Pre-election mailbag

A focus on what really matters — Amtrak

Okay, folks.

I’m tired of talking about the election, and I’m also flying to San Antonio for a pre-election long weekend. But it turns out that answering questions is one of the most fun ways to engage with the issues right now, so I really appreciate everyone who writes in. Thank you all for subscribing and for participating!

We do have one more election-related note, though: If you’re looking to make a last-minute donation (or know someone who is), I suggest taking a look at our round-up of the candidates who could most use your money, which includes a link to a consolidated donation page.

Now, on to the mailbag! These are normally for paid subscribers, but we’re sharing this one with all of our readers. We hope you enjoy!

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srynerson: The day after the election, Kamala Harris calls you and says that following Yglesias Thought is what ultimately led her to victory, so she's giving you first pick of any appointed position in the Federal Government that you would like — what position do you choose and what is your starting agenda for the department/agency/etc.?

Clearly this calls for giving me some kind of murky “senior advisor” gig in the West Wing, where I just deliver my hot takes and have minimal actual responsibilities. But if she wants that, she could just subscribe to the newsletter.

Beyond that, obviously, I’d like to be HUD Secretary.

This is not a job with a ton of direct influence over housing policy or urban development in the United States, but I do think there is substantial bully pulpit potential there, which could be wielded to good effect both in debates internal to super-blue areas like New York and San Francisco, but also in terms of trying to shake loose bipartisan deals and maintain good working relationships with pro-housing Republicans. My actual recommendation, though, is that Harris should appoint a Republican to this job. Because it’s a place where you don’t necessarily need a moderate Republican or like an anti-Trump Republican who quit the party over January 6. Some normal conservative Republicans are bad on housing and most are just blah and disengaged on the issue, but plenty are good — it’s just not a very partisan issue — and you could put a YIMBY Republican in office.

I would also find it entertaining to run Amtrak and spend a lot of time yelling at everyone to be less stupid.

This would probably end in tears for everyone, and the objection that I am not “qualified” would be raised in the sense that these gigs normally go to either freight rail executives or airline executives. But what would actually qualify someone to run Amtrak would be a track-record of running a successful passenger railroad, which would mean basically a person from China, Japan, Korea, France, Spain, Italy, or Switzerland. This is, as I understand it, against the law. That seems awfully dumb to me. The United States of America may not know anything about running passenger trains, but we are a lot richer than six of those countries and could surely find a qualified railroad executive who speaks fluent English and offer them a nice pay raise to cross the Atlantic. Instead, though, we keep circling the drain with a series of freight railroaders and airline executives who are no more qualified than I am.

Right now, Amtrak is so out to lunch that the best guy they have is Andy Byford running their small high-speed rail team. Byford is great, and not coincidentally, he’s not American and has extensive experience working abroad.

But he’s English. England doesn’t have high-speed rail, and none of Byford’s previous jobs have involved high-speed rail. He should be running the Federal Transit Administration! High-speed rail should be run by someone who has worked in a successful high-speed rail system. My whole thing as Amtrak CEO would be trying to hire foreigners to do things. Amtrak has a kind of side business in performing commuter rail operations for a handful of local transit agencies — you need some Germans with S-Bahn experience to run that. I’d push this below the executive level, too. To whatever extent possible it would be great to have line workers with actual experience working for actual high-quality passenger railroads doing jobs for Amtrak.

That’s my pitch. Yglesias runs Amtrak, tries to fire as many people as humanly possible and replace them with Italians and such.

Lost Future: How much of recent US economic outperformance is just debt-driven? I think we've all heard that the US is growing faster than any other developed country for a while now, post-Covid but also really post-GFC. However, we've also taken on the most debt. Are we just experiencing debt-fueled growth? Which obviously has a hard limit somewhere

I’m glad somebody asked this, because it’s an idea that’s been floating around in the conservative information ecosystem for a while, and I think it makes intuitive sense to a lot of people, but it’s pretty seriously wrong and speaks to the core of why Trump 2.0 isn’t going to be what people think.

The basic model that I think a lot of people have is of a household that is “living beyond its means,” maintaining consumption through debt and heading toward a day of reckoning. This is something that can happen to small, highly trade dependent countries that borrow in foreign currencies, but it doesn’t characterize the American macroeconomy very well. What happens in a country like ours is that debt can generate prosperity when the economy is operating well below potential. That was the situation for most of Obama’s presidency — more debt meant more growth, but the politics pointed to deficit reduction. Then Trump became president and raised military spending, but also raised non-military spending and also cut taxes, which boosted growth.

Today, though, the economy is at full employment.

This means the scale of the 2024 budget deficit is not providing useful stimulus to the economy. Which also means that the downside of that debt isn’t occurring at some hypothetical time in the future, it’s happening right now. Specifically, in 2021 and especially 2022 an overstimulated economy generated a burst of inflation, then in 2023 and 2024, we got that inflation under control with higher interest rates from the Federal Reserve. But those higher rates had a direct, immediate cost to the American private sector in the form of higher costs for mortgages, auto loans, small business loans, and other credit products. Which is just to say that today’s economy is humming, not because of debt accumulation, but despite it. What we need now more than anything is a prudent program of deficit reduction to bring private sector interest rates down.

Back to Trump. What voters want from Trump is a return to Trump-era conditions, with low inflation and interest rates.

But Trump 1.0 started from a position where higher deficits were useful, and he acted to make deficits much larger. Today, Trump is starting from a position where the deficit is too high, and he’s promising to make the deficit dramatically larger. This is a really bad idea — and it doesn’t even include the idea he keeps floating to replace the entire income tax with taxes on imports.

If you did this, it would not “juice” the economy, it would put massive upward pressure on inflation and interest rates.

This is why in the final days of the campaign, Trump’s business plot allies, like Elon Musk and John Paulson, are suddenly talking about how Trump is going to need to do large, multi-trillion dollar reductions in federal spending. This did not happen during Trump’s first term. During his first term, spending on Social Security went up. So did spending on Medicare. So did spending on Medicaid. So did the federal domestic discretionary budget. So did the military budget.

Voters enjoyed a happy free lunch along with the tax cuts.

Trump’s current proposals will make the deficit much higher, even though they already bake large Social Security cuts into the cake. Musk and Paulson, meanwhile, don’t deign to actually tell us which programs they’re planning to cut. They just want to go on the record as having floated massive cuts before the election so they can say Trump campaigned on this, even though neither they nor anyone else has told us whose ox is going to get gored — but I’ll tell you right now the answer (in the first instance) is working families who rely on ACA subsidies or Medicaid to provide themselves with insurance and elderly or disabled relatives with long-term care.

Michael Adelman: Just stepping back from day-to-day politics ... isn’t there something astonishing and historically unprecedented about the massive gap between Trump’s pretend moderation on the campaign trail and the hard-right policy we will get if he wins? Republicans are planning to aggressively reshape American society into one with far less social insurance and far less personal autonomy - and not only have they not attempted really any persuasion on behalf of this agenda, they have actively worked to conceal it! Has a political party in a democracy ever attempted social change on this scale via sneak attack? And don’t Trump’s authoritarian aspirations kind of make sense in light of all this?

Yes.

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt: You’ve written a lot about the success of do-nothing politicians, like opposite party governors, because they don't do any controversial changes. Yet a super majority of people say they want major changes in the country. Is there a way to reconcile these views, or do people just not like the change they are calling for when it happens?

Some of this is that people are not very well-informed about the government.

I think the 1993 Ivan Reitman movie “Dave” is probably the best window into the folk theory of politics. The plot is that the real president gets replaced by an impersonator who the staff initially plans to control. But the impersonator manages to seize control of his own administration. And just having a nice, earnest, well-meaning person in the Oval Office turns out to solve a bunch of problems. He asks a friend of his, a skilled small business accountant, to go over the federal budget with him and together they find a ton of waste, which makes it possible to keep financing important programs while reducing the deficit without any increases in taxes. What a great guy!

John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Moss give a more systematic account of folk beliefs about politics in their 2002 book “Stealth Democracy: Americans' Beliefs About How Government Should Work.” The centerpiece of this is a very sincere belief that if well-meaning people decided to roll up their sleeves and fix things, you could basically solve problems without contentious fighting and difficult tradeoffs.

So when you hear that the public wants major change, the model you should have in your head is that the public thinks politics and politicians are bad, that corruption is extremely widespread, and that if you brought pragmatic outsiders in, they could sideline bad ideologues and solve problems in non-specific ways — eliminating corruption and waste will let them have everything that they want without giving up anything. What happens is that ideologues on both sides seek to portray this kind of diffuse, anti-system thinking and non-specific cynicism as a demand for their own highly ideological agenda. But we see time and again that in the real world, the public strongly prefers bipartisanship to highly partisan policy shifts. This, in practice, often means that the most popular figures (Andy Beshear, Phil Scott) don’t actually accomplish very much. I don’t think this is exactly an affirmative preference for doing nothing, but it is an extreme aversion to big partisan changes, and in practice, “do nothing” is often the best path forward.

This is why Kamala Harris’s embrace of housing abundance makes me feel good about her as a person and good about the policy judgment of her team, but also a little queasy as a YIMBY. I think certain dramatic housing reforms can be enacted in a way that is popular and politically sustainable, but that entails bipartisanship and happy signing ceremonies, where business leaders and affordable housing advocates celebrate together. That feels to people like how politics ought to work.

James: I feel like I've noticed your posts becoming more concise than they used to be ~3 years ago. Was this a conscious change or just a reflection of the way that your writing style has evolved?

Better editing!

City of Trees: Here’s a take that seems appropriate to get on the record right before Election Day to see if we might be able to pick up on political trends: which states that are not competitive today do you think could become swing states of the future, and which current swing states do you think could become non-competitive?

I enjoy this kind of parlor game, but my earnest answer is that forecasting these trends is basically impossible because there is no long-term directionality.

For example, if you looked at the 2012-2016 shift, it clearly pointed in the direction of Texas as a future swing state. Hillary Clinton did moderately better than Barack Obama with the national Hispanic population, Trump seemed to be locking the GOP into an anti-immigration corner that would box them out with that demographic, and Clinton was gaining with white suburbanites, particularly in the largest metropolitan areas. Nobody was suggesting that Biden should bank on Texas as a pivotal state in 2020, but it seemed like it could plausibly be in reach and certainly a swing state in 2024 or 2028. What happened instead is that while Biden continued to gain ground in the big Texas metros, there was a sharp swing of Hispanic voters against him.

This was most pronounced in heavily Hispanic South Texas, but it also occurred in urban Texas. If you look at San Antonio, Biden did better than Clinton in the suburbs north of the city and in the white area northeast of downtown (and the little gentrification zone due south of downtown), but much worse in the Hispanic neighborhoods on the west and south sides of the city.

A lot of polling suggests the 2016 to 2020 demographic shifts will continue into 2024, which will naturally generate predictions of continuation across multiple cycles. If that happens, New Mexico will become a swing state and Nevada will slip out of Democrats’ grasp. Wisconsin and Michigan will still be swing states, but blue-leaning rather than red-leaning as they currently are. Places like Kansas and Nebraska will start to sneak into the battleground, and Iowa will become a swing state again.

But I don’t think there is any particularly strong reason to believe the shifts will continue! The original Trump Realignment suggested Republicans would soon be winning New Hampshire and Maine, while Nevada slips out of their grasp. But it just reversed! To know what’s going to happen in 2028 or 2032, you would need a lot of additional information like who the incumbent president is and what strategies the parties will use. And I have no idea.

Brian T: You generally align with “it’s the phones” as an explanation for many negative social trends. Assuming this is true, beyond banning phones in high schools, what policy options are there?

I think a very underrated idea is Paul Romer’s proposal for a progressive tax on digital advertising. Because the point here isn’t that “phones” per se are a hazard, it’s that social media apps are a hazard. I think the first-ever article written about Facebook was an Amelia Lester column that appeared in The Crimson in February 2004 back when it was called “The Facebook” and only Harvard students could join. Her immediate response was to say using it generated anxiety, but that it was addictive and hard to quit cold turkey. You should tax this stuff, not to eliminate it, but to mildly discourage it as a business and consumption model while easing the burden on more productive activities.

Joachim: Should Democrats abandon the gun control issue? It loses votes in swing states and alienates moderate voters who would otherwise be up for grabs. It fails to understand the crucial role the Second Amendment plays in American history and culture as an ”equalizer of force potential” and as a tool for self-protection.

There are already hundreds of millions of guns circulating out there and it will be impossible to confiscate them (even a small number of them) without creating an authoritarian police state and it would bankrupt the government if there was a succesful buyback scheme. If some bad actor wants to get hold of a gun, they will most likely succeed regardless of what control policies are implemented at this point in time.

Also, if Democrats decide to abandon this issue, are there still some more minimal, restrictive policies that would be useful? Other policies that would work against gun violence (e.g. improved mental health services)?

This is an old piece, but yes, I think that after Sandy Hook, Democrats re-engaged with the gun control issue and while that play made some sense ex ante, it has completely failed and they should give up. There is room for gains to be made through stricter enforcement of existing gun laws, and the federal government could probably play a role here. Depending on what happens with the election, I’ll do a somewhat refreshed take on the outlook heading forward.

Andrew: Is stochastic violence real? Like does increasingly polarized identity politics lead to greater acts of violence in general?

Or is today’s Republican Party engaging in a kind of identity anxiety theater that’s causing this constant freak out or something else. Even as our most identity anxious person in these comments my real life friends have been in far more agitated than me for so long.

If stochastic violence is real, it’s not a linear function of political polarization, because there was a lot of political violence in the low-polarization 1970s — the most shot-at president was Gerald Ford. The main concern I have about political violence as an ongoing issue is attention-seeking behavior. It seems like the bar has been raised for deranged spree shooters in terms of what can earn you infamy, while taking shots at politicians could be a guaranteed route to the front page.

Deadpan Troglodytes: What's the “Schoolhouse Rock” story of how take-slingers influence policy? I imagine that influence can take several forms: building public support or outrage, providing material for the congressional record, and perhaps connecting directly with personnel in charge of policy.

Which form dominates? Are there any unambiguous examples?

My favorite work of political science is Hans Noel’s 2014 book “Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America,” because he outlines a theory of politics that specifically includes a role for columnists and editorial writers.

He starts with the premise that a political party is, in a sense, a “long coalition” of different interest groups and advocates who have different policy demands. And a lot of what politicians do is try to manage these coalitions. But not only do the pieces of the puzzle sometimes fit poorly due to mechanical conflicts — the coal mining union really wants to keep coal mines open and climate advocates do not want to keep coal mines open — there are also ideological considerations at work. Decades ago, pro-Israel politics was mostly associated with Democrats because most Jews were Democrats and the GOP-aligned oil industry favored good relations with the Gulf States. Dick Durbin first won a House seat in 1982 with heavy AIPAC support against a GOP incumbent, for example. But for a whole bunch of reasons having to do with other things, Palestinian nationalism came to be associated with the global left, such that you now have Greta Thunberg talking about it, and it’s a big bone of factional contention among Democrats, while Republicans are uniformly pro-Israel.

Noel’s argument is that this kind of ideological work, defining “what goes with what,” is an important part of the role of the take-slinger. He notes, for example, that long before abortion rights was a live issue in American politics, the handful of columnists who talked about it were overwhelmingly on the left. So even though it actually took a long time for this to become a highly partisan issue in Congress, the groundwork was laid much earlier for the idea that abortion rights was connected to feminism, which was connected to the civil rights movement and environmentalism.

This is why I think my most important work has been a dozen years of YIMBY advocacy, where part of the point is spreading awareness of the underlying policy ideas, but a lot of it just involves trying to park the notion of housing abundance as a center-left idea.