTF bond is redeemed.
My objection is less to a tax increase in general and more to doing it via an uncapped payroll tax. Capital gains, dividends, and S-corp distributions aren't payroll, and that's how the really rich people make their money.
The system is designed so the more you pay in, the more you get out. If people start getting their unearned income FICA'd, that will also increase their benefits in the end.
Right now only employers need to worry about FICA, not the financial institutions. I'd rather tweak the formula a little bit (maybe people like me get 1% less in retirement?) than require more things to fall under FICA.
When Social Security collects more in payroll taxes and other income than it needs to pay benefits in a given year, the surplus is invested in special-issue U.S. Treasury securities. In effect, the surplus becomes a loan to the rest of the federal government (via the Treasury) because the government uses that payroll tax surplus for other federal spending.
Those securities are backed by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government and earn interest. The trust funds hold these securities and record them as assets.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
+2
The Concord Coalition
+2
For example: the Congressional Research Service states that “because the assets held by the trust funds are U.S. government securities … the trust fund balance represents the amount of money owed to the Social Security trust funds by the General Fund of the Treasury.”
It’s not a situation where Social Security beneficiaries personally have to pay back money because the government “borrowed from them” in a direct way. The trust funds are a federal accounting mechanism.
The “borrowing” is internal to the government (intragovernmental debt), not borrowing from workers or beneficiaries directly.
Cato Institute
+1
The fact that there are these U.S. Treasury obligations held by the trust funds does not guarantee fully funded benefits forever — the system still depends on ongoing tax revenues, demographic factors, benefit levels, etc.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
+1
🔍 Why this matters with regard to “benefit cuts”
Because some of the surplus was invested and thus recorded as an asset, that may make it appear as though Social Security has “savings.” But when it comes time to redeem those securities (to pay beneficiaries when taxes collected that year aren’t enough), the Treasury has to source the cash — which generally comes from general revenues or additional borrowing from the public.
Cato Institute
+1
Thus, if future payroll taxes + interest aren’t sufficient, we face the scenario where benefits may need to be reduced (or taxes increased) unless changes are made.
🧮 Quick summary
So in short:
Yes – surplus Social Security income was used by the government for broader spending and was “loaned” to the trust funds via Treasury securities.
I'm a little sad that Wiener is running, since I think he could accomplish a lot more in CA state government than he has any hope of doing in Congress.
He only has two years left in Sacramento before he's termed out, though. And while it's likely true he won't be as effective in Congress, people said the same thing when he went from the Board of Supervisors to the Assembly...
I ran into Scott campaigning at an SF farmer's market shortly after I moved to the city in 2015. I was paying $1700 for a 90sqft pantry that had been converted into a bedroom in a 4bd 1ba apartment. He said "wanna know why your rent is absurd?" and then explained SF's residential zoning laws, and I was YIMBY-pilled ever since.
I think he's left enough of a legacy in the CA legislature that other people will carry his YIMBY banner. As Sully says, he's also nearly termed out. Maybe in the House he'd be able to get permitting reform done or expand HUD funding and remit.
It does seem like an odd fit for him. He seems custom-made to be governor more than just about any other local official in the country. Porter's campaign doesn't look unbeatable.
I think he could be an amazing Governor but I think he’s most comfortable representing San Franciscans who appreciate him. Californians are probably fine with pictures of him out and about at LGBT events looking not very mainstream but he is not living his life like a person who is most interested in preserving his political viability. I can’t imagine Pete Buttigieg at the Folsom
I mostly know him in the context of housing and saw the policy part of his Wikipedia article has a section on "Nightlife and culture" because he actually has commissioned economic studies on it, which is just nerdily adorable. I also had no idea he was 6'7".
He's a true legislative workhorse. The man is absolutely relentless. He will be writing a ton of bills. Perhaps he'd be a good executive too, but we already know that he's quite good at this part.
While I'd want to agree, I wouldn't underestimate his political abilities. He seems like someone who could do well in the House specifically. I know people who have been his constituents and staffers and he seems like the real deal.
The biggest hit on him is SB 145, which is VERY easy to misconstrue as being weak on sex crimes. But that wouldn't be an issue in his House campaign.
My favorite seen is Hank Paulson (then Secretary of the Treasury) is so stressed out he's literally dry heaving into a waste basket. He comes over and gets on his knees to beg Nancy to pass the emergency bailout. And Nancy says, "Hank, we're not opposing this, your side is."
You'll recall that day when there was a vote and it failed and the stock market went into free fall collapse*. The holdouts panicked and the bailout passed on a revote later that day.
* CNBC had the market indexes on one side of the screen and the vote total
screen from the House. The second it showed the vote failing the bottom fell out of the market with across the board panicked selling.
During Obama’s second term, her allocation of campaign funds seemed more aimed at protecting frontline incumbents than creating a majority. When you are in the minority, frontline incumbents should get less than those challenging vulnerable incumbents. If the environment is good enough for the challengers to win, the incumbents can hang on with moderate funding. So I don’t really think she played to win. But, she did play to win more than any of her progressive contemporaries other than Obama.
"She broke with Bill Clinton on the Permanent Normal Trade Relations issue in 2000 and criticized the continuation of that policy into the Bush era even more vehemently."
We could honor Pelosi by calling it by its real name, Most Favored Nation. The people sucking up to Communist China changed the name to "Normal Trade Relations" as part of the spin.
But MFN *was* normal trade relations. I worked in trade policy at the time, and there was a sincere belief among most policy people that bringing China into the WTO regime would promote political and economic reform. History may have proven Pelosi correct, but this was a minority view at the time.
It was CALLED "Most Favored Nation", and the only reason the name was changed was because people who favored freely rewarding a murderous Communist regime with our highest level of trade preference thought it sounded bad to admit they were giving these evil bastards "most favored" treatment. So they changed the name to spin their grossly immoral decision.
And no, sorry, it wasn't "sincere". Not saying nobody believed in it, but they believed in it in the Upton Sinclair sense that there was a ton of money on the side of believing it. Everyone knew what Communist China was back then. We all knew about Tiananmen Square, the ethnic cleansing of Tibet, the repression of Falun Gong, the sale of the harvested organs of executed political prisoners, and the complete represssion of any political opposition to their dictators.
But a lot of people wanted to make a lot of money, so they pretended all that would magically change if we gave the Communist murderers favored treatment.
So yes, those who supported it should live with the shame of "Most Favored Nation".
I think the changing of the name itself is really damning for supporters of the policy. Because if one really thought China was liberalizing, there'd be no problem with granting them Most Favored Nation status. Of course! They're liberalizing, so we grant them Most Favored Nation to encourage liberalization.
It was precisely because everyone actually knew this was about the money and this was an evil, brutal dictatorship and was going to continue to be one that they had to change it to "Permanent Normal Trade Relations".
<raises hand> I favored it. Because as lindamc says, I really did think that China would moderate and liberalize as they joined the international trading system. In the late 90s, I did not foresee the creation of the great firewall and expected exposure to American culture would influence China the way it had Japan, S. Korea, etc.
Realized I was wrong in the early teens and have thought since that we should be creating a new coalition of trading partners that attempts to exclude them again.
I think if you believe your opinion was in no way influenced by the big money and the zeitgeist in our government and Democratic Party produced by that money, you need to seriously ask yourself why you believed a Communist dictatorship that was imprisoning masses of political prisoners, executing some and selling their organs, arresting people for religious demonstrations, had done the Tiananmen Square massacre, and had photos of Mao everywhere was planning on liberalizing.
I knew what the score was, as did Pelosi, and I'm really pissed at the people who didn't, because we lost our only chance to turn China into a better global citizen.
Wonderful. So we stick it to China, resulting in the continuous impoverishment of hundreds of millions of Chinese people. And American poor are poorer because they can't afford nearly the same quality of life.
I lived in China for a long time. There's a lot of bad stuff going on there, but trying to make them poorer is a bad policy. And it's plenty hypocritical when we have lots of Middle Eastern friends who are as bad or worse.
A better way of looking at it is we had one chance, in the period from around 1985-2002 or so, to use our leverage to force China, which desperately wanted foreign trade, to implement serious reforms to their government. It probably would have worked, because as I said we had the leverage and China needed us. And that would mean that China would not be poorer now-- they'd probably be richer, because their governmental system produces all sorts of mistakes and inefficiencies.
Instead, we decided to just make all the money we could and screw ever having any sort of decent Chinese government.
"to use our leverage to force China, which desperately wanted foreign trade, to implement serious reforms to their government."
I don't actually think this is true. China was developing in all kinds of ways and was experiencing high GDP growth in the 90s before it had MFN status. It would have taken them longer, but they would have industrialized anyway, and with the population they have (larger than Europe and N. America combined), they are an enormous economy in and of themselves.
It was very convenient for everyone who wanted to make money to presume that we could not demand anything of the Communist murderers.
Notably WE DIDN'T ASK. It's not like we tried for a decade to get them to democratize and liberalize and gave up. We caved IMMEDIATELY-- indeed we rewarded them for the massacre at Tiananmen Square and then went out and lied that there was nothing we could do.
It was all a money driven lie and a capitulation to Communism.
What a role model. I love that video of her from so many years ago. I don't think I've seen older clips of her like that. She was very pretty in that video.
Pelosi was great at what she did and knew her limits. She was one of the much-maligned boomer women who broke the glass ceiling, was tough as nails, and would’ve swallowed glass before letting anyone see weakness. We owe a lot to those women. Much respect.
I know every Dem leader hates Trump. But man, no one hated him like Pelosi. I'll miss it!
Agree with all of this other than the fact that Pelosi is no boomer. She’s part of a harder, tougher generation.
I stand corrected! She was born in 1940, making her part of the Silent Gen.
Most effective Democratic member of Congress of the 21st century.
And her only competition in any party in the last 50 years is really Mitch McConnell. But it’s much easier to be effective at no than to be effective at yes.
That "I’d watch what you say about a woman’s face" comment is one of the most 2018 things ever.
Whatever her virtues, Pelosi has to bear some of the blame for shit like that getting a non-trivial foothold in the Democratic Party (and apparently her own staff!)
I'm sure that response was born from many real experiences of sexism. It's difficult to tease apart legitimate, tough-to-hear criticism from criticisms motivated in part by misogyny, since both of those kinds of criticisms are prevalent in politics.
Frankly in this case it isn’t tough. This is so obviously a turn of phrase that I simply do not believe the staffer in question was actually acting in good faith. If they were, then they were a moron
I don't think the staffer's anger was over the specific phrase. It was over the fact that Matt thought wrote that she should step down solely based on the image she presents. And we all know that we judge the appearance of older women more harshly than men.
The point is that the English idiom "fresh face" has nothing to do with physical appearance.
Matt was wrong and Jeffries is worthless and pelosis stepping down hasn’t really been that anchoring for voters
Nice column ya got there, MattY. Be a shame if something happened to it.
Talk about my face again! C’mon!
That example of you getting admonished by a Democratic staffer for talking “about a woman’s face” is so late 2010s. Progressive took to policing language and often times that would deliberately lie about what was said to admonish people.
The whole tactic of “I will ignore what you said and substitute in something that is rhetorically easy to attack” is trust destroying and is one reason I think the whole Progressive movement is on the back foot now.
Given the likely age of the staffer at issue, I don't think that's so much an example of ignoring what someone said and substituting in something that is rhetorically easy to attack as it is an example of a Millennial or younger individual being utterly ignorant of basic English language expressions. (I'm completely serious when I say that linguists or someone need to be studying what the Hell is going on with under-45 people's deteriorating awareness of what were not (i) high-falutin' literary references/rhetorical flourishes or (ii) hypertrendy flash-in-the-pan slang, but were everyday expressions in common usage for many decades by people of average education well within in living memory.)
Exactly this, people like that enjoy fighting and just were addicted to outrage at that time.
Wait, you think there is deterioration here? I thought it’s completely standard for every generation to make up folk etymologies for phrases that originated when social and technological conditions were different. (And also, in this case, the folk etymology is probably right - the metaphor of a “fresh face” for a new person comes from the idea that new people tend to be young and young people tend to have faces that are “fresh” in whatever sense that is. But it’s a dead metaphor now, not a literal statement about someone’s face.)
I think there's definitely deterioration here. Because I don't think this has anything to do with folk etymologies for metaphors, but rather is about not even grasping that something *IS* a metaphor, notwithstanding widespread and long-standing use. (A Google Books search for "fresh face" in 19th Century texts turns up metaphoric usages of it going back to at least the middle of the century.)
Look, if you’d spent that much money on Botox and fillers, you’d be touchy about your face too.
Yup. Although I'd spend that much money on Botox and fillers if I had her wealth and had to appear on camera daily.
My favorite aspect of Pelosi's appearance was her pointy heels click-clicking through the hallway as reporters tried to ask her questions as late as 2024. I hope my gait is that good if I reach my eighties.
She got a lot of shit from the dumber people on all sides but Dems haven't produced anyone as effective as her yet
Are you trying to tell me that Jeffries isn't as effective as Nancy?! lol, just kidding obviously, if we had 5 more Nancy Pelosi's we'd be in good shape.
Jeffries’ interview with Matt was so bad. He had absolutely zero to offer
Amen.
How the heck did Jeffries become the minority leader?
5 might be too many. You might end up with a "too many cooks in the kitchen" problem if we had that many.
That staffer Matt mentioned just called to express outrage that you implied Pelosi’s work is in the kitchen
🤣
Fair point
I've thought since the late Trump 1 years that Pelosi has overperformed expectations regarding Democratic leadership and Schumer has underperformed.
"But a “message bill” in that era didn’t mean “just ignore the Senate vote count and do the groups’ whole laundry list.” The idea of a “message bill” was to set up the message for the next election, putting Democrats’ most popular ideas on the floor and daring Republicans to block them in order to give candidates something broadly appealing to talk about."
I really wish congressional Democrats would remember this.
Pelosi stands out as a Democratic leader who really would listen to individual members and the concerns they had about needing to vote their district, while ironically presiding over the caucus at a time in which the national image alone was driving polarization and the decline of split ticket voting that allowed those members to win in the first place. I don't think Pelosi was responsible for this national shift, but it's interesting to think about how she navigated this trend.
She was also an important institutional memory at a time in which there was a lot of turnover in the caucus after the 2010 midterm and a wave of retirements after 2012 redistricting. I think she herself reflected on the cap and trade vote a lot and came down hard against the very groups that pushed the caucus to pass a bill as the final version contained a lot of provisions necessary to secure passage that the environmentalists weren't happy with. After the House voted they literally started messaging about fixing the bill in the Senate. She held a grudge on that for many years and despite the groups still managing to steer the party in their direction long term did what she could to push back in belief that climate change was a cause too important to leave just to the NGOs.
Pelosi understood that you need to iterate on top of subsequent successes. If you don't have small wins to create a foundation, you can't lay the groundwork for later wins. Her critics on the left in particular kept expecting to win the whole loaf at once.
She’s also just been so savvy. So many times she was under attack from within her own party or the right and she always came out of it. I remember in Trump v.1 when a lot of progressives were annoyed at her for some reason. She was on tv more and more and she just had great poise and some decent zingers(calling it the Trump shutdown at just the right moment to his face). Her little condescending clap to Trump at (?maybe) sotu ended up viral at a time she was getting a lot of heat and made her look like a badass. Ended up on a mug my wife got as a gift from someone. Used to love drinking from it…wonder where it went. Isn’t having Hakeem Jeffries as minority leader a sign of her sustained influence as well?
Although a big part of the issue was that John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Kerry had been writing a senate version of the bill together, that would have passed, if Deepwater Horizon didn’t show everyone the sympathetic face of endangered oil companies.
Graham claims its because Obama was doing immigration reform by executive order, or threatening to do so. I always had my doubts on if a Senate bill really could pass.
Good post but if anything Matt undersells Pelosi, whatever you think of her personally she's one of the most powerful and effective Speakers in history (and also obviously the most liberal). The only real rivals to "doing the job effectively" would be Joe Cannon who ruled the House of Reps with an iron fist in the early 20th Century or Thomas Brackett Reed the guy who basically invented the job in the late 19th century (before then the job was more like the Speaker of the House of Commons, a largely ceremonial job devoid of much real influence). And note that other Speakers who have tried to ascend to these heights have often gone full Icarus, see Jim Wright or Newt Gingrich (and Newt in many ways helped to create the modern dysfunctional Republican Party and it's obsession with institutional destruction and a means of power so he gets two Fs in my book.)
She’s the most consequential politician of the era and the greatest speaker in maybe a 100 years. His post is oddly very narrow about all that she accomplished and how incredible she was in her job is unique. Anyone who worked in Congress would agree. Matt’s post majorly undersells the most important politician in maybe 50 years
Fair, but that's because almost all of our take writers overemphasize the presidency (which is prominent and interesting) and underemphasize Congress (which is less prominent and boring) the same way few people post much about county government but it's important in all sorts of ways
But this is supposed to be slowboring, not the desperate tv take writers
Are you really going to just leave Sam Rayburn out of the equation?
He was a jovial fellow to drink bourbon with, I'll give you that, but he was not a main driven of events this the three above were.
While I wish she would have retired 5 or 6 years ago, I think she has been one of the finest Speakers and Congressional leaders in recent history. Thanks for your hard work, Nancy, also thanks for being a real one on China for decades, voting against the Bush wars and helping pass the ACA and understanding how to keep a caucus together to win elections. We need more like you. It's a shame that Golden is retiring, I was hoping he'd get more of a leadership role in Congress. But it sounds like his family has been through a lot...
Was great twenty years ago is one of the democrats problems. I hope Chuck is listening.
Great point.
How much better we’d be if GW Bush had managed with Democrats to put SS back on a financial footing. In 2034, give or take, SS will go insolvent. Because we raided SS surpluses to fund our government, SS will be required by law to reduce benefits by 23%.
Our gutless politicians, afraid of pissing off Americans and being primaried, will do nothing. So we will have a crisis and eventually they will pass some changes. Age of retirement, but future benefits, raise taxes, maybe get rid of the cap and means test benefits.
Changes will come. Riots happened in France when they tried to move the retirement age to 64.
If Americans want a pension, it has to be funded like a pension. We no longer have enough workers to support a scheme that takes from the young to transfer to the elderly.
My 100-year-old mother died this month, boomers will live at least to that age or more. As currently configured SS is no longer is fiscally sound. Yet, nothing will be done. It is a fantasy for many that taxing the rich will solve all our problems....It won’t, it just is schadenfreude for them.
"SS will be required by law to reduce benefits by 23%."
Oh heavens! Your portion of FICA will go from 6.2% to 7.6% - it's utter destitution for us all! The end of the republic as we know it! Whatever will become of us?!?!
The year before 2035 (or whatever the year is) the government will take in $M trillion in general tax, $N in FICA tax, and pay out $O in SS.
The next year, the government will take in M+delta, N+delta, and pay out O+delta, where each delta is what you'd normally see year-to-year.
The only thing that SSTF emptying out requires is for Congress to actually pass a law keeping benefits the same. The total inflows and outflows are essentially the same.
Eh, France has riots about everything. It's part of the founding.
"My children have no wine at school! Take to ze streets!"
>Because we raided SS surpluses to fund our government, SS will be required by law to reduce benefits by 23%.<
This is completely wrong. We didn't "raid" anything. The system is working as designed: for many years the payroll tax generated surpluses (by design) which were spent on various federal priorities (by design) and the difference was kept track of via the use of intergovernmental IOUs (by design). The accumulated IOUs—the Trust Fund—was anticipated to last beyond the year 2050. The fact that it's going to be exhausted more quickly isn't because of "raiding" but mostly because of demographics (longer life expectancy and fewer babies) and economics (lower productivity growth).
In any event a couple of modest changes could keep Social Security funded indefinitely.
https://jabberwocking.com/fixing-social-security-in-two-easy-steps/
I'm fairly certain the only thing we need to do is just lift the cap on income to a much higher level or get rid of it entirely. I don't think that's a particularly hard sell.
> get rid of it entirely. I don't think that's a particularly hard sell
I think "biggest tax increase ever" is a pretty hard sell.
It's just going to be partially funded out of general revenue, but it's being partially funded out of general revenue right now, each time a SSTF bond is redeemed.
Biggest non-wartime increase ever, TBF.
My objection is less to a tax increase in general and more to doing it via an uncapped payroll tax. Capital gains, dividends, and S-corp distributions aren't payroll, and that's how the really rich people make their money.
The system is designed so the more you pay in, the more you get out. If people start getting their unearned income FICA'd, that will also increase their benefits in the end.
Right now only employers need to worry about FICA, not the financial institutions. I'd rather tweak the formula a little bit (maybe people like me get 1% less in retirement?) than require more things to fall under FICA.
"Because we raided SS surpluses to fund our government" why do you believe this happened?
From Chat GPTWhat did happen
When Social Security collects more in payroll taxes and other income than it needs to pay benefits in a given year, the surplus is invested in special-issue U.S. Treasury securities. In effect, the surplus becomes a loan to the rest of the federal government (via the Treasury) because the government uses that payroll tax surplus for other federal spending.
Cato Institute
+3
Congress.gov
+3
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
+3
Those securities are backed by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government and earn interest. The trust funds hold these securities and record them as assets.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
+2
The Concord Coalition
+2
For example: the Congressional Research Service states that “because the assets held by the trust funds are U.S. government securities … the trust fund balance represents the amount of money owed to the Social Security trust funds by the General Fund of the Treasury.”
Congress.gov
+1
❗ What it is not
It’s not a situation where Social Security beneficiaries personally have to pay back money because the government “borrowed from them” in a direct way. The trust funds are a federal accounting mechanism.
The “borrowing” is internal to the government (intragovernmental debt), not borrowing from workers or beneficiaries directly.
Cato Institute
+1
The fact that there are these U.S. Treasury obligations held by the trust funds does not guarantee fully funded benefits forever — the system still depends on ongoing tax revenues, demographic factors, benefit levels, etc.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
+1
🔍 Why this matters with regard to “benefit cuts”
Because some of the surplus was invested and thus recorded as an asset, that may make it appear as though Social Security has “savings.” But when it comes time to redeem those securities (to pay beneficiaries when taxes collected that year aren’t enough), the Treasury has to source the cash — which generally comes from general revenues or additional borrowing from the public.
Cato Institute
+1
Thus, if future payroll taxes + interest aren’t sufficient, we face the scenario where benefits may need to be reduced (or taxes increased) unless changes are made.
🧮 Quick summary
So in short:
Yes – surplus Social Security income was used by the government for broader spending and was “loaned” to the trust funds via Treasury securities.
a loan is a financial arrangement where money is temporarily borrowed and later repaid with interest
Should have just put it in the stock market.
To the moon!
This would be a perfect seat for a principled moderate to run for and win!!
I'm a little sad that Wiener is running, since I think he could accomplish a lot more in CA state government than he has any hope of doing in Congress.
He only has two years left in Sacramento before he's termed out, though. And while it's likely true he won't be as effective in Congress, people said the same thing when he went from the Board of Supervisors to the Assembly...
I ran into Scott campaigning at an SF farmer's market shortly after I moved to the city in 2015. I was paying $1700 for a 90sqft pantry that had been converted into a bedroom in a 4bd 1ba apartment. He said "wanna know why your rent is absurd?" and then explained SF's residential zoning laws, and I was YIMBY-pilled ever since.
Man's the YIMBY 🐐
I think he's left enough of a legacy in the CA legislature that other people will carry his YIMBY banner. As Sully says, he's also nearly termed out. Maybe in the House he'd be able to get permitting reform done or expand HUD funding and remit.
It does seem like an odd fit for him. He seems custom-made to be governor more than just about any other local official in the country. Porter's campaign doesn't look unbeatable.
I think he could be an amazing Governor but I think he’s most comfortable representing San Franciscans who appreciate him. Californians are probably fine with pictures of him out and about at LGBT events looking not very mainstream but he is not living his life like a person who is most interested in preserving his political viability. I can’t imagine Pete Buttigieg at the Folsom
Street fair in leather showing his bare chest.
I mostly know him in the context of housing and saw the policy part of his Wikipedia article has a section on "Nightlife and culture" because he actually has commissioned economic studies on it, which is just nerdily adorable. I also had no idea he was 6'7".
He is crazy tall and he looks much younger than he is. As someone who is the same age I envy whatever is giving him that youthful look.
He's a true legislative workhorse. The man is absolutely relentless. He will be writing a ton of bills. Perhaps he'd be a good executive too, but we already know that he's quite good at this part.
Like an Elizabeth Warren who won't ignore all their knowledge of economics!
While I'd want to agree, I wouldn't underestimate his political abilities. He seems like someone who could do well in the House specifically. I know people who have been his constituents and staffers and he seems like the real deal.
The biggest hit on him is SB 145, which is VERY easy to misconstrue as being weak on sex crimes. But that wouldn't be an issue in his House campaign.
Nothing on the financial crises?
My favorite seen is Hank Paulson (then Secretary of the Treasury) is so stressed out he's literally dry heaving into a waste basket. He comes over and gets on his knees to beg Nancy to pass the emergency bailout. And Nancy says, "Hank, we're not opposing this, your side is."
You'll recall that day when there was a vote and it failed and the stock market went into free fall collapse*. The holdouts panicked and the bailout passed on a revote later that day.
* CNBC had the market indexes on one side of the screen and the vote total
screen from the House. The second it showed the vote failing the bottom fell out of the market with across the board panicked selling.
During Obama’s second term, her allocation of campaign funds seemed more aimed at protecting frontline incumbents than creating a majority. When you are in the minority, frontline incumbents should get less than those challenging vulnerable incumbents. If the environment is good enough for the challengers to win, the incumbents can hang on with moderate funding. So I don’t really think she played to win. But, she did play to win more than any of her progressive contemporaries other than Obama.
Did she allocate campaign funds? I thought that was more Obama and whoever he put in charge of the DNC to replace Howard Dean.
"She broke with Bill Clinton on the Permanent Normal Trade Relations issue in 2000 and criticized the continuation of that policy into the Bush era even more vehemently."
We could honor Pelosi by calling it by its real name, Most Favored Nation. The people sucking up to Communist China changed the name to "Normal Trade Relations" as part of the spin.
But MFN *was* normal trade relations. I worked in trade policy at the time, and there was a sincere belief among most policy people that bringing China into the WTO regime would promote political and economic reform. History may have proven Pelosi correct, but this was a minority view at the time.
It was CALLED "Most Favored Nation", and the only reason the name was changed was because people who favored freely rewarding a murderous Communist regime with our highest level of trade preference thought it sounded bad to admit they were giving these evil bastards "most favored" treatment. So they changed the name to spin their grossly immoral decision.
And no, sorry, it wasn't "sincere". Not saying nobody believed in it, but they believed in it in the Upton Sinclair sense that there was a ton of money on the side of believing it. Everyone knew what Communist China was back then. We all knew about Tiananmen Square, the ethnic cleansing of Tibet, the repression of Falun Gong, the sale of the harvested organs of executed political prisoners, and the complete represssion of any political opposition to their dictators.
But a lot of people wanted to make a lot of money, so they pretended all that would magically change if we gave the Communist murderers favored treatment.
So yes, those who supported it should live with the shame of "Most Favored Nation".
You're entitled to your opinion but you cannot know other people's motives.
I think the changing of the name itself is really damning for supporters of the policy. Because if one really thought China was liberalizing, there'd be no problem with granting them Most Favored Nation status. Of course! They're liberalizing, so we grant them Most Favored Nation to encourage liberalization.
It was precisely because everyone actually knew this was about the money and this was an evil, brutal dictatorship and was going to continue to be one that they had to change it to "Permanent Normal Trade Relations".
<raises hand> I favored it. Because as lindamc says, I really did think that China would moderate and liberalize as they joined the international trading system. In the late 90s, I did not foresee the creation of the great firewall and expected exposure to American culture would influence China the way it had Japan, S. Korea, etc.
Realized I was wrong in the early teens and have thought since that we should be creating a new coalition of trading partners that attempts to exclude them again.
I think if you believe your opinion was in no way influenced by the big money and the zeitgeist in our government and Democratic Party produced by that money, you need to seriously ask yourself why you believed a Communist dictatorship that was imprisoning masses of political prisoners, executing some and selling their organs, arresting people for religious demonstrations, had done the Tiananmen Square massacre, and had photos of Mao everywhere was planning on liberalizing.
I knew what the score was, as did Pelosi, and I'm really pissed at the people who didn't, because we lost our only chance to turn China into a better global citizen.
Wonderful. So we stick it to China, resulting in the continuous impoverishment of hundreds of millions of Chinese people. And American poor are poorer because they can't afford nearly the same quality of life.
I lived in China for a long time. There's a lot of bad stuff going on there, but trying to make them poorer is a bad policy. And it's plenty hypocritical when we have lots of Middle Eastern friends who are as bad or worse.
A better way of looking at it is we had one chance, in the period from around 1985-2002 or so, to use our leverage to force China, which desperately wanted foreign trade, to implement serious reforms to their government. It probably would have worked, because as I said we had the leverage and China needed us. And that would mean that China would not be poorer now-- they'd probably be richer, because their governmental system produces all sorts of mistakes and inefficiencies.
Instead, we decided to just make all the money we could and screw ever having any sort of decent Chinese government.
"to use our leverage to force China, which desperately wanted foreign trade, to implement serious reforms to their government."
I don't actually think this is true. China was developing in all kinds of ways and was experiencing high GDP growth in the 90s before it had MFN status. It would have taken them longer, but they would have industrialized anyway, and with the population they have (larger than Europe and N. America combined), they are an enormous economy in and of themselves.
It was very convenient for everyone who wanted to make money to presume that we could not demand anything of the Communist murderers.
Notably WE DIDN'T ASK. It's not like we tried for a decade to get them to democratize and liberalize and gave up. We caved IMMEDIATELY-- indeed we rewarded them for the massacre at Tiananmen Square and then went out and lied that there was nothing we could do.
It was all a money driven lie and a capitulation to Communism.
What a role model. I love that video of her from so many years ago. I don't think I've seen older clips of her like that. She was very pretty in that video.