Republicans' most toxic policy commitment

Plus lessons from Cuomo's flop, why Slow Boring commenters are the best, and more

I’m on The Ezra Klein Show this week talking about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 — it’s not good! You can listen to the episode or read the transcript here.

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Tomorrow is Independence Day, and Slow Boring is taking the day off (don’t worry, we’ll be sharing an older article from behind the paywall), which means you’re getting the mailbag a day early.

The family has been up in Maine for a couple of weeks now and will be until the end of August. This area is represented by Jared Golden, the Democrat with the most conservative voting record in Congress and, not coincidentally, the Democrat with the reddest seat in Congress.

Golden called his “no” vote on OBBBA one of the easiest votes he’s taken, which is a reminder of the incredible — and incredibly underrated — value of finding nominees who can win in tough states and districts. By my count, there are about 25 House seats that Trump won by the same (or smaller) margin as ME-2 that are held by Republicans. If running Golden-esque candidates had won a third of those seats, Democrats would have a majority in the House. It would be a majority that progressives would find frustrating in terms of its limited willingness to advance an affirmative progressive agenda. But it wouldn’t be stripping health care from millions of people or exploding the budget deficit.

Winning is really valuable, not just for the things it lets you do, but for the things it lets you stop.

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bill: If you were advising Republicans, what things should they moderate on? What priorities would become more attainable by doing that moderation?

The answer is obviously health care.

Republican Party elites clearly regard it as inconceivable that they would do anything upon obtaining power other than try to enact huge rollbacks in Americans’ health coverage. There’s no conservative political party anywhere else in the developed world that supports anything resembling the GOP approach to health care. In part, for that reason, I recommend this as the issue on which to moderate. American conservatives all acknowledge the Australian Liberals and the Conservative Party of Canada as like-minded political movements. Republicans disagree as to whether they are more CDU or more AfD or more FDP in terms of German politics, but none of Germany’s parties on the right would advance a bill to strip millions of people of their health insurance coverage.

There are a lot of complexities to health care policy and therefore to health care politics. But the key fact is that except when thermostatic backlash to Obamacare was at its peak, the voters just agreed with the left on the level of moral values about this.

That’s rare. Conservatives outnumber liberals by a large margin in the US, and normally, the most effective way to advance a specific liberal policy idea is to cloak it in conservative values. Health care, though, is a topic where even in the highly individualistic United States, most people accept the progressive moral premise.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Republicans need to moderate in the sense of advancing a universal health care plan. But the smart thing for them to do would be to accept the ACA as fait accompli, for the holdout states to accept Medicaid expansion funds, and to just try to advance a conservative policy agenda on other fronts.

The problem with this is that restraint on health care would force Republicans to be more restrained with regressive tax cuts. And this brings us to the big incoherence in Republican Party politics.

As I’ve written a million times, Democrats are torn between saying that Trump is a critical threat to democracy and saying that they don’t want to compromise on the progressive agenda for the sake of beating Trump. The incoherence on the GOP side is that people on the right almost never say they are highly motivated by a desire to pass regressive tax cuts, and yet the tax agenda is always a legislative priority and always drags the GOP into advancing politically toxic health care rollbacks. Everything from immigration restriction to banning late term abortions to fighting “wokeness” is held hostage to an elite agenda that demands huge political sacrifices on behalf of cutting rich people’s taxes.

I think you really see the profound weakness of the GOP stance on health care in the messaging around the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Essentially nobody in electoral politics will say, “I just don’t think poor people should get health care treatments” because they know it’s not a defensible position. The argument is based on lying and trying to convince the country that it’s possible to save hundreds of billions of dollars purely by targeting able-bodied young men and illegal immigrants.

When you have a position you can’t defend, you should consider changing the position.

TheEleaticStranger: As a corollary to Why [you] write such excellent posts, why do you attract such excellent comments? Whenever I venture into the comment sections of other substacks that would probably be included in the Neoliberal Shill bundle if Substack ever goes for the bundling concept, the comments are often less polite and less thoughtful. Does this substack just attract more like-minds than other substacks, or do you think you set the tone effectively with your generally (and much appreciated) dispassionate style, or something else?

I mean, yes, obviously, I am brilliant and therefore attract the most brilliant readers and thus have the best comments section.

More realistically, I think one reason the comments are good is that the team is monitoring them and participating and we have a lot of moderation. I know that not everyone agrees with every moderation call, which is fair — there’s always room for reasonable people to disagree about exactly how to handle situations. But I think that almost any comment section that features occasionally heavy-handed moderation will be better than one that lacks it. In unmoderated forums, obnoxious behavior inevitably crowds out everything else. If you moderate in a serious way, you’re not going to make everyone happy all the time with your choices but you’ll come up with a product that’s better than one where you refuse to choose.

I also like to think that we attract an audience that is genuinely interested in getting into the weeds on policy issues and curious about what other people think. Obviously, not everyone is perfectly behaved all the time, but a lot of the lengthier comment threads are people really digging into these things in a serious way. I think that reflects really well on our readers, which is just one of the many reasons we’re grateful to you all for being here.

Eric: Why in Star Wars do they have both artificial intelligence and faster than light technology, both of which seem available to almost everyone, yet many people still do menial labor like working in mines, farming, fixing machines, etc. and are also quite poor? Is this kind of future likely or does the development of those technologies deterministically preclude such non-utopian outcomes?

Obviously, it’s common for science fiction movies to have models of the future that don’t make a ton of sense economically, and part of the backdrop of all this storytelling is that I think it’s harder to wring drama out of utopian scenarios.

But I do think Star Wars is unusually egregious in both the mismatch between the technological fundamentals and people’s observed living standards, and also in not even really gesturing at an explanation. In “Blade Runner,” I think we’re supposed to understand that Earth has suffered ecological collapse and is now inhabited by a negatively selected group of people who have not made it to the Off-World Colonies. The techno-utopia does exist, we just aren’t seeing it.

With Star Wars, thematically, I think George Lucas was really making a western or a samurai movie that happened to be set in outer space, not actually trying to tell a science fiction story. But in terms of cultural history, I think it reflects the 1970s degrowth vibes — the idea that technological progress leads to human betterment didn’t seem natural to Lucas, so he doesn’t really bother with an in-universe explanation of why that’s not the case.

J. Willard Gibbs: Shouldn't the lesson from Mamdani's win be the same as the 2016 (and for that matter, 2008) Democratic presidential primary? Clear front runner that nobody likes (Hillary, Cuomo), charismatic insurgent (Obama, Bernie, Mamdani), everyone overreacting to that insurgent by interpreting that result as a thirst for left wing policies? Sometimes it really just is a question of the front runner being unlikeable... I know that critique of Hillary generated a lot of backlash but it's hard to argue otherwise.

I basically agree with this, but I’d like to be a little bit more specific than the generic “unlikeable” versus “charismatic” label.

Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008 and lost narrowly for a variety of reasons, but the marquee issue that Barack Obama wielded against her was her support for the 2003 Iraq AUMF. Clinton was hardly alone among Democrats in casting that vote (Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt, among others, were with her) but most Democrats in Congress voted “no,” even though it was an unpopular position at the time. But by 2008, most Americans and certainly most Democrats felt that the minority of their party’s elected officials who voted with George W. Bush had made a big mistake. Obama pressed that issue against Hillary to great effect and became president.

Nothing that happened between 2008 and 2016 fixed Clinton’s vulnerability on this score, she just successfully played elite coalition-building to the point where most of the party’s elected officials (including Obama) decided it was no longer a big deal.

But obviously, if you knew there was going to be a big socialist challenge and the mainstream party wanted to fend it off, it would be a total no-brainer to say the party needed to pick someone who wasn’t around for various political debates (welfare reform, NAFTA, Commodities Futures Modernization Act) of the 1990s and who didn’t vote for the Iraq War. That doesn’t describe some kind of unique snowflake — most Democrats in Congress voted against the AUMF. Clinton had unusual and obvious vulnerabilities relative to most mainstream Democrats, and Sanders was able to exploit them to great effect, though he ultimately fell short.

Cuomo, of course, was driven from office just a few years ago by a pretty serious scandal. He doesn’t seem to have made any amends or restitution for it, and it just obviously made him a terrible choice to be the mainstream standard-bearer against a socialist insurgent. Cuomo’s actual record as governor also doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. A key edge Mamdani had once it became a two-person race is that Mamdani supporters liked Mamdani and had a lot of nice things to say about him. I thought Mamdani’s policy proposals were mostly bad, but I couldn’t tell you that Cuomo’s were good or that I was impressed by his record or character. The whole campaign was a house of cards built on people endorsing him because they assumed he would win. If it had been a two-person race against anyone else in the field — or if a contender like Tish James had been in the race — I think Mamdani likely would have lost.

So long story short, I agree that there has been a lot of over-interpreting of this race.

Mamdani has a big platform now, and if he manages to use it to govern effectively, that will be a big deal. But as a political formula, the fact that socialists can win primaries in very blue cities if they’re up against scandal-plagued opponents is not that interesting. Brandon Johnson is already mayor of Chicago after beating a very flawed opponent, and Barbara Lee won a tough race in Oakland against an appealing moderate. The two major questions about leftists are whether they can beat Republicans in swing seats (no) and whether they can govern effectively, not whether they can sometimes win primaries.

Eric Wilhelm: Why is Maine so poor?

I’m not sure Maine is particularly poor. Here’s a map of state-level poverty rates using both the official and the supplemental (which accounts for in-kind transfers but also differential cost of living).

Of course, Maine is not a super-rich state either, and it’s not home to big companies or major superstar industries. But lots of states are like that. I think Florida is widely perceived to be thriving, even though it’s also an example of a state whose economy is built around leisure, tourism, and natural amenities rather than globally competitive tradable sectors. And not only does Maine have a lower poverty rate than Florida, it has a slightly higher median household income. So I actually think Maine is doing fine, as a whole, notwithstanding the far-from-unique problems of factory towns suffering from de-industrialization.

Das P: This is a question about speech policing. I am generally cheering the fact that Mamdani took out the corrupt creep Cuomo and taught the “paid to lose” Democratic party insiders how not to run campaigns. However I find Mamdani to be a very slippery guy on the issue of anti-semitism.

For the last 12 years or so, if not longer, Dems and the center-left have broadly taken the position that the targets of potential hate speech get to determine its valence and intent, not the users of said speech. This is the basis on which left-liberals reject the Confederate flag as “merely a symbol of Southern culture” or other related excuses made on its behalf.

But here we have a so called far left guy saying the valence of “Globalize the intifada” is not to be determined decisively by the targets of this chant but by obscure/ambiguous Arabic meanings of “intifada” and that we should not police speech in this context.

Clearly there is no way to reconcile such a position with condemning any kind of bigoted dog whistles targeting other minority groups because there is always ambiguity in such instances. So should someone really test Mamdani on whether he is actually a free speech absolutist or if that is only on matters sympathetic to his co-religionists’ beliefs?

Beyond Mamdani in particular, I agree that the Palestine issue tends to induce progressives to return to a principled defense of free speech that they’ve often abandoned in other contexts.

Gergő Tisza: The government as stationary bandits narrative is a fun one but seems very hit and miss. Why does it apply to New York (where Matt thinks the municipal budget is full of waste and rent-seeking) and not the US as a whole (where Matt thinks the federal budget is almost waste-free)? Surely the US population is even more of a captured audience — it’s harder to move to a different country than to a different city. And there's more money in the pot, just in terms of budget dollars per capita. What are the structural forces that counteract banditry on the federal level but don't exist on the municipal level (or at least, specifically for New York)?

Two points on this:

One, the big difference is that all of American partisan politics is organized around sharp, hyper-polarized contestation of high-profile federal elections, so there’s a much stronger tendency of federal political outcomes to reflect something resembling “what the voters want” than you see in big city politics. There are factions in municipal government, of course, but it’s notable that even relatively sharp transitions, like Bloomberg to De Blasio or Adams to Mamdani, aren’t accompanied by anything remotely resembling “wave” elections in the City Council. Municipal politics is dominated by incumbents winning low-salience races, by hazy legislative coalitions, and by non-ideological horse trading. Federal politics is much more heavily influenced by ideological movements with real policy agendas.

The second is the very ambiguous meaning of “waste.”

What I said in the heyday of DOGE was that they were not going to uncover a meaningful amount of wasteful spending in the sense of literal fraud or program efficiencies where you could accomplish the same things at much less expense. Elon Musk and Donald Trump, for example, claimed that a large amount of Social Security payments were being improperly made to dead people and that they could save a lot of money by ending them. I warned that this would turn out to be false, and I was right.

Does that mean that there is no waste in Social Security? Not really. I think you could make a strong case that the fundamental structure of the program, which pays more in benefits to people who had higher earnings during their working years, is wasteful. You could restructure it as a completely flat benefit and set the flat benefit so as to both reduce total spending and also reduce elder poverty. To me, that would be a more efficient way to organize America’s cash support for the elderly. Or I would say that $1 of SNAP benefits is less valuable to a recipient than a dollar of American currency would be. You could cut benefit levels by 5 percent but convert it to cash, make most poor people better off, and simplify administration of the program.

But that’s not “waste” in the DOGE sense, where you audit the books and discover some secret scam. I think it would be better to rely more on cash and less on in-kind benefits, but the programs are being administered according to the law. It’s not some kind of bureaucratic screw-up.

am: What do you think of the following idea to reduce NIMBY opposition — communities/jurisdictions that allow new housing get a reduction in their property taxes? You could go further and say the reduction only applies to existing residents.

Has any jurisdiction tried this? What would be the pros/cons?

I don’t think that’s totally workable the way that you describe it, but I do think that policymakers should more seriously consider the fiscal benefits of market rate housing.

DC, where I live, is facing several years of difficult budgetary circumstances as a downstream consequence of the Trump administration’s attacks on the civil service. This is going to mean cuts in programming, higher taxes, or both. At the same time, despite the negative shock to the city’s economy, there continues to be robust demand for housing in some neighborhoods. If you allow the construction of market-rate infill — especially the much-bemoaned “luxury apartments” full of 1-bedroom units — you’re bringing a lot of additional income tax, sales tax, and restaurant tax revenue into the city without raising tax rates. Of course, a higher population requires more city services, but the residents of market-rate apartment buildings consume a dramatically below-average level of services. And for things like policing, as a city becomes denser, it’s possible to increase the number of cops per square mile while reducing the number of cops per person and end up with a win-win from the standpoint of public safety and the budget.

DJ: What do you think of Elissa Slotkin's call to ban phones from K-12 schools? Should this be part of the party platform?

I agree with it on the merits, and I was glad to see DCPS announce that our system will be going phone-free starting this upcoming school year. But before I recommend putting this in a national platform, I would want to see some polling and message testing.

Stepping back, I think that when Democrats think about “taking on Big Tech,” they should be thinking more along these lines than the idea that we need to “break up” the companies. Which is to say ask if there are specific, concrete ways that digital technology is making life worse (alongside the many ways that it is making life better) and try to propose remedies.