Great post. I'm not sure I understand why Matt chose to compare the present-day US with the post-WWII US. Why not do some comparison with modern governments that have higher trust and/or efficacy?
I think this is the 2nd of your big idea posts that, in my opinion, don't seem to be getting the credit they deserve. The first was about how democrats could have more success by pointing to accomplishments instead of failures. Keep it simple and show what we've done for you. It's a plan.
And the state will have a website where people can enter their information on the honor system until they get the eligibility answer they want that they can then show to a health provider that won't (and doesn't want to) confirm.
Overly complex policy + Ease of evading that policy = Resentment toward people seen as "gaming" the (easily gamed) system and the government that allowed it
That's a good post (though I would point out that Medicare and Medicaid are both run by private companies, including insurers and the govt simply pays for most of it.) It did get me thinking that it may be a not terrible idea to run the vaccination program through the secretary of state's office. The SOS has a website where you can go, plug in your address and say date of birth and last 4 digits of your social and it tells you where to go, when and what documents to bring. That's what we want for our vaccination effort. We want everyone to go to a website, enter their address, their DOB, maybe some other characteristic and have the website tell us where to go, when and what documents to bring. I know.. it sounds nuts but why not? You don't even have to make it obvious it's SOS. It can be redirect from the department of public health.
This is a fantastic post. Thank you. The triad approach seems eminently sensible.
I do have one quibble, however. You seem to believe that the people who argue that QE has been a giveaway to the rich are incorrect. They are not. One consequence of financial repression has been a sharp increase in the wealth gap. Persistent QE has effectively resulted in the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in history. It is actually sort of doing what it says on the tin, as it were, as the goal of QE is to support asset prices and the widening wealth gap is largely explained by differences in the composition of household wealth.
Hence why when an autocratic mechanism, like say the Chinese or Singaporean bureaucracy decides to do something and it's effective, it looks like a working government.
I always liked Charles Peters' Washington Monthly approach because it emphasized understanding how government really works. The lack of that approach is reflected in this misguided post.
Government actions should be clear and effectively carried out? Sure, sign me up. But what does that mean in practice? Hard to figure out from this post, except the hobbyhorse of age-based vaccine distribution. (OK, fine; let's do that. That just leaves us everything else government is responsible for.)
So PPP was complicated and not always well carried out whereas give almost everyone $1200 was popular and easy to execute. But what if your goal is to keep small businesses alive while they're forced to shut down? How effective is everyone having $1200 at making sure that happens? Giving everyone access to healthcare is what we want, but how do we do that by "doing what it says on the tin" and avoid the complications of an ACA? I mean, in the real world, where the simple-in-the-abstract Medicare4All doesn't reflect what the American public is willing to buy into (at least not yet).
The ARRA wasn't unpopular because it was complicated; it was because it was too small. Had it been super complicated (and it was! what with Race to the Top, renewable energy support etc.) but twice as big and the economy boomed, the American people would have been a lot happier.
Frankly, I think Obamacare is an example of falsely advertised policy. Fundamentally it raised some taxes on the wealthy to increase access to health care, but that was never part of the sales job (or even acknowledged). Would have been better to admit the tradeoff and argue in favor of it!
I don't understand your point. The ACA was always advertised as "raised some taxes on the wealthy to increase access to health care." What do you recall it being advertised as?
Great post! Cuomo is really an attack on your whole blue states need to take the lead in advancing liberal ideas. Trump gave us 50 experiments that show that governments aren't good at doing stuff.
This post ties into the idea of "expensive ideas". Essentially - the cost of attaining positions of decision making (recommendations) like consultants and lawyers is so high. Ranging from college to opportunity cost of future career earnings - that they can't change the program to appeal to the "tin". Simple, unfortunately doesn't work on resumes.
On the subject of vaccine distribution I will offer this. Now that we have vaccines and they are being distributed we know something about the resistance of people to taking it. It is larger than I feared. But that may abate it time as people see there are very few cases of adverse consequences. Your argument that it should be prioritized based on age because of risk is not without merit but I think it misses a few key points.
The one I fear is Evolution, dumb blind Evolution. We have already seen more easily transmissible strains emerge. And if you have a basic grasp of the underlying theory that makes sense. That is a successful mutation from the point of view of the evolving organism. A mutation that kills its host isn't a successful mutation but it doesn't know that. The more hosts you have then there is a higher risk of that happening. And if you understand how flu travels through the population as a swarm of strains and how gene reassortment occurs to generate new strains and also why flu vaccines must be strain specific in many cases then you would share my fear.
This is a bomb that could go off at any time. Get anyone who wants to be vaccinated vaccinated as soon as possible and hope the shit doesn't hit the fan. But this must be done properly. If a single dose only produces partial immunity then doing that only assists this thing in evolving just as improper use of antibiotics produces antibiotic resistant strains. And, as a matter of fact, no antibiotic has ever been introduced that did not produce resistant strains within ten years of introduction.
Assuming the Senate won’t end the filibuster, can they carve out a way to pass HR 1 anyway? Without redistricting reform, the House stands a very good chance of flipping in two years. I know many Senators like the lack of accountability that comes with the filibuster but they have to know that their chances at re-election are higher if they have a Democratic House to work with and pass popular legislation.
Turning the vaccine distribution procedure into something it seems like the DMV would do isn't a good way to win people over to the Democrats, and I say this as a Democrat who used to be a Republican when he was young and stupid in college.
If the answer is fewer lawyers (but muh rules!) in politics, and more product managers, let's do it! As someone who in my day job preaches outcome over effort, seeing Newsom and Cuomo spin on this is about as frustrating as it could be.
I do like the way you think about such things. But I also think, based on very solid evidence, that your arguments fall apart in the face of reality, especially in the face of urgency. Take TARP for example. Most people even now fail to understand how imminent disaster was because of the liquidity crisis that started with a melt down in the housing market. Why, people asked, was TARP money going to General Electric? Many conspiracy theories were offered. Unless, of course, you understood how Main Street worked and not Wall Street.
Anyone who has ever attended a trade show for anything at all knows what that cluster of booths at the end of the hall is for. That's where you finance your new CNC machines, or your fleet of school buses or whatever. Banks don't do this stuff at all. And if you went to your bank and asked them to finance such capital acquisitions they would generally show you the door. They don't know what that thing is. They don't know what the market for it might be and they aren't going to accept it as security against a loan. That is what leasing firms like GE Capital are for. And those guys borrow their capital from banks which they couldn't do at the time.
I suppose you could have made a can labelled Money To Prevent Mass Order Cancellations (which started to happen) and sent that money direct to the Main Street where it wound up. If you could figure out how to do it in about two weeks. And then people would know that TARP saved Main Street. But I seriously doubt it. Sometimes you just have to use the means at your disposal.
This post is Exhibit A for the case "Why I am so happy to pay for Matt."
BTW, this approach to governance in low-trust also applies, I'd argue, to any corporate support function whose performance is not tied to revenue.
Great post. I'm not sure I understand why Matt chose to compare the present-day US with the post-WWII US. Why not do some comparison with modern governments that have higher trust and/or efficacy?
I think this is the 2nd of your big idea posts that, in my opinion, don't seem to be getting the credit they deserve. The first was about how democrats could have more success by pointing to accomplishments instead of failures. Keep it simple and show what we've done for you. It's a plan.
Washington has a strong new entry into the overly complex vaccine prioritization sweepstakes.
"Phase 1" has six separate Tiers - A1, A2, B1, B2, B3, B4. https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/VaccinationPhasesInfographic.pdf
And the state will have a website where people can enter their information on the honor system until they get the eligibility answer they want that they can then show to a health provider that won't (and doesn't want to) confirm.
Overly complex policy + Ease of evading that policy = Resentment toward people seen as "gaming" the (easily gamed) system and the government that allowed it
That's a good post (though I would point out that Medicare and Medicaid are both run by private companies, including insurers and the govt simply pays for most of it.) It did get me thinking that it may be a not terrible idea to run the vaccination program through the secretary of state's office. The SOS has a website where you can go, plug in your address and say date of birth and last 4 digits of your social and it tells you where to go, when and what documents to bring. That's what we want for our vaccination effort. We want everyone to go to a website, enter their address, their DOB, maybe some other characteristic and have the website tell us where to go, when and what documents to bring. I know.. it sounds nuts but why not? You don't even have to make it obvious it's SOS. It can be redirect from the department of public health.
This is a fantastic post. Thank you. The triad approach seems eminently sensible.
I do have one quibble, however. You seem to believe that the people who argue that QE has been a giveaway to the rich are incorrect. They are not. One consequence of financial repression has been a sharp increase in the wealth gap. Persistent QE has effectively resulted in the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in history. It is actually sort of doing what it says on the tin, as it were, as the goal of QE is to support asset prices and the widening wealth gap is largely explained by differences in the composition of household wealth.
Beyond that quibble, though, great post.
Hence why when an autocratic mechanism, like say the Chinese or Singaporean bureaucracy decides to do something and it's effective, it looks like a working government.
I always liked Charles Peters' Washington Monthly approach because it emphasized understanding how government really works. The lack of that approach is reflected in this misguided post.
Government actions should be clear and effectively carried out? Sure, sign me up. But what does that mean in practice? Hard to figure out from this post, except the hobbyhorse of age-based vaccine distribution. (OK, fine; let's do that. That just leaves us everything else government is responsible for.)
So PPP was complicated and not always well carried out whereas give almost everyone $1200 was popular and easy to execute. But what if your goal is to keep small businesses alive while they're forced to shut down? How effective is everyone having $1200 at making sure that happens? Giving everyone access to healthcare is what we want, but how do we do that by "doing what it says on the tin" and avoid the complications of an ACA? I mean, in the real world, where the simple-in-the-abstract Medicare4All doesn't reflect what the American public is willing to buy into (at least not yet).
The ARRA wasn't unpopular because it was complicated; it was because it was too small. Had it been super complicated (and it was! what with Race to the Top, renewable energy support etc.) but twice as big and the economy boomed, the American people would have been a lot happier.
So: effective, yes of course; simple -- meh.
Fantastic article
A lot of good stuff in here!
Frankly, I think Obamacare is an example of falsely advertised policy. Fundamentally it raised some taxes on the wealthy to increase access to health care, but that was never part of the sales job (or even acknowledged). Would have been better to admit the tradeoff and argue in favor of it!
I don't understand your point. The ACA was always advertised as "raised some taxes on the wealthy to increase access to health care." What do you recall it being advertised as?
Great post! Cuomo is really an attack on your whole blue states need to take the lead in advancing liberal ideas. Trump gave us 50 experiments that show that governments aren't good at doing stuff.
This post ties into the idea of "expensive ideas". Essentially - the cost of attaining positions of decision making (recommendations) like consultants and lawyers is so high. Ranging from college to opportunity cost of future career earnings - that they can't change the program to appeal to the "tin". Simple, unfortunately doesn't work on resumes.
On the subject of vaccine distribution I will offer this. Now that we have vaccines and they are being distributed we know something about the resistance of people to taking it. It is larger than I feared. But that may abate it time as people see there are very few cases of adverse consequences. Your argument that it should be prioritized based on age because of risk is not without merit but I think it misses a few key points.
The one I fear is Evolution, dumb blind Evolution. We have already seen more easily transmissible strains emerge. And if you have a basic grasp of the underlying theory that makes sense. That is a successful mutation from the point of view of the evolving organism. A mutation that kills its host isn't a successful mutation but it doesn't know that. The more hosts you have then there is a higher risk of that happening. And if you understand how flu travels through the population as a swarm of strains and how gene reassortment occurs to generate new strains and also why flu vaccines must be strain specific in many cases then you would share my fear.
This is a bomb that could go off at any time. Get anyone who wants to be vaccinated vaccinated as soon as possible and hope the shit doesn't hit the fan. But this must be done properly. If a single dose only produces partial immunity then doing that only assists this thing in evolving just as improper use of antibiotics produces antibiotic resistant strains. And, as a matter of fact, no antibiotic has ever been introduced that did not produce resistant strains within ten years of introduction.
Assuming the Senate won’t end the filibuster, can they carve out a way to pass HR 1 anyway? Without redistricting reform, the House stands a very good chance of flipping in two years. I know many Senators like the lack of accountability that comes with the filibuster but they have to know that their chances at re-election are higher if they have a Democratic House to work with and pass popular legislation.
Turning the vaccine distribution procedure into something it seems like the DMV would do isn't a good way to win people over to the Democrats, and I say this as a Democrat who used to be a Republican when he was young and stupid in college.
If the answer is fewer lawyers (but muh rules!) in politics, and more product managers, let's do it! As someone who in my day job preaches outcome over effort, seeing Newsom and Cuomo spin on this is about as frustrating as it could be.
I do like the way you think about such things. But I also think, based on very solid evidence, that your arguments fall apart in the face of reality, especially in the face of urgency. Take TARP for example. Most people even now fail to understand how imminent disaster was because of the liquidity crisis that started with a melt down in the housing market. Why, people asked, was TARP money going to General Electric? Many conspiracy theories were offered. Unless, of course, you understood how Main Street worked and not Wall Street.
Anyone who has ever attended a trade show for anything at all knows what that cluster of booths at the end of the hall is for. That's where you finance your new CNC machines, or your fleet of school buses or whatever. Banks don't do this stuff at all. And if you went to your bank and asked them to finance such capital acquisitions they would generally show you the door. They don't know what that thing is. They don't know what the market for it might be and they aren't going to accept it as security against a loan. That is what leasing firms like GE Capital are for. And those guys borrow their capital from banks which they couldn't do at the time.
I suppose you could have made a can labelled Money To Prevent Mass Order Cancellations (which started to happen) and sent that money direct to the Main Street where it wound up. If you could figure out how to do it in about two weeks. And then people would know that TARP saved Main Street. But I seriously doubt it. Sometimes you just have to use the means at your disposal.