I have interacted with so many people who believe that because DOGE exists, the administration will be bringing deficits down rather than expanding them significantly (despite all evidence to the contrary). Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard some form of “it’s refreshing that somebody is finally doing something to balance the budget!” Even if you show them the charts of planned deficits in the House reconciliation plan, there is a ton of psychological resistance to believing what the GOP is really up to.
DOGE may be an ideological project but its main function appears to be as an extremely effective political smokescreen.
I think progressives kinda fooled themselves into thinking the deficit and high interest rates weren’t a big deal. Now the even more fiscally irresponsible party gets to completely explode the deficit, while also claiming the mantle of budget cuts.
My understanding of the MMT view is that inflation is the critical constraint on government spending. Not sure I'd argue either party is doing more than lip-service on that front.
yeah AFAIK the actual thesis statement of MMT is something like, "Taxes do not raise revenue, they reduce inflation. Spending is not limited by revenue, it's limited by inflation."
that said i am not sure this is actually that different from a standard keynesian view except in the most technical theory sense, and the actual fight is that its proponents seem to love going on podcasts to talk about how the government can spend as much money as it wants, so people associate it with that as its main point.
The MMT people are correct that any government that issues its own currency can print as much of it as it wants. They are incorrect in believing that inflation has no negative economic or political consequences.
The actual MMT theoreticians were mistaken about what thresholds of deficit spending would engender inflation and are, you know, economists who are changing their minds as a result.
The lefty kids who used to talk about MMT have already stopped because it's no longer a vehicle providing a justification for engorging on candy.
They were engaged in a lot of Motte-and -Bailey stuff, but in their more defensible position, I think they would agree that inflation had negative consequences, but had the view that anything you could materially "do" you could defacto "afford."
As a descriptive matter, this is just true when it comes to states.
That's my point. In the post-war era, Republicans began as inflation hawks but now they are functionally not. Democrats have never been inflation hawks even though inflation has wrecked two of their presidents.
In practice Democrats were too inflation hawkish 2008-20 for not complaining more loudly tht the Fed was not inflating enough to fulfill its mandates. We need inflation owls, not hawks or doves.
Gotcha. I guess I was thinking more that if they functionally believed in MMT, they'd be saying something like, 'Hey, inflation is already persistently high. We need to be very careful about excessive spending now,' which, as you point out, is definitely not the focus on either side of the aisle these days!
No they should have said, 'Hey, inflation is already persistently high. We need to be very careful get revenue (ideally from consumption taxes) up now."
When the MMT people had their moment in the sun, all the mainstream Democratic economists trashed their crazy ideas. The Democratic administration didn't give them the time of day.
Is there a parallel with Trump's and the Republicans' economic ideas? Not that I see.
I'm pretty sure that anyone who historically could be considered to qualify as a "mainstream Republican economist" has trashed MAGAnomics at this point. They've just been labeled "libtard betacuck soyf@gs" and exiled from publicly visible GOP spaces.
Right, it’s hard for progressives to stir up opposition to exploding deficits when three years ago they were vigorously insisting any such concern was reactionary fake news. Wonder if anything could be learned from this.
Yea, sure, pull the other one. The $1,500 tax cut to my 95th percentile of the income distribution household is so important compared to the value of my investment portfolio and access to small business debt funding at reasonable interest rates, not to mention that my raises won't pace the inflation engendered.
This will single-handedly be the worst single piece of economic policy this country has enacted since at least Nixon. The Bush I tax cuts and the 2017 tax cuts don't compare.
There will be almost no households in the whole country for whom this will be a net positive.
Don't minimize the Bush cuts. They destroyed Clinton's surplus. And healthy trade surpluses would have giving a very different manufacturing response to NAFTA and Chinese liberalization.
Tax cuts for people who have mostly inherited their wealth/position, directly or indirectly, and who will spend it on frivilous luxury items vs strategic investments that makes the country as a whole better off and/or helps poor people. Let’s go for the first option!!!
> My point is that NEITHER party believes in fiscal discipline.
Did you even read Matt's blog post? Outside of Biden, past Dem administrations and even Kamala seemed very interested in deficit reduction or not adding to the budget. To compare the Dem administrations to Bush or Trump (last term or this one) seems ignorant at best and bad faith at worst.
Giving people tax cuts as you are saying still doesn't reduce government spending and that isn't what Republicans are proposing, neither does it do anything to reduce the debt, which we should be doing in times of high employment so that if a future situation calls for it, we can respond appropriately with fiscal stimulus and be able to be nimble as a country to invest in ourselves.
BBB money didn’t disappear into thin air, it went into people’s pockets to pay for construction, infrastructure, and services. That’s also money in people’s pockets and not just the wealthy, plus we get something out of it more than trickle down economics
Yeah I've heard praise for DOGE from people who I was shocked to hear it from who really should know better. It's still impossible to overestimate how informed people are in the comment section compared to the average voter.
I remember when I was younger seeing Bill Maher on Larry King and one of the callers suggested the way to balance the budget was to freeze the pay of Congress. I remember Bill rightfully laughing this off. But I got to tell you, it was not the first time I had heard that sentiment. It was actually clarifying because I had just started becoming more politically aware and even then I was like "how much do you think Congress gets paid?" And it was my first window into realizing a lot of voters all stripes have no great sense at all as to what our government actually spends money on. And also, that you can basically balance the budget with a few tweaks here and there*. So yeah, not that shocked that you've encountered people who think DOGE must have achieved some major savings.
Having said that. Musk's polling is pretty terrible. https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate-silver-bulletin Now maybe if he wasn't so obnoxious in the way he conducted himself his polling would be better. In fact, I think it's likely that would be true. But nonetheless I think it's worth keeping in mind that he basically only has the support of the MAGA base (and you may see more erosion there if his asinine cutting starts leading to older Trump voters or Trump voters with elderly parents not getting their Social Security checks).
I have no doubt you've had some of the interactions you've had. But I'm really wondering how widespread this is. Sort of (possibly) a version of Pauline Kael's quote (that she never actually said) that she didn't know how Nixon could have won, she didn't know anyone who voted for him.
* In general, I think the movie "Dave" is very enjoyable RomCom and just a general fun Friday night date night movie. But wow, does it have some absolutely awful ideas about how budget works and how government works in general. Like talk about a window into the normie worldview of how our government operates. That you can just gather the cabinet around an oak table, cut the very obvious "waste, fraud and abuse" and presto! that social program that helps small children is paid for. Yay!
I think it is really, really hard to overestimate how much any number greater than ~$10 million all "sounds the same" to people. Like, once it triggers, "Way more money than I have," people get really sloppy about vastly different numbers.
Taking it 100% at face value, it's for $5.2 million. So if we found 10 savings of that magnitude every day including Christmas, then we'd... save $18 billion per year. Do that for all four years of Trump's administration, and we'd be at under $80B in savings. Do 10x that, and we wouldn't get to the $1 trillion that DOGE promised.
I think that for at least 30% of the population, all that fuzzes into "a lot of interchangeable big numbers," and for another 30% of the population, they can math through it if they concentrate on it, but if they just hear something mentioned off-hand, millions or tens of millions sounds "big," not "inconsequential."
Also a version of that (possibly misattributed) Stalin quote ""A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." Once numbers get big enough it just becomes this abstraction to most people.
Its why I get it when politicians pepper their speeches with personal anecdotes about how some policy they champion or policy they passed helped out one individual. Even when they are particularly treacly or when I start to say "oh come on, this policy is why John/Jane Doe has a job?". I'm sure a lot of them (like Obama or I hate to say it, but from everything we know, DeSantis) could recite deep in the weeds numbers about a policy to an audience...and also know that audience would fall asleep in about 10 minutes.
I think that the idea of government being massively inefficient and bloated is something that a very large swath of center-left and center-right Americans believe in their bones. (And they're probably right.) For a lot of politically middle-ish people who have been disappointed with both the Democrats and the Republicans for a while, this has been their main gripe for decades. I am thinking right now of people like my dad who I am 99% sure voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 and constantly mutters "both parties are crazy".
For those people, if you come at them with evidence of DOGE's failures and exaggerations, their reply is "well can you really fault them for at least trying? Somebody has to do it eventually!"
It just strikes people as absurd that a well-intentioned effort to slim down government waste would ever not be successful. Honestly, I feel the same way! The degree to which Musk et al seem to be going about things incompetently is pretty jaw-dropping.
One of the many tragedies with this. There really was an opening to do targeted cuts that were probably necessary. Our procurement process for government contracts is just ripe for overcharging and skimming off the top for one.
I think also, one of the problems is a lot of the solutions to make government more efficient is counterintuitive to average people. I think its one of the reasons GOP feels free to massively cut IRS funding (not just Trump). Like tell someone that we should increase funding of the IRS, and I suspect a lot of normies are like "wait you want to make filing my taxes even harder and think more bureaucrats would make things more efficient?!" Feel pretty confident a decent number of Harris voters would say some version of this.
The party that hates government and has never been interested in learning how it works was never going to make smart targeted cuts and make government more efficient.
It is ironic. In an effort to avoid fraud and waste - calls for more scrutiny and stronger controls ... produce process that have even more red-tap that enables even more graft.
I think once you decide procurement should go through a competitive bidding process you've committed to waste, and then you take on more waste to avoid wastes more nefarious siblings, fraud and abuse. And then you take on even more waste to ensure fairness and transparency in the process.
The alternative is to just give Elon Musk the contract for funny money amounts and call it a day, but I don't hear any serious clamoring for that approach.
That is why the best politicians come up with positive ways to spin this stuff, even it is a simplification or slightly misleading.
Here are some ideas to sell increased IRS staffing:
- Everyone knows that the government is using ancient computer systems, we need to modernize, so things will be faster and more efficient. It will save time and money and you'll get your returns within 48 hours* (in most cases)
- IRS does your taxes for you! If you have just w2/1099s the IRS will mail you return and you don't need to do anything if it is correct. This works great in places like australia. Show the example form on TV. Give everybody a $200 credit if they need to file their own, both to bring the people with complex taxes along with you and to through the tax industry a bone for less oppoisition
- Create the Tax Fraud Agency. Or Billionaires Tax Group. Position things as just going after the tax cheats. Maybe even through people like foreign investors under the bus (at least rhetorically) and cite examples of sympathetic people ripping off their fellow citizens. Joe construction worker pays his taxes, why they hell does the real estate developer with sketchy accounting get away without paying taxes?
The democrats increasing failure to sell anything to the public, other than pitching things to fellow leftists, or worse - to wonks and bureaucrats, astounds
TBF I wouldn't have voted for Johnson if I lived in a swing state, but I live in Texas, so it was safe to do so, and unlike some libertarian candidates, tolerably sane, competent, and well intended.
It is just beyond me why intelligent well meaning people can possibly imagine that effectively slimming down the most complex institution in, as far as we can tell, the history of the Milky Way galaxy would be straightforward.
Of course it is massively inefficient, but not in ways that are important macroeconomically or that compare to the inefficiency of NEPA/NIMBY/deficits/ import restrictions/failure to attract world talent, no tax on net CO2 emissions.
And that’s why you can’t have a functioning democracy with a population of willfully ignorant imbeciles. They literally do not know what they vote for or against.
On the Dave point, the China trade/Nobel prize storyline on Veep drove me insane by how big the gap was between how the writers thought the world worked and reality.
It's a shame because in general Veep got a lot right about the very real way petty grievancies, stupid personal slights and pettiness drive a lot of dad to day political activity. I've mentioned before but I've worked multiple campaigns and my wife has worked for both NY senators. In addition, we have lots of friends from our politics days. We all basically loved the show in part because there would be certain scenes where all of us would say "I think I've heard this exact conversation" or "I definitely remember someone exactly like this".
My line to people who are interested in politics but haven't worked in politics is that if you take West Wing and Veep, mush them together, you get decently close to reality; West Wing is too positive in its outlook* and Veep much too cynical. But they both get a lot right.
*One of the more underrated episodes of West Wing that stuck with me is when Sam Seaborne's character convinces an old law school buddy to run for Congress. But the administration pulled the rug out from under him when they discovered there was some case that maybe had evidence of racial bias in jury selection and that administration wouldn't throw their support behind the campaign. Sam has to tell his friend who is understandably furious which of course weighs on Sam. Because West Wing is West Wing we're supposed to understand that Sam is broken up about this development. But I thought it was "great" in showing that even the most "pure of heart" political operative, politicians etc. will end up having to make some pretty cold blooded decisions that end up knifing people in the back.
Given how terrible most Americans are at math, this hardly surprises me. To the average Joe, $1 million, $3 billion, $8 trillion, it's all just big numbers, with the relative amounts between these figures, incomprehensible. Thus, a DOGE savings of $5 million by not feeding starving children in Africa is equivalent, in their minds, to cutting $500 billion from the deficit.
I don't know what the solution is, but the fact is that people are vulnerable to this sort of deception, in part, because math education in the United States really sucks.
I think that news articles about federal spending should never use the words “million” or “trillion”. They should all be talking about .04 billion (instead of 40 million) and 4,862 billion (instead of 4.8 trillion). I know their style guide rejects this and in fact says to always simplify these things, but that makes them easy to read quickly and hard to understand, while I think newspapers have a duty to make it easy to understand even if it makes things a little bit ugly to read quickly.
"Anything that ends in -illion all sounds the same to voters."
When the media reports on the size of a meteorite, they never say "12 meters" or something boring. They'll say "size of a car" "size of a truck" "size of a school bus". They'll measure volumes in terms of Olympic-sized swimming pools.
This used to annoy me but I think they're genuinely onto something. Only nerds like us care about something lame like "meters." Oh, heaven forbid, "metres."
I'm not sure exactly what unit should be used -- maybe "1.2 defense budgets" or "9.5 GDPs of Canada"? It should be something that kind of moves in line with inflation and doesn't rapidly fluctuate year-to-year.
I don’t think you need to. I don’t think it needs to even be stable from article to article. What is essential is really just that within an article, they stick to one unit.
I think this still fails to comprehend that ppl have no base conception of how much a billion is. I think doing everything as Percent of Federal budgets would be much cleaner and more intuitive. People have a better sense of how much 20% of anything is than some large number
My thought is that people have no more or less conception of how much a billion is or how much the federal budget is.
What is most important is that there is one reference unit used throughout. I think the advantage of using "billion dollars" as that reference unit rather than "federal budget" is that with "billion dollars", these things will usually range from about 0.001 billion dollars to 17,000 billion dollars, while with "federal budget", it'll range from 0.00000006 to 1. But definitely when talking specifically about bigger things, it could be better to use "federal budget" than "billion dollars". As long as the article is consistent throughout about which single unit it uses.
This seems like a very good idea, although I think I might make "million" the root (or else relax the restraint and allow both "million"--at least in single-digit-million amounts--and "billion"). A million dollars is nowadays a cognizable amount for actual-human consumption goods (e.g., housing in major cities can reasonably be measured relative to a million dollars). Calling it ".001 billion dollars" seems kind of weird in a way that doesn't apply as much to amounts in the 10+ million to trillion dollar range.
The main reason I don’t like allowing million at all here is that even I was briefly tricked by stories saying something like “they cut $4 billion but also saved $7 million”. But if one story is only talking about millions, then that’s probably fine - it’s just that a story that involves both millions and billions needs to pick one and stick with it.
Smart people everywhere think their country's education system is terrible because people aren't actually a blank slate who can be made smart across all dimensions by education.
Same thing w/ the assumption voters don't know anything is a specific American thing. Voters everywhere don't know things, it's just there are 300 million American's, other countries rightly care about American politics, and low-info people in say Austria or Taiwan don't post about politics in English on social media.
I think it's slightly higher in the US than maybe say, Germany but not that much worse.
My favorite story is the UK had to institute the Police Caution: “You do not have to say anything. But, it may harm your defense if you do mention…”
Because people in the UK didn’t understand that Miranda rights don't apply in the UK.
I’ve heard that cops in many countries - Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden and especially Canada have suspects saying, “I know my rights.” And the cops are like, “This isn’t America!”
Part of what I find annoying about this is that a lot of these numbers (like the $5 million you mention) are so much lower than numbers people hear passively through entertainment, like how much Deshaun Watson's contract is or how much the most recent Indiana Jones movies cost to make. And those numbers are still small compared to the size of our economy or the Pentagon's budget.
The CDC Lead Program's budget, which Matt mentions in this post as getting eliminated, is about the same as Deshaun Watson makes in a year to not play football ($51m and $46m, respectively). Most of the Lead Program budget is just transfers to state governments in the form of grants.
I think it's really hard to overcome quite literally decades of messaging that the government is bad and inefficient. I don' think this is fixable honestly; there will always be some specific example of spending or procedural breakdown that people can point to as an example of government inefficiency.
I also genuinely believe that if any large organization were subjected to the same type of public scrutiny and reporting as the government, the scandals/waste/fraud/abuse would be just as bad if not worse.
Think of how much public money American sports leagues regularly waste, but politicians who stand up to a team that threatens to leave if they aren't gifted a $500M new stadium risk reelection. And that doesn't even get into teams like the Jets have found ways to light money on fire or teams like the Arizona Cardinals that have spent decades being irrelevant.
I question how effective it is. We obviously travel in different circles, but I don't know anybody who thinks Musk is delivering bang-up fiscal results (I don't dispute that they're out there, among Trump's base). More to the point, it won't be effective when the red ink turns from a river to a tsunami in the coming months. The bond market is the great equalizer. That's another thing James Carville was right about.
Not personal circles (All my friends are college ed libs & lefties), but I see on reddit r/nostupidquestions fairly frequently something like "If DOGE is saving all this money where is it going?" Not realizing it's impercetabily small amounts of money in the context of the budget. Destroying entire federal agencies *sounds* like it would save money, those are radical changes! But also really small when you compare it to the money spent on healthcare benefits or cash transfers.
It's not just the GOP. Remember Biden trying to push 6 trillion in BBB until Manchin shut it down?
And that's because politicians in both sides lie to voters, and voters want to believe the lies.
The truth is WAY more has been promised in entitlements than will ever be paid. The truth is that there will need to be cuts to SS and Medicare/Medicaid.
No, you can't pay for it all by taxing billionaires. No you can't pay for it by cutting waste fraud and abuse.
Yes Obamacare contributed to the problem by greatly expanding Medicare.
Yes I'm fine with modest increases in the payroll tax if paired with entitlement cuts. Something like
Raise the retirement age and index it to life expectancy
end heroic end of life care on tax payer dime.
Require people on Medicaid to stay thin and fit (take a page from Japan)
How did Obama expand Medicare? I just looked it up and it sounds like the three substantial changes to Medicare were making preventative care free, demanding that it pay lower rates for care, and plugging an intermediate gap in prescription drug coverage. Only the third of those would increase spending, but it seems by less than the second would cut spending.
It seems weird to take the one bill that did the most to fix the cost problems with Medicare and say that it worsened the situation.
Oh you meant *Medicaid*, not Medicare. Those are very importantly different programs. Medicare already covers everyone over 65. The point of Medicaid expansion was that it eliminates uninsured populations, which actually ends up being a lot closer to budget neutral than you think, because of government reimbursement to hospitals for emergency coverage of uninsured patients.
In the context of rolling Medicaid, Medicare, CHIP, and Tricare together to rationalize all of the overhead and making it a universal program for minors, over-60's, veterans, and the poor.
Then use it to squeeze the ever-loving fuck out of provider/vendor/pharma/PBM rent-seeking until it is able to deliver today's results and outcomes with 80% of the budget of those four programs.
THEN... sell it on the exchanges at cost for anyone who needs to buy a plan.
Squeeze the private insurers to actually innovate and deliver value, or die.
Dude - you are all over this thread, constantly talking about a bill that never passed. And making it seem like Obama and Biden economics policies were as bad as Bush or Trump is just plain ignorant at best or bad faith at worst.
I also don't get your statement that way more has been promised in entitlements than ever will be paid. That simply isn't true. There do not need to be cuts to Social Security in order to keep it funded, just get rid of the cap on payroll taxes, or increase the retirement age by 2 years.
I do agree with you that our commitments to Medicare and Medicaid do need to be dealt with, but the healthcare system in America is a beast so it is too complicated to break down and solve with a simple solution. That said, I assume you are saying that Medicaid expansion and the ACA were the worst things to happen, but one could argue that the increased benefits of having a healthier population and access to healthcare is still better, and it at least tried to be offset originally by a tax if you recall.
Telling people who may be disabled to stay thin and fit, may not be reasonable in practice or even possible, but sounds good on paper... In a civilized society that is also the richest country in the history of the world, we should not be blaming the poorest possible and disadvantaged people for our current financial situation.
That's because more was promised in benefits than paid in taxes.
Your contention that a massive tax increase would fix the gap makes my point. WAY more was promised in benefits than was paid for in taxes by the people getting the benefits.
Your solution of course is to raise taxes on other people. IE make SS even more of a welfare program.
Staying thin is simple (though not easy). Eat less. You even save money doing it.
If we are going to provide healthcare funding for poor people, then they should be doing their part to keep costs down.
Getting rid of the cap on payroll taxes would not be a massive tax increase... In fact the CBO already estimated that a small increase of just 3.5% would make it solvent for basically the rest of this century...
It's also not just raising taxes on other people, I max out on my social security tax every year so it'd also be raising the tax on myself. I simply stated that we could fix the program if we wanted to. You also previously said that you are fine with a modest increase to pay for it, and I agreed but provided some nuance so now you are against it lol? Pick a lane dude. Social Security does not need cuts as it is self funding, we can just fix it if we wanted to.
Also did you read the article you quoted?
> ""There was high inflation that resulted in a high COLA, and then those benefits affect the solvency of the trust fund," he said."
If you actually looking at the data any payout or solvency issues are mostly driven by demographic shifts and a shrinking worker-to-beneficiary ratios. Not because we over promised people. Calling social security a welfare program when people pay into the system sure is a take... the government doesn't have a debt or deficit problem because of social security.
I also am thin and in shape, that doesn't mean I think poor people may be overweight (what definition are you using btw? >20% BMI?) they should lose their benefits. There is no such thing as a perfect program in all of human history, if we can get something as close to 80% or 90% good for any program we should be happy about that and tweak as needed.
I had previously agreed with you that a modest increase to the payroll tax and potential small cuts to Medicare / Medicaid do need to be done. I also think if you have a high net worth, you should get reduced benefits from Social Security.
It just seems like you hate poor people, or think that if someone is overweight, think work injury, diabetes or back issues and poor it is entirely their fault and we shouldn't' give them benefits. Even if the social cost and real cost over time would be more expensive to society. Believe me, I wish our society took a few more notes from other cultures like Japan regarding being healthy, low crime and urban walkability, mass transit, etc. Americans have an obesity problem, just punishing the poor because they get a benefit and otherwise may still be working or low income seems needlessly cruel and doesn't give the savings you think we'd need.
As already stated in my previous comment, we need to reduce our debt, but you and I seem deeply divided over tax increases. You can't save your way out of the deficit we have. We need some tax increases to pay for stuff, either now or later, and you also need growth. Good things there are ways to do both!
SS taxes are currently set at 12.4% (split between employer and employee).
So a 3.5% increase would be effectively an increase of 28.2% If my tax rate when up 28% I would call that pretty massive.
That being said, even eliminating the cab entirely (IE a truly insane tax increase) wouldn't fully solve the problem.
"Another policy option to increase revenues for Social Security is to raise or eliminate the cap on the amount of income subject to the Social Security tax. In 2024, workers pay Social Security tax on only the first $168,600 of income. According to CRFB, increasing the taxable income limit subject to the Social Security tax to $350,000 could generate around $830 billion in new revenues over the next 10 years, closing 22 percent of Social Security’s 75-year solvency shortfall. The same analysis projects that eliminating the Social Security tax cap altogether could raise $1.8 trillion in new revenues for the program over 10 years and close the 75-year solvency gap by 68 percent. "
Note I'm fine with tax increases if paired with real entitlements reforms.
So maybe increase the SS tax rate by from say 12.4% to 13.4% (keeping the cap), along with raising the retirement age, and indexing it to life expectancy. Also changing to chained CPI.
For Medicare we need to end heroic end of life care. We also need to invest a LOT more money in R&D on increasing healthspan instead of just life span. And probably pay for a lot more GLP-1's for people even when younger.
I think one thing that everyone is missing is that when the budget process started to now the bond market has changed. The tariffs broke the exceptionalism of US debt. The bond market is going to look very differently at a largely unfunded tax cuts than they might have previously and reaction is probably going to be more like Truss tax cuts than people expect.
Republican's can obviously ignore the bond market but that will only make everything else more difficult and given the US credit market there is likely to be immediate pain felt by everyone.
Doesn't mean that Democrats should rely on the bond market discipline but it will factor into making the process a lot hard that Republican's admit.
Britain's Conservative Party actually cares about the national interest and had a feasible means of replacing the incompetent Truss with a credible alternative. Neither of those things is true about the Republican Party.
It's not true with respect to Trump, but it's more true of Congress. They may very well change course if their budget causes issues in the treasury market.
I would have thought Republican businessmen would have a vested interest in preserving a stable and predictable policymaking environment over marginal tax cuts, but here we are.
For any particular Republican businessman, what's the net difference between "money I make from getting tax cuts passed" and "money I lose from problems in the bond market"?
Given that Trump is currently e-screaming at Powell for not cutting interest rates yeah, I'm pretty sure he's not taking the bond market very seriously.
I mean jeez guys it's been EIGHT DAYS since that vertical spike that forced Trump to pause the tariffs, are we still talking about bonds? Christ!
Basically Trump and the GOP are moving the U.S. towards default risk. If he starts calling on the Fed to cut interest rates it signals he is going to stoke inflation to as a tacit default.
President Donald Trump said Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s termination from his position can’t come quickly enough, arguing that the US central bank should have lowered interest rates already this year, and in any case should do so now.
What particularly scares me is that if the Fed does this, they may find themselves pushing on a string to a certain extent. Meaning that more demand from the Fed will be partially offset by weaker demand from foreign investors (which could be weakened even further by news of the Fed's action.)
The Fed will most likely cut rates sometime soon as it sees the economy careening toward a bad recession and Trump will crow about his great victory over Jerome Powell.
The inflation, which is FAKE NEWS and totally the fault of Sleepy Joe, Lyin Kamala, and the DEEP STATE, will be kept under the control by our Manufacturing of Arms and Ammunition to equip Our Fighting Men in Greenland and Panama! Low Taxes equal lower prices! Pass The Great Big Beautiful Bill!
"Point Five. Every establishment, concern, corporation or person engaged in production of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth produce the same amount of goods per year as it, they or he produced during the Basic Year , no more and no less. The year to be known as the Basic or Yardstick Year is to be the year ending on the date of this directive. Over or under production shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.
"Point Six. Every person of any age, sex, class or income, shall henceforth spend the same amount of money on the purchase of goods per year as he or she spent during the Basic Year, no more and no less. Over or under purchasing shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.
"Point Seven. All wages, prices, salaries, dividends, profits, interest rates and forms of income of any nature whatsoever, shall be frozen at their present figures, as of the date of this directive.
The 10-year hasn't really moved much. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/US10Y?qfsearchterm=. I mean it's up, but by normal random variance amounts. Not by any amount that signals investors think this is a real threat. If I had to guess, the WSJ report that Trump backed off tariffs due to the spike in the 10-year is likely giving too many investors a false sense of security that he wouldn't actually follow through on this threat.
It's the relationship to the equity market that spooked people, not the magnitude of the change. Even with random noise, equities and fixed income should have an inverse relationship. The third part of the story here is forex, where USD has *also* been performing badly (I think USD to EUR is at its lowest point since 2021?). These things are supposed to have predictable relationships to one another that are breaking down because the underlying dynamic (that the US government is essentially infinitely trustworthy and US debt is a zero-risk asset) is no longer seen as completely accurate.
This little mini-scare is going to be like one of those tiny strokes you get before a real one if the GOP moves ahead with trillions of dollars in unfunded tax cuts.
What's concerning is the 10 year has basically stayed the same despite the odds of a recession going from like 20% to 50-60%.
The initial theory of the Trump administration was you'd have essentially a "hot" economy with a bunch of deficit spending tilted toward the rich. This is why the 10 year yield actually peaked at 4.7% back in January when the SP 500 was above 6k... the expectation is you'd have a bunch of unpaid for/deficit increasing tax cuts, but the economy would basically keep firing the same way.
Now we have an consensus of much weaker economic growth and an increased odds of a recession, but the interest rate on the 10 year has only dropped to 4.3% or so. If you consider that the monetary response to weak economic growth "should" be dramatic rate cuts this seems troubling.
It probably reflects the idea that any fed rate cuts will be pushing against a nasty inflationary environment even if there's an economic slowdown.
There are two components to this -- one is that tariffs mechanically raise the prices... in theory the fed should look through this an not raise tariffs due to a one time increase in prices from a new tariffs level but impacts are complicated and difficult to disentangle sometimes.
The second is more troubling, essentially tariffs disrupt the whole US and global supply chain so they will reduce overall manufacturing output, which is a classic supply shock and can result in a situation where despite lower growth you have higher inflation. In this case the Fed doesn't have a great way to respond since you have inflation (same amount of dollars chasing fewer goods) but also a weak economy.
Will this definitely happen? It's hard to say. But we've gone to a situation where both the inflation and employment rates were relatively benign and had very favorable outlooks to a situation where there are risks on both sides (and more concerningly the possibility of stagflation/inflation in a low growth/recessionary scenario). The market reflects this possibility which is the concern rather than 4.3% being an especially "high" 10 year yield.
"What's concerning is the 10 year has basically stayed the same"
What happened to the 10 year treasuries is that they moved 100 bp lower due to fears of a looming recession and the expectation that the Fed would cut rates to counter it while simultaneously increasing 100 bp due to fears of looming increases in inflation and the expectation that the Fed would raise rates to counter it.
I certainly think significant inflation is coming. Banana republic dictators frequently try to get out of their problems by printing money. I don’t see why Trump would be any different.
Now that would be entertaining! No, I think he'll launch an attack on the independence of the Fed. He can remove members "for cause." Suppose he does that on some trumped-up (pun not intended) ground and replaces them with more pliant people. Who's going to stop him?
The courts? I mean, Trump can declare that he's removing them, but, other than throwing them in jail or having the FBI tackle them as they try to walk into the building, he can't stop them from showing up for work, and their replacements have to be approved by the Senate in any event.
Just going to keep posting this quote "I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a . 400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."
This is actually why apropos of this post that Yglesias underrates the possibility that GOP doesn't actually end up passing a massive tax cut or underrates the possibility the bill will have a lot smaller tax cuts and much heavier spending cuts. Yes, the House and Senate are increasingly made up of Trumpy nutballs like MTG or Tommy Tubberville. But there are still plenty of members who are not idiots (even someone like John Kennedy of LA, the idiocy is mostly for show. Which in some ways makes his "dumb" statements more infuriating). Given tight margins in House and Senate (the GOP margin in the senate is at the end of the day not that high historically), are we really sure there aren't enough Senate and House members who will get spooked by the bond market and vote no on a bill they know will spike the 10-year? It would only take a few House members for this to happen which is I think Matt underrates this possibility.
Republican legislators are motivated more by individual electoral prospects than any macroeconomic good of the country. Giving them more credit than I think they deserve, I'll concede they do care about the economy, just not enough to stand in the way of Trump. They'll choose the safer bet for themselves and a roll of the dice for the rest of us.
The problem is neither party really wants to make the hard decisions, and voters certainly don't want to hear that benefits will be getting cut for THEM and their taxes going up as well.
So I honestly think we probably have a 75%+ shot of a fiscal greater depression. The market will be fine until it's not. And then the collapse will make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
The US bond market is WAY bigger than mortgages, it's the most important market in the world, and if it collapses there will be a global greater depression.
One can hope so, but as a political matter, is the connection between Republicans’ clown show budget math and macroeconomic pain associated with a debt spiral tight enough in the minds of voters to discipline the Republicans should they see rising interest rates and just choose to ignore them?
if unemployment goes up materially, Dems will start crushing it on the generic ballot and everything will change. Trump’s floor is around 35, and would not avert carnage in the midterms
On the one hand, good if true I guess. On the other hand, this answer seems like it depends on everything actually going to shit in order to create any kind of political incentive for fiscal discipline, whereas Truss’s sacking was preemptive.
Given their track record and the absurdity of their budget proposals to date, my priors are that due to a combination of hyperbolic discounting, safe seats, general idiocy and fecklessness, and the hope that they can mislead the electorate into this being the Democrat’s fault somehow, the Republicans would just go ahead and do it and wait for the political bill to come due (hoping they can weasel out of it then) instead of reasoning backwards from future electoral losses to avoid economic catastrophe today.
they have to know lowering taxes on the rich is shitty politics. however, many of the house members are more interested in pleasing rich people who might help them in the future than their own constituents.
we have enough money to live abroad until 2029 if it comes to it. my wife might get a wfh job as an accountant, in which case we wouldn’t even bleed much. i would end up doing document review or some other form of shit work or just slowly bleeding wealth. worse than the life we’ve built but better than el salvador.
What struck me reading this is how hard it is to communicate effectively about extremely important but tedious matters of public policy.
I have a PhD, and while it's the kind of social science PhD that's basically a "kick me" sign in this comments section, I'm sort of smart (though a lot dumber than I should be). And yet I found this article difficult to follow on a casual read and glossed over a lot of the details. With concentration I would be perfectly capable of following the macroeconomic chains of reasoning, but there's two huge caveats there - "with concentration," as in the time and patience to sit down with something out of my normal cognitive terrain, and "I", as in someone who's in an upper percentile for quantitative reasoning (stop snickering) and reading comprehension.
Now try communicating the consequences of GOP budget proposals to someone who has neither of those things.
Also, one thing we learned in the runup to the last election during the Great Inflation Discourse was that subject matter expertise is ipso facto "elitist," and the right and heterodox left discovered their shared enthusiasm for lived experience and standpoint epistemology. How dare you tell "ordinary voters/folx/working families other conversation-stopping populist-sounding term" that inflation is not, in fact, historically high and is coming down? Eggs! EGGS, by God!
"Slow boring of hard boards" is becoming a mantra for me in these "we're based you're a cuck LOL" times, but I admit that its invocatory powers are waning.
One of the biggest concern voters have about Elon musk is that he’ll get a tax cut while people lose Medicare benefits. I think this can in fact be messaged!
I hope so! I keep thinking about one of the Lisas (Lisa C?) who told that story about being invited to a party by a Elon cultist…hopefully not a typical sort of person.
I think of it like this: using social science research as a political instrument (as opposed to a policy instrument) is a category error. Doing so with low-quality, ephemeral research is even worse, and creates huge problems for responsible practitioners.
ETA: by "politics" I mean something closer to "campaigning" and by "policy", I mean "governing".
In one sense, policy *is* politics, but I take your larger meaning. I was reading some paper or other the other day to use in a research proposal, and early on it used the phrase "moral clarity" and I was like nyoooooope.
This problem is as old as Aristotle. No one has the patience to follow a Logos argument, so we use Ethos as a shortcut. But no one trusts anyone, so the only option left is Pathos. Thence, "you're a cuck lol"
They get that living beyond your means is not sustainable. Of course the message isn't very believable from Democrats that tried to pass a 6 trillion BBB
Yeah, as a data scientist, i can relate a lot! Like I needed to take time to follow this kinda stuff even if I’m used to this type of thing.
And while I fantasize the world where ppl see the data (and understand it correctly including the data generation process) more than “lived experience”, persuading ppl out of that has been extremely hard - granted, I tend to be really(maybe too much lol) cautious trying not to come across as invalidating their feeling but still…
You can’t have a democracy with an uneducated populace. Something people in this comment section should think of before they go into their usual anti-education rants (”education is useless, better with vocational training etc”).
I agree, and despite me saying that “lack of an educated population” is a contemporary problem it’s been a problem since the invention of civilization, as someone pointed out in this thread. The fact that populations in a sufficiently complex society are largely not able to grasp issues of public policy at the scales that matter is a central paradox of democratic government. But it also sucks that ignorance is actively being celebrated (“based LOL”).
At the same time, from one point of view higher education in its form as the university *is* useless for a lot of people. I don’t mean that in a judging way; I mean that a large part of any population is not going to be interested in learning formalized systems of abstract thought, critical thinking, historical analysis, quantitative reasoning, etc. And that’s fine! There should be alternatives to “university” that equip people for decent jobs.
Having said that, the fact that governments have taken a “university for all” (which has often been a means of stashing away unemployed young people, let’s be honest) approach has given me a career. So I there is some hypocrisy in my first paragraph.
I understand that the SB type - educated, largely within spitting distance of centrist politics (whether right or left), and dominated by deeply empirical disciplines (lots of engineers, lawyers, etc. around here) would have looked at the last 15 years of what universities (in the US) have become and be exasperated. I share some of that, because I’m a recovering former post-structuralist-ish type (I say “ish” because I was never smart or patient enough to get really deep into it, so even now most of what I know is broad strokes).
But I agree that it also sucks being a punching bag, and there are days in this comments section where it’s like, maybe I’ll just take a smoke break on this one.
At the end of this process, how exactly will 'the rich' benefit? They will get a tax cut, but what will become of their substantial investments in equities and treasuries?
If I were rich, would I prefer a world where I pay more tax but can simply toss my wealth into index funds and government bonds and usually watch 'line go up', or a world where I pay less tax but my investments are now high risk and something I have to worry about? And aside from that, rich people (like all others) benefit from high quality governance with educated people doing their jobs effectively.
I feel that the change in how the Treasury market is viewed will have big negative ramifications for the future. What a waste.
With the Truss story, a major part of what happened was that specifically wealthy people revolted against a plan that was going to give them a tax cut. If you don't have the wealthy people on your side, then what even is the constituency for doing a tax cut for rich people?
The problem is that the US political context is different. The GOP has only one political constituency: Donald Trump. If Trump decides the tax cuts are good, he will do tax cuts. If the Senators get calls from their rich friends that the treasury markets have them spooked, they might resist -- unless Trump says "no, fuck that, we are doing the tax cuts". Then they will fall in line. They have no capacity to resist him.
There are senators like Murkowski that are immune to Trump. She's won an election as a write-in candidate. If anyone threatens to primary her, she'll just respond "come at me, bro"
It only takes one or two like her to tank everything, if the plan gets truly insane. Unfortunately, though, a lot of damage can be done to the country with a plan that is only mildly insane.
We'll see. The margins are so damned narrow that it only takes a handful to think, "these contacts are my retirement plan and my social cachet rests with them as well, fuck it, I'll just retire comfortably instead of staying in office to try to clean up the mess."
They are very clearly sick people. They will plow over thousands or millions of lives to try to get a High Score. Money is not what it is to us to these people.
It might have more to do with the situation they are in than inherent character defects. I can't say for sure what kind of crazy notions I would start to get in my head if I never had to concern myself about any kind of material want for half a second, for the rest of my life.
My inner Beutler yearns for a sharp message that coheres the attack on Trump's executive lawlessness with the GOPs Congressional impulse to obliterate federal finances.
To us libs the picture is pretty clear - it's the Hungarification of the USA. But even that is too intellectual.
Something to the effect of "Republicans hate your guts and think you're too stupid to know it. They are going to destroy the programs you've already paid for your health and retirement to give rich fuckos more tax breaks while allowing Trump to tank what's left of the economy. Then they're going to destroy the constitution to make sure you can't throw them out of power."
Just replace "you're too stupid to know it" with "they've tricked you and exploited your loyalty and trust" and it becomes more palatable while retaining its truth value.
"To us libs the picture is pretty clear - it's the Hungarification of the USA. But even that is too intellectual."
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Just say "Russification." With where we're starting from it's more like Hungary, but the end point is pretty much the same (and probably more similar because of our [soon-to-be-ex-]superpower status), and people get what you mean when you say it.
Oh, but say "like Russia" instead of "Russification," for the purposes of this discussion.
In addition to what David R says, the other reassuring thing about this cultural revolution is that they haven’t managed to turn the students against their teachers. Texas A&M students aren’t out protesting Gaza, but they are fighting the regents in court for the right to put on a drag show, not for the right to fire or kill their decadent professors the way 1976 in China played out.
It's somewhat relieving, because the broad middle and professional classes are literally 100X the population share of the "intellectual regressives" in the 1970's PRC. Like I said the other day, it's not possible for the GOP/DOGE program to club the researchers, professors, public servants, HR people, doctors, and public-sector consultants without also at least delivering a heavy glancing blow to the engineers, accountants, small business owners.
The suburbs of Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Lancaster, Columbus, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Omaha... these places matter electorally and will feel pain from the stupid Maoism-lite aspects of what Trump is pursuing, or at least allowing his pet ideologues to pursue.
well, it is a cultural revolution with american characteristics. the chinese version also had a backlash of a sort: the gang of four didn't have a happily ever after. revolutionaries rarely do, but the inevitability of the backlash doesn't stop them.
but yes, it is a large sector so they have to be at least a bit picky
I've been trying to figure out whether Elon Musk or Laura Loomer is playing Madame Mao in this version. Particularly hard to say because Trump himself is playing both Napoleon I and Napoleon III, this time even more farcical and tragic.
Yeah, not quite sure if that’s intentional is Trump and the modern day GOP creates so many dramas after another (and many of them have actual significance), it def is really hard to focus on one thing…
Part of me is wondering best we could do what GOP does which is to adjust the messaging priorities depending on the channel/target audience for owned/paid channels.
It's really hard to not look at the last 30 years of politics and just conclude that everything the right ever claimed to care about was a lie. I have always been cynical about politics but man the cynicism these people deserve is off the charts. I don't see how we ever put our politics back together.
Yes, and that military spending is generally good. But if Trump tells them to change course they will do so immediately. Even if Trump disappeared tomorrow, how could you ever negotiate with Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham on anything? What do they believe in? What values do they hold that we should all share as Americans? It's all so absurd.
No offense Matt but what do you actually want to do here? What does Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer? This line about “adding $4.5 trillion to the debt” is predicated on the assumption that 100% of the 2017 bill goes away. Is that desirable? I know in budget land that is zero impact but in practice it’s a huge tax hike.
On the spending side what is desirable? Joe Biden massively increased Medicaid to the point that about 30% of Americans are on it. That whole increase was necessary and any rollback is “draconian”? Or just what the GOP is proposing? You rightly mock the GOP promise to cut trillions without touching entitlements but I can’t imagine Dems plan to do so through entitlement reform.
I appreciate that it is in Jeffries’ and Schumers’ best interest to not engage. The GOP is in a difficult position and frankly are not smart enough to wriggle out of it. Ideally they screw it up from action or inaction & Dems can take over. But it’s disappointing to see Slow Boring just sort of happily spin this. What should Republicans do here? Should Democrats try and engage to extend the good parts of TCJA along with smaller cuts to Medicaid or other programs? How should Dems think of this problem which will become theirs in 1.5 years most likely? These all seem like more interesting questions to answer; this could have just been a “the GOP wants to take away poor peoples health insurance to finance tax cuts for the rich” tweet.
Matt has many times said that now is the time where the parties should do a negotiated tax increases and spending cuts. Current law vs current policy makes the tax cut vs tax increase complicated. But general idea would be increases vs current policy.
However, the Democrats don't have a majority in either house, can't bring a bill to the floor, aren't being asked for their votes. It would be insane political malpractice to put a counter out there now.
When you currently have power, you need to show something about what you are doing with it. But when you don’t, you just activate the haters without also activating the people who like what you say.
If the Democrats are publicly offered a good bill and turn it down, _then_ they theoretically "have power" and are doing something bad with it.
But until that time, nope.
(Offering specifics on cutting things always seems to make them less popular - why would Democrats offer any specifics if you don't even have the power to _do_ them)
In 2024, Democrats were the party in power and were widely perceived by voters to have no plan. Now that Democrats are demonstrably not in power, they do not owe anyone a plan. Republicans are in charge. Everything that goes wrong is their fault. They own it, they're breaking it, and if enough voters get mad about it, they'll put the Democrats back in charge. If that happens, Democrats should have an agenda, and the Common Sense Democratic Manifesto is a good philosophical basis or that agenda. But that discussion needs to be kept "within the family" and not litigated in public, because Democrats are NOT the party in power and their job is to OPPOSE, not PROPOSE. It's idiotic that center-left people want to play "government" when they are not IN government.
"Should Democrats try and engage to extend the good parts of TCJA along with smaller cuts to Medicaid or other programs?"
As the minority party, Democrats shouldn't try to do anything, because they can't. Just keep explaining what's going on.
But Democrats would have ABSOLUTELY tried to extend the "good" parts of the TCJA if they were in power right now. Are you kidding me? Do you even know what a Democrat is?
I put "good" in scare quotes because "middle class taxes can never rise, ever, by a penny" is pretty clearly a terrible policy corner we've painted ourselves into, but they wouldn't just be like "TRUMP LAW, ALL BAD!"
Since you're asking for a plan, I think we need a tax hike and a spending cut. Ideally, instead of letting TCJA expire, it should be given a phased expiration so that taxes eventually rise to their pre-TCJA level over the course of a few years. If there was political will you can keep some of the better TCJA cuts and instead replace them with new taxes (VAT! Or just uncapping the payroll tax, but that's much worse -- still probably better than a corporate hike?). We can get away with relatively modest cuts to all three major entitlement programs. Touching social security and medicare is suicide, but if it's a bipartisan compact the political damage to any one party is limited. Realistically, though, reducing medicare spending in an effective way requires actually bringing down costs, which should be a big focus.
On the discretionary side, I think there was a strong case for doing some phased reductions in various departments not so much for savings but for labor reallocation. Government should have larger labor forces in lax labor markets and smaller ones under tight labor markets. But these days I am not sure, since it's unclear whether the labor market will still be tight in 2027 when this negotiation could actually happen.
So there seems to be some substance to this, though less in terms of who Medicaid covers for healthcare and more what it’s doing other than healthcare.
But the numbers I found after Avery brought this to my attention seem to be a small fraction of the total that the GOP needs to cut.
Do you have any information about the magnitude of the spending within Medicaid on programs that aren’t just “health insurance for the poor?”
I am pretty sure it's about 25% of medicaid that is spent on long term care for disabled and elderly people, i.e. a bit over $200billion. That is completely separate from the poverty health coverage.
But I think cutting health insurance for relatively-healthy poor people is both politically and substantively better than cutting long term care for disabled people, so I don't think the above actually helps much.
I dunno. The notion that the Democrats are committed to just continuously expanding the expectations placed on federal welfare spending is pretty legit to my mind, and given how inefficient we are at this, I personally would be fine with drawing a line in the sand.
Make the Democrats of the 2030's commit to actually wringing some of the damned rent-seeking out to pay for any expansions of coverage or service they want any of Medicare, Medicaid, or CHIP to offer.
Oh I completely agree. I think the long term care system is fairly inefficient (my wife is a nurse who has spent her career in home health, assisted living, and nursing homes and, to be frank, i was regularly thinking 'this guy you're telling me about sounds like he's eating my tax dollars because his family hates him, not because he actually needs to be in a nursing home'). But at the end of the day health costs are sky-high across the board, you're not going to squeeze much just by cutting spending, you actually need reform to bust up the cartels, increase supply, do wage suppression on doctors, etc. Would be great to see dems willing to fight on this. The high costs effect every single part of every healthcare program, and I guess I'd just rather make sure genuinely disabled people get the care they need than provide health insurance to people in case they happen to have acute medical emergencies.
Also worth mentioning, "provide health insurance to people in case they happen to have acute medical emergencies."
Medicaid's expenses are actual care costs, not notional insurance rates. They (obviously) self-insure. So Medicaid expenditures aren't "in case people have emergencies" they're "because people had emergencies."
Yeah this is a good point (and an extremely obvious one in retrospect lol). So it's more like the effect is to shift the debt burden for emergencies onto the people in question who almost certainly won't pay it, and in practical terms that probably raises the revenue providers need to get from other sources (and hey, maybe it puts a bit of cost discipline on them, if we are doing wishful thinking).
It's a tough call but I still lean toward preserving LTSS, only because those are services that just don't exist without the government support in question. But your other comment is right that credibly committing to a cut forces everyone to get serious. Maybe we should start doing cuts-in-advance to take effect right after presidential elections, so the relevant actors have time to identify efficiencies and the balance of pressure is more in real terms and less in political terms.
I wholeheartedly agree with this, I just also completely buy the fiscal conservative line that unless they strangle the Democrats into doing this they will never make those hard choices.
I'm usually not an accelerationist, I want good things to happen. Having said that, I really need Republicans to royally step in it in 2027/2028. The time horizons for the institutional damage and the economic damage Trump is doing are mismatched, and they need to coincide to be discredited.
Now, maybe the correct process wasn’t followed and Trump is saying all sorts of insane shit about deporting Americans to hell prisons in El Salvador but it seems like the narrative of “kindly family man and pillar of local community deported for no reason but racism” is not going to age well and is going to beclown democrats.
I think a perfectly acceptable outcome is Kilmar is brought back to the US, gets a hearing, and is deported officially. But completely trashing the concepts of habeus corpus and due process is a real "first they came for the Jews, but I did not speak up because I was not a Jew" moment.
This is also where I am. If the government demanded him back, followed process with the courts, then deported him again, well that's just following the laws. The idea that the executive can rush someone out of the country for the express purpose of dodging due process is quite sinister.
We don't even know he's still alive. El Salvadore hasn't even asserted he is, have they?
Basically it's murder, or close enough to "we-don't-care-if-you-get-murdered-without-any-oversight-and-we'd-never-be-able-to-check-anyway" that it's still murder.
The court could find that the order to withhold deportation to El Salvador is no longer valid, and then send him there, yes. They probably won't though, given that Bukele tossed him in a supermax for no reason.
Also I think the immigration court that granted him immunity from deportation specifically reviewed this incident and found it not credible. I also recall reading that the detective who filed the initial report was eventually fired for basically being a bad cop (falsifying records and general bad behavior).
Cannot possibly emphasize enough the extent to which I don't give the slightest fuck who this guy is or whether or not he's sympathetic. Absolutely pales in comparison to the issue of the Feds disappearing people into foreign torture prisons they claim to have no control over or accountability for. This isn't a "bad man stays in jail" issue. This is a "government agents criminally operating outside the scope of the rule of law" issue, and if there's not judicial recourse the next available recourse is violent resistance. This is genuine constitutional collapse stuff.
I agree that it’s bad on the process/constitution issue. That’s what liberals should be emphasizing. It’s the immediate need for liberals to claim every non white persona who is treated unjustly is totally innocent/pillar of their community. It’s absurd performance art and it undercuts the other arguments.
It’s a “believe all non white people” situation that is counter productive.
The disaster is the principle of the thing, and setting up a precedent where the executive has defied the courts. It's a total constitutional mess.
But I think you're right that banking on sympathy for this particular guy is never going to work. His story, illegal entry, followed by a court granted reprieve suggesting either (i) the guy is in fact a gang member, hence the fear of being targeted, or (ii) law and order is so bad in El Salvador that theoretically anyone who gets here can stay on that basis, is exactly the kind of thing getting people angry about the immigration system.
In 1973, the Soviet Union was so repressive that every single person who defected would be in danger if returned there, so it was the case that anyone who got to the US could stay on that basis. Why was it OK for Soviets then but it is not OK for Salvadorians now?
If a country is sufficiently bad, then every single person who gets out is entitled to asylum somewhere. That's the entire point of the asylum system.
The "problem" is that transportation is cheaper and easier now, so it's possible to literally empty entire countries in a way it was not when the system was designed. But that's a good thing: it means that when a country devolves that way, millions of people don't die any more, they are able to get out and then live on as refugees.
The challenge we have - globally, not nationally - is that if someone has the right to leave El Salvador and not be returned there, then they have to live somewhere. Yet there are more people doing that than there places in countries willing to accept them. So, what do we do? Send them back to die? Or accept that every country will have to take more refugees than it would like to and get on with building up the infrastructure to accept them?
> Why was it OK for Soviets then but it is not OK for Salvadorians now?
Because we were in a cold war with the Soviets and every defectors from their system to ours was proof of how much they sucked. It was absolutely in American interests to show off our trophies.
No one is winning any kind of cold war with El Salvadore.
Also the defectors made a really big ostentatious show of distancing themselves from the old system and loudly loving the new system.
The number was also kept dramatically small because they would get shot at as they ran away. There was a wall, it was just built to keep people in.
"In 1973, the Soviet Union was so repressive that every single person who defected would be in danger if returned there, so it was the case that anyone who got to the US could stay on that basis. Why was it OK for Soviets then but it is not OK for Salvadorians now?"
Because a dirty secret is that El Salvador is massively improved from what it was. I've spoken with Salvadorans living in the US and they think Bukele has done amazing things when they go back and visit. The Soviet and Cuban defectors were not just economic migrants.
In an alternate-history sense one wonders if some piece of land (maybe somewhere in Alaska? who knows) could be dedicated as a kind of internationalist-state obligated to take all comers with open borders (with public order initially provided by the US or UN and gradually devolved to local civil authorities). Maybe it would become its own Singapore-style multiethnic economic hub that became attractive even to countries that initially established it so that they could avoid arbitrarily high refugee flows and instead direct them to the country of last resort. Maybe not.
It's a difficult topic. My guess is the success of a project like that would rest almost entirely on the willingness of the rich world to invest in and maintain it. Otherwise it could devolve into its own separate humanitarian crisis.
Richard is entirely correct though, that we have laws designed with the horrors of the middle 20th century or Soviet purges in mind that no longer work well for a globalized world where the distinction between economic migrants and individuals fleeing persecution as traditionally understood has blurred. I know where I'd draw the line and it probably isn't where the bleeding hearts would like it but opinions are like assholes and the only ones whose opinions matter have refused to codify something.
I am extremely pessimistic that an Artic colony of alleged refugees would be anything other than a nightmare — you are selecting for a problematic population and there won’t be any local culture to assimilate into, or local economy to absorb them. It would be just a giant refugee camp. Which, OK, is maybe still better than getting murdered for the genuine refugee cases, but it’s not going to be Singapore.
I don't entirely disagree with you on nature of the problem even if I wouldn't state it quite as dramatically. In the US the only organ that can answer that question with legitimacy is Congress. Its persistent failure to do so is what has us here, with back to back administrations trying to force outcomes by creating facts on the ground including at times via all out crisis, and with the true believers in the immigration bar doing their part to make it even worse.
I just don't get what the problem is with letting a lot of people in. They're refugees. They can't live in their home country. They have to live somewhere else. I don't understand why any country has a problem with unlimited numbers coming. There are a billion Chinese - their government is awful, and every one of them should be entitled to asylum. What's the problem with a billion Chinese people all moving to Belgium?
Alas, there's places around here that could actually use the influx of people but the people here all hate foreigners, so that's not gonna happen so instead west virginia will die out and be brain drained forever.
I don’t know how you jump straight to (II) there, especially since the claim that got him withdrawal of removal was that he and his family were being specifically targeted, not that everyone in El Salvador is equally at risk of gang violence.
If he is not in fact a gang member what other conclusion would there be? I mean I guess that analysis doesn't apply to Bukele himself and maybe certain other high ranking officials (though I bet the gangs want them dead too) but there is probably not a single regular person in El Salvador who could not plausibly claim to be afraid of being targeted by a gang.
I mean you could just read about the case instead of speculating. I am having trouble believing you think either only gang members are at risk from gangs, or literally everyone is.
Two things can be true: The Trump Administration is lawless, is denying this person (and probably many, many others) due process and will likely force a confrontation between the Judicial and Executive branches in the coming year.
Also: The immigration system is profoundly stupid -- the idea that an immigration judge in 2019 ruled that this gang member couldn't be deported back to his home country because other gangs in El Salvador might be mean to him is deranged. So he was re-released into the US so this gang member could do gang member things but to American citizens?
As David Frum famously wrote: "If liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will." Well, we are in the time of the last words of his quote.
> an immigration judge in 2019 ruled that this gang member couldn't be deported back to his home country because other gangs in El Salvador might be mean to him
That’s not at all what the judge ruled. You’re lying.
It doesn't matter if he was in a gang or not. What matters is the ignoring of due process. Someone who doesn't like you says you're a gang member, so ICE picks you up and sends you to CECOT and the Trump says, welp, nothing more we can do here.
The threading system on Substack allows you to ignore conversations you deem are unimportant. Click on the long vertical bar to the left and the whole subthread will collapse.
You’re going to put a guy on the stand to say another guy told him a third guy was in a gang? That is actually not admissible in a court under the hearsay rule.
The OP is entirely about distinguishing “is this guy going to turn out to be super sympathetic“ [contested topic of discussion] from “is the government behaving poorly as regards due process and the law” [everyone agrees yes very bad].
Fair as to the OP, but there is definitely some bleed-over from your 1 to your 2 in this thread.
I don’t think we are going to learn any more about this person’s alleged gang ties, and therefore the main effect of the speculation will be to encourage people who think maybe the government has a point.
An aside: what does it even mean to accuse someone of being a “gang member?” It doesn’t appear to require any overt act. Is there a registry? (Lol.) Isn’t this an unfalsifiable accusation that can be leveled against anyone, or at least anyone Hispanic-looking?
Everybody knows that gangs being mean to you just consists of noogies and Indian burns.
But overall this guy is just spouting totally unsupported bullshit, which he himself concedes is not legally relevant to Kilmar's detention status. If there is somebody who takes down posts here for misinformation reasons they might want to just consider blasting this whole thread.
I don't care, and neither should our immigration system. If his life was in danger from other gangs, well, that comes along with, you know, being a gang member.
Asylum is -- or should be -- reserved for political or ethnic persecution by a government. Not because a gang member is in danger from rival gangs.
The article stated -- now perhaps the article's author is lying, but I assume the NBC News article isn't lying -- that "Later in 2019, an immigration judge barred him from being sent to El Salvador. The order said he proved he had a “well-founded fear of future persecution” from local gangs"
So he came here illegally and an immigration judge decided he was specifically targeted by rival gangs in El Salvador such that he could stay in the US.
We will have a chance again in the future to do so. I hope we have learned our lesson because the way people like Stephen Miller do it is antithetical to the rule of law.
Good reason for an administrative judge to reject allowing him to enter the US. Burden of proof means something. Not a good reason to deport him with no proof he had done anything wrong in the US except being here illegally. This is not the dimension on whihc Liberals are not enforcing immigration law.
It is, in fact, one of the dimensions on which we chose not enforce immigration laws. The law states that people here illegally are subject to deportation, regardless of whether they have committed other crimes.
I agree on "subject to." The issue here is their situation one of justified fear of specific violence. I agree that "El Salvador is a dangerous place" (is it now?) is not grounds for either admission or non-deportation.
And again, it ought to be a cost benefit analysis which people subject to depuration it makes sense to deport.
Trump is sending illegal immigrants to El Salvador to deter others from coming. Defying judicial rulings is a bit scary — though there is certainly room for pushing back against judicial overreach. However, the basic idea of “deter unlawful crossings through high profile, exemplary measures” is sound.
This also spares the administration the need for workplace raids, which would destabilize the Republican coalition.
TIL that sending someone to a hellhole with no means of release or parole ever is a “high profile, exemplary measure.” I’ve seen lots of euphemisms in my life, but that has to be in the top ten.
Good point, although I’m split 50-50 between “Trump thinks this is an effective way to deter migrants” and “Trump is doing a shitty thing on purpose to pwn the libz.”
Especially the kind of crime that leads to tens of thousands of deaths and destruction of trillions of dollars of wealth, which seems more important to deter than the kind of crime that leads to one death or a thousand dollars of damage.
I tend to agree. Abrego Garcia's guilty and personal qualities really aren't the source of the problem here.
The government needs to go through due process before deporting someone.
The government needs to go through due process before incarcerating someone.
That's the problem: Abrego Garcia wasn't given a hearing in front of an immigration judge before the US deported him, and he wasn't given a jury trial before the US had him incarcerated.
But it is always terrible to focus on individual cases, the exact circumstances of one person will be the focus of discussion and don't tell you anything about the effect of the policy.
it's not about him, though. i think a useful question to ask yourself is ``does this case make me marginally more worried that a stupid sequence of events would end up with me in some hellhole, indefinitely, and with absolutely no recourse?''
i think people are wondering whether that could happen to them, and the way to address that is to tell them a bit about the person who this happened to.
But we have to know the truth about who that person is and not go along with his families invented narrative. Especially when that family knows they could potentially win millions of dollars in a civil suit.
The gang allegations came from a supposed confidential informant. The government has produced no other evidence. This is all in the article you linked so I’m not sure where your question comes from.
This is the quote that makes me think it isn't quite that simple.
"In another document from the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, a court agreed to deny Abrego Garcia bond after his arrest outside the Home Depot in 2019 and wrote that the allegation that he is a gang member “appears to be trustworthy and is supported by other evidence in the record” in the Prince George’s County police documents."
He was picked up at the Home Depot with two other gang members.
> He was picked up at the Home Depot with two other gang members.
Notably, there were 4 people arrested there, not 3.
Also notably, his case did not end after this bond hearing in 2019. There’s a reason he was let go and given a work permit: the gang allegation was dropped in later hearings, likely because it wasn’t credible in the first place.
I understand that too, and that he has never been officially determined to be a gang member. I do not think we will be able to determine whether he is or isn't in a gang in these comments.
My point back at my original comment was that you do not want the discussion about the very real attack on the rule of law by the Trump admin hinging on this guy's case. He entered illegally. He has now been arrested twice, both times in the company of people who apparently are MS-13 members. His wife filed a protective order against him. Maybe that is all unlucky coincidence. But even if he is not a criminal the fact that people with this sort of smoke around their lives being permitted to stay in the country only reinforces the (IMO accurate) perception that these processes are totally broken and allowing people in who probably shouldn't be.
That seems like really flimsy evidence. It amounts to "he was wearing a hoodie that is "associated with Hispanic Gang Culture" which isn't even an association with a specific gang, and he was standing in a Home Depot parking lot looking for work next to some other Hispanic dudes who might have been shady.
As far as I understand it 2 of those dudes were confirmed gang members.
I used to live in an MS 13 interdiction zone in LA. I know a little bit about this stuff. It’s very hard to prove direct membership with a gang, many people are “associated” without official rank or status.
It’s a grey area where a lot of people are working normal jobs but doing things on the side for the gang.
Maybe all of that isn’t true for this individual but my point is jumping on the “totally innocent narrative” is a huge mistake and I feel like Ezra kind of sheepishly doubled down on it. Which helps no one.
it completely ignores the personal aspects of the case and manages to be more alarming than anything else (yay!?).
edit: the rest of that podcast is also interesting. they say that one possible outcome is that a lot of the wiggle room will be taken out of the system (this would be terrible, imo). they also say that the democrats they talk to all say they will retaliate if and when in power (this is comforting).
What this article drives home for me is the jaw-dropping degree of cognitive dissonance of the current administration. The whole America First-MAGA cultural war stuff—the war on universities, the war on woke, the DOGE-driven, indiscriminate destruction of state capacity, the trade war, the war on vaccines—it all gets a lot *harder* if they add lunatic budgeting to the mix, doesn't it?
This is why I remain optimistic about American democracy -- Trump/MAGA are massively discrediting themselves with the general public right out of the gate and also damaging state capacity for running an authoritarian regime.
I hope you’re right. Before the markets tanked, I was wondering why they hadn’t and wishing that they would to bring on the backlash ASAP. This is…worse than I imagined, by a long shot, but it seems like there’s at least a chance that they’re speedrunning their own demise through sheer incompetence.
Matt is probably referring to the fact that Reagan cut taxes and increased spending at a time of high interest rates, not just that interest rates were high.
That's my point. Bracket creep is one of the things that is a bit of an automatic stabilizer. It automatically takes more money out of the economy when inflation gets higher.
Indexing wages to inflation, and indexing tax rates to inflation, both provide extra stimulus when the economy is over-stimulated and prolong inflation.
inflation in the 1980s was pretty famously ended by really really high interest rates, aka monetary policy, which was the purview of Paul Volcker, not Reagan.
Volcker, of course, was appointed and charged with ending inflation by Carter. I know you know this, I just always like to mention it, because far too many people out there credit Reagan.
Ending inflation was monetary, not fiscal policy. Engineering the recession was the right thing to do, and it also wouldn't have been so brutal if Reagan believed in fiscal constraints.
Yes, yes, the Republicans are destroying the world order that has kept peace, undermined global prosperity, trashed the rule of law in the US, shattered scientific research, and pushed us toward devastating stagflation if not worse.
But let's be fair. Trump has also called to get rid of the penny.
When I first started paying attention to Congress, and had recently come out, there were two openly gay members of Congress - Barney Frank, and Jim Kolbe, Republican from Arizona. Kolbe was campaigning to eliminate the penny, but Republican members of Congress literally turned their back on him whenever he would speak about this, because they thought the fact that he was openly gay was disgraceful.
The wild thing is, if republicans came in, decided the deficit was too much, and then capped social security payments by income, raise the retirement age, and did reduced the federal healthcare outlays, I’d hate it, but at least I would understand it.
This, though, is insanity. I guess our best hope is the freedom caucus
Freedom Caucus = MAGA. Trump said “deficit,” deficit it was. Since Reagan, deficits for Republicans have been ok if necessary to reduce taxes on high income people (and they always are, becasue they do not have the political courage to cut transfers to low income people).
I see two possible scenarios; one is predictable and scary, while the other is intriguing.
Scenario 1: Trump says "no cuts to anything, cut taxes, and I will fire Jerome Powell and force the Fed to cut interest rates to finance the debt" which would be an economic disaster waiting to happen. It, probably does not quite blow up during his term which means Trump can either ride off into the sunset and claim victory OR set up a fourth Trump nomination, and third term. Trump would have to deal with it at that point, but by then he'd be so firmly entrenched as America's dictator he won't care.
Scenario 2: Trump actually raises taxes on wealthy Americans, which blunts the damage enough that he limps on. This also upends politics in the United States in ways I cannot predict.
We'll see, Scenario 2 goes so deeply against the Republican grain I could see the remnants of Reaganism really resisting Trump. But then again, it also reflects Trump's actual rhetoric.
There is Scenario 3: Trump's entire budget collapses and they accomplish nothing making Trump look like a nincompoop...but I think that's unlikely.
"the conventional wisdom among political operatives had pivoted so hard against deficit reduction"
Maybe politicians should pay more attention to economists and less to "political operatives." Or let them stay in their lane, figuring out how to we make good policy at as low political cost as possible. [Same goes for keeping Trump 1's trade restrictions, not increasing legal immigration, controlling the border.]
I have interacted with so many people who believe that because DOGE exists, the administration will be bringing deficits down rather than expanding them significantly (despite all evidence to the contrary). Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard some form of “it’s refreshing that somebody is finally doing something to balance the budget!” Even if you show them the charts of planned deficits in the House reconciliation plan, there is a ton of psychological resistance to believing what the GOP is really up to.
DOGE may be an ideological project but its main function appears to be as an extremely effective political smokescreen.
I think progressives kinda fooled themselves into thinking the deficit and high interest rates weren’t a big deal. Now the even more fiscally irresponsible party gets to completely explode the deficit, while also claiming the mantle of budget cuts.
Annoying!
Both parties now functionally believe in MMT.
My understanding of the MMT view is that inflation is the critical constraint on government spending. Not sure I'd argue either party is doing more than lip-service on that front.
Agreed
yeah AFAIK the actual thesis statement of MMT is something like, "Taxes do not raise revenue, they reduce inflation. Spending is not limited by revenue, it's limited by inflation."
that said i am not sure this is actually that different from a standard keynesian view except in the most technical theory sense, and the actual fight is that its proponents seem to love going on podcasts to talk about how the government can spend as much money as it wants, so people associate it with that as its main point.
The MMT people are correct that any government that issues its own currency can print as much of it as it wants. They are incorrect in believing that inflation has no negative economic or political consequences.
The actual MMT theoreticians were mistaken about what thresholds of deficit spending would engender inflation and are, you know, economists who are changing their minds as a result.
The lefty kids who used to talk about MMT have already stopped because it's no longer a vehicle providing a justification for engorging on candy.
They were engaged in a lot of Motte-and -Bailey stuff, but in their more defensible position, I think they would agree that inflation had negative consequences, but had the view that anything you could materially "do" you could defacto "afford."
As a descriptive matter, this is just true when it comes to states.
That's my point. In the post-war era, Republicans began as inflation hawks but now they are functionally not. Democrats have never been inflation hawks even though inflation has wrecked two of their presidents.
In practice Democrats were too inflation hawkish 2008-20 for not complaining more loudly tht the Fed was not inflating enough to fulfill its mandates. We need inflation owls, not hawks or doves.
Gotcha. I guess I was thinking more that if they functionally believed in MMT, they'd be saying something like, 'Hey, inflation is already persistently high. We need to be very careful about excessive spending now,' which, as you point out, is definitely not the focus on either side of the aisle these days!
No they should have said, 'Hey, inflation is already persistently high. We need to be very careful get revenue (ideally from consumption taxes) up now."
>Both parties now functionally believe in MMT.<
The hard left thinks deficits won't harm the economy. The MAGA right *doesn't care* if deficits harm the economy.
When the MMT people had their moment in the sun, all the mainstream Democratic economists trashed their crazy ideas. The Democratic administration didn't give them the time of day.
Is there a parallel with Trump's and the Republicans' economic ideas? Not that I see.
I'm pretty sure that anyone who historically could be considered to qualify as a "mainstream Republican economist" has trashed MAGAnomics at this point. They've just been labeled "libtard betacuck soyf@gs" and exiled from publicly visible GOP spaces.
This isn't really true, as evidenced by the fact Democrats try to find pay-fors when they try to expand programs.
Right, it’s hard for progressives to stir up opposition to exploding deficits when three years ago they were vigorously insisting any such concern was reactionary fake news. Wonder if anything could be learned from this.
"Now the even more fiscally irresponsible party"
Dems tried to push 6 trillion in new spending with BBB
At least Republicans are doing it by letting people keep their own money
Yea, sure, pull the other one. The $1,500 tax cut to my 95th percentile of the income distribution household is so important compared to the value of my investment portfolio and access to small business debt funding at reasonable interest rates, not to mention that my raises won't pace the inflation engendered.
This will single-handedly be the worst single piece of economic policy this country has enacted since at least Nixon. The Bush I tax cuts and the 2017 tax cuts don't compare.
There will be almost no households in the whole country for whom this will be a net positive.
Don't minimize the Bush cuts. They destroyed Clinton's surplus. And healthy trade surpluses would have giving a very different manufacturing response to NAFTA and Chinese liberalization.
I'm not minimizing them, they were absolutely terrible policy.
This is just going to be utterly and immediately disastrous in a way that they were not.
Oh, a bill that didn’t pass? Check the deficit by administration since Reagan please
This bill hasn't passed either, it's not even a bill yet.
My point is that NEITHER party believes in fiscal discipline.
But given the choice between big tax cuts, and big government spending, I will chose the tax cuts.
Even when the tax cuts are heavily concentrated on the rich?
Who do you think pays all the taxes?
For example, the top 1% earn 26% of the income, but pay 46% of the taxes
The top 10% earn 53% of the income but pay 76% of the taxes
Where else do you think the tax cuts would go, they go to the taxpayers who pay all the money
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/
Tax cuts for people who have mostly inherited their wealth/position, directly or indirectly, and who will spend it on frivilous luxury items vs strategic investments that makes the country as a whole better off and/or helps poor people. Let’s go for the first option!!!
> My point is that NEITHER party believes in fiscal discipline.
Did you even read Matt's blog post? Outside of Biden, past Dem administrations and even Kamala seemed very interested in deficit reduction or not adding to the budget. To compare the Dem administrations to Bush or Trump (last term or this one) seems ignorant at best and bad faith at worst.
Giving people tax cuts as you are saying still doesn't reduce government spending and that isn't what Republicans are proposing, neither does it do anything to reduce the debt, which we should be doing in times of high employment so that if a future situation calls for it, we can respond appropriately with fiscal stimulus and be able to be nimble as a country to invest in ourselves.
Yes, I read Matt’s post, but I don’t believe the spin. Democrats have never really been interested in reducing spending, or fixing deficits.
If so, entitlements would have been fixed years ago when republicans tried repeatedly to fix them
BBB money didn’t disappear into thin air, it went into people’s pockets to pay for construction, infrastructure, and services. That’s also money in people’s pockets and not just the wealthy, plus we get something out of it more than trickle down economics
Yea, and in a sense, Musk sucked up the hate that would’ve been directed at Trump too (not saying he doesn’t deserve it)…
Yeah I've heard praise for DOGE from people who I was shocked to hear it from who really should know better. It's still impossible to overestimate how informed people are in the comment section compared to the average voter.
I remember when I was younger seeing Bill Maher on Larry King and one of the callers suggested the way to balance the budget was to freeze the pay of Congress. I remember Bill rightfully laughing this off. But I got to tell you, it was not the first time I had heard that sentiment. It was actually clarifying because I had just started becoming more politically aware and even then I was like "how much do you think Congress gets paid?" And it was my first window into realizing a lot of voters all stripes have no great sense at all as to what our government actually spends money on. And also, that you can basically balance the budget with a few tweaks here and there*. So yeah, not that shocked that you've encountered people who think DOGE must have achieved some major savings.
Having said that. Musk's polling is pretty terrible. https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate-silver-bulletin Now maybe if he wasn't so obnoxious in the way he conducted himself his polling would be better. In fact, I think it's likely that would be true. But nonetheless I think it's worth keeping in mind that he basically only has the support of the MAGA base (and you may see more erosion there if his asinine cutting starts leading to older Trump voters or Trump voters with elderly parents not getting their Social Security checks).
I have no doubt you've had some of the interactions you've had. But I'm really wondering how widespread this is. Sort of (possibly) a version of Pauline Kael's quote (that she never actually said) that she didn't know how Nixon could have won, she didn't know anyone who voted for him.
* In general, I think the movie "Dave" is very enjoyable RomCom and just a general fun Friday night date night movie. But wow, does it have some absolutely awful ideas about how budget works and how government works in general. Like talk about a window into the normie worldview of how our government operates. That you can just gather the cabinet around an oak table, cut the very obvious "waste, fraud and abuse" and presto! that social program that helps small children is paid for. Yay!
I think it is really, really hard to overestimate how much any number greater than ~$10 million all "sounds the same" to people. Like, once it triggers, "Way more money than I have," people get really sloppy about vastly different numbers.
Like, here's a Doge tweet about savings: https://x.com/DOGE/status/1912165825571627132
Taking it 100% at face value, it's for $5.2 million. So if we found 10 savings of that magnitude every day including Christmas, then we'd... save $18 billion per year. Do that for all four years of Trump's administration, and we'd be at under $80B in savings. Do 10x that, and we wouldn't get to the $1 trillion that DOGE promised.
I think that for at least 30% of the population, all that fuzzes into "a lot of interchangeable big numbers," and for another 30% of the population, they can math through it if they concentrate on it, but if they just hear something mentioned off-hand, millions or tens of millions sounds "big," not "inconsequential."
Also a version of that (possibly misattributed) Stalin quote ""A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." Once numbers get big enough it just becomes this abstraction to most people.
Its why I get it when politicians pepper their speeches with personal anecdotes about how some policy they champion or policy they passed helped out one individual. Even when they are particularly treacly or when I start to say "oh come on, this policy is why John/Jane Doe has a job?". I'm sure a lot of them (like Obama or I hate to say it, but from everything we know, DeSantis) could recite deep in the weeds numbers about a policy to an audience...and also know that audience would fall asleep in about 10 minutes.
Nothing wrong with concrete examples if they are in fact exemplary.
More like 10 seconds.
I think that the idea of government being massively inefficient and bloated is something that a very large swath of center-left and center-right Americans believe in their bones. (And they're probably right.) For a lot of politically middle-ish people who have been disappointed with both the Democrats and the Republicans for a while, this has been their main gripe for decades. I am thinking right now of people like my dad who I am 99% sure voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 and constantly mutters "both parties are crazy".
For those people, if you come at them with evidence of DOGE's failures and exaggerations, their reply is "well can you really fault them for at least trying? Somebody has to do it eventually!"
It just strikes people as absurd that a well-intentioned effort to slim down government waste would ever not be successful. Honestly, I feel the same way! The degree to which Musk et al seem to be going about things incompetently is pretty jaw-dropping.
One of the many tragedies with this. There really was an opening to do targeted cuts that were probably necessary. Our procurement process for government contracts is just ripe for overcharging and skimming off the top for one.
I think also, one of the problems is a lot of the solutions to make government more efficient is counterintuitive to average people. I think its one of the reasons GOP feels free to massively cut IRS funding (not just Trump). Like tell someone that we should increase funding of the IRS, and I suspect a lot of normies are like "wait you want to make filing my taxes even harder and think more bureaucrats would make things more efficient?!" Feel pretty confident a decent number of Harris voters would say some version of this.
The party that hates government and has never been interested in learning how it works was never going to make smart targeted cuts and make government more efficient.
Our procurement process is indeed incredibly wasteful, but it's the process the people have demanded and will demand again.
It is ironic. In an effort to avoid fraud and waste - calls for more scrutiny and stronger controls ... produce process that have even more red-tap that enables even more graft.
I think once you decide procurement should go through a competitive bidding process you've committed to waste, and then you take on more waste to avoid wastes more nefarious siblings, fraud and abuse. And then you take on even more waste to ensure fairness and transparency in the process.
The alternative is to just give Elon Musk the contract for funny money amounts and call it a day, but I don't hear any serious clamoring for that approach.
That is why the best politicians come up with positive ways to spin this stuff, even it is a simplification or slightly misleading.
Here are some ideas to sell increased IRS staffing:
- Everyone knows that the government is using ancient computer systems, we need to modernize, so things will be faster and more efficient. It will save time and money and you'll get your returns within 48 hours* (in most cases)
- IRS does your taxes for you! If you have just w2/1099s the IRS will mail you return and you don't need to do anything if it is correct. This works great in places like australia. Show the example form on TV. Give everybody a $200 credit if they need to file their own, both to bring the people with complex taxes along with you and to through the tax industry a bone for less oppoisition
- Create the Tax Fraud Agency. Or Billionaires Tax Group. Position things as just going after the tax cheats. Maybe even through people like foreign investors under the bus (at least rhetorically) and cite examples of sympathetic people ripping off their fellow citizens. Joe construction worker pays his taxes, why they hell does the real estate developer with sketchy accounting get away without paying taxes?
The democrats increasing failure to sell anything to the public, other than pitching things to fellow leftists, or worse - to wonks and bureaucrats, astounds
Gary Johnson voter here as well. We would have been a LOT better off if he had won!
TBF I wouldn't have voted for Johnson if I lived in a swing state, but I live in Texas, so it was safe to do so, and unlike some libertarian candidates, tolerably sane, competent, and well intended.
Honestly, I've had the opposite reaction. If Musk is bragging about cutting 0.001% of the budget, than our government is incredibly efficient.
It is just beyond me why intelligent well meaning people can possibly imagine that effectively slimming down the most complex institution in, as far as we can tell, the history of the Milky Way galaxy would be straightforward.
Of course it is massively inefficient, but not in ways that are important macroeconomically or that compare to the inefficiency of NEPA/NIMBY/deficits/ import restrictions/failure to attract world talent, no tax on net CO2 emissions.
People generally think half the budget goes to welfare and foreign aid.
And that’s why you can’t have a functioning democracy with a population of willfully ignorant imbeciles. They literally do not know what they vote for or against.
Americans are generally very stupid people.
On the Dave point, the China trade/Nobel prize storyline on Veep drove me insane by how big the gap was between how the writers thought the world worked and reality.
It's a shame because in general Veep got a lot right about the very real way petty grievancies, stupid personal slights and pettiness drive a lot of dad to day political activity. I've mentioned before but I've worked multiple campaigns and my wife has worked for both NY senators. In addition, we have lots of friends from our politics days. We all basically loved the show in part because there would be certain scenes where all of us would say "I think I've heard this exact conversation" or "I definitely remember someone exactly like this".
My line to people who are interested in politics but haven't worked in politics is that if you take West Wing and Veep, mush them together, you get decently close to reality; West Wing is too positive in its outlook* and Veep much too cynical. But they both get a lot right.
*One of the more underrated episodes of West Wing that stuck with me is when Sam Seaborne's character convinces an old law school buddy to run for Congress. But the administration pulled the rug out from under him when they discovered there was some case that maybe had evidence of racial bias in jury selection and that administration wouldn't throw their support behind the campaign. Sam has to tell his friend who is understandably furious which of course weighs on Sam. Because West Wing is West Wing we're supposed to understand that Sam is broken up about this development. But I thought it was "great" in showing that even the most "pure of heart" political operative, politicians etc. will end up having to make some pretty cold blooded decisions that end up knifing people in the back.
Given how terrible most Americans are at math, this hardly surprises me. To the average Joe, $1 million, $3 billion, $8 trillion, it's all just big numbers, with the relative amounts between these figures, incomprehensible. Thus, a DOGE savings of $5 million by not feeding starving children in Africa is equivalent, in their minds, to cutting $500 billion from the deficit.
I don't know what the solution is, but the fact is that people are vulnerable to this sort of deception, in part, because math education in the United States really sucks.
I think that news articles about federal spending should never use the words “million” or “trillion”. They should all be talking about .04 billion (instead of 40 million) and 4,862 billion (instead of 4.8 trillion). I know their style guide rejects this and in fact says to always simplify these things, but that makes them easy to read quickly and hard to understand, while I think newspapers have a duty to make it easy to understand even if it makes things a little bit ugly to read quickly.
"Anything that ends in -illion all sounds the same to voters."
When the media reports on the size of a meteorite, they never say "12 meters" or something boring. They'll say "size of a car" "size of a truck" "size of a school bus". They'll measure volumes in terms of Olympic-sized swimming pools.
This used to annoy me but I think they're genuinely onto something. Only nerds like us care about something lame like "meters." Oh, heaven forbid, "metres."
I'm not sure exactly what unit should be used -- maybe "1.2 defense budgets" or "9.5 GDPs of Canada"? It should be something that kind of moves in line with inflation and doesn't rapidly fluctuate year-to-year.
I think using one of the “-illion” words as the unit is fine, as long as they only ever use one of them, and represent the others in terms of it.
I don't see how to make the standard stable over time. Last century's million is this century's billion.
I don’t think you need to. I don’t think it needs to even be stable from article to article. What is essential is really just that within an article, they stick to one unit.
I love this idea.
I think this still fails to comprehend that ppl have no base conception of how much a billion is. I think doing everything as Percent of Federal budgets would be much cleaner and more intuitive. People have a better sense of how much 20% of anything is than some large number
My thought is that people have no more or less conception of how much a billion is or how much the federal budget is.
What is most important is that there is one reference unit used throughout. I think the advantage of using "billion dollars" as that reference unit rather than "federal budget" is that with "billion dollars", these things will usually range from about 0.001 billion dollars to 17,000 billion dollars, while with "federal budget", it'll range from 0.00000006 to 1. But definitely when talking specifically about bigger things, it could be better to use "federal budget" than "billion dollars". As long as the article is consistent throughout about which single unit it uses.
Yea thats true. Above a certain level it makes more sense for the entire budget. but below that consistency is better.
This seems like a very good idea, although I think I might make "million" the root (or else relax the restraint and allow both "million"--at least in single-digit-million amounts--and "billion"). A million dollars is nowadays a cognizable amount for actual-human consumption goods (e.g., housing in major cities can reasonably be measured relative to a million dollars). Calling it ".001 billion dollars" seems kind of weird in a way that doesn't apply as much to amounts in the 10+ million to trillion dollar range.
The main reason I don’t like allowing million at all here is that even I was briefly tricked by stories saying something like “they cut $4 billion but also saved $7 million”. But if one story is only talking about millions, then that’s probably fine - it’s just that a story that involves both millions and billions needs to pick one and stick with it.
Sounds reasonable to me.
"News Notation," AKA Modern Standard Rebased Scientific Notation for Dummies
“ because math education in the United States really sucks.”
Math education is the US is fine. People are just stupid.
Smart people everywhere think their country's education system is terrible because people aren't actually a blank slate who can be made smart across all dimensions by education.
I wonder how much the world would change is people understood that?
Same thing w/ the assumption voters don't know anything is a specific American thing. Voters everywhere don't know things, it's just there are 300 million American's, other countries rightly care about American politics, and low-info people in say Austria or Taiwan don't post about politics in English on social media.
I think it's slightly higher in the US than maybe say, Germany but not that much worse.
My favorite story is the UK had to institute the Police Caution: “You do not have to say anything. But, it may harm your defense if you do mention…”
Because people in the UK didn’t understand that Miranda rights don't apply in the UK.
I’ve heard that cops in many countries - Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden and especially Canada have suspects saying, “I know my rights.” And the cops are like, “This isn’t America!”
New Zealand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1K02dHs6Oo
Part of what I find annoying about this is that a lot of these numbers (like the $5 million you mention) are so much lower than numbers people hear passively through entertainment, like how much Deshaun Watson's contract is or how much the most recent Indiana Jones movies cost to make. And those numbers are still small compared to the size of our economy or the Pentagon's budget.
The CDC Lead Program's budget, which Matt mentions in this post as getting eliminated, is about the same as Deshaun Watson makes in a year to not play football ($51m and $46m, respectively). Most of the Lead Program budget is just transfers to state governments in the form of grants.
Same here!
The “waste, fraud, and abuse” meme is just extremely strong. People struggle to recognize that it’s just not plausible.
You could probably fix some fraud by funding the IRS more...
I think it's really hard to overcome quite literally decades of messaging that the government is bad and inefficient. I don' think this is fixable honestly; there will always be some specific example of spending or procedural breakdown that people can point to as an example of government inefficiency.
I also genuinely believe that if any large organization were subjected to the same type of public scrutiny and reporting as the government, the scandals/waste/fraud/abuse would be just as bad if not worse.
Think of how much public money American sports leagues regularly waste, but politicians who stand up to a team that threatens to leave if they aren't gifted a $500M new stadium risk reelection. And that doesn't even get into teams like the Jets have found ways to light money on fire or teams like the Arizona Cardinals that have spent decades being irrelevant.
I question how effective it is. We obviously travel in different circles, but I don't know anybody who thinks Musk is delivering bang-up fiscal results (I don't dispute that they're out there, among Trump's base). More to the point, it won't be effective when the red ink turns from a river to a tsunami in the coming months. The bond market is the great equalizer. That's another thing James Carville was right about.
Not personal circles (All my friends are college ed libs & lefties), but I see on reddit r/nostupidquestions fairly frequently something like "If DOGE is saving all this money where is it going?" Not realizing it's impercetabily small amounts of money in the context of the budget. Destroying entire federal agencies *sounds* like it would save money, those are radical changes! But also really small when you compare it to the money spent on healthcare benefits or cash transfers.
It's not just the GOP. Remember Biden trying to push 6 trillion in BBB until Manchin shut it down?
And that's because politicians in both sides lie to voters, and voters want to believe the lies.
The truth is WAY more has been promised in entitlements than will ever be paid. The truth is that there will need to be cuts to SS and Medicare/Medicaid.
No, you can't pay for it all by taxing billionaires. No you can't pay for it by cutting waste fraud and abuse.
Yes Obamacare contributed to the problem by greatly expanding Medicare.
Yes I'm fine with modest increases in the payroll tax if paired with entitlement cuts. Something like
Raise the retirement age and index it to life expectancy
end heroic end of life care on tax payer dime.
Require people on Medicaid to stay thin and fit (take a page from Japan)
How did Obama expand Medicare? I just looked it up and it sounds like the three substantial changes to Medicare were making preventative care free, demanding that it pay lower rates for care, and plugging an intermediate gap in prescription drug coverage. Only the third of those would increase spending, but it seems by less than the second would cut spending.
It seems weird to take the one bill that did the most to fix the cost problems with Medicare and say that it worsened the situation.
Obamacare allowed states to greatly expand Medicare with the federal government paying 90% of the bill.
https://www.kff.org/status-of-state-medicaid-expansion-decisions/
Oh you meant *Medicaid*, not Medicare. Those are very importantly different programs. Medicare already covers everyone over 65. The point of Medicaid expansion was that it eliminates uninsured populations, which actually ends up being a lot closer to budget neutral than you think, because of government reimbursement to hospitals for emergency coverage of uninsured patients.
Sorry I did mean Medicaid, I mistyped.
It was Medicaid expansion that Obamacare did.
Giving poor people more access to healthcare.
Obama should burn in hell for that.
If you wish to kill Medicaid, I will buy that...
In the context of rolling Medicaid, Medicare, CHIP, and Tricare together to rationalize all of the overhead and making it a universal program for minors, over-60's, veterans, and the poor.
Then use it to squeeze the ever-loving fuck out of provider/vendor/pharma/PBM rent-seeking until it is able to deliver today's results and outcomes with 80% of the budget of those four programs.
THEN... sell it on the exchanges at cost for anyone who needs to buy a plan.
Squeeze the private insurers to actually innovate and deliver value, or die.
Dude - you are all over this thread, constantly talking about a bill that never passed. And making it seem like Obama and Biden economics policies were as bad as Bush or Trump is just plain ignorant at best or bad faith at worst.
I also don't get your statement that way more has been promised in entitlements than ever will be paid. That simply isn't true. There do not need to be cuts to Social Security in order to keep it funded, just get rid of the cap on payroll taxes, or increase the retirement age by 2 years.
I do agree with you that our commitments to Medicare and Medicaid do need to be dealt with, but the healthcare system in America is a beast so it is too complicated to break down and solve with a simple solution. That said, I assume you are saying that Medicaid expansion and the ACA were the worst things to happen, but one could argue that the increased benefits of having a healthier population and access to healthcare is still better, and it at least tried to be offset originally by a tax if you recall.
Telling people who may be disabled to stay thin and fit, may not be reasonable in practice or even possible, but sounds good on paper... In a civilized society that is also the richest country in the history of the world, we should not be blaming the poorest possible and disadvantaged people for our current financial situation.
Right now SS is facing 20% in cuts in 2032
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/social-security-benefits-could-drop-20-by-2032/
That's because more was promised in benefits than paid in taxes.
Your contention that a massive tax increase would fix the gap makes my point. WAY more was promised in benefits than was paid for in taxes by the people getting the benefits.
Your solution of course is to raise taxes on other people. IE make SS even more of a welfare program.
Staying thin is simple (though not easy). Eat less. You even save money doing it.
If we are going to provide healthcare funding for poor people, then they should be doing their part to keep costs down.
Getting rid of the cap on payroll taxes would not be a massive tax increase... In fact the CBO already estimated that a small increase of just 3.5% would make it solvent for basically the rest of this century...
It's also not just raising taxes on other people, I max out on my social security tax every year so it'd also be raising the tax on myself. I simply stated that we could fix the program if we wanted to. You also previously said that you are fine with a modest increase to pay for it, and I agreed but provided some nuance so now you are against it lol? Pick a lane dude. Social Security does not need cuts as it is self funding, we can just fix it if we wanted to.
Also did you read the article you quoted?
> ""There was high inflation that resulted in a high COLA, and then those benefits affect the solvency of the trust fund," he said."
If you actually looking at the data any payout or solvency issues are mostly driven by demographic shifts and a shrinking worker-to-beneficiary ratios. Not because we over promised people. Calling social security a welfare program when people pay into the system sure is a take... the government doesn't have a debt or deficit problem because of social security.
I also am thin and in shape, that doesn't mean I think poor people may be overweight (what definition are you using btw? >20% BMI?) they should lose their benefits. There is no such thing as a perfect program in all of human history, if we can get something as close to 80% or 90% good for any program we should be happy about that and tweak as needed.
I had previously agreed with you that a modest increase to the payroll tax and potential small cuts to Medicare / Medicaid do need to be done. I also think if you have a high net worth, you should get reduced benefits from Social Security.
It just seems like you hate poor people, or think that if someone is overweight, think work injury, diabetes or back issues and poor it is entirely their fault and we shouldn't' give them benefits. Even if the social cost and real cost over time would be more expensive to society. Believe me, I wish our society took a few more notes from other cultures like Japan regarding being healthy, low crime and urban walkability, mass transit, etc. Americans have an obesity problem, just punishing the poor because they get a benefit and otherwise may still be working or low income seems needlessly cruel and doesn't give the savings you think we'd need.
As already stated in my previous comment, we need to reduce our debt, but you and I seem deeply divided over tax increases. You can't save your way out of the deficit we have. We need some tax increases to pay for stuff, either now or later, and you also need growth. Good things there are ways to do both!
SS taxes are currently set at 12.4% (split between employer and employee).
So a 3.5% increase would be effectively an increase of 28.2% If my tax rate when up 28% I would call that pretty massive.
That being said, even eliminating the cab entirely (IE a truly insane tax increase) wouldn't fully solve the problem.
"Another policy option to increase revenues for Social Security is to raise or eliminate the cap on the amount of income subject to the Social Security tax. In 2024, workers pay Social Security tax on only the first $168,600 of income. According to CRFB, increasing the taxable income limit subject to the Social Security tax to $350,000 could generate around $830 billion in new revenues over the next 10 years, closing 22 percent of Social Security’s 75-year solvency shortfall. The same analysis projects that eliminating the Social Security tax cap altogether could raise $1.8 trillion in new revenues for the program over 10 years and close the 75-year solvency gap by 68 percent. "
https://www.pgpf.org/issues/social-programs/
Note I'm fine with tax increases if paired with real entitlements reforms.
So maybe increase the SS tax rate by from say 12.4% to 13.4% (keeping the cap), along with raising the retirement age, and indexing it to life expectancy. Also changing to chained CPI.
For Medicare we need to end heroic end of life care. We also need to invest a LOT more money in R&D on increasing healthspan instead of just life span. And probably pay for a lot more GLP-1's for people even when younger.
It may be effective now but I'll withhold judgment on that until after we're fully immersed in the inevitable FO phase of this FAFO administration.
I think one thing that everyone is missing is that when the budget process started to now the bond market has changed. The tariffs broke the exceptionalism of US debt. The bond market is going to look very differently at a largely unfunded tax cuts than they might have previously and reaction is probably going to be more like Truss tax cuts than people expect.
Republican's can obviously ignore the bond market but that will only make everything else more difficult and given the US credit market there is likely to be immediate pain felt by everyone.
Doesn't mean that Democrats should rely on the bond market discipline but it will factor into making the process a lot hard that Republican's admit.
Every Republican congress person should be googling "Liz Truss mini-budget" right now
Britain's Conservative Party actually cares about the national interest and had a feasible means of replacing the incompetent Truss with a credible alternative. Neither of those things is true about the Republican Party.
It's not true with respect to Trump, but it's more true of Congress. They may very well change course if their budget causes issues in the treasury market.
I’d like to think republican businessman who have a vested interest in a strong bond market will prioritize that over their own tax cuts.
I would have thought Republican businessmen would have a vested interest in preserving a stable and predictable policymaking environment over marginal tax cuts, but here we are.
For any particular Republican businessman, what's the net difference between "money I make from getting tax cuts passed" and "money I lose from problems in the bond market"?
Given that Trump is currently e-screaming at Powell for not cutting interest rates yeah, I'm pretty sure he's not taking the bond market very seriously.
I mean jeez guys it's been EIGHT DAYS since that vertical spike that forced Trump to pause the tariffs, are we still talking about bonds? Christ!
> The bond market is going to look very differently at a largely unfunded tax cuts than they might have previously
Where would I look to see concrete evidence of this?
Ten year treasury yields.
Basically Trump and the GOP are moving the U.S. towards default risk. If he starts calling on the Fed to cut interest rates it signals he is going to stoke inflation to as a tacit default.
And … right on time. From Bloomberg this morning:
President Donald Trump said Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s termination from his position can’t come quickly enough, arguing that the US central bank should have lowered interest rates already this year, and in any case should do so now.
Just saw. What a fucking loser. Heavy Inflation here we come.
The right way, the wrong way, and the Donald Trump way. Which is just the wrong way, but faster.
What particularly scares me is that if the Fed does this, they may find themselves pushing on a string to a certain extent. Meaning that more demand from the Fed will be partially offset by weaker demand from foreign investors (which could be weakened even further by news of the Fed's action.)
The Fed will most likely cut rates sometime soon as it sees the economy careening toward a bad recession and Trump will crow about his great victory over Jerome Powell.
The inflation, which is FAKE NEWS and totally the fault of Sleepy Joe, Lyin Kamala, and the DEEP STATE, will be kept under the control by our Manufacturing of Arms and Ammunition to equip Our Fighting Men in Greenland and Panama! Low Taxes equal lower prices! Pass The Great Big Beautiful Bill!
Directive 10-289
"Point Five. Every establishment, concern, corporation or person engaged in production of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth produce the same amount of goods per year as it, they or he produced during the Basic Year , no more and no less. The year to be known as the Basic or Yardstick Year is to be the year ending on the date of this directive. Over or under production shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.
"Point Six. Every person of any age, sex, class or income, shall henceforth spend the same amount of money on the purchase of goods per year as he or she spent during the Basic Year, no more and no less. Over or under purchasing shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.
"Point Seven. All wages, prices, salaries, dividends, profits, interest rates and forms of income of any nature whatsoever, shall be frozen at their present figures, as of the date of this directive.
Sorry; what's that a quote from?
The 10-year hasn't really moved much. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/US10Y?qfsearchterm=. I mean it's up, but by normal random variance amounts. Not by any amount that signals investors think this is a real threat. If I had to guess, the WSJ report that Trump backed off tariffs due to the spike in the 10-year is likely giving too many investors a false sense of security that he wouldn't actually follow through on this threat.
It's the relationship to the equity market that spooked people, not the magnitude of the change. Even with random noise, equities and fixed income should have an inverse relationship. The third part of the story here is forex, where USD has *also* been performing badly (I think USD to EUR is at its lowest point since 2021?). These things are supposed to have predictable relationships to one another that are breaking down because the underlying dynamic (that the US government is essentially infinitely trustworthy and US debt is a zero-risk asset) is no longer seen as completely accurate.
This little mini-scare is going to be like one of those tiny strokes you get before a real one if the GOP moves ahead with trillions of dollars in unfunded tax cuts.
What's concerning is the 10 year has basically stayed the same despite the odds of a recession going from like 20% to 50-60%.
The initial theory of the Trump administration was you'd have essentially a "hot" economy with a bunch of deficit spending tilted toward the rich. This is why the 10 year yield actually peaked at 4.7% back in January when the SP 500 was above 6k... the expectation is you'd have a bunch of unpaid for/deficit increasing tax cuts, but the economy would basically keep firing the same way.
Now we have an consensus of much weaker economic growth and an increased odds of a recession, but the interest rate on the 10 year has only dropped to 4.3% or so. If you consider that the monetary response to weak economic growth "should" be dramatic rate cuts this seems troubling.
It probably reflects the idea that any fed rate cuts will be pushing against a nasty inflationary environment even if there's an economic slowdown.
There are two components to this -- one is that tariffs mechanically raise the prices... in theory the fed should look through this an not raise tariffs due to a one time increase in prices from a new tariffs level but impacts are complicated and difficult to disentangle sometimes.
The second is more troubling, essentially tariffs disrupt the whole US and global supply chain so they will reduce overall manufacturing output, which is a classic supply shock and can result in a situation where despite lower growth you have higher inflation. In this case the Fed doesn't have a great way to respond since you have inflation (same amount of dollars chasing fewer goods) but also a weak economy.
Will this definitely happen? It's hard to say. But we've gone to a situation where both the inflation and employment rates were relatively benign and had very favorable outlooks to a situation where there are risks on both sides (and more concerningly the possibility of stagflation/inflation in a low growth/recessionary scenario). The market reflects this possibility which is the concern rather than 4.3% being an especially "high" 10 year yield.
"What's concerning is the 10 year has basically stayed the same"
What happened to the 10 year treasuries is that they moved 100 bp lower due to fears of a looming recession and the expectation that the Fed would cut rates to counter it while simultaneously increasing 100 bp due to fears of looming increases in inflation and the expectation that the Fed would raise rates to counter it.
I certainly think significant inflation is coming. Banana republic dictators frequently try to get out of their problems by printing money. I don’t see why Trump would be any different.
Trump doesn't have seven FOMC votes. But these are crazy times, maybe he has enough votes in Congress for naked seigniorage?
Now that would be entertaining! No, I think he'll launch an attack on the independence of the Fed. He can remove members "for cause." Suppose he does that on some trumped-up (pun not intended) ground and replaces them with more pliant people. Who's going to stop him?
"Who's going to stop him?"
The courts? I mean, Trump can declare that he's removing them, but, other than throwing them in jail or having the FBI tackle them as they try to walk into the building, he can't stop them from showing up for work, and their replacements have to be approved by the Senate in any event.
Just going to keep posting this quote "I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a . 400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."
This is actually why apropos of this post that Yglesias underrates the possibility that GOP doesn't actually end up passing a massive tax cut or underrates the possibility the bill will have a lot smaller tax cuts and much heavier spending cuts. Yes, the House and Senate are increasingly made up of Trumpy nutballs like MTG or Tommy Tubberville. But there are still plenty of members who are not idiots (even someone like John Kennedy of LA, the idiocy is mostly for show. Which in some ways makes his "dumb" statements more infuriating). Given tight margins in House and Senate (the GOP margin in the senate is at the end of the day not that high historically), are we really sure there aren't enough Senate and House members who will get spooked by the bond market and vote no on a bill they know will spike the 10-year? It would only take a few House members for this to happen which is I think Matt underrates this possibility.
Republican legislators are motivated more by individual electoral prospects than any macroeconomic good of the country. Giving them more credit than I think they deserve, I'll concede they do care about the economy, just not enough to stand in the way of Trump. They'll choose the safer bet for themselves and a roll of the dice for the rest of us.
The problem is neither party really wants to make the hard decisions, and voters certainly don't want to hear that benefits will be getting cut for THEM and their taxes going up as well.
So I honestly think we probably have a 75%+ shot of a fiscal greater depression. The market will be fine until it's not. And then the collapse will make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
The US bond market is WAY bigger than mortgages, it's the most important market in the world, and if it collapses there will be a global greater depression.
One can hope so, but as a political matter, is the connection between Republicans’ clown show budget math and macroeconomic pain associated with a debt spiral tight enough in the minds of voters to discipline the Republicans should they see rising interest rates and just choose to ignore them?
if unemployment goes up materially, Dems will start crushing it on the generic ballot and everything will change. Trump’s floor is around 35, and would not avert carnage in the midterms
On the one hand, good if true I guess. On the other hand, this answer seems like it depends on everything actually going to shit in order to create any kind of political incentive for fiscal discipline, whereas Truss’s sacking was preemptive.
Given their track record and the absurdity of their budget proposals to date, my priors are that due to a combination of hyperbolic discounting, safe seats, general idiocy and fecklessness, and the hope that they can mislead the electorate into this being the Democrat’s fault somehow, the Republicans would just go ahead and do it and wait for the political bill to come due (hoping they can weasel out of it then) instead of reasoning backwards from future electoral losses to avoid economic catastrophe today.
Great (but depressing) summary!
they have to know lowering taxes on the rich is shitty politics. however, many of the house members are more interested in pleasing rich people who might help them in the future than their own constituents.
the sheep who voted for trump have it coming.
I'm stuck in the same country they are!
we have enough money to live abroad until 2029 if it comes to it. my wife might get a wfh job as an accountant, in which case we wouldn’t even bleed much. i would end up doing document review or some other form of shit work or just slowly bleeding wealth. worse than the life we’ve built but better than el salvador.
What struck me reading this is how hard it is to communicate effectively about extremely important but tedious matters of public policy.
I have a PhD, and while it's the kind of social science PhD that's basically a "kick me" sign in this comments section, I'm sort of smart (though a lot dumber than I should be). And yet I found this article difficult to follow on a casual read and glossed over a lot of the details. With concentration I would be perfectly capable of following the macroeconomic chains of reasoning, but there's two huge caveats there - "with concentration," as in the time and patience to sit down with something out of my normal cognitive terrain, and "I", as in someone who's in an upper percentile for quantitative reasoning (stop snickering) and reading comprehension.
Now try communicating the consequences of GOP budget proposals to someone who has neither of those things.
Also, one thing we learned in the runup to the last election during the Great Inflation Discourse was that subject matter expertise is ipso facto "elitist," and the right and heterodox left discovered their shared enthusiasm for lived experience and standpoint epistemology. How dare you tell "ordinary voters/folx/working families other conversation-stopping populist-sounding term" that inflation is not, in fact, historically high and is coming down? Eggs! EGGS, by God!
"Slow boring of hard boards" is becoming a mantra for me in these "we're based you're a cuck LOL" times, but I admit that its invocatory powers are waning.
One of the biggest concern voters have about Elon musk is that he’ll get a tax cut while people lose Medicare benefits. I think this can in fact be messaged!
The biggest winner in political messaging is to convey a sense of unfairness: these guys are getting a sweet deal while you're getting ripped off.
People hate tax cuts for rich people for the same reason they hate affirmative action.
I hope so! I keep thinking about one of the Lisas (Lisa C?) who told that story about being invited to a party by a Elon cultist…hopefully not a typical sort of person.
That was me! I too hope she was not representative.
It was a banger of a story, though!
I think of it like this: using social science research as a political instrument (as opposed to a policy instrument) is a category error. Doing so with low-quality, ephemeral research is even worse, and creates huge problems for responsible practitioners.
ETA: by "politics" I mean something closer to "campaigning" and by "policy", I mean "governing".
In one sense, policy *is* politics, but I take your larger meaning. I was reading some paper or other the other day to use in a research proposal, and early on it used the phrase "moral clarity" and I was like nyoooooope.
In retrospect, I should have contrasted 𝘤𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 with 𝘨𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 rather than
politics with policy.
Yeah, I started to qualify that distinction, but realized I couldn't do that and make my point without making the comment a sprawling beast.
This problem is as old as Aristotle. No one has the patience to follow a Logos argument, so we use Ethos as a shortcut. But no one trusts anyone, so the only option left is Pathos. Thence, "you're a cuck lol"
Maybe the messaging should borrow from the same "household accounting" playbook that Republicans used to like so much
That is exactly how you connect to people.
They get that living beyond your means is not sustainable. Of course the message isn't very believable from Democrats that tried to pass a 6 trillion BBB
yeah but "it's okay to use your credit card in an emergency" could play
Sure the problem is the emergency never seems to end. I was ok with the stimulus in 2020. But you need to pay it back afterwards
Yeah, as a data scientist, i can relate a lot! Like I needed to take time to follow this kinda stuff even if I’m used to this type of thing.
And while I fantasize the world where ppl see the data (and understand it correctly including the data generation process) more than “lived experience”, persuading ppl out of that has been extremely hard - granted, I tend to be really(maybe too much lol) cautious trying not to come across as invalidating their feeling but still…
Maybe I’m too low IQ and incompetent but idk lol
You can’t have a democracy with an uneducated populace. Something people in this comment section should think of before they go into their usual anti-education rants (”education is useless, better with vocational training etc”).
I agree, and despite me saying that “lack of an educated population” is a contemporary problem it’s been a problem since the invention of civilization, as someone pointed out in this thread. The fact that populations in a sufficiently complex society are largely not able to grasp issues of public policy at the scales that matter is a central paradox of democratic government. But it also sucks that ignorance is actively being celebrated (“based LOL”).
At the same time, from one point of view higher education in its form as the university *is* useless for a lot of people. I don’t mean that in a judging way; I mean that a large part of any population is not going to be interested in learning formalized systems of abstract thought, critical thinking, historical analysis, quantitative reasoning, etc. And that’s fine! There should be alternatives to “university” that equip people for decent jobs.
Having said that, the fact that governments have taken a “university for all” (which has often been a means of stashing away unemployed young people, let’s be honest) approach has given me a career. So I there is some hypocrisy in my first paragraph.
I understand that the SB type - educated, largely within spitting distance of centrist politics (whether right or left), and dominated by deeply empirical disciplines (lots of engineers, lawyers, etc. around here) would have looked at the last 15 years of what universities (in the US) have become and be exasperated. I share some of that, because I’m a recovering former post-structuralist-ish type (I say “ish” because I was never smart or patient enough to get really deep into it, so even now most of what I know is broad strokes).
But I agree that it also sucks being a punching bag, and there are days in this comments section where it’s like, maybe I’ll just take a smoke break on this one.
“…yet I found this article difficult to follow on a casual read and glossed over a lot of the details”
It’s a free offering.
At the end of this process, how exactly will 'the rich' benefit? They will get a tax cut, but what will become of their substantial investments in equities and treasuries?
If I were rich, would I prefer a world where I pay more tax but can simply toss my wealth into index funds and government bonds and usually watch 'line go up', or a world where I pay less tax but my investments are now high risk and something I have to worry about? And aside from that, rich people (like all others) benefit from high quality governance with educated people doing their jobs effectively.
I feel that the change in how the Treasury market is viewed will have big negative ramifications for the future. What a waste.
I do think you are on to something here.
With the Truss story, a major part of what happened was that specifically wealthy people revolted against a plan that was going to give them a tax cut. If you don't have the wealthy people on your side, then what even is the constituency for doing a tax cut for rich people?
The problem is that the US political context is different. The GOP has only one political constituency: Donald Trump. If Trump decides the tax cuts are good, he will do tax cuts. If the Senators get calls from their rich friends that the treasury markets have them spooked, they might resist -- unless Trump says "no, fuck that, we are doing the tax cuts". Then they will fall in line. They have no capacity to resist him.
There are senators like Murkowski that are immune to Trump. She's won an election as a write-in candidate. If anyone threatens to primary her, she'll just respond "come at me, bro"
It only takes one or two like her to tank everything, if the plan gets truly insane. Unfortunately, though, a lot of damage can be done to the country with a plan that is only mildly insane.
We'll see. The margins are so damned narrow that it only takes a handful to think, "these contacts are my retirement plan and my social cachet rests with them as well, fuck it, I'll just retire comfortably instead of staying in office to try to clean up the mess."
Permission structures are weird.
They are very clearly sick people. They will plow over thousands or millions of lives to try to get a High Score. Money is not what it is to us to these people.
It might have more to do with the situation they are in than inherent character defects. I can't say for sure what kind of crazy notions I would start to get in my head if I never had to concern myself about any kind of material want for half a second, for the rest of my life.
My inner Beutler yearns for a sharp message that coheres the attack on Trump's executive lawlessness with the GOPs Congressional impulse to obliterate federal finances.
To us libs the picture is pretty clear - it's the Hungarification of the USA. But even that is too intellectual.
Something to the effect of "Republicans hate your guts and think you're too stupid to know it. They are going to destroy the programs you've already paid for your health and retirement to give rich fuckos more tax breaks while allowing Trump to tank what's left of the economy. Then they're going to destroy the constitution to make sure you can't throw them out of power."
I suck at this. But damn these guys suck
Just replace "you're too stupid to know it" with "they've tricked you and exploited your loyalty and trust" and it becomes more palatable while retaining its truth value.
Not quite. The actual truth is that they (the voters) are stupid, but you can’t say that.
Nice build
"To us libs the picture is pretty clear - it's the Hungarification of the USA. But even that is too intellectual."
-------
Just say "Russification." With where we're starting from it's more like Hungary, but the end point is pretty much the same (and probably more similar because of our [soon-to-be-ex-]superpower status), and people get what you mean when you say it.
Oh, but say "like Russia" instead of "Russification," for the purposes of this discussion.
i am actually most troubled by the cultural revolution aspect of it
In addition to what David R says, the other reassuring thing about this cultural revolution is that they haven’t managed to turn the students against their teachers. Texas A&M students aren’t out protesting Gaza, but they are fighting the regents in court for the right to put on a drag show, not for the right to fire or kill their decadent professors the way 1976 in China played out.
good point
It's somewhat relieving, because the broad middle and professional classes are literally 100X the population share of the "intellectual regressives" in the 1970's PRC. Like I said the other day, it's not possible for the GOP/DOGE program to club the researchers, professors, public servants, HR people, doctors, and public-sector consultants without also at least delivering a heavy glancing blow to the engineers, accountants, small business owners.
The suburbs of Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Lancaster, Columbus, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Omaha... these places matter electorally and will feel pain from the stupid Maoism-lite aspects of what Trump is pursuing, or at least allowing his pet ideologues to pursue.
well, it is a cultural revolution with american characteristics. the chinese version also had a backlash of a sort: the gang of four didn't have a happily ever after. revolutionaries rarely do, but the inevitability of the backlash doesn't stop them.
but yes, it is a large sector so they have to be at least a bit picky
Sure. It's just going to be very self-limiting and very short-lived, is all I'm saying.
I've been trying to figure out whether Elon Musk or Laura Loomer is playing Madame Mao in this version. Particularly hard to say because Trump himself is playing both Napoleon I and Napoleon III, this time even more farcical and tragic.
I think this is more Argentine than Hungarian, including the commitment to financing a simulacrum of a European safety net.
"They are going to destroy the programs you've already paid for your health and retirement"
except people didn't pay for their health and retirement. That's why there are already huge deficits for Medicare and SS.
The unfunded entitlements is over 100 trillion. That's before Trump does anything.
Yeah, not quite sure if that’s intentional is Trump and the modern day GOP creates so many dramas after another (and many of them have actual significance), it def is really hard to focus on one thing…
Part of me is wondering best we could do what GOP does which is to adjust the messaging priorities depending on the channel/target audience for owned/paid channels.
It's really hard to not look at the last 30 years of politics and just conclude that everything the right ever claimed to care about was a lie. I have always been cynical about politics but man the cynicism these people deserve is off the charts. I don't see how we ever put our politics back together.
They have been very consistent that rich people should have more money and poor people should have less.
Yes, and that military spending is generally good. But if Trump tells them to change course they will do so immediately. Even if Trump disappeared tomorrow, how could you ever negotiate with Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham on anything? What do they believe in? What values do they hold that we should all share as Americans? It's all so absurd.
With heavy support from ”Christians” who seem not to have read the Bible.
No offense Matt but what do you actually want to do here? What does Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer? This line about “adding $4.5 trillion to the debt” is predicated on the assumption that 100% of the 2017 bill goes away. Is that desirable? I know in budget land that is zero impact but in practice it’s a huge tax hike.
On the spending side what is desirable? Joe Biden massively increased Medicaid to the point that about 30% of Americans are on it. That whole increase was necessary and any rollback is “draconian”? Or just what the GOP is proposing? You rightly mock the GOP promise to cut trillions without touching entitlements but I can’t imagine Dems plan to do so through entitlement reform.
I appreciate that it is in Jeffries’ and Schumers’ best interest to not engage. The GOP is in a difficult position and frankly are not smart enough to wriggle out of it. Ideally they screw it up from action or inaction & Dems can take over. But it’s disappointing to see Slow Boring just sort of happily spin this. What should Republicans do here? Should Democrats try and engage to extend the good parts of TCJA along with smaller cuts to Medicaid or other programs? How should Dems think of this problem which will become theirs in 1.5 years most likely? These all seem like more interesting questions to answer; this could have just been a “the GOP wants to take away poor peoples health insurance to finance tax cuts for the rich” tweet.
Matt has many times said that now is the time where the parties should do a negotiated tax increases and spending cuts. Current law vs current policy makes the tax cut vs tax increase complicated. But general idea would be increases vs current policy.
However, the Democrats don't have a majority in either house, can't bring a bill to the floor, aren't being asked for their votes. It would be insane political malpractice to put a counter out there now.
Democrats have one job right now: voting "No." Anything else is silly.
If Democrats want power again, they should have a clear plan on what they are going to do with that power.
As we saw in 2024, being NOT Trump isn't always enough.
When you currently have power, you need to show something about what you are doing with it. But when you don’t, you just activate the haters without also activating the people who like what you say.
100%
If the Democrats are publicly offered a good bill and turn it down, _then_ they theoretically "have power" and are doing something bad with it.
But until that time, nope.
(Offering specifics on cutting things always seems to make them less popular - why would Democrats offer any specifics if you don't even have the power to _do_ them)
In 2024, Democrats were the party in power and were widely perceived by voters to have no plan. Now that Democrats are demonstrably not in power, they do not owe anyone a plan. Republicans are in charge. Everything that goes wrong is their fault. They own it, they're breaking it, and if enough voters get mad about it, they'll put the Democrats back in charge. If that happens, Democrats should have an agenda, and the Common Sense Democratic Manifesto is a good philosophical basis or that agenda. But that discussion needs to be kept "within the family" and not litigated in public, because Democrats are NOT the party in power and their job is to OPPOSE, not PROPOSE. It's idiotic that center-left people want to play "government" when they are not IN government.
"Do not promulgate a grand vision for policy at levels of government you do not currently control."
if Democrats want to break Trump’s trifecta in 2026, then they need to have a plan.
Democrats need that plan now, not later. I think if Democrats actually embraced something like an abundance agenda they would do very well.
But so far I see very little evidence of that. Shit look at how the rebuilding in Hawaii and CA is going after their respective fires.
"Should Democrats try and engage to extend the good parts of TCJA along with smaller cuts to Medicaid or other programs?"
As the minority party, Democrats shouldn't try to do anything, because they can't. Just keep explaining what's going on.
But Democrats would have ABSOLUTELY tried to extend the "good" parts of the TCJA if they were in power right now. Are you kidding me? Do you even know what a Democrat is?
I put "good" in scare quotes because "middle class taxes can never rise, ever, by a penny" is pretty clearly a terrible policy corner we've painted ourselves into, but they wouldn't just be like "TRUMP LAW, ALL BAD!"
Sometimes Matt writes in support of preferred policy. Other times he writes in support of political ends. This is one of the latter times.
Since you're asking for a plan, I think we need a tax hike and a spending cut. Ideally, instead of letting TCJA expire, it should be given a phased expiration so that taxes eventually rise to their pre-TCJA level over the course of a few years. If there was political will you can keep some of the better TCJA cuts and instead replace them with new taxes (VAT! Or just uncapping the payroll tax, but that's much worse -- still probably better than a corporate hike?). We can get away with relatively modest cuts to all three major entitlement programs. Touching social security and medicare is suicide, but if it's a bipartisan compact the political damage to any one party is limited. Realistically, though, reducing medicare spending in an effective way requires actually bringing down costs, which should be a big focus.
On the discretionary side, I think there was a strong case for doing some phased reductions in various departments not so much for savings but for labor reallocation. Government should have larger labor forces in lax labor markets and smaller ones under tight labor markets. But these days I am not sure, since it's unclear whether the labor market will still be tight in 2027 when this negotiation could actually happen.
So there seems to be some substance to this, though less in terms of who Medicaid covers for healthcare and more what it’s doing other than healthcare.
But the numbers I found after Avery brought this to my attention seem to be a small fraction of the total that the GOP needs to cut.
Do you have any information about the magnitude of the spending within Medicaid on programs that aren’t just “health insurance for the poor?”
I am pretty sure it's about 25% of medicaid that is spent on long term care for disabled and elderly people, i.e. a bit over $200billion. That is completely separate from the poverty health coverage.
But I think cutting health insurance for relatively-healthy poor people is both politically and substantively better than cutting long term care for disabled people, so I don't think the above actually helps much.
I dunno. The notion that the Democrats are committed to just continuously expanding the expectations placed on federal welfare spending is pretty legit to my mind, and given how inefficient we are at this, I personally would be fine with drawing a line in the sand.
Make the Democrats of the 2030's commit to actually wringing some of the damned rent-seeking out to pay for any expansions of coverage or service they want any of Medicare, Medicaid, or CHIP to offer.
Oh I completely agree. I think the long term care system is fairly inefficient (my wife is a nurse who has spent her career in home health, assisted living, and nursing homes and, to be frank, i was regularly thinking 'this guy you're telling me about sounds like he's eating my tax dollars because his family hates him, not because he actually needs to be in a nursing home'). But at the end of the day health costs are sky-high across the board, you're not going to squeeze much just by cutting spending, you actually need reform to bust up the cartels, increase supply, do wage suppression on doctors, etc. Would be great to see dems willing to fight on this. The high costs effect every single part of every healthcare program, and I guess I'd just rather make sure genuinely disabled people get the care they need than provide health insurance to people in case they happen to have acute medical emergencies.
Also worth mentioning, "provide health insurance to people in case they happen to have acute medical emergencies."
Medicaid's expenses are actual care costs, not notional insurance rates. They (obviously) self-insure. So Medicaid expenditures aren't "in case people have emergencies" they're "because people had emergencies."
Yeah this is a good point (and an extremely obvious one in retrospect lol). So it's more like the effect is to shift the debt burden for emergencies onto the people in question who almost certainly won't pay it, and in practical terms that probably raises the revenue providers need to get from other sources (and hey, maybe it puts a bit of cost discipline on them, if we are doing wishful thinking).
It's a tough call but I still lean toward preserving LTSS, only because those are services that just don't exist without the government support in question. But your other comment is right that credibly committing to a cut forces everyone to get serious. Maybe we should start doing cuts-in-advance to take effect right after presidential elections, so the relevant actors have time to identify efficiencies and the balance of pressure is more in real terms and less in political terms.
I wholeheartedly agree with this, I just also completely buy the fiscal conservative line that unless they strangle the Democrats into doing this they will never make those hard choices.
“Or they can just do it the way that doubles the national debt, with all the downsides that entails.“
*sigh* It’s going to be this one, isn’t it?
I'm usually not an accelerationist, I want good things to happen. Having said that, I really need Republicans to royally step in it in 2027/2028. The time horizons for the institutional damage and the economic damage Trump is doing are mismatched, and they need to coincide to be discredited.
Not to derail the topic but I am genuinely curious about this-
“mistakenly sending a man to prison in El Salvador”
So it seems like he did have some gang connections?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna201665
Now, maybe the correct process wasn’t followed and Trump is saying all sorts of insane shit about deporting Americans to hell prisons in El Salvador but it seems like the narrative of “kindly family man and pillar of local community deported for no reason but racism” is not going to age well and is going to beclown democrats.
I think a perfectly acceptable outcome is Kilmar is brought back to the US, gets a hearing, and is deported officially. But completely trashing the concepts of habeus corpus and due process is a real "first they came for the Jews, but I did not speak up because I was not a Jew" moment.
This is also where I am. If the government demanded him back, followed process with the courts, then deported him again, well that's just following the laws. The idea that the executive can rush someone out of the country for the express purpose of dodging due process is quite sinister.
I think we need a different word than "deport" to distinguish:
1. being sent to another country where you walk off the plane and then stand there wondering what to do
2. being sent to another country where you are carted straight to jail
I was thinking about this on the way to work this morning. The US didn't just deport him; the US has both deported him and had him incarcerated.
Both of those things require due process, and I think the incarceration part of this might help some people see the problem more clearly.
We don't even know he's still alive. El Salvadore hasn't even asserted he is, have they?
Basically it's murder, or close enough to "we-don't-care-if-you-get-murdered-without-any-oversight-and-we'd-never-be-able-to-check-anyway" that it's still murder.
"and is deported officially."
to where
He's from El Salvadore isn't he?
The court could find that the order to withhold deportation to El Salvador is no longer valid, and then send him there, yes. They probably won't though, given that Bukele tossed him in a supermax for no reason.
The evidence in that article consists of two things
- that he was wearing a hoodie and a bulls cap
- that a cop said he talked to a guy who said he was in the gang
I think the fact that the hoodie is included tells you everything you need to know about the strength of their case.
Also I think the immigration court that granted him immunity from deportation specifically reviewed this incident and found it not credible. I also recall reading that the detective who filed the initial report was eventually fired for basically being a bad cop (falsifying records and general bad behavior).
Yeah I think we should grant the cop a similar level of credence as "lots of Hispanic gang members also like the bulls"
Cannot possibly emphasize enough the extent to which I don't give the slightest fuck who this guy is or whether or not he's sympathetic. Absolutely pales in comparison to the issue of the Feds disappearing people into foreign torture prisons they claim to have no control over or accountability for. This isn't a "bad man stays in jail" issue. This is a "government agents criminally operating outside the scope of the rule of law" issue, and if there's not judicial recourse the next available recourse is violent resistance. This is genuine constitutional collapse stuff.
THANK YOU
I agree that it’s bad on the process/constitution issue. That’s what liberals should be emphasizing. It’s the immediate need for liberals to claim every non white persona who is treated unjustly is totally innocent/pillar of their community. It’s absurd performance art and it undercuts the other arguments.
It’s a “believe all non white people” situation that is counter productive.
The disaster is the principle of the thing, and setting up a precedent where the executive has defied the courts. It's a total constitutional mess.
But I think you're right that banking on sympathy for this particular guy is never going to work. His story, illegal entry, followed by a court granted reprieve suggesting either (i) the guy is in fact a gang member, hence the fear of being targeted, or (ii) law and order is so bad in El Salvador that theoretically anyone who gets here can stay on that basis, is exactly the kind of thing getting people angry about the immigration system.
In 1973, the Soviet Union was so repressive that every single person who defected would be in danger if returned there, so it was the case that anyone who got to the US could stay on that basis. Why was it OK for Soviets then but it is not OK for Salvadorians now?
If a country is sufficiently bad, then every single person who gets out is entitled to asylum somewhere. That's the entire point of the asylum system.
The "problem" is that transportation is cheaper and easier now, so it's possible to literally empty entire countries in a way it was not when the system was designed. But that's a good thing: it means that when a country devolves that way, millions of people don't die any more, they are able to get out and then live on as refugees.
The challenge we have - globally, not nationally - is that if someone has the right to leave El Salvador and not be returned there, then they have to live somewhere. Yet there are more people doing that than there places in countries willing to accept them. So, what do we do? Send them back to die? Or accept that every country will have to take more refugees than it would like to and get on with building up the infrastructure to accept them?
> Why was it OK for Soviets then but it is not OK for Salvadorians now?
Because we were in a cold war with the Soviets and every defectors from their system to ours was proof of how much they sucked. It was absolutely in American interests to show off our trophies.
No one is winning any kind of cold war with El Salvadore.
Also the defectors made a really big ostentatious show of distancing themselves from the old system and loudly loving the new system.
The number was also kept dramatically small because they would get shot at as they ran away. There was a wall, it was just built to keep people in.
"In 1973, the Soviet Union was so repressive that every single person who defected would be in danger if returned there, so it was the case that anyone who got to the US could stay on that basis. Why was it OK for Soviets then but it is not OK for Salvadorians now?"
Because a dirty secret is that El Salvador is massively improved from what it was. I've spoken with Salvadorans living in the US and they think Bukele has done amazing things when they go back and visit. The Soviet and Cuban defectors were not just economic migrants.
In an alternate-history sense one wonders if some piece of land (maybe somewhere in Alaska? who knows) could be dedicated as a kind of internationalist-state obligated to take all comers with open borders (with public order initially provided by the US or UN and gradually devolved to local civil authorities). Maybe it would become its own Singapore-style multiethnic economic hub that became attractive even to countries that initially established it so that they could avoid arbitrarily high refugee flows and instead direct them to the country of last resort. Maybe not.
It's a difficult topic. My guess is the success of a project like that would rest almost entirely on the willingness of the rich world to invest in and maintain it. Otherwise it could devolve into its own separate humanitarian crisis.
Richard is entirely correct though, that we have laws designed with the horrors of the middle 20th century or Soviet purges in mind that no longer work well for a globalized world where the distinction between economic migrants and individuals fleeing persecution as traditionally understood has blurred. I know where I'd draw the line and it probably isn't where the bleeding hearts would like it but opinions are like assholes and the only ones whose opinions matter have refused to codify something.
I am extremely pessimistic that an Artic colony of alleged refugees would be anything other than a nightmare — you are selecting for a problematic population and there won’t be any local culture to assimilate into, or local economy to absorb them. It would be just a giant refugee camp. Which, OK, is maybe still better than getting murdered for the genuine refugee cases, but it’s not going to be Singapore.
> Why was it OK for Soviets then but it is not OK for Salvadorians now?
That's easy: the policy wasn't just humanitarian. Every defection was a PR win for the US, in the midst of an existential ideological conflict.
Immigration is still good PR for the US, and you're right about the transportation issue, but the cold war comparison isn't going anywhere.
I don't entirely disagree with you on nature of the problem even if I wouldn't state it quite as dramatically. In the US the only organ that can answer that question with legitimacy is Congress. Its persistent failure to do so is what has us here, with back to back administrations trying to force outcomes by creating facts on the ground including at times via all out crisis, and with the true believers in the immigration bar doing their part to make it even worse.
I just don't get what the problem is with letting a lot of people in. They're refugees. They can't live in their home country. They have to live somewhere else. I don't understand why any country has a problem with unlimited numbers coming. There are a billion Chinese - their government is awful, and every one of them should be entitled to asylum. What's the problem with a billion Chinese people all moving to Belgium?
CULTURE
The domestic conservative in america is a much more vicious person than any immigrant.
Who cares?
You cannot possibly fail to understand why Belgians would have a problem with a billion Chinese moving to Belgium, even if you don’t.
Alas, there's places around here that could actually use the influx of people but the people here all hate foreigners, so that's not gonna happen so instead west virginia will die out and be brain drained forever.
People everywhere dislike people from other places.
Death of the Welfare State.
“What's the problem with a billion Chinese people all moving to Belgium?”
You’re including committed communists in that?
I guess the question is if the people of Belgium get a vote on that, and whether the answer should be respected.
We just need a law that if you manage to immigrate 51% of the population of a country, you can claim it.
I don’t know how you jump straight to (II) there, especially since the claim that got him withdrawal of removal was that he and his family were being specifically targeted, not that everyone in El Salvador is equally at risk of gang violence.
If he is not in fact a gang member what other conclusion would there be? I mean I guess that analysis doesn't apply to Bukele himself and maybe certain other high ranking officials (though I bet the gangs want them dead too) but there is probably not a single regular person in El Salvador who could not plausibly claim to be afraid of being targeted by a gang.
I mean you could just read about the case instead of speculating. I am having trouble believing you think either only gang members are at risk from gangs, or literally everyone is.
I have read about it, see also my reply to you below quoting the article here that I read but that I am no longer sure you have.
> If he is not in fact a gang member what other conclusion would there be?
Maybe the gang tried to recruit him and threatened him when he refused to join? There's at least one other case where that's the claim.
Maybe. How many young men in El Salvador could say that? I bet it's a whole lot, which is my point.
What is the problem with a whole lot of Salvadorians moving to the US?
USAID all over again!
Two things can be true: The Trump Administration is lawless, is denying this person (and probably many, many others) due process and will likely force a confrontation between the Judicial and Executive branches in the coming year.
Also: The immigration system is profoundly stupid -- the idea that an immigration judge in 2019 ruled that this gang member couldn't be deported back to his home country because other gangs in El Salvador might be mean to him is deranged. So he was re-released into the US so this gang member could do gang member things but to American citizens?
As David Frum famously wrote: "If liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will." Well, we are in the time of the last words of his quote.
> an immigration judge in 2019 ruled that this gang member couldn't be deported back to his home country because other gangs in El Salvador might be mean to him
That’s not at all what the judge ruled. You’re lying.
Well, he's wrong. We don't know he's lying tho.
I rephrased from the article for effect. But it isn't a lie. "Being mean to him" is pretty closely related to "persecution" from local gangs.
It’s intentionally misleading to the point of dishonesty.
“gang member” there’s no evidence of this.
Look, I don’t like Chicago Bulls fans either, but come on.
> there’s no evidence
There absolutely is evidence. They have a witness. That 100% counts in a court as evidence.
It's not proof.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
It doesn't matter if he was in a gang or not. What matters is the ignoring of due process. Someone who doesn't like you says you're a gang member, so ICE picks you up and sends you to CECOT and the Trump says, welp, nothing more we can do here.
Not a good system.
The threading system on Substack allows you to ignore conversations you deem are unimportant. Click on the long vertical bar to the left and the whole subthread will collapse.
You’re going to put a guy on the stand to say another guy told him a third guy was in a gang? That is actually not admissible in a court under the hearsay rule.
What caused him to be particularly endangered by gangs compared to other innocents in his El Salvador community?
I don't know, and neither do you.
A judge looked at his claim and decided it was credible.
But more importantly, in the America I grew up in, we don't send people to foreign prisons based on speculation.
Don’t misunderstand: What the Trump Administration did to Mr. Garcia was wrong, legally and morally. But we do deserve to know what the full truth is.
The OP is entirely about distinguishing “is this guy going to turn out to be super sympathetic“ [contested topic of discussion] from “is the government behaving poorly as regards due process and the law” [everyone agrees yes very bad].
Fair as to the OP, but there is definitely some bleed-over from your 1 to your 2 in this thread.
I don’t think we are going to learn any more about this person’s alleged gang ties, and therefore the main effect of the speculation will be to encourage people who think maybe the government has a point.
An aside: what does it even mean to accuse someone of being a “gang member?” It doesn’t appear to require any overt act. Is there a registry? (Lol.) Isn’t this an unfalsifiable accusation that can be leveled against anyone, or at least anyone Hispanic-looking?
Was it because he’s satan? I bet he’s satan. So it’s best if he goes to a prison in El Salvador because no one else has a better story.
If you say so. I don’t think anyone should have been sent to El Salvador in the manner they were.
"because other gangs in El Salvador might be mean to him"
Seems like his life was in danger.
Everybody knows that gangs being mean to you just consists of noogies and Indian burns.
But overall this guy is just spouting totally unsupported bullshit, which he himself concedes is not legally relevant to Kilmar's detention status. If there is somebody who takes down posts here for misinformation reasons they might want to just consider blasting this whole thread.
I don't care, and neither should our immigration system. If his life was in danger from other gangs, well, that comes along with, you know, being a gang member.
Asylum is -- or should be -- reserved for political or ethnic persecution by a government. Not because a gang member is in danger from rival gangs.
I can't find any real evidence he was in a gang.
Also, I'm more trying to point out how aren't being accurate. You are over-stating your case.
The article stated -- now perhaps the article's author is lying, but I assume the NBC News article isn't lying -- that "Later in 2019, an immigration judge barred him from being sent to El Salvador. The order said he proved he had a “well-founded fear of future persecution” from local gangs"
So he came here illegally and an immigration judge decided he was specifically targeted by rival gangs in El Salvador such that he could stay in the US.
So why lie and claim the judge found that he was a gang member?
He did come here illegally, no argument from me there. Perfectly fair for you to care about that.
There is also evidence that gangs had it out for him.
But there is, to my knowledge, no actual evidence he was in a gang. Some cop said he was, but that cop is now understood to not be a credible source.
I don't think the courts got to the point where they actually examined that lying cop's statements.
I agree that liberals should enforce borders tho.
We will have a chance again in the future to do so. I hope we have learned our lesson because the way people like Stephen Miller do it is antithetical to the rule of law.
Good reason for an administrative judge to reject allowing him to enter the US. Burden of proof means something. Not a good reason to deport him with no proof he had done anything wrong in the US except being here illegally. This is not the dimension on whihc Liberals are not enforcing immigration law.
It is, in fact, one of the dimensions on which we chose not enforce immigration laws. The law states that people here illegally are subject to deportation, regardless of whether they have committed other crimes.
I agree on "subject to." The issue here is their situation one of justified fear of specific violence. I agree that "El Salvador is a dangerous place" (is it now?) is not grounds for either admission or non-deportation.
And again, it ought to be a cost benefit analysis which people subject to depuration it makes sense to deport.
Trump is sending illegal immigrants to El Salvador to deter others from coming. Defying judicial rulings is a bit scary — though there is certainly room for pushing back against judicial overreach. However, the basic idea of “deter unlawful crossings through high profile, exemplary measures” is sound.
This also spares the administration the need for workplace raids, which would destabilize the Republican coalition.
TIL that sending someone to a hellhole with no means of release or parole ever is a “high profile, exemplary measure.” I’ve seen lots of euphemisms in my life, but that has to be in the top ten.
Fair enough, but bear in mind the use/mention distinction. I think it's probably a really accurate model of what Trump thinks he's doing.
Good point, although I’m split 50-50 between “Trump thinks this is an effective way to deter migrants” and “Trump is doing a shitty thing on purpose to pwn the libz.”
We could also do it by sending Trump to a prison in El Salvador. That would probably do more to deter crime.
Especially the kind of crime that leads to tens of thousands of deaths and destruction of trillions of dollars of wealth, which seems more important to deter than the kind of crime that leads to one death or a thousand dollars of damage.
What about arresting him and jailing him for doing "gang member things."
I tend to agree. Abrego Garcia's guilty and personal qualities really aren't the source of the problem here.
The government needs to go through due process before deporting someone.
The government needs to go through due process before incarcerating someone.
That's the problem: Abrego Garcia wasn't given a hearing in front of an immigration judge before the US deported him, and he wasn't given a jury trial before the US had him incarcerated.
I have no idea what happened here.
But it is always terrible to focus on individual cases, the exact circumstances of one person will be the focus of discussion and don't tell you anything about the effect of the policy.
So why did the administration say deporting him was a mistake?
it's not about him, though. i think a useful question to ask yourself is ``does this case make me marginally more worried that a stupid sequence of events would end up with me in some hellhole, indefinitely, and with absolutely no recourse?''
My point is liberals are making it about him being an upstanding “Maryland man”.
This is a trap liberals fall into by making an everything bagel morality argument.
We should say the process and the constitution matters, even if this guy is a gang member.
We shouldn’t hold him up as a martyr. It will lose people.
i think this is just a natural human desire to want to know more about the case. skeptical that ``message discipline'' can do much to stir this.
Winning argument “freedom good, constitution good, bill of rights good”
Losing argument “we need to be kinder and gentler to illegal immigrants (even if they are gang members in a notorious international gang)”
i think people are wondering whether that could happen to them, and the way to address that is to tell them a bit about the person who this happened to.
But we have to know the truth about who that person is and not go along with his families invented narrative. Especially when that family knows they could potentially win millions of dollars in a civil suit.
The gang allegations came from a supposed confidential informant. The government has produced no other evidence. This is all in the article you linked so I’m not sure where your question comes from.
This is the quote that makes me think it isn't quite that simple.
"In another document from the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, a court agreed to deny Abrego Garcia bond after his arrest outside the Home Depot in 2019 and wrote that the allegation that he is a gang member “appears to be trustworthy and is supported by other evidence in the record” in the Prince George’s County police documents."
He was picked up at the Home Depot with two other gang members.
> He was picked up at the Home Depot with two other gang members.
Notably, there were 4 people arrested there, not 3.
Also notably, his case did not end after this bond hearing in 2019. There’s a reason he was let go and given a work permit: the gang allegation was dropped in later hearings, likely because it wasn’t credible in the first place.
Now who is it that's speculating?
Whatever the guy is he ain't a slam dunk PR case for the functioning of the immigration system.
I'm not speculating! The government drops the gang allegation in later hearings, you can find this easily.
I understand that too, and that he has never been officially determined to be a gang member. I do not think we will be able to determine whether he is or isn't in a gang in these comments.
My point back at my original comment was that you do not want the discussion about the very real attack on the rule of law by the Trump admin hinging on this guy's case. He entered illegally. He has now been arrested twice, both times in the company of people who apparently are MS-13 members. His wife filed a protective order against him. Maybe that is all unlucky coincidence. But even if he is not a criminal the fact that people with this sort of smoke around their lives being permitted to stay in the country only reinforces the (IMO accurate) perception that these processes are totally broken and allowing people in who probably shouldn't be.
That seems like really flimsy evidence. It amounts to "he was wearing a hoodie that is "associated with Hispanic Gang Culture" which isn't even an association with a specific gang, and he was standing in a Home Depot parking lot looking for work next to some other Hispanic dudes who might have been shady.
As far as I understand it 2 of those dudes were confirmed gang members.
I used to live in an MS 13 interdiction zone in LA. I know a little bit about this stuff. It’s very hard to prove direct membership with a gang, many people are “associated” without official rank or status.
It’s a grey area where a lot of people are working normal jobs but doing things on the side for the gang.
Maybe all of that isn’t true for this individual but my point is jumping on the “totally innocent narrative” is a huge mistake and I feel like Ezra kind of sheepishly doubled down on it. Which helps no one.
Ezra did a good breakdown:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-asha-rangappa.html
here is a ross douthat podcast that is mostly about the case
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/ross-douthat-interesting-times-jack-goldsmith.html
it completely ignores the personal aspects of the case and manages to be more alarming than anything else (yay!?).
edit: the rest of that podcast is also interesting. they say that one possible outcome is that a lot of the wiggle room will be taken out of the system (this would be terrible, imo). they also say that the democrats they talk to all say they will retaliate if and when in power (this is comforting).
I truly hope Douthat is reflecting on the potential future state of his immortal soul in light of his behavior for the last year.
What this article drives home for me is the jaw-dropping degree of cognitive dissonance of the current administration. The whole America First-MAGA cultural war stuff—the war on universities, the war on woke, the DOGE-driven, indiscriminate destruction of state capacity, the trade war, the war on vaccines—it all gets a lot *harder* if they add lunatic budgeting to the mix, doesn't it?
Republicans have a hard time prioritizing just like Democrats do.
The priority is making Trump momentarily happy so that his anger gets directed at someone else.
This is why I remain optimistic about American democracy -- Trump/MAGA are massively discrediting themselves with the general public right out of the gate and also damaging state capacity for running an authoritarian regime.
I hope you’re right. Before the markets tanked, I was wondering why they hadn’t and wishing that they would to bring on the backlash ASAP. This is…worse than I imagined, by a long shot, but it seems like there’s at least a chance that they’re speedrunning their own demise through sheer incompetence.
"Interest payments as a share of GDP were really high in the 1980s as a result of Ronald Reagan’s bad fiscal policies."
Yeah, ending inflation was a truly disasterous policy.
Matt is probably referring to the fact that Reagan cut taxes and increased spending at a time of high interest rates, not just that interest rates were high.
Indexing tax brackets to inflation was a good thing.
Why? Isn’t that how you prolong inflation, by indexing things to it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket_creep?wprov=sfla1
That's my point. Bracket creep is one of the things that is a bit of an automatic stabilizer. It automatically takes more money out of the economy when inflation gets higher.
Indexing wages to inflation, and indexing tax rates to inflation, both provide extra stimulus when the economy is over-stimulated and prolong inflation.
Interest payments as a share of GDP were really high in the 1980s more as a result of interest rates being high than as a result of deficit spending.
> bad *fiscal* policies.
inflation in the 1980s was pretty famously ended by really really high interest rates, aka monetary policy, which was the purview of Paul Volcker, not Reagan.
Volcker, of course, was appointed and charged with ending inflation by Carter. I know you know this, I just always like to mention it, because far too many people out there credit Reagan.
Ending inflation was monetary, not fiscal policy. Engineering the recession was the right thing to do, and it also wouldn't have been so brutal if Reagan believed in fiscal constraints.
Yes, yes, the Republicans are destroying the world order that has kept peace, undermined global prosperity, trashed the rule of law in the US, shattered scientific research, and pushed us toward devastating stagflation if not worse.
But let's be fair. Trump has also called to get rid of the penny.
Trump wants to be hated by squished-penny-collecting children throughout America!
(My son has two albums of squished pennies, he's always like "ooh, Mommy, can I get one?" when he sees one of those penny-squishing machines)
When I first started paying attention to Congress, and had recently come out, there were two openly gay members of Congress - Barney Frank, and Jim Kolbe, Republican from Arizona. Kolbe was campaigning to eliminate the penny, but Republican members of Congress literally turned their back on him whenever he would speak about this, because they thought the fact that he was openly gay was disgraceful.
Imagine paying good, hard currency to deface valueless cents. Tariffs? The worst value destroyer is squished penny machines.
The wild thing is, if republicans came in, decided the deficit was too much, and then capped social security payments by income, raise the retirement age, and did reduced the federal healthcare outlays, I’d hate it, but at least I would understand it.
This, though, is insanity. I guess our best hope is the freedom caucus
Freedom Caucus = MAGA. Trump said “deficit,” deficit it was. Since Reagan, deficits for Republicans have been ok if necessary to reduce taxes on high income people (and they always are, becasue they do not have the political courage to cut transfers to low income people).
The insanity is the point!
I see two possible scenarios; one is predictable and scary, while the other is intriguing.
Scenario 1: Trump says "no cuts to anything, cut taxes, and I will fire Jerome Powell and force the Fed to cut interest rates to finance the debt" which would be an economic disaster waiting to happen. It, probably does not quite blow up during his term which means Trump can either ride off into the sunset and claim victory OR set up a fourth Trump nomination, and third term. Trump would have to deal with it at that point, but by then he'd be so firmly entrenched as America's dictator he won't care.
Scenario 2: Trump actually raises taxes on wealthy Americans, which blunts the damage enough that he limps on. This also upends politics in the United States in ways I cannot predict.
We'll see, Scenario 2 goes so deeply against the Republican grain I could see the remnants of Reaganism really resisting Trump. But then again, it also reflects Trump's actual rhetoric.
There is Scenario 3: Trump's entire budget collapses and they accomplish nothing making Trump look like a nincompoop...but I think that's unlikely.
"the conventional wisdom among political operatives had pivoted so hard against deficit reduction"
Maybe politicians should pay more attention to economists and less to "political operatives." Or let them stay in their lane, figuring out how to we make good policy at as low political cost as possible. [Same goes for keeping Trump 1's trade restrictions, not increasing legal immigration, controlling the border.]