428 Comments

Side note- There's a good amount of literature that the relationship between a country's income and emigration is inverse U-shape. Emigration takes thousands of dollars, so when a country is real power their people can't really afford to immigrate to another country. However, as the country's income approves their people have the money to immigrate to a higher income country where they believe their kids can have a better life. However, once the country's income reaches more of the middle income level, emigration slows down as emigrating becomes less attractive b/c of the lower income differential. For example, immigration from Mexico is much lower nowadays b/c Mexico has become middle income country.

So the United States shouldn't bet on immigration from Northern Triangle countries slowing down even if we somehow help their economies. It's going to take more than a one or two presidential administrations to get Northern Triangle's GDPs to converge to Mexico's. Meanwhile if their economies improve, there's a good chance that it might actually increase emigration b/c more people will be able to afford to pay the coyotes.

Expand full comment

Agree with this. Honduras, especially, is so poor that even doubling GDP per capita would still leave it significantly poorer than Mexico and likely *increase* the outflow of migrants rather than decrease it.

Expand full comment

Doesn't this justify part of the "Remain in Mexico" idea? Even if Hondurans can't come to the U.S. their prospects are likely to be better in Mexico than Honduras. In fact, helping Mexico absorb immigrants from the Northern Triangle could be more cost-effective than trying to grow those economies

Expand full comment

The long term answer to that isn't to keep Honduras so poor that it can't send more immigrants though! The solution in the long term best interest of the United States, not to mention Honduras, is for the US to do what it can to bring the GDP of Honduras above where it's a constant source of poor immigrants. In this era of concern about global supply chain insecurity, it seems like the answer is sitting in plain sight.

Expand full comment

What’s the answer? What specific actions should the US take to increase the GDP of Honduras?

Expand full comment

Letting in a large number of Honduran immigrants who can find work here and remit cash back to their families has the advantage of requiring very little positive effort on our part: in fact we mostly just need to stop doing a number of hugely expensive and morally obscene things.

And of course, anything that makes it easier for Honduran farmers and manufacturers to sell their goods in our markets helps.

Expand full comment

In labor market terms, free trade is an equivalent or substitute to immigration - immigration-in-place, if you will. So for one thing, make it harder for US companies to outsource low wage work to far away low-wage countries, in southeast Asia or wherever, than to nearby low-wage countries like those in Central America.

Expand full comment

I’ll admit to some (a lot of) ignorance of Honduras specifically, but I have some knowledge of other S. American countries and the problems seem to go so far beyond this as a fix that I think it’s overwhelming. The issues of violence and corruption seem nearly implacable.

Expand full comment

You could say that about Mexico but Mexico is middle-income and emigration to the U.S. has fallen.

Expand full comment

So something like a North and Central American Free Trade Agreement? NACAFTA, if you will?

Expand full comment

Do you want another GOP president? Because this is how you get another GOP president. Good grief.

Expand full comment
Comment removed
Mar 24, 2021
Comment removed
Expand full comment

My initial take is YES, but I would love to hear a discussion of the pros and cons of offering all three countries statehood.

Expand full comment

Better yet, just colonize the place and force-develop it in the interests of American capitalists. They'd end up better off.

Expand full comment

I say let in any American state that wants to join the Union. It is the United States of America, after all. Just as everyone understands that once you're in, you can't leave....

Expand full comment

You're my kind of madman. :)

Expand full comment

Why is this project better than just instituting effective border controls and effective immigration policies? It sounds very difficult, very lengthy, and and very expensive, all to address a problem that most Americans will view as not our fault, thus no obligation to fix in the first place. It doesn't sound like the effective, popular policy that Democrats want to support if they want to win elections.

Expand full comment

It's not in opposition to effective border controls and immigration policies, just the opposite, because a wealthier Central America eases border and immigration tensions. It's in opposition to trade policies, for example, that make low-wage labor in faraway places like Southeast Asia more attractive to US companies than low-wage labor nearby in our southern neighbors.

Expand full comment

Exactly. Also the United States foreign aid doesn't have a great track record of improving poor countries' economies. The most effective way the United States helps poor countries's economies is through accepting immigrants whose remittances often finance economic development. Remittances are really important!!!

Expand full comment

It's puzzling why politicians seem incapable of explain things like this in plain terms. I don't think the American public is too dumb to understand a well reasoned, comprehensive policy towards Central America with both long and short term goals. And in the long term, isn't the obvious best strategy to build up the wealth of Central American countries. Instead of more free trade agreements that raise low wages in places like Vietnam, focus on Central America. And if our failed drug war is increasing corruption and rule of law there, explain that too. But US policy towards Central and Latin has never really put all the pieces together in a long term strategy that would be best for the US as well as other countries in the region.

Expand full comment

I agree that Biden should make the (to me) unassailable case for muddling through the present mess while taking long-term steps.

That said, strengthening Vietnam is important to any strategy of dealing with China.

Expand full comment

There are always tradeoffs and it's hard to predict the future....but I think the idea that 50 years from now we'll be in a stronger positive relative to China because we prioritized the development and strengthening of poor countries in China's periphery and natural sphere of influence, over the poor countries next door in ours, is delusional.

Expand full comment

I think we can do both on the next few years scale rather than the 50 years scale.

Expand full comment

Who else here actually works with a lot of highly skilled/educated foreigners? I do, and watching them--STEM PhDs from fancy schools, etc.--struggle with visa issues has totally radicalized me. They're amazing, and dithering about keeping them when they would otherwise be in China or wherever but they want to be here is the most unbelievably self-destructive thing I have ever observed. I do not need the US government protecting my job from my brilliant colleagues. My brilliant colleagues are the reason my job is fun and prestigious in the first place. Chasing them out so people like me have less competition is the definition of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

Expand full comment

Smart people coming here to get educated and then us forcing them to leave is one of the sillier elements of our policies.

Expand full comment

I'm a university student in Canada, but I've had a similar feeling. Maybe they're technically competition, but I think that this country would simply be a worse places without my foreign friends.

Expand full comment

I am a US national who has had to obtain work visas in Tanzania, India and Kenya, and those experiences similarly radicalized me on immigration policy. It's crazy the amount of documentation to collect, hoops to jump through, money to pay, and capriciousness throughout the process in order to get permission to work. I would love the US to make it MUCH easier for people to obtain visas and for that to serve as a model in other countries.

Expand full comment

I am in constant awe of the amount of s**t they go through to live and work here, not to mention up-ending their lives and giving up practically everything and everyone they know. I didn't even want to move across the country! Yet we just take it for granted that the world's best and brightest will always want to come here. I'm afraid we will realize too late if and when it comes to pass that that's no longer true.

Expand full comment

This crisis was 100% predictable. I'm amazed they walked into something so obvious.

As someone who supported Biden from day 1 in the primaries, I'm just annoyed with the incompetence on display.

The only rational policy is one that removes incentives from making the journey in the first place.

Telling people "showing up at the border gives you your best shot at getting in" leads to disaster.

Trump's final policies (that is, after child separation was stopped) should have been the starting point, at least to start.

Expand full comment

^^^Telling people "showing up at the border gives you your best shot at getting in" leads to disaster.^^^

"Disaster" is a very strong word indeed to describe what's going on. It remains to be seen whether it's even a political "disaster" (I doubt it, but time will tell) for Democrats, much less a substantive disaster for America.

The country isn't harmed when foreigners come to the United States. Really, it isn't.

Expand full comment

Here's what I mean: You could say "we're going to run a lottery to let in X-thousand immigrants under a refugee program, and you need to apply from your home country." And people would apply, and you would give better lives to the people who got in.

But if you say "Your best chance of getting one of those slots is to spend your life savings to hire a smuggler and try to get across the border first", then you're creating a zero-sum game where everyone who takes part pays a high price, and you've saved no additional people. You've only succeeded in abusing the people you let in.

Expand full comment

I've long advocated something similar to address the bulk of traditional, economics-driven undocumented immigration. Have an annual (western) "hemispheric" lottery for US work authorization visas , but reserve, say, half the slots for those who have failed to win a visa in the past. Every year you fail to win you're granted an additional entry in the lottery. So, the more times you fail to win, the greater your odds of winning in a subsequent lottery (which incentivizes patience, and working within the system). Persons convicted of immigration violations would be barred for life from entering the lottery in the future (thus giving would-be immigrants an incentive to refrain from trying to enter the US illegally).

Expand full comment

If you were truly expecting competence from Joe Biden you haven't been paying attention.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/bidens-chance-disavow-his-bad-foreign-policy-ideas/612787/

Expand full comment

Surprised Matt did not contend with the main issue that frustrates the asylum process- it is broken and largely used as a loophole to get around the legal immigration. Don’t have the exact stats handy, but something like 80% of asylum claims ultimately rejected. However, we have a shortage of judges and limits on how long we can detain asylum seekers awaiting trial. So the old policy was to release them into the US until the trial- except this was abused and many simply skipped the trial and stayed in the US illegally. This was even easier if you had a child in tow because a judge ruled you can only hold children for a short time, and absent Trump’s harsh child separation policy, the adults would be released with the children after a very short holding period.

This became a simple strategy for migrants wanting to enter the country illegally- show up at the border, preferably with children, claim asylum, wait a few days until they release you and presto- you are now safely in the US.

This is not only disorderly but also overloads the asylum system and frustrates the people that actually do qualify for asylum. Many ways to fix it- funding more judges to expedite trials seems obvious.

Expand full comment

While not without its issues, the "Remain in Mexico" policy was directly aimed at addressing this, and not without reason IMO.

Expand full comment

Agree with Matt's point that if Trump had started with this sort of approach instead of child separation, it may have actually worked out or at least not been a huge political backlash. I'm not privy to the exact conditions in Mexico where the migrants where waiting, but it seems to me that Mexico is perfectly capable of providing safe and humane conditions. For all of Mexico's problems relative to a rich country like the US, it's not North Korea. It will be interesting to see if Biden repackages this approach into something that seems less Trumpy.

Expand full comment

I could never figure out why Trump didn't just staff up the courts conducting these hearings and just process those claims much faster. I think the cruelty is the point crowd got too enamored with the cruelty part that they missed a good opportunity to achieve their original goal of sending people back as quickly as possible without needing an act of Congress to change US asylum law.

Expand full comment

I could be wrong, but I thought it was a congressional issue and the executive branch doesn't have the authority to unilaterally add judges or budget. I imagine if you declare emergency that would be mitigated, albeit temporarily.

Expand full comment

I think you are right, but this seems like the kind of thing they should have been able to pass, especially from 2016-2017. Changing asylum law would have been a much bigger lift.

Expand full comment

I think "America needs more of every kind of judge (except perhaps local judges in the back of beyond)" is a pretty good take on our judicial system. (I know immigration judges are technically part of the executive, but let me have my hobbyhorse.) I remember seeing a graph that shows the US is a bit below the OECD average number of judges per 1000 people (or whatever). This probably overstates things, too, since there are a lot of judges in the US who are seriously underworked (the aforementioned local judges in the back of beyond). And because the US is well known to be an unusually litigious society, it's absurd that we don't have substantially *more* judges than OECD average. But we don't because people don't think that's important. /mild rant

Expand full comment

I wonder if creating some sort of immigration category for people who wouldn't meet the criteria for asylum, but are living in a country that definitely has very bad conditions (gangs, poverty) might solve the problem. And then have people claiming that status apply in their home countries. Honduras does have a really serious crime problem and it makes sense for people to want to leave, but the situation is not the same as being a member of certain ethnic groups in China and treating them the same doesn't make a lot of sense.

Expand full comment

Agreed and this is- at least in my mind- mainly lumped in with the broad non-asylum legal immigration category which of course also desperately needs reform. I think that depending on where you draw that line on poverty and crime, it could easily include half the world's population, so it gets a bit dicey.

Expand full comment

Correction: I should say asylum “hearings” not “trials.”

Expand full comment

The missing piece here seems to be discouraging "asylum seeking" by people who are just seeking better conditions than they have at home, by rapidly hearing their cases and sending back those who cannot prove a legitimate asylum claim.

Expand full comment

It really puzzles me the way "refugees applying for political asylum" and "undocumented migration" are conflated. It's really perplexing, and it doesn't seem to make any sense at all to pretend you can disincentivize people theoretically running for their lives

Expand full comment

This is because the asylum system has become heavily "gamed" in order to gain admission to the US, as other posters have noted. Many, many asylum seekers are not actually seeking asylum in the classical sense, just making use of the system to enter the US, after which they will not show up for further court dates. Not passing a value judgement on them doing that here, that's just the facts, which is why it's not possible to separate these two concerns right now.

And of course, with this said, many people applying for asylum in the US do have legitimate asylum claims, even if the system is increasingly used to facilitate regular undocumented migration.

Expand full comment

BTW most asylum seekers do show up for court dates. They just don't show up for deportation when their claims are denied.

Expand full comment

It's not really so strange. The line between political oppressions and poor governance that leads to poverty, gang violence, paramilitaries, etc. is not clear. But it's the role of immigration judges to make that difference.

Expand full comment

"Does what it says on the tin" = the WYSIWYGlesias rule.

Expand full comment

Disclaimer: speaking for myself, not my employer.

"We should be letting Silicon Valley hire foreign-born programmers in unlimited numbers." I can't disagree with this enough. We're just now starting to see companies (large and small) investing in skill development and training programs because the supply for high skill product development programmers is far too small for demand. Full employment is going to force companies to invest in the human capital development and the second you allow unlimited immigration, that all goes out the window. I can't think of a better use for the billions of dollars major tech companies are sitting on than job training programs.

From my recent national hiring round, I'd estimate that 80% or more of the programmers in the US could get 20-30% more productive with the right training and processes in place. We ended up hiring two engineers from another tech hub because nobody else had the skills we needed.

Full employment will force me to hire and train up folks who I just passed on; unlimited immigration will perpetuate the winner-take-all tech hubs setup that so detrimental.

Expand full comment

For America’s dominant tech sector to stay that way, we should hire the best foreign programmers, not marginal Americans.

Expand full comment

Everyone is marginal from the start. Training and opportunities are the key.

Expand full comment

There’s plenty of free training materials available online. If someone wants to train, they don’t really need a company to help them; you could learn everything with your personal computer and the Internet.

I am very skeptical that everyone can “learn to code” as well as, say, the median Google engineer. It requires some unusual aptitude and talent.

Expand full comment

Not everyone obviously but Google hires lots of people who are just CS majors at good schools with warm bodies, not geniuses or anything, and presumably turns them into successful engineers on the job.

Also it's harder than it sounds to train yourself to code well using the internet, especially if you have another full-time job, I think everyone I know who's done it ended up using a bootcamp or worked their way up from lower-end computer-related jobs like IT

Expand full comment

It is very, very hard to get experience with building and maintaining a long lived system with changing requirements outside of a job doing just that. It is very hard to get experience dealing with how a system behaves under load other than working at a job where you have to deal with that. It is very hard to get experience working with a complex distributed system outside of a job doing that. It's effectively impossible to learn how and when to push back against product management unless you work with them. Which of those things do you think require more aptitude than experience?

Expand full comment

That's all true. But I don't think you need those skills to get a programming job. Indeed, a common criticism of tech interviews is that they undervalue experience (like the skills you list), and overvalue what you learn in college or online (e.g. algorithms, whiteboard coding).

Expand full comment

Those are the sorts of things that I'm arguing that non-tech hub programmers are mainly lacking, or at least a significant enough tranche of them. I screened ~40 people over the past few weeks from all over the country. The folks that failed out of my pipeline were pretty evenly divided between lacking a high level of those skills and folks without the aptitude to develop them. All but one person who made it to the final round was someone from a tech hub. It'd a 12-18 month investment to take people who can already code and make them into good software engineers vs. IT programmers. That's the sort of thing I'm arguing for.

Expand full comment

Or rather - America's tech sector is already hiring the best foreign programmers. The question is whether we should have them live and spend that sweet tech lucre here or in other countries.

Expand full comment

I don't get why the assumption in this thread is that it's a dichotomy, having a tech hub with lots of immigrants makes it MORE likely that local people will get jobs in the tech sector than being in a place with "less competition."

Clearly this is a bit of puffery (couldn't find a better source), but San Jose State, which is a moderately selective state school, is a huge source for Silicon Valley hiring. https://www.sjsu.edu/global/about/graduate-students/powering-silicon-valley/index.html

If the competition thesis were accurate, you would expect Cleveland State grads or something to benefit from the fact that there aren't a lot of immigrants in Ohio. But in reality locals have a better shot of getting in to a big and growing industry.

Expand full comment

Do immigrants with a masters degree from San Jose state count as locals?

Expand full comment

What's happened so far is that in tech hubs the progression has gone something like: Pull in all the engineers from local selective schools -> pull in all the engineers from local, not so selective schools and train them-> create local engineers via bootcamps and train them-> ???. With COVID, we're now at a place where a lot of folks are willing to recruit nationally and there is a wonderful opportunity to start actually helping the folks in Ohio get more productive and make more money.

Expand full comment

While there is a difference in aptitude in many cases, the majority of the difference in capabilities is in training, experience, and process.

Expand full comment

I know this is true in sports. Once people have access to high level coaching, nutrition, and competition they seem to be pretty equal.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Mar 24, 2021
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

They won’t be as good, even with lots of training (the foreigners are training too, for one thing). It’s not really you get trained for a year and then you’re as good as anyone else. Different people are way more or less productive.

Expand full comment

I don't understand your point--are Americans somehow genetically incapable of learning at the same rate as foreigners? (I'm the product of a tech mill in the early '90s, and of the classmates I keep in touch with, most of us are CIO level after very satisfying careers in the field.)

Expand full comment

My view is: there’s a limited supply of programmer talent, and not enough talented Americans to meet demand. So we should important talented people from elsewhere, rather than try and make do with less-talented Americans who won’t perform as well.

Expand full comment

I don't know if I agree. Lots of people can't run the marathon of continuing change and drop out of programming. Being good at it is more about the desire and ability to study a lot than any kind of talent.

Also, lots of immigrants who are programmers are not great at their jobs. There's a lot of randomness involved, and people are bad at evaluating talent on the frontend.

I really think everyone is wrong here. Immigration is unrelated to preserving american jobs, and the talent levels are pretty mixed, it's not the case that everyone stuck in the visa queue is Fabrice Bellard.

Expand full comment

But most of the smartest Americans don't go into tech, no? If Goldman, Bridgewater, and Wachtell have lots of English majors who learn to become genuinely great at finance, which they do, I don't see why Google can't just take marginal coders who are otherwise very smart and train them up

Expand full comment

It can be really damn hard to find people able to do the most demanding tech jobs. Just really, really, hard

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Mar 24, 2021
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

There’s big benefits to the rest of the economy from Google being good (eg you can Google things). Maybe protectionism is good for US programmers, but it’s bad for the rest of the US. And ultimately if big US tech companies get outcompeted by foreign competitors, that will be bad for the programmers too (That’s what happened to Detroit with cars, AFAIK).

I don’t think it’s good to think of industries as primarily jobs programs. The point is to produce valuable stuff.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Mar 24, 2021
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Hear, hear. Credentialism is the real obstacle here. That plus a desire by companies to benefit from training other people have paid for.

Expand full comment

Yup; it seems a little crazy to me to suggest permitting unlimited foreign competition in one of the seemingly few domestic fields these days where it's possible for lots of people to get a really good job with great future prospects!

Expand full comment

Wouldn't this suggest that it would be wise for programmers could command higher salaries by leaving tech hubs to go to places with less competition? But the way these jobs usually work is that having more workers in a particular sector creates more opportunities for specialization and makes workers more productive, so they are not really in competition with each other because the size of the tech labor market in a particular place is not fixed.

Expand full comment

This is why many (by no means all) Big Tech employees want to work remotely and why it will be very interesting to see how each major SWE employer makes decisions about remote work.

Expand full comment

We also have intense training programs in high school and community college. If we were to open the floodgates, that effort would be wasted. Didn't we learn from the manufacturing industry?

Expand full comment

Do most Slow Boring readers consider themselves liberal because I feel like the comment section is always really conservatives. Are SB readers just conservatives that like that MY wants to reduce housing regulation?

I feel like we should do a poll.

Expand full comment

I would say that a lot of folks in the comments of SB are heterodox in their thinking. Unfortunately that reads as “conservative” to some folks because politics is increasingly become an “either you’re with us or against us” endeavor for many people.

Expand full comment

I think a lot of SB readers self conceive as heterodox but it feels like there is a lot more traditional social conservativism than people would admit.

Expand full comment

Maybe, definitely possible. I also think that one would find socially conservative views in a batch of folks that are genuinely heterodox.

Expand full comment

That is true but I feel like you would find more socially liberal ones as well. Social conservatism seems to be close to consensus here on many issues.

Expand full comment

On what issues? That’s not my impression.

Expand full comment

Immigration for starters. Policing, Race, anything more cultural than the fed setting interest rates.

Expand full comment

How do you think about "social conservatism"? What would be some issue defining views? When I hear social conservatism ... I immediately think about the Christian right. But maybe this is up for interpretation.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Mar 24, 2021
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

I think point 2 is very true. I think that is an issue with forums that form from dissatisfaction with existing ones.

Expand full comment

Define social conservatism

Expand full comment

I'm a traditional liberal according to hiddentribes.us and in 2021 that means I'm too left-wing in general for the GOP, and too right-wing for the Democratic Party rhetoric dominating social media. It feels politically homeless, but I vote for Democrats.

Expand full comment

Before I found Matt Y I was a hard conservative. Listen to Rush and Hannity in my car every day. 6 months of reading Matt Y in Moneybox on Slate and I was a moderate Democratic on most issues I voted McCain in 2008 and Obama in 2012. I still see value in having a 0 immigration. Cultural cohesion forcing elites to deal with the people already here rather than import better people etc. But I am basically as open boarders as Matt Y is at this point and I am that way for economic reasons.

Expand full comment

My intuition is, like most of Substack's user base, we're here and willing to pay money to participate in comment threads because there aren't a lot of other options for thoughtful conversation that challenges conventional thinking on the left (and not a lot of thinking on the right--ok that was untrue/mean-ish). So we're mostly disaffected NPR listeners who feel like the liberal side of the argument has already been well-hashed and we're here to dissect the other factors.

Expand full comment

I'm going cold turkey for a week now on my 24 hr a week NPR habit.

Expand full comment

I’m pretty libertarian. Very YIMBY, very pro-immigration. Matt is a little too economically left-wing for me, but spot on on “social” issues. But the Republicans all seem crazy to me (they nominated Trump?!), so I vote Democrat.

Expand full comment

I would say liberal. But I'm pretty far from the people, who really seem to sincerely believe, that we can abolish the police and prisons if we have a really generous safety net.

Expand full comment

One of the weirdest things to me when I step back and think, is how many topics are lumped together in ideological frameworks that have very little to do with each other. Being pro-abortion, union supporting, social democratic/socialists, gun control, environmentally conscious, etc. So many of these are unrelated, yet if you agree or disagree with any one of them, you are labeled a particular way.

It also shows how strong partisanship is that people who would otherwise start with one opinion will often change it based on party signaling.

Expand full comment

I'm not big on rigid self-identification, which is why I'm here in the first place. But if I had to pick, liberal for sure. Probably not progressive by today's definition. Never conservative.

Expand full comment

Depends on what you mean by liberal. I am a classical liberal, meaning that I believe in small government and the freedom of all to believe what they want, and live their lives as they want as long as they are not directly harming others - basically the opposite of Authoritarianism.

On a political scale, which is better measured as Progressive (wanting to make changes) vs. Conservative (conserving the status quo) I am an independent. I look at each argument based on it's merits, rather than the political ideology of those proposing it. This means that I side with the Republicans at times, and the Democrats at others. I am thinker, rather than a follower.

Expand full comment

I really struggle with my place along a liberal - conservative dimension. I felt left of Obama in 08 but now feel right of Biden. But then I have pretty extreme single issue views that seem orthogonal (e.g., Chomsky-esc anti-interventionist, more conservative views on monetary policy that debt levels matter, probably radical views on anti tax fraud). Landscape seems every shifting so it’s hard to assess how much I’ve changed too.

Expand full comment

We could do a poll but need more than 2 options.

Expand full comment

We often see people who are pro immigration but also NIMBY but here we get to see the YIMBYers who are anti immigration.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Mar 24, 2021
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

I am a fiscal conservative, and as you can imagine I agree with very little of what Matt writes in that category. But I like to read his stuff anyway because I think of it as representing the most reasonable and well-articulated case for progressive fiscal policies. If I tried to read an NYT op-ed on the same subject (or, god forbid, some activist's tweetstorm) I doubt I would be able to even get through it.

Expand full comment

I would personally like to hear from you and other right-of-center people more on this substack. There are only a few people I can think of that regularly respond who seem to be right-of-center fiscally. I like reading the debate and hearing both sides. Sometimes it feels like there are great ideas that I support but there is never enough of, "ok so how do we pay for this?" This is not my field of expertise at all so I like hearing both sides.

Expand full comment