I was gonna say Jared Polis should get state housing laws changed, before he tries to strongarm cities into following his policies on housing. But then I read the article. He did! The cities which would lose out on state funds are violating state law. FAFO, NIMBY cities.
It doesn’t sound from the article like the governor has the statutory authority to withhold grants as the remedy for noncompliance. Still seems more Trumpian than not.
The cities that are suing say he doesn't have the statutory authority. But those same cities say the state doesn't have the authority to force cities to allow accessory dwelling units, or upzone near transit. NIMBYs always, always complain they need local control, and they want to build housing, when in fact when they get local control they use it to deny housing. Every time. I don't think whiny NIMBY cities are the authority on what states can allow. So we'll see what the Colorado courts say.
"People are invested in UBI as transformational, rather than just letting resource-constrained people work less and consume more, because transformation sells politically, and 'Let's transfer your money to someone else so they can work less and consume more' doesn't."
I'm one of those people that think UBI might eventually be necessary if AI and robotics lives up the the hype.
But we aren't there yet.
Also that still doesn't solve the problem that people and especially men REALLY need to keep busy. Otherwise they get into a ton of trouble. This becomes less of an issue if you have young kids. It's easy for them to take up your whole day.
Anyway, you might have to do some type of make work program instead. Men need to provide.
I'll believe the AI -> mass unemployment thesis when I see it. To me it just looks like another technological disruption that we should be able to ameliorate by keeping the labor market tight.
This is a separate question from what welfare policy should look like, and there are good reasons, AI or no AI to simplify it.
Ironically I think the UBI proponents are making the wrong argument. Cash payments without strings attached are harder to abuse. At most, somebody wasted $X. They can't get any more than that.
As for mass unemployment, again, I'll believe it when I see it. I doubt we'll see >20% unemployment due to AI.
Luckily, the idea that AI would cause unemployment makes essentially no economic sense.
Productivity improvements tend to increase employment (because your products become more attractive) so the closest scenario would be if China got AI and you didn't and all your customers left for them.
Ironically, I think this is what this really kills is the Charles Murray-style "kill the welfare state and send the poors a small check monthly" style of center-right welfare reform that was pushed by people a lot.
Yeah $300/month isn’t a UBI and it’s completely ridiculous and disingenuous anyone’s coming to any conclusions about UBI based on that data, particularly during the pandemic and then inflation. It’s a nonstory.
I think maybe this is an argument that we just need to make the existing means tested welfare state suck less. Probably more aptly put streamline it.
Back when I met my wife she was in a temporary financial mess after an awful healthcare problem and unemployed. To a large extent I viewed UBI as the antidote to the fractured welfare state and time tax and eligibility issues. It's universal and includes something the state has capacity for, and ideally you wouldn't even have to apply for it because you just get enough money to survive off of because you exist.
Back when I first met my wife she had had her life fucked up by a freak medical incident leaving her financially ruined. And the lack of you just show up at the welfare state office and get a comprehensive you'll be fine benefit package while you look for work is kind of awful.
I thought the thing of import was towards the end. The various non-UBI policies in effect now, or pretty much anything in the budget, never went through this kind of rigorous analysis. It's a limitation of measures.
"Programs that provide in-kind benefits create political constituencies who have an interest in making sure that you don’t evaluate whether they work. Farmers and others in the food industry don’t want you to know whether food stamps work. Home builders and others in the housing industry don’t want you to know whether housing subsidies work. Health care providers don’t want you to know whether subsidies for health care work. Teachers unions don’t want you to know whether education subsidies work. Non-profits that sponge off government programs to help the homeless don’t want you to know that those programs don’t work."
This is suffering from the usually leftist fallacy of believing people are defined by material interests.
When's the last time a farmer tried to stop you from knowing how food stamps worked? If you drive down California you'll find all kinds of farmer political opinions on their signs. None of them are about how great food stamps are.
I suspect it’s like a lot of things, there’s an activist/lobbyist class that’s aware of it, and most of the people they’re meant to represent are oblivious.
I feel like various UBI proponents talk past each other. I favor a massive simplification of the welfare just because I think that would be a better way to do things, not because my goal is to supplant the necessity of work. And at any price that would be affordable, it wouldn't be anyways.
"critics warn this move will jeopardize access to government services including 'affordable housing, health care and registering to vote' for non-English speakers."
I generally hate glib social media posting by federal agencies, but if HUD linked this story on its official Twitter account and put a "That's the point" animated GIF over it, I would actually respect that.
Also, could someone please let me know what Matt recently said about Gaza or Israel/Palestine that has pro-Palestinian Twitter users gunning for him even harder than usual? I'm terminally on-line, but somehow missed Matt saying anything in the past week that seemed edgier/more controversial than his normal Gaza takes.
(1) He's shifted what the thinks is the right political move for the Democratic party based on the updated polling.
(2) There's a debate which was going on about whether the folks who were calling the Israeli actions starting October 8th genocide were right all along, or if Israel's actions have become genocidal over time, with him taking the latter position.
(3) There's a weird debate about the overton window on this and the effects on domestic policy/politics of the campus protests and Uncommitted movement and other such protest groups.
On 1-2, I think he's probably right? On 3, he's trolling in a way I find moderately annoying, but I find his twitter presence fairly trolly often, in a way I would mostly find amusing if not for the fact that he alternates between it and posts requesting to be taken literally, in a way which feels like...cheating to me? Not sure that makes sense.
Basically, a bunch of stuff about why he thought that people who got to “Israel is doing war crimes/genocide” before he did sucked even though he eventually came around to their object-level position on the issue, largely because the recent large shift in US public opinion is vindicating for a faction that he opposes in intra-Democratic coalition struggle.
I haven't been following this twitter debate at all, but it seems to me from this short description that Matt's position isn't unreasonable as the Israeli government's conduct has gotten worse as the war has gone on.
I definitely agree that the conduct has gotten worse and the evidence has become harder to argue with, but stuff like the Amalek speech, essential service cutoffs, more bombs dropped than the entire Iraq War (on one tiny and highly urbanized area, over a much shorter time period), and a life expectancy cut about six times as big as the Syrian Civil War’s came within the first few months of the conflict. If you didn’t deliberately decide to shut your eyes to it, the evidence that this wasn’t a campaign conducted with restraint or real regard for civilian life has been there for quite some time.
In general, I try to avoid arguing about this on the Internet, but I’ll bite. “…more bombs dropped than the entire Iraq War (on one tiny and highly urbanized area, over a much shorter time period)…” Assuming that this is correct (these things are hard to estimate), this shows that only a very high regard for civilian life has prevented one million dead (or firebombing-of-Tokyo levels of death). To clarify, I don’t believe that Netanyahu has very high regard for Palestinian civilians, but that’s how I read your argument.
The point is that the sheer scale of the bombing is wildly disproportionate to the size of the territory involved in the conflict or the military strength of the enemy that they’re opposing in a way that makes claims that it all serves legitimate military objectives (rather than say, a desire to destroy Gaza’s built environment to accelerate later ethnic cleansing efforts— which a number of government ministers have described as a primary objective of the campaign). The fact that the death rate has been ~similar to that of the firebombing of Tokyo rather than higher does suggest that the disregard for casualties wasn’t total (before the 2024 election, they had to be at least kind of optics-sensitive), but the sheer scale still isn’t “just normal war”— it’s significantly more indiscriminate and heedlessly destructive than say, Russian conduct in Ukraine, Azeri conduct in Nagorno-Karabakh, or even Bashar al-Assad’s conduct in Aleppo and other rebellious Syrian cities. (And this is visible in the conflict’s casualty rates and life expectancy impacts— the war has already killed about 6% of Gaza’s population in a little under two years— about half Khmer Rouge speed, but fast relative to most civilian population destructions, including many which are pretty much universally agreed to be monstrous.)
On a side note, from the discussion earlier today, I have infinitely more respect for a partisan Republican who will tell me they don't want DC to be a state because it'll 2 liberal Democrats than people who try to make a bunch of excuses or explanations on why people in DC should be happy being part of VA/MD or whatever, when deep down, they mostly just don't want 2 more liberal Democrats that'll move the Democrats to the left either.
This perspective seems so weird. Of course highly partisan democrats and republicans don't give a shit about the people in Washington DC; they only care about the balance of the Senate and what DC statehood could do for that.
Whereas if someone's primary concern is getting the city out from under the control of the federal government and letting it be a normal city governed in a normal way, then I think the question would be what makes that happen the fastest. Sure people in DC say they don't want to be part of Maryland. But do they want to be under the control of whatever president wants to jerk them around for political reasons, or in the best of times be benignly ignored by a federal government that has no interest in catering to their needs? I would bet they don't want that either!
After another few years of Trump, I wonder what the answer will when polling the question of would residents of DC rather:
1. Continue in the status quo for the next 40 years with no prospect of statehood in sight because the Republicans will block it at all costs.
2. Be subsumed by Maryland as a political compromise.
Maybe Congress could pass a broader home rule law that still kept federal oversight so that things don't get too out of control. Sort of like how Canada's Governor General is the monarch's local franchisee, but still has to follow the dictates of the franchise agreement when push comes to shove.
If progressive and "liberal" Democrats who claim to want DC to be a state actually wanted DC to be a state, they would move the party to the center and actual win a functional majority that could actually make DC statehood a reality instead of trying to pull the party to the left.
Almost got there in 2020 - too bad we nominated a weirdo in Sinema instead of a more normie Dem in Arizona like Gallego and Cal Cunningham couldn't keep his dick in his pants. Note I don't blame Manchin, except for having bad opinions, but alas.
Ironically, the real split I actually have with Matt and others here is dommerism over the ability of Democrats to ever win again - I'm old enough to remember when David Shor only a few years ago was claiming based on political trends that the Republicans would have a supermajority by now instead of 53 seats, which indeed sucks, but is not the insurmountable hill that only can be done by nominating a bunch of 1994-style Democrats.
2026 is pretty rough, but 2028 is likely to be an election w/ a weak incumbent and a meh Republican nominee w/ a bunch of Republican candidates who are fully lost in the world where Trump is still GodKing.
As I said, no we shouldn't nominate AOC in Iowa, Kansas, or Missouri in 2028 but I think we can nominate and win fairly normie Dems in Wisconsin and Norrth Carolina and have a chance of winning those seats in 2028.
Yeah Shor has turned into a weird doomer. I too remember exactly what you were talking about, it's around the time that I started to take him less seriously. A couple of weeks ago he would just not shut up about how the smartphones are turning all of the Kids These Days into zombie-brained Nazis or whatever, and I had to unfollow him. He was really into the obviously fake FT chart about how kids lack conscientiousness now (which was quickly disproven), and..... yeah. He's gotten very negative
Almost as badly Twitter brained as Matt, unfortunately. At least Shor has the lost job (though I bet money he made more money the year after his 'cancellation' than the year before) to have a reason.
He's weirdly focused on the idea all left-wing people are neurotic weirdos who should be on meds or whatever, which may be true of a very specific sliver of people on say Bluesky, but generally the reason the kids are more socially liberal and say, more 'woke' on various things is globalization and social media.
I even agree that in theory, the GOP could've had a large majority going into 2024, but the changes in the composition of their base are the exact reason they never could have a party of Rob Portman's or whatever winning those 59 seats.
"Almost got there in 2020 - too bad we nominated a weirdo in Sinema"
Except she actually won her race. Maybe progressives should win more and they wouldn't need to worry about the "weirdos" like Sinema.
Also, Shor said in April 2022 the modal outcome was a Trump win with a ~60 Senate seats and that was pre-Dobbs. The outcome was a Trump win and 53 Senate seats with 10 Senate Democrats in Trump-won states, some of whom might not have survived if not for the Dobbs ruling. Hardly the miss you're claiming. His prognostication was certainly more accurate than that of most progressive and liberal Democrats, who thought Biden could continue to coast along and would just magically get popular again after the 2022 midterms and win in 2024.
Are you unaware of the Chesterson's Fence argument on this? Or are you aware, but dismiss it out of hand?
I think Democrats who make the arguments for DC statehood to serve their partisan ends are thinking very short term. My strong preference is for skating along the sharp edge of divided governments unable to make significant and lasting changes until the parties sort themselves out, or are replaced with saner alternatives.
It's the exact opposite - part of the reason we have "non-sane" parties is because of the filibuster and a tons of other veto points, parties can't actually pass the policies they promise and as a result, you can promise insane things without any real damage to your political career because everything needs 60 votes, so normie voters don't care because it doesn't passes but primary voters are happy because you can blame the other side.
Like, I saw centrists immediately post-election basically say, "see isn't a good thing we have a filibuster now" and no, I think a Congress should be able to pass what it wants w/ 218 votes and 50 Senators + a supportive VP. Majoritarian democracy seems to work fine in most of the First World.
Will there be a bit of back 'n' forth immediately? Sure. But when swing state Senators lose because they finally have to vote for the wacky stuff and gets passed and people don't like it, then they'll adjust or continue to lose.
If you're talking about some weird situation where Republican's begin splitting states, so be it. Just like the Supreme Court adding seats so its absurd and no longer supports it, the Senate expanding itself to irrelevance is a positive thing in my view.
In my view, the main problem with Newsom as a candidate isn't his policy preferences, which are... flexible (not an insult really, I'm down with realpolitik) but the fact that he slept with his close friend's wife and split up their marriage. I really do not want to have to deal with that talking point in a general election campaign.
Jared Polis would crash hard in a national Democratic primary even if he looked like Newsom, much like Charlie Baker or Larry Hogan would in a GOP one.
Hell, I bet Polis would get a healthy challenge even within Colorado if he could run for another term or tried to run for Senate.
[The New York Post on Monday reported that the Department of Housing and Urban Development will provide materials only in English]
Critics warn this move will jeopardize access to government services including “affordable housing, health care and registering to vote” for non-English speakers, while advocates of the policy promise that it will jeopardize access to government services including “affordable housing, health care and registering to vote” for non-English speakers.
CT’s housing funding is pitiful, although I guess it’s a small comfort that everywhere else is pitiful.
Also, our governor let the NIMBYs bully him into vetoing a decent housing bill. I’m not voting for the Republican next election, but Lamont can get FUCKED.
The developers threatened to make use of the CT law which bypasses local zoning control for an affordable housing development and everyone seems to hate that idea, but I think it’s hilarious and they should do it
I run by that area multiple times a season. It’s not “quaint”, the neighborhood character is “criminally underutilized with a bunch of pointless dilapidated buildings not remotely befitting Westport’s tony reputation”.
I’m going to continue calling out Matt’s bad prior on St. Louis crime, until someone gets his ear and corrects him.
Because it’s just a plain fucking fact that the city and county crime stats are reported separately, and when you look at stats for entire metro areas, STL drops into the 20th/30th worst.
Please, I’m begging everyone here who will listen, but especially Matt, this is such a dumb thing to KEEP GETTING WRONG.
I dunno, is this really true? There are lots of other American cities that are only measured within the actual city limits, and exclude the suburbs. Baltimore, Atlanta, Boston, NYC, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Cincinnati are all small-core cities, off the top of my head. It's really just in the Sunbelt where the cities aggressively expanded to include suburbs.
I'm not sure I believe that St. Louis drops into 20th or 30th worst homicide rates if you adjust. It has an insanely high homicide rate no matter how you squint
Why isn't just comparing city cores (i.e. ex-suburbs) equally or more valid? A high crime city could be surrounded by relatively safe suburbs, which is my understanding of say Detroit and Anchorage. So if you just look at metro areas, 'high crime core, low crime suburb' makes them look artificially good.
Why not just compare city cores? Because if you look at it that way, St. Louis appears to be extremely high, though I agree not the literal highest in the US
I’d argue that crime stats on “just cores” can still be deceiving because of the level of granularity that crime happens at.
Ferguson, for instance, isn’t in the core of STL — nowhere near it! And it’s not even one of the worst municipalities, but definitely worse than average.
But if it was swapped for, say, the within-city-limits neighborhood that the McCloskeys lived in, then the city’s stats would go up, the county’s down, and the metro’s would stay the exact fucking same.
I consider that a pretty convincing case to both (1) look at crime on metro-wide levels when comparing what cities are doing well or poorly in general, and (2) look at crime on neighborhood levels to determine what the actual problems are that could be prevented by better enforcement.
ALSO, a whole metro area is a much more relevant political unit for considering the structural drivers of crime.
As Matt was ignorant of in his comment on the pod today, STL can’t JUST reallocate cops from the city to the county — they’re different jurisdictions. They only really do it for big crises on a voluntary basis.
Structurally, the county both thinks it pays for the city’s dysfunction AND refuses to pay to clean up the mess — don’t ask me, it’s just another bigoted stereotype like the supposedly lazy immigrants stealing jobs — so they really don’t give a shit about the city. The city in turn struggles to get ANY traction on any of its problems except when private investors are footing the bill. It’s like being the Mayor of Fallujah: Even an unthinkably-perfect policy agenda is simply going to get drowned out by larger trends and challenges.
And unlike Baltimore, we have a hostile state government that wants to peacock about how good little Trumpists they are by doing to STL what Trump’s doing to DC: Not helping one fucking bit, turning a deployment of external resources into a photo op so they can pretend that they solved everything with some light-to-medium authoritarianism.
But you don’t learn ANY of that by just having a shithead take on a podcast that STL should, like, redeploy its cops.
Too bad about Housing and Urban Development's new rules, though at least English is far and away the world's most popular language and not, say, Finnish.
Places like Florida probably also had a ton of remote workers moving to them? It is a fun place to try and live if you don't have to be near an office in a much more expensive place.
Agreed. I certainly mean my question as a legit question that I don't know how to research.
My gut is that the remote work was far bigger for tech than other industries. But, even that, I would have a hard time supporting. :( And is it big enough that it would be seen in some of these trends?
"critics warn this move will jeopardize access to government services including “affordable housing, health care and registering to vote” for non-English speakers."
It strikes me that homebuilders are wildly misguided in their pessimism. Prices and rates are at all-time highs, input costs have been out of control, but yet their sales and margins are just fine. It seems like a situation where they are just too close to the situation to accurately appraise their performance.
While NIMBYism is a big issue and maybe this is true of a lot of industries, homebuilders seem to be especially touchy and back off from investment at the smallest sign of economic turbulence despite the basically decades long unbroken run of high home prices (outside of a few years after 2008).
I think they are risk averse because most of them are not especially huge companies and each of their projects puts a lot of money and debt at stake and so they have very little leeway to take baths on things.
44% of the builder market is controlled by 10 companies. Not sure whether the NAHB survey accounts for that. But those companies should be pretty sophisticated in their views.
Full disclosure I know this because I got tripped up badly a long time ago by assuming what you assumed.
It’s surprising there’s not more pressure for consolidation within the industry. Potentially because construction risk is correlated nationally so there’s no benefit from scale.
I mean, parts of California is legitimately possibly one of the greatest places on Earth when it comes to weather, etc. with the bonus of a teeming megacity for all its many political issues.
OTOH, Florida is a massive swamp outside of Miami and I say that as somebody who live in Florida for a decade.
I'll never get over the fact that we discovered a massive flat basin along the coast that has nearly unmatched weather, almost 300 sunny days a year, and then we decided to pave it over with a network of supergiant freeways that make sitting in a car mandatory for two hours per day. Our own Edo plain or north Holland totally squandered.
Since you used to live in Florida, maybe you know that the Everglades burns here and there every year. But I've been here nine years and this is the first time seeing it in August.
Florida is a pretty soulless place to live for the most part, but one thing it has going for it is that it's a very good state for food, especially cheap eats.
Even NYC isn't really a place to feel unsafe, anymore. Maybe some of the more industrial parts? The touristy places, at the very least, were fine. Dirty. But fine.
Yes! SD has better weather and the zoo but Oakland is way more walkable (perfect walk score baybeeee), has a more vibrant music and theater scene, has better museums, and has better Asian and African food. I walk around Oakland to get to and from work and the gym and enjoy the lake and all the activity around it. Love the live music, food trucks, drum circles, street vendors, etc.
SD has only lost one of its big sports teams whereas Oakland has lost them all. Even though being a Padres fan is deep suffering, even I'll admit that A's fans have had a 24-carat run of bad fortune.
You publicly want all sports banned and violently excommunicated from American culture, but if I scratch the surface, you fantasize about both your idols and enemies playing sports and if I dig a bit deeper there is a repressed desire, (possibly honest, possibly sadomasochistic) to play baseball yourself?
I feel about sports the same way I feel about drag queens - I'm glad that there's the people who enjoy that performance have a place they can do it, but I usually find it uncomfortable to watch, and I'm annoyed that people often assume I have an opinion about a particular performance.
A good thing about California is that while the housing market and overall cost of living is absurd, it is somewhat made up for by salaries being higher if you can get a decent job. I can then utilize this higher wage for things like travel - I can spend freely when visiting Italy or Ohio, the same cannot be said for Italians or Ohioites when visiting California.
The thing about Florida is that you don't actually have to live directly on the coast where your house is going to get flooded all the time. There's lots of land in the interior where you can live in easy driving distance from beaches and beach resorts, but the worst a hurricane is going to do is knock your power out for a while, and that's what backup generators are for. There's still no state income tax. Of course it's incredibly hot most of the year, but that's what A/C is for and at least there's never any snow or ice.
There's industry in Florida too. It doesn't compare to some states, but there are manufacturing plants and phosphate mining and agriculture. There are jobs, even technical jobs, to be had. Housing prices are still very high of course, and that's a serious problem as the article notes, but prices aside there's plenty to recommend Florida.
"...you don't actually have to live directly on the coast where your house is going to get flooded all the time. There's lots of land in the interior where you can live in easy driving distance from beaches..."
Or, live on the coast in a high rise. Even easier beach access, if that's your thing.
Also some developments here in Maryland with Gov. Moore and Sec. Day trying to get out ahead of potential issues around their housing package next year:
I was gonna say Jared Polis should get state housing laws changed, before he tries to strongarm cities into following his policies on housing. But then I read the article. He did! The cities which would lose out on state funds are violating state law. FAFO, NIMBY cities.
It doesn’t sound from the article like the governor has the statutory authority to withhold grants as the remedy for noncompliance. Still seems more Trumpian than not.
The cities that are suing say he doesn't have the statutory authority. But those same cities say the state doesn't have the authority to force cities to allow accessory dwelling units, or upzone near transit. NIMBYs always, always complain they need local control, and they want to build housing, when in fact when they get local control they use it to deny housing. Every time. I don't think whiny NIMBY cities are the authority on what states can allow. So we'll see what the Colorado courts say.
State grants are often discretionary. It may be under Polis' agencies discretion to deny funds to recalcitrant cities.
It’s 2025 we don’t do norms now
They don’t have to apply for the grants
Maybe he sees that it's working for Trump.
Kelsey Piper describes how UBI's been taking an L: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/giving-people-money-helped-less-than
And I think this point by McMegan is good: https://x.com/asymmetricinfo/status/1958204789918999027
"People are invested in UBI as transformational, rather than just letting resource-constrained people work less and consume more, because transformation sells politically, and 'Let's transfer your money to someone else so they can work less and consume more' doesn't."
I'm one of those people that think UBI might eventually be necessary if AI and robotics lives up the the hype.
But we aren't there yet.
Also that still doesn't solve the problem that people and especially men REALLY need to keep busy. Otherwise they get into a ton of trouble. This becomes less of an issue if you have young kids. It's easy for them to take up your whole day.
Anyway, you might have to do some type of make work program instead. Men need to provide.
I'll believe the AI -> mass unemployment thesis when I see it. To me it just looks like another technological disruption that we should be able to ameliorate by keeping the labor market tight.
This is a separate question from what welfare policy should look like, and there are good reasons, AI or no AI to simplify it.
I can easily foresee a future where AI plus humanoid robots are just better than people at a LOT of jobs.
Not next year, but within 10-20 years yes. I think this time might actually be different.
I agree about the simplification of welfare. But the problem is making sure the system isn't being abused.
Ironically I think the UBI proponents are making the wrong argument. Cash payments without strings attached are harder to abuse. At most, somebody wasted $X. They can't get any more than that.
As for mass unemployment, again, I'll believe it when I see it. I doubt we'll see >20% unemployment due to AI.
Luckily, the idea that AI would cause unemployment makes essentially no economic sense.
Productivity improvements tend to increase employment (because your products become more attractive) so the closest scenario would be if China got AI and you didn't and all your customers left for them.
Ironically, I think this is what this really kills is the Charles Murray-style "kill the welfare state and send the poors a small check monthly" style of center-right welfare reform that was pushed by people a lot.
Yeah $300/month isn’t a UBI and it’s completely ridiculous and disingenuous anyone’s coming to any conclusions about UBI based on that data, particularly during the pandemic and then inflation. It’s a nonstory.
I think maybe this is an argument that we just need to make the existing means tested welfare state suck less. Probably more aptly put streamline it.
Back when I met my wife she was in a temporary financial mess after an awful healthcare problem and unemployed. To a large extent I viewed UBI as the antidote to the fractured welfare state and time tax and eligibility issues. It's universal and includes something the state has capacity for, and ideally you wouldn't even have to apply for it because you just get enough money to survive off of because you exist.
Back when I first met my wife she had had her life fucked up by a freak medical incident leaving her financially ruined. And the lack of you just show up at the welfare state office and get a comprehensive you'll be fine benefit package while you look for work is kind of awful.
I thought the thing of import was towards the end. The various non-UBI policies in effect now, or pretty much anything in the budget, never went through this kind of rigorous analysis. It's a limitation of measures.
"Programs that provide in-kind benefits create political constituencies who have an interest in making sure that you don’t evaluate whether they work. Farmers and others in the food industry don’t want you to know whether food stamps work. Home builders and others in the housing industry don’t want you to know whether housing subsidies work. Health care providers don’t want you to know whether subsidies for health care work. Teachers unions don’t want you to know whether education subsidies work. Non-profits that sponge off government programs to help the homeless don’t want you to know that those programs don’t work."
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/cash-transfers-fail
This is suffering from the usually leftist fallacy of believing people are defined by material interests.
When's the last time a farmer tried to stop you from knowing how food stamps worked? If you drive down California you'll find all kinds of farmer political opinions on their signs. None of them are about how great food stamps are.
I suspect it’s like a lot of things, there’s an activist/lobbyist class that’s aware of it, and most of the people they’re meant to represent are oblivious.
I feel like various UBI proponents talk past each other. I favor a massive simplification of the welfare just because I think that would be a better way to do things, not because my goal is to supplant the necessity of work. And at any price that would be affordable, it wouldn't be anyways.
Thanks, Halina. These round-ups are super useful.
"critics warn this move will jeopardize access to government services including 'affordable housing, health care and registering to vote' for non-English speakers."
I generally hate glib social media posting by federal agencies, but if HUD linked this story on its official Twitter account and put a "That's the point" animated GIF over it, I would actually respect that.
Also, could someone please let me know what Matt recently said about Gaza or Israel/Palestine that has pro-Palestinian Twitter users gunning for him even harder than usual? I'm terminally on-line, but somehow missed Matt saying anything in the past week that seemed edgier/more controversial than his normal Gaza takes.
So, he's doing three things:
(1) He's shifted what the thinks is the right political move for the Democratic party based on the updated polling.
(2) There's a debate which was going on about whether the folks who were calling the Israeli actions starting October 8th genocide were right all along, or if Israel's actions have become genocidal over time, with him taking the latter position.
(3) There's a weird debate about the overton window on this and the effects on domestic policy/politics of the campus protests and Uncommitted movement and other such protest groups.
On 1-2, I think he's probably right? On 3, he's trolling in a way I find moderately annoying, but I find his twitter presence fairly trolly often, in a way I would mostly find amusing if not for the fact that he alternates between it and posts requesting to be taken literally, in a way which feels like...cheating to me? Not sure that makes sense.
Thanks!
Basically, a bunch of stuff about why he thought that people who got to “Israel is doing war crimes/genocide” before he did sucked even though he eventually came around to their object-level position on the issue, largely because the recent large shift in US public opinion is vindicating for a faction that he opposes in intra-Democratic coalition struggle.
I haven't been following this twitter debate at all, but it seems to me from this short description that Matt's position isn't unreasonable as the Israeli government's conduct has gotten worse as the war has gone on.
I definitely agree that the conduct has gotten worse and the evidence has become harder to argue with, but stuff like the Amalek speech, essential service cutoffs, more bombs dropped than the entire Iraq War (on one tiny and highly urbanized area, over a much shorter time period), and a life expectancy cut about six times as big as the Syrian Civil War’s came within the first few months of the conflict. If you didn’t deliberately decide to shut your eyes to it, the evidence that this wasn’t a campaign conducted with restraint or real regard for civilian life has been there for quite some time.
In general, I try to avoid arguing about this on the Internet, but I’ll bite. “…more bombs dropped than the entire Iraq War (on one tiny and highly urbanized area, over a much shorter time period)…” Assuming that this is correct (these things are hard to estimate), this shows that only a very high regard for civilian life has prevented one million dead (or firebombing-of-Tokyo levels of death). To clarify, I don’t believe that Netanyahu has very high regard for Palestinian civilians, but that’s how I read your argument.
The point is that the sheer scale of the bombing is wildly disproportionate to the size of the territory involved in the conflict or the military strength of the enemy that they’re opposing in a way that makes claims that it all serves legitimate military objectives (rather than say, a desire to destroy Gaza’s built environment to accelerate later ethnic cleansing efforts— which a number of government ministers have described as a primary objective of the campaign). The fact that the death rate has been ~similar to that of the firebombing of Tokyo rather than higher does suggest that the disregard for casualties wasn’t total (before the 2024 election, they had to be at least kind of optics-sensitive), but the sheer scale still isn’t “just normal war”— it’s significantly more indiscriminate and heedlessly destructive than say, Russian conduct in Ukraine, Azeri conduct in Nagorno-Karabakh, or even Bashar al-Assad’s conduct in Aleppo and other rebellious Syrian cities. (And this is visible in the conflict’s casualty rates and life expectancy impacts— the war has already killed about 6% of Gaza’s population in a little under two years— about half Khmer Rouge speed, but fast relative to most civilian population destructions, including many which are pretty much universally agreed to be monstrous.)
Didn’t the Azeris reduce the Armenian population in NK by basically 100%?
It's a pity both sides can't lose.
Thanks!
I looked last night because someone else mentioned it. I couldn’t find anything, but I’m not a good Xitter.
On a side note, from the discussion earlier today, I have infinitely more respect for a partisan Republican who will tell me they don't want DC to be a state because it'll 2 liberal Democrats than people who try to make a bunch of excuses or explanations on why people in DC should be happy being part of VA/MD or whatever, when deep down, they mostly just don't want 2 more liberal Democrats that'll move the Democrats to the left either.
What they need to do is gerrymander the state lines so that DC is made part of WV.
Indeed, since DC along wouldn't do it, but there's plenty extra to capture along the Fairfax/Montgomery/Loudoun trio on the way.
They should get Dulles. Seems fair.
This perspective seems so weird. Of course highly partisan democrats and republicans don't give a shit about the people in Washington DC; they only care about the balance of the Senate and what DC statehood could do for that.
Whereas if someone's primary concern is getting the city out from under the control of the federal government and letting it be a normal city governed in a normal way, then I think the question would be what makes that happen the fastest. Sure people in DC say they don't want to be part of Maryland. But do they want to be under the control of whatever president wants to jerk them around for political reasons, or in the best of times be benignly ignored by a federal government that has no interest in catering to their needs? I would bet they don't want that either!
After another few years of Trump, I wonder what the answer will when polling the question of would residents of DC rather:
1. Continue in the status quo for the next 40 years with no prospect of statehood in sight because the Republicans will block it at all costs.
2. Be subsumed by Maryland as a political compromise.
Maybe Congress could pass a broader home rule law that still kept federal oversight so that things don't get too out of control. Sort of like how Canada's Governor General is the monarch's local franchisee, but still has to follow the dictates of the franchise agreement when push comes to shove.
I bet support for DC statehood will be even higher or similar in 2028 considering it's only continued to go up over the past few years, as Matt retweeted - https://x.com/AlexCTaliadoros/status/1958153848184570172
If anything, this happening is making more people supportive of DC as its own distinct entity and its own state for obvious reasons.
If progressive and "liberal" Democrats who claim to want DC to be a state actually wanted DC to be a state, they would move the party to the center and actual win a functional majority that could actually make DC statehood a reality instead of trying to pull the party to the left.
Almost got there in 2020 - too bad we nominated a weirdo in Sinema instead of a more normie Dem in Arizona like Gallego and Cal Cunningham couldn't keep his dick in his pants. Note I don't blame Manchin, except for having bad opinions, but alas.
Ironically, the real split I actually have with Matt and others here is dommerism over the ability of Democrats to ever win again - I'm old enough to remember when David Shor only a few years ago was claiming based on political trends that the Republicans would have a supermajority by now instead of 53 seats, which indeed sucks, but is not the insurmountable hill that only can be done by nominating a bunch of 1994-style Democrats.
2026 is pretty rough, but 2028 is likely to be an election w/ a weak incumbent and a meh Republican nominee w/ a bunch of Republican candidates who are fully lost in the world where Trump is still GodKing.
As I said, no we shouldn't nominate AOC in Iowa, Kansas, or Missouri in 2028 but I think we can nominate and win fairly normie Dems in Wisconsin and Norrth Carolina and have a chance of winning those seats in 2028.
Yeah Shor has turned into a weird doomer. I too remember exactly what you were talking about, it's around the time that I started to take him less seriously. A couple of weeks ago he would just not shut up about how the smartphones are turning all of the Kids These Days into zombie-brained Nazis or whatever, and I had to unfollow him. He was really into the obviously fake FT chart about how kids lack conscientiousness now (which was quickly disproven), and..... yeah. He's gotten very negative
Almost as badly Twitter brained as Matt, unfortunately. At least Shor has the lost job (though I bet money he made more money the year after his 'cancellation' than the year before) to have a reason.
He's weirdly focused on the idea all left-wing people are neurotic weirdos who should be on meds or whatever, which may be true of a very specific sliver of people on say Bluesky, but generally the reason the kids are more socially liberal and say, more 'woke' on various things is globalization and social media.
I even agree that in theory, the GOP could've had a large majority going into 2024, but the changes in the composition of their base are the exact reason they never could have a party of Rob Portman's or whatever winning those 59 seats.
"Almost got there in 2020 - too bad we nominated a weirdo in Sinema"
Except she actually won her race. Maybe progressives should win more and they wouldn't need to worry about the "weirdos" like Sinema.
Also, Shor said in April 2022 the modal outcome was a Trump win with a ~60 Senate seats and that was pre-Dobbs. The outcome was a Trump win and 53 Senate seats with 10 Senate Democrats in Trump-won states, some of whom might not have survived if not for the Dobbs ruling. Hardly the miss you're claiming. His prognostication was certainly more accurate than that of most progressive and liberal Democrats, who thought Biden could continue to coast along and would just magically get popular again after the 2022 midterms and win in 2024.
https://x.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912
Are you unaware of the Chesterson's Fence argument on this? Or are you aware, but dismiss it out of hand?
I think Democrats who make the arguments for DC statehood to serve their partisan ends are thinking very short term. My strong preference is for skating along the sharp edge of divided governments unable to make significant and lasting changes until the parties sort themselves out, or are replaced with saner alternatives.
It's the exact opposite - part of the reason we have "non-sane" parties is because of the filibuster and a tons of other veto points, parties can't actually pass the policies they promise and as a result, you can promise insane things without any real damage to your political career because everything needs 60 votes, so normie voters don't care because it doesn't passes but primary voters are happy because you can blame the other side.
Like, I saw centrists immediately post-election basically say, "see isn't a good thing we have a filibuster now" and no, I think a Congress should be able to pass what it wants w/ 218 votes and 50 Senators + a supportive VP. Majoritarian democracy seems to work fine in most of the First World.
Will there be a bit of back 'n' forth immediately? Sure. But when swing state Senators lose because they finally have to vote for the wacky stuff and gets passed and people don't like it, then they'll adjust or continue to lose.
If you're talking about some weird situation where Republican's begin splitting states, so be it. Just like the Supreme Court adding seats so its absurd and no longer supports it, the Senate expanding itself to irrelevance is a positive thing in my view.
"Majoritarian democracy seems to work fine in most of the First World"
That, of course, on what you mean by "fine."
If Dems had someone who looked like Gavin Newsom and had the policy preferences of Jared Polis, we'd be unstoppable in 2028.
In my view, the main problem with Newsom as a candidate isn't his policy preferences, which are... flexible (not an insult really, I'm down with realpolitik) but the fact that he slept with his close friend's wife and split up their marriage. I really do not want to have to deal with that talking point in a general election campaign.
That’s small potatoes these days.
Jared Polis would crash hard in a national Democratic primary even if he looked like Newsom, much like Charlie Baker or Larry Hogan would in a GOP one.
Hell, I bet Polis would get a healthy challenge even within Colorado if he could run for another term or tried to run for Senate.
Newsom is not that far away from Polis. Especially compared to like, AOC.
[The New York Post on Monday reported that the Department of Housing and Urban Development will provide materials only in English]
Critics warn this move will jeopardize access to government services including “affordable housing, health care and registering to vote” for non-English speakers, while advocates of the policy promise that it will jeopardize access to government services including “affordable housing, health care and registering to vote” for non-English speakers.
CT’s housing funding is pitiful, although I guess it’s a small comfort that everywhere else is pitiful.
Also, our governor let the NIMBYs bully him into vetoing a decent housing bill. I’m not voting for the Republican next election, but Lamont can get FUCKED.
Of course it costs $0 to simply upzone and let people build.
But alas:
https://patch.com/connecticut/westport/proposed-massive-westport-development-denied-p-z-report
Yes, and those fuckers should be voted out too.
The developers threatened to make use of the CT law which bypasses local zoning control for an affordable housing development and everyone seems to hate that idea, but I think it’s hilarious and they should do it
I run by that area multiple times a season. It’s not “quaint”, the neighborhood character is “criminally underutilized with a bunch of pointless dilapidated buildings not remotely befitting Westport’s tony reputation”.
So yeah fuck them, build away.
Connecticut needs a Gina Raimondo, not a Ned Lamont!
I want a Polis. You up for the job? CT pizza will help bulk you up!
I would happily be Governor of Connecticut. Does it come with a house?
Yes, but it's in Hartford.
Only if you build me one.
You can’t just BUILD housing, David! Are you daft!
I’m going to continue calling out Matt’s bad prior on St. Louis crime, until someone gets his ear and corrects him.
Because it’s just a plain fucking fact that the city and county crime stats are reported separately, and when you look at stats for entire metro areas, STL drops into the 20th/30th worst.
Please, I’m begging everyone here who will listen, but especially Matt, this is such a dumb thing to KEEP GETTING WRONG.
I dunno, is this really true? There are lots of other American cities that are only measured within the actual city limits, and exclude the suburbs. Baltimore, Atlanta, Boston, NYC, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Cincinnati are all small-core cities, off the top of my head. It's really just in the Sunbelt where the cities aggressively expanded to include suburbs.
I'm not sure I believe that St. Louis drops into 20th or 30th worst homicide rates if you adjust. It has an insanely high homicide rate no matter how you squint
The metro-area stats are the ONLY ones that are apples-apples. You’ve got it the other way around.
Why isn't just comparing city cores (i.e. ex-suburbs) equally or more valid? A high crime city could be surrounded by relatively safe suburbs, which is my understanding of say Detroit and Anchorage. So if you just look at metro areas, 'high crime core, low crime suburb' makes them look artificially good.
Why not just compare city cores? Because if you look at it that way, St. Louis appears to be extremely high, though I agree not the literal highest in the US
I’d argue that crime stats on “just cores” can still be deceiving because of the level of granularity that crime happens at.
Ferguson, for instance, isn’t in the core of STL — nowhere near it! And it’s not even one of the worst municipalities, but definitely worse than average.
But if it was swapped for, say, the within-city-limits neighborhood that the McCloskeys lived in, then the city’s stats would go up, the county’s down, and the metro’s would stay the exact fucking same.
I consider that a pretty convincing case to both (1) look at crime on metro-wide levels when comparing what cities are doing well or poorly in general, and (2) look at crime on neighborhood levels to determine what the actual problems are that could be prevented by better enforcement.
But just taking an arbitrary core… is arbitrary.
ALSO, a whole metro area is a much more relevant political unit for considering the structural drivers of crime.
As Matt was ignorant of in his comment on the pod today, STL can’t JUST reallocate cops from the city to the county — they’re different jurisdictions. They only really do it for big crises on a voluntary basis.
Structurally, the county both thinks it pays for the city’s dysfunction AND refuses to pay to clean up the mess — don’t ask me, it’s just another bigoted stereotype like the supposedly lazy immigrants stealing jobs — so they really don’t give a shit about the city. The city in turn struggles to get ANY traction on any of its problems except when private investors are footing the bill. It’s like being the Mayor of Fallujah: Even an unthinkably-perfect policy agenda is simply going to get drowned out by larger trends and challenges.
And unlike Baltimore, we have a hostile state government that wants to peacock about how good little Trumpists they are by doing to STL what Trump’s doing to DC: Not helping one fucking bit, turning a deployment of external resources into a photo op so they can pretend that they solved everything with some light-to-medium authoritarianism.
But you don’t learn ANY of that by just having a shithead take on a podcast that STL should, like, redeploy its cops.
Love to see that Downtown Brooklyn unit construction number. That’s a very centrally located area with very good transit access.
Too bad about Housing and Urban Development's new rules, though at least English is far and away the world's most popular language and not, say, Finnish.
“I’ve spent the last three years learning Finnish, which should come in handy here in Virginia!”
https://youtu.be/sQ_4m2ocxhI?feature=shared
Places like Florida probably also had a ton of remote workers moving to them? It is a fun place to try and live if you don't have to be near an office in a much more expensive place.
I really wish we had some good data on this shit, because like a lot of things it ends up being mostly just speculation without data.
Agreed. I certainly mean my question as a legit question that I don't know how to research.
My gut is that the remote work was far bigger for tech than other industries. But, even that, I would have a hard time supporting. :( And is it big enough that it would be seen in some of these trends?
Indeed!
"critics warn this move will jeopardize access to government services including “affordable housing, health care and registering to vote” for non-English speakers."
I voted for this. Quit trying to convince me.
It strikes me that homebuilders are wildly misguided in their pessimism. Prices and rates are at all-time highs, input costs have been out of control, but yet their sales and margins are just fine. It seems like a situation where they are just too close to the situation to accurately appraise their performance.
While NIMBYism is a big issue and maybe this is true of a lot of industries, homebuilders seem to be especially touchy and back off from investment at the smallest sign of economic turbulence despite the basically decades long unbroken run of high home prices (outside of a few years after 2008).
I think they are risk averse because most of them are not especially huge companies and each of their projects puts a lot of money and debt at stake and so they have very little leeway to take baths on things.
44% of the builder market is controlled by 10 companies. Not sure whether the NAHB survey accounts for that. But those companies should be pretty sophisticated in their views.
Full disclosure I know this because I got tripped up badly a long time ago by assuming what you assumed.
It’s surprising there’s not more pressure for consolidation within the industry. Potentially because construction risk is correlated nationally so there’s no benefit from scale.
I think community counts are still below pre-pandemic levels. NIMBYism is likely a culprit on throttling single home supply.
It’s insane to me that people still move to CA and FL.
I mean, parts of California is legitimately possibly one of the greatest places on Earth when it comes to weather, etc. with the bonus of a teeming megacity for all its many political issues.
OTOH, Florida is a massive swamp outside of Miami and I say that as somebody who live in Florida for a decade.
I'll never get over the fact that we discovered a massive flat basin along the coast that has nearly unmatched weather, almost 300 sunny days a year, and then we decided to pave it over with a network of supergiant freeways that make sitting in a car mandatory for two hours per day. Our own Edo plain or north Holland totally squandered.
Or just don't go anywhere everyday and enjoy paradise. I have friends in Santa Monica and West Hollywood that don't own cars.
The LA basin was originally a bunch of oil fields. Not really an ideal place for Manila-style density.
You get to see the sunshine through your car windows.
"...Florida is a massive swamp outside of Miami..."
A massive, burning swamp:
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/live-updates-fire-in-the-everglades-spreads-smoke-all-over-south-florida/3680027/
Since you used to live in Florida, maybe you know that the Everglades burns here and there every year. But I've been here nine years and this is the first time seeing it in August.
Been nearly 20 years since I've lived there....but nothing comes to mind immediately, so it seems Not Great.
Maybe we should try cloud seeding? It worked great in Texas a couple months ago.
It normally rains every day over the Everglades this time of year. It's been a dry year.
Florida is a pretty soulless place to live for the most part, but one thing it has going for it is that it's a very good state for food, especially cheap eats.
Living in CA is fantastic. They'll drag me away from Oakland in a body bag.
Quite literally.
I laughed, but seriously, I walk home alone every night in Oakland and have never once felt unsafe. It's a far cry from NYC that way.
Even NYC isn't really a place to feel unsafe, anymore. Maybe some of the more industrial parts? The touristy places, at the very least, were fine. Dirty. But fine.
In NYC’s defense, I lived at the end of the L train past Ocean Hill.
As someone who moved from SF (Inner Sunset, then SSF) to the East Village in 2022.... polar opposite experience here!
Compared to San Diego?
Yes! SD has better weather and the zoo but Oakland is way more walkable (perfect walk score baybeeee), has a more vibrant music and theater scene, has better museums, and has better Asian and African food. I walk around Oakland to get to and from work and the gym and enjoy the lake and all the activity around it. Love the live music, food trucks, drum circles, street vendors, etc.
SD has only lost one of its big sports teams whereas Oakland has lost them all. Even though being a Padres fan is deep suffering, even I'll admit that A's fans have had a 24-carat run of bad fortune.
Ah, see, I feel about sports the way conservatives feel about drag queens, so that doesn't bother me at all.
You publicly want all sports banned and violently excommunicated from American culture, but if I scratch the surface, you fantasize about both your idols and enemies playing sports and if I dig a bit deeper there is a repressed desire, (possibly honest, possibly sadomasochistic) to play baseball yourself?
I feel about sports the same way I feel about drag queens - I'm glad that there's the people who enjoy that performance have a place they can do it, but I usually find it uncomfortable to watch, and I'm annoyed that people often assume I have an opinion about a particular performance.
A good thing about California is that while the housing market and overall cost of living is absurd, it is somewhat made up for by salaries being higher if you can get a decent job. I can then utilize this higher wage for things like travel - I can spend freely when visiting Italy or Ohio, the same cannot be said for Italians or Ohioites when visiting California.
The thing about Florida is that you don't actually have to live directly on the coast where your house is going to get flooded all the time. There's lots of land in the interior where you can live in easy driving distance from beaches and beach resorts, but the worst a hurricane is going to do is knock your power out for a while, and that's what backup generators are for. There's still no state income tax. Of course it's incredibly hot most of the year, but that's what A/C is for and at least there's never any snow or ice.
There's industry in Florida too. It doesn't compare to some states, but there are manufacturing plants and phosphate mining and agriculture. There are jobs, even technical jobs, to be had. Housing prices are still very high of course, and that's a serious problem as the article notes, but prices aside there's plenty to recommend Florida.
If only it weren't for all the damn Republicans.
The republicans are why the state is well run
"...you don't actually have to live directly on the coast where your house is going to get flooded all the time. There's lots of land in the interior where you can live in easy driving distance from beaches..."
Or, live on the coast in a high rise. Even easier beach access, if that's your thing.
Also some developments here in Maryland with Gov. Moore and Sec. Day trying to get out ahead of potential issues around their housing package next year:
https://marylandmatters.org/2025/08/19/day-gives-county-planners-pre-decisional-look-at-2026-housing-priorities/