Matt, this is lazy: “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.” Of course that stimulation contributed to inflation, but it was a world wide phenomenon, triggered mostly by the pandemic effect on demand and supply chains and by the initial impact of the Ukraine war on food and fuel distribution. The US overstimulation contributed to a faster recovery from those disruptions and helped enhance inflation, but other countries who committed to less stimulation have had worse inflation that lingered much longer. Another sentence would have made your point clearer.
I think the gun answer is correct but super depressing. I am in the UK for a couple of weeks. We had dinner last night with American friends whose youngest kid was 3 when they moved to the UK. The adults were reminiscing about a favorite fried chicken place that included bullet proof glass at the order window. The girl was totally confused about why there would be such a thing at a chicken shack. She also said she would be scared if she saw regular police carrying guns, and her parents had to explain that the police have to assume that anyone they interact with also has a gun. As I listened to the parents explain all this to the girl, it made me realize how utterly nuts out gun culture is to people on the outside.
I think you are joking? There have been some great chances to the Constitution over the years, such as those that now allow me to vote
Last year the number of deaths due to gun violence excluding accidents or suicide was 4.31 per 100,00 in the US vs .013 per 100,000 in the UK, so maybe we should be looking a bit more askance at ourselves
No, I’m not joking. (Pardon the multiple deletions and re-comments, Substack app issue.)
Since the policies you advocate for would require at least a few million raids on homes across America, would you be volunteering to help out?
That’s rhetorical of course, so who would you have do it? Most municipal police outside of some large coastal cities (and maybe Chicago) wouldn’t comply, and the federal LE establishment just doesn’t have enough people for it. If necessary, would you support the deputization of anti-gun civilians into a militia to enforce confiscation?
This isn’t some joke question, this is what you would actually have to do for UK-style gun control in America. Since the death toll would probably greatly exceed several years of gun violence in America, would your moral justification be that non-compilers deserve to be killed anyway, along with any unfortunate family members?
"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."
This post it note is going right next to the one that says "the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb."
I know it's a popular view here but there is no real evidence that social media is bad for you, despite an army of academics trying to prove this over the past decade. Sometimes Matt makes jokes about misinformation on the left, and this would be a prime candidate. Not just my opinion, everyone who looks at this to write about it ends up in the same place, yet the myth persists.
It’s proven by the fact that Trump has a chance of winning as much as anything else.
I think it’s difficult to decouple harms from social media from other harms caused by retreat from real life to online life, video games, etc. social media is but one prong of a very bad fork
That's fine if you want to believe that, but if you actually want to improve society by enacting taxes that nudge people into better behaviors as Matt suggested, you need to have some plausible theory for how things actually work and evidence to back that up. Otherwise we're just checking if people are witches by seeing if they float.
I am about convinced that gun control should be a states rights issue. States that want to let people own guns can. States that don't, can ban them. States that are closely divided could choose to let municipalities decide.
"But the second amendme-" Yeah I know. But perhaps a Grand Bargain could be struck there. People are always complaining about "well regulated militia" and what does that really mean. Maybe there could be a compromise where the second amendment is replaced by something that explicitly bans the federal government from regulating guns except on federal lands, but then explicitly allows state governments to ban guns if they want to.
"What is a gun? Does that mean the federal government can't ban people from private ownership of artillery?" Yeah, I know, obviously there would be a lot of details to work out here.
The problem with this argument is that lax gun laws in some states lead to illegal gun flow to other states. (Hell this happens to other countries, where American guns are used by Mexican cartels, other Latin American gangsters, etc.) So there's an externality where the consequences of one state's laws don't stop at their border
Re: phones and social media – 100% agree on the progressive tax on digital ad revenue. But I also think federalism could do some work here.
Since the Telecommunication Act of 1996, the federal government has pushed hard to make internet access, both broadband and mobile, as widely accessible and as cheap as possible. They want it to be a competitive industry that will deliver low costs to consumers. To that end, they’ve mandated interconnection, discouraged monopoly, and precluded most state and local regulation of the industry.
If they just stepped back a bit and left more to the states, we could potentially get some interesting policy experimentation. We should allow the 50 states to serve as laboratories of democracy. Let’s see what happens under different regulatory regimes and we can use that to inform the national (and global) conversation.
It seems like Florida has been doing some heavy regulation of at least the youth part of social media use, to the extent (if enforced, etc) that you'd think we'd able to see if it improves mental health or other outcomes over the next few years.
I'm glad to learn that the current deficits are useless so when the cuts are actually made, it should have very limited effect on the economy. Both parties are responsible for this current situation and neither have done anything over the last 24 years. At this point, I'm so fed up of people defending deficit spending that I don't care how it's fixed. You either fix deficits on your own terms when you're in power or it gets fixed on someone else's terms when they're in charge. It's also important to remember that fixing the deficits is not enough. There's a mountain of debt that needs to be repaid or at least reduced.
I have an alternative answer to MattY's. US is a very rich country and less than 15% are poor. Everyone else is either lower or upper middle class, rich or filthy rich. Democrats have made it their mission to focus on those 15%. Morally, that's quite defensible but that requires moving resources (spending/attention/focus/redistribution) from the remaining 85% to those 15%. If there was political consensus among those 85% that this is the right thing to do, then there would be high approval for those measures. But the fact is that Democrats are doing this without political consensus, so naturally there is high disapproval for those actions. The alternative is to do things that 70-80% of the voters approve of but that's not what either party is interested in.
In San Antonio, I highly, highly recommend El Jarro del Arturo - the cabrito is amazing - for Mexican food. I've planned trips to SAT around meal times there (it is near the airport, at 281 and Bitters). An old time Mexican food place run by the same family forever.
In terms of the question regarding the "hard right" policies Trump 2.0 would involve, I think we need better language for Trump (and others) than right/left. Trump is not a conservative, he's a populist with some traditional conservative stuff in the mix. (I'd argue Harris is more a populist with some traditional left stuff in the mix as well). Calling his populism "hard right" doesn't help understand him - is eliminating the income tax and replacing it with tariffs or eliminating the income tax on tips "conservative" or "right wing" in any meaningful sense? I guess the former takes us back to the 19th century but that's not really how most conservatives think. In fact, most traditional conservatives think that both of those ideas are terrible ideas (broaden the base, lower rates is the traditional conservative remedy on taxes in theory, if not in practice after a tax "reform" goes through the sausage mill). Trump seems to pick policies because they appeal to him at the moment he thinks of them, not because they fit some model of the world that we'd call "conservative". That's the very essence of a populist - he's more Peron than Thatcher or Reagan or Goldwater. He just happened to gravitate to the Republicans. If he'd joined the Democrats (as he originally was), he'd be promoting an equally random mix of policies, albeit with a slight leftward cast. He just saw a better opportunity in the Republicans at the time he decided to enter politics. But a good author could write an alternative history where he becomes a major force among the Democrats instead and it would not be implausible (see Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here and Huey Long generally).
On the folk theory of democracy: I’m not sure it’s directionally wrong.
Things are pretty good in America and, even when things are relatively bad, they’re still pretty good! More importantly, I don’t think we have a lot of ideas about how to make things better judging from the broadly failed policy initiatives from both parties.
We’d be well-served by less ideologically-driven government at this moment because ideologies just don’t have clear advantages right now.
For example, you’d think that climate change had a clear ideological valence. But that doesn’t seem right. Clean energy is environmentally good, sure, but it’s also a big business that restores a lot of market mechanisms in a space presently dominated by regulated monopolies.
YIMBY is another good example. It’s needed to lower housing costs for average people. But it’s also very reliant on deregulation.
It just doesn’t really feel like we’re in an ideological moment to me at the level of the issues we actually have even though the politics are dominated by ideology.
Matt, this is lazy: “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.” Of course that stimulation contributed to inflation, but it was a world wide phenomenon, triggered mostly by the pandemic effect on demand and supply chains and by the initial impact of the Ukraine war on food and fuel distribution. The US overstimulation contributed to a faster recovery from those disruptions and helped enhance inflation, but other countries who committed to less stimulation have had worse inflation that lingered much longer. Another sentence would have made your point clearer.
I think the gun answer is correct but super depressing. I am in the UK for a couple of weeks. We had dinner last night with American friends whose youngest kid was 3 when they moved to the UK. The adults were reminiscing about a favorite fried chicken place that included bullet proof glass at the order window. The girl was totally confused about why there would be such a thing at a chicken shack. She also said she would be scared if she saw regular police carrying guns, and her parents had to explain that the police have to assume that anyone they interact with also has a gun. As I listened to the parents explain all this to the girl, it made me realize how utterly nuts out gun culture is to people on the outside.
Not as nuts as people who want to burn the Constitution so they don’t get looked at askance by a bunch of limeys!
I think you are joking? There have been some great chances to the Constitution over the years, such as those that now allow me to vote
Last year the number of deaths due to gun violence excluding accidents or suicide was 4.31 per 100,00 in the US vs .013 per 100,000 in the UK, so maybe we should be looking a bit more askance at ourselves
No, I’m not joking. (Pardon the multiple deletions and re-comments, Substack app issue.)
Since the policies you advocate for would require at least a few million raids on homes across America, would you be volunteering to help out?
That’s rhetorical of course, so who would you have do it? Most municipal police outside of some large coastal cities (and maybe Chicago) wouldn’t comply, and the federal LE establishment just doesn’t have enough people for it. If necessary, would you support the deputization of anti-gun civilians into a militia to enforce confiscation?
This isn’t some joke question, this is what you would actually have to do for UK-style gun control in America. Since the death toll would probably greatly exceed several years of gun violence in America, would your moral justification be that non-compilers deserve to be killed anyway, along with any unfortunate family members?
Compliers, damn it. Most computer programs, for example, are non-compilers.
"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."
This post it note is going right next to the one that says "the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb."
> Places like Kansas and Nebraska will start to sneak into the battleground.
Interesting! I assume because of Kansas City’s/Omaha’s relative growth to the rural parts of the state?
Selzer is releasing a poll tomorrow. I'm trying soooo hard to keep my expectations low, but man, I'm already consumed by anxiety.
I know it's a popular view here but there is no real evidence that social media is bad for you, despite an army of academics trying to prove this over the past decade. Sometimes Matt makes jokes about misinformation on the left, and this would be a prime candidate. Not just my opinion, everyone who looks at this to write about it ends up in the same place, yet the myth persists.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/17/social-media-mental-health-research-surgeon-general/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/17/upshot/social-media-teen-mental-health.html
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/we-know-less-about-social-media-than-we-think
You don’t need an RCT to prove that water is wet.
A common response and yet if it's so obvious how come every time anyone tries to test for it they can't find it?
It’s proven by the fact that Trump has a chance of winning as much as anything else.
I think it’s difficult to decouple harms from social media from other harms caused by retreat from real life to online life, video games, etc. social media is but one prong of a very bad fork
That's fine if you want to believe that, but if you actually want to improve society by enacting taxes that nudge people into better behaviors as Matt suggested, you need to have some plausible theory for how things actually work and evidence to back that up. Otherwise we're just checking if people are witches by seeing if they float.
the only thing i want for christmas is for someone to protest trump at his rally in dearborn. it would restore my faith in humanity, truly.
"That’s my pitch. Yglesias runs Amtrak, tries to fire as many people as humanly possible and replace them with Italians and such."
"They're takin' errr jerbs!"
I am about convinced that gun control should be a states rights issue. States that want to let people own guns can. States that don't, can ban them. States that are closely divided could choose to let municipalities decide.
"But the second amendme-" Yeah I know. But perhaps a Grand Bargain could be struck there. People are always complaining about "well regulated militia" and what does that really mean. Maybe there could be a compromise where the second amendment is replaced by something that explicitly bans the federal government from regulating guns except on federal lands, but then explicitly allows state governments to ban guns if they want to.
"What is a gun? Does that mean the federal government can't ban people from private ownership of artillery?" Yeah, I know, obviously there would be a lot of details to work out here.
The problem with this argument is that lax gun laws in some states lead to illegal gun flow to other states. (Hell this happens to other countries, where American guns are used by Mexican cartels, other Latin American gangsters, etc.) So there's an externality where the consequences of one state's laws don't stop at their border
I cannot believe my chevron deference question got passed over. 😑 It got a fair amount of upvotes too.
I bet Matt's working on a piece on it or has one queued up.
Re: phones and social media – 100% agree on the progressive tax on digital ad revenue. But I also think federalism could do some work here.
Since the Telecommunication Act of 1996, the federal government has pushed hard to make internet access, both broadband and mobile, as widely accessible and as cheap as possible. They want it to be a competitive industry that will deliver low costs to consumers. To that end, they’ve mandated interconnection, discouraged monopoly, and precluded most state and local regulation of the industry.
If they just stepped back a bit and left more to the states, we could potentially get some interesting policy experimentation. We should allow the 50 states to serve as laboratories of democracy. Let’s see what happens under different regulatory regimes and we can use that to inform the national (and global) conversation.
It seems like Florida has been doing some heavy regulation of at least the youth part of social media use, to the extent (if enforced, etc) that you'd think we'd able to see if it improves mental health or other outcomes over the next few years.
Re: Economy being fueled by debt
I'm glad to learn that the current deficits are useless so when the cuts are actually made, it should have very limited effect on the economy. Both parties are responsible for this current situation and neither have done anything over the last 24 years. At this point, I'm so fed up of people defending deficit spending that I don't care how it's fixed. You either fix deficits on your own terms when you're in power or it gets fixed on someone else's terms when they're in charge. It's also important to remember that fixing the deficits is not enough. There's a mountain of debt that needs to be repaid or at least reduced.
Re: Do nothing politicians being more popular.
I have an alternative answer to MattY's. US is a very rich country and less than 15% are poor. Everyone else is either lower or upper middle class, rich or filthy rich. Democrats have made it their mission to focus on those 15%. Morally, that's quite defensible but that requires moving resources (spending/attention/focus/redistribution) from the remaining 85% to those 15%. If there was political consensus among those 85% that this is the right thing to do, then there would be high approval for those measures. But the fact is that Democrats are doing this without political consensus, so naturally there is high disapproval for those actions. The alternative is to do things that 70-80% of the voters approve of but that's not what either party is interested in.
In San Antonio, I highly, highly recommend El Jarro del Arturo - the cabrito is amazing - for Mexican food. I've planned trips to SAT around meal times there (it is near the airport, at 281 and Bitters). An old time Mexican food place run by the same family forever.
In terms of the question regarding the "hard right" policies Trump 2.0 would involve, I think we need better language for Trump (and others) than right/left. Trump is not a conservative, he's a populist with some traditional conservative stuff in the mix. (I'd argue Harris is more a populist with some traditional left stuff in the mix as well). Calling his populism "hard right" doesn't help understand him - is eliminating the income tax and replacing it with tariffs or eliminating the income tax on tips "conservative" or "right wing" in any meaningful sense? I guess the former takes us back to the 19th century but that's not really how most conservatives think. In fact, most traditional conservatives think that both of those ideas are terrible ideas (broaden the base, lower rates is the traditional conservative remedy on taxes in theory, if not in practice after a tax "reform" goes through the sausage mill). Trump seems to pick policies because they appeal to him at the moment he thinks of them, not because they fit some model of the world that we'd call "conservative". That's the very essence of a populist - he's more Peron than Thatcher or Reagan or Goldwater. He just happened to gravitate to the Republicans. If he'd joined the Democrats (as he originally was), he'd be promoting an equally random mix of policies, albeit with a slight leftward cast. He just saw a better opportunity in the Republicans at the time he decided to enter politics. But a good author could write an alternative history where he becomes a major force among the Democrats instead and it would not be implausible (see Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here and Huey Long generally).
The Kingfish! One of the two most dangerous men in America, according to FDR
But a funny one. I must say I’m rather fond of Huey Long from the wild stories
Just jumping in to say don’t hire Germans to run your trains system, hire Swiss people or Japanese people, German trains are a mess right now.
On the folk theory of democracy: I’m not sure it’s directionally wrong.
Things are pretty good in America and, even when things are relatively bad, they’re still pretty good! More importantly, I don’t think we have a lot of ideas about how to make things better judging from the broadly failed policy initiatives from both parties.
We’d be well-served by less ideologically-driven government at this moment because ideologies just don’t have clear advantages right now.
For example, you’d think that climate change had a clear ideological valence. But that doesn’t seem right. Clean energy is environmentally good, sure, but it’s also a big business that restores a lot of market mechanisms in a space presently dominated by regulated monopolies.
YIMBY is another good example. It’s needed to lower housing costs for average people. But it’s also very reliant on deregulation.
It just doesn’t really feel like we’re in an ideological moment to me at the level of the issues we actually have even though the politics are dominated by ideology.
Then again, I tend to turn strongly against whatever has become popular online and highly ideological politics are definitely that.