Live by the omnibus bill; die by the omnibus bill. We have lost a lot by trading committee work on understandable bills for total leadership control. Maybe the secret congress still does some of the old style of lawmaking, but it seems that spending bills are now strictly partisan and they are worse for it.
Getting rid of earmarks was a mistake. They were essentially a rounding error on the budget but worked very well for negotiation purposes, gave reps and senators something they could tell constituents what they had done, and also gave them more power in committees and over leadership.
i hear this a lot but I am doubtful that it would make much difference at this point. In 2022 voters are just not voting based on what is actually delivered to their districts. Ben Nelson successfully secured the "Cornhusker Kickback" for Nebraska in the ACA negotiations and people in Nebraska hated it.
Excellent and important point! The top-down dynamic also makes so much of the day-to-day work of lawmakers kind of meaningless; I wonder whether that contributes to the performance-over-actual-work character of today's politicians.
I wish that journalists would dig into this big picture, and the harm it does, more, rather than finding random stupid things to highlight (they don't seem highlight the actually good things that somehow make it into giant bills very often).
Does this go back to filibuster reform being necessary?
I still think I'm going to be happy (in the long run) if Republicans end up abolishing the filibuster even if I'm unhappy in the short run and wish Democrats had done it _this_ time.
I think the filibuster will be gone whenever a party has 50 or greater but less than 60 votes to do something it really wants to do. There were a couple close calls for the GOP in 2017-2018, and Democrats in 2021-2022, but so far the votes just weren't there.
2. Party core voters really want it, not just activists.
3. Party has unified government.
4. Party has at least 54 Senators but not more than 57.
Those are the conditions you need to get rid of the filibuster. For that reason I don't think it is going anywhere.
As a Democrat one lesson I'm drawing from 2021 is neither Progressives or Moderates really care that much about reversing the structural biases in the Senate. Very clearly progressives prioritized passing BBB over pushing for more states.
I feel like there's at least a reasonable take that the opposite dynamic is real too. Where there are limited agenda items that would pass with bipartisan support that never come for a vote because of all-or-nothing coalition brain.
I think that's right, but I think my fear with most filibuster "reform" is that it seems to simply be concerned with lowering the bar for passing the all-or-nothing coalition bills, when I think the real goal should be to disaggregate the individual policies to be voted on.
Ooh, I like this distinction. I wonder if there could be a rule change that takes the process into account. Put the brakes on single party bills that no one has read, but lower the bar for more manageable bills. Not sure how to make that distinction — bills from committee? Bills from bipartisan working groups?
Committee bills require a filibuster proof majority. The filibuster is the reason why omnibus bills have become the main source of polarized legislation.
They also can't do bipartisan spending bills as they only have a limited number of filibuster exempt bills, due to the stupid rules of Senate.
If we allowed an infinite number of filibuster exempt spending bills we could see a return to the committee process and potentially see "odd coalition" bills, like Romney's child tax credit bill but Manchin votes against it.
This is where it would be helpful to have a Conservative party and media apparatus with real ideas around government, rather than one that solely exists to trigger the libs.
There is a legitimate crisis in state capacity across our government. To name a tiny example, it takes the IRS 18 months to answer a letter. The Democrat solution is to septuple the IRS budget to hire auditors to chase down minor tax discrepancies. The Republican solution is to abolish the IRS. How about we just have a party that tries to get them to open the mail punctually and go from there?
Same problem exists wrt 3 year immigration court waits, 9 month passport turnaround, continued shutdown of social security services. Small c conservative good governance is highly in demand right now!
I might not always (ever?) agree with a more serious Conservative party, but it is unhealthy for that role to be played solely by Joe Manchin and Susan Collins across the entire government.
“ The Democrat solution is to septuple the IRS budget to hire auditors to chase down minor tax discrepancies.”
This is, frankly, a ridiculous caricature.
Increased numbers of skilled, trained personnel is *precisely* the fix for what ails the IRS (both customer service and policing tax fraud by the wealthy) state DOT design work (like CalTrans’ HSR debacle), and policing.
It’s not the fix for teaching or a bunch of other things, but the quoted statement is patently ridiculous.
I am obviously being a little glib (the GOP also has no serious plan to abolish IRS) but I don’t agree at all with your characterization or your prescription.
There’s a reasonable argument to be made that modestly increased staffing and an adjusted budget could improve IRS functions, but that was patently not the proposed direction of the reform. BBB nearly tripled IRS budget with the express aim of raising revenue. The fiction that this would only come from large cases is insulting when EITC irregularities are so much more common.
The idea that you should throw more money and bodies at an agency, ignore whatever problems they face and give them an ambitious new mandate has been Democratic policy for at least a half decade. It’s bad! It makes government worse and undermines the foundation that new programs depend on.
“BBB nearly tripled IRS budget with the express aim of raising revenue.”
Good! Everyone in this field, public or private, knows that tax receipts are a good 20% lower than they should be based on GDP and income data and the information released by publicly traded companies. By necessity, the vast majority of this tax gap stems from the complex tax returns of the top 5% or so of the income distribution.
“The fiction that this would only come from large cases is insulting when EITC irregularities are so much more common.”
Forgive me, but “fiction, my ass”.
The average EITC irregularity is worth several hundred dollars; the rampant fraud occurring at the top, several orders of magnitude more, which more than makes up for its (perhaps, unproven assertion there) lower absolute frequency.
The only way one should oppose this is if they're in favor of allowing the wealthy to commit rampant tax fraud without consequence.
As for “new mandate”, lolz. The IRS’s entire remit is to enforce the tax code. The GOP got away with its own version of “Defund the Police”, time to end that.
The problem is that it is 100 times easier to train people to find EITC discrepancies than to hire people who are qualified to do deep-dive auditing in the returns of multimillionaires. That level of hiring encourages the former even if we'd like it to be the latter
The skills exist, we formerly employed them, and we can obviously cultivate them again.
I'm not going to take "but disproportionate impact!!!!" as a reason not to *enforce the fucking law*.
I would happily apply this same theory of enforcement to literally everything else, from automating enforcement of traffic violations, confiscating vehicles from unlicensed/insured drivers, to blanketing high-crime areas in cameras until the cost-benefit analysis for all but the stupidest, most impulsive morons says "don't do it!"
Funding the tax police is a proven way to increase revenues. I should know--I am the (local) tax police in Philadelphia. (Not alone, of course. Just a cog in the machine.) My job exists because the City decided to get serious about tax enforcement during the 2010s, and the result has been dramatically higher collection rates on all taxes that received extra enforcement resources. (I don't have the figures offhand, but it was impressive.) Inversely, collections numbers for City water service went down drastically during the pandemic because of a moratorium on active collections. (This was all revealed during the recent water rate setting last year.) Using enforcement tools is key to getting taxes (and other government claims) paid, and it takes money to actually exercise them. It's true that at a certain point you reach the point of diminishing marginal returns, but the evidence suggests the IRS is nowhere near there.
Actually, the last comment reminds me, how far out of control does the city let an unpaid real estate tax bill get before sending something to sheriff's auction?
Interesting! The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department has also struggled historically with collections. Because it's a huge and very old system, serving (IIRC) at least 40% of the state, this has been a big problem for a while. I don't know much about what's going on with it now, but in 2013/14, when I wrote a paper on it, they were in the process grappling with the situation and trying to increase collections and align rates to the realities of providing the service. This is around the time that Flint decided to go its own way.
I'm not an expert on this, and obviously it was a complex situation. But I'd love to see this kind of evidence published somewhere to help make the case for strategies that can work for other systems. You should write about it if permitted by your COI rules!
It was spun off into a new authority (at least broadly) during the bankruptcy so that the infrastructure is owned by the whole region precisely because of the 40% figure you cited. Plenty of good Freep articles on the subject and years of open records since.
I'm a bit tangential to that side of things, I just absorbed information I heard colleagues discussing after the rate case ended. (Read: If I know about the effect on revenues, the information is already public lol.) The primary active collections actions that were suspended during the pandemic were shutoff of service and new lawsuits, which are kind of obvious tools for a utility to encourage people to pay (especially shutoff). The effect on the increase in enforcement on Philadelphia tax collections (both hiring more lawyers and using previously-neglected tools like sheriff's sale, license revocation, and sequestration) to make collections was well documented before I arrived. (It was in the Inquirer.)
We can have fiscal policy that aims at and largely achieves full employment in the private sector.
Or we can have a civil service that is staffed with competent, motivated and qualified professionals.
But it’s probably going to be very difficult to have both at the same time, unless we want to commit the government to competing with the likes of Google and Morgan Stanley on salaries.
And it’s going to be flat out _impossible_ to have that as long as we have a de facto national consensus that both internal migration and external immigration are bad, thereby depressing the number of prime-age adults in the workforce generally and especially in places where the government likes to hire people.
In addition to noting the Singapore example that Frigid raises, I'll also point out that *dispersing the damned bureaucracy* would make it a much more attractive employer even at current pay scales.
But overall, yes, we're always going to be playing catch-up to some degree.
The only alternatives to America's "let the private sector be so productive that we can afford for the public sector to suck" are Singapore's "pay the civil service private sector wages but hang them for corruption", which is my preference but politically impossible, and Western Europe's "So thoroughly fetter the labor market that private sector employment has no advantages relative to public", which no one who is above the bottom quintile of the income distribution should ever want.
Astralcodexten had an interesting tidbit tucked away in an article about Xi Jinping where Tsinghua University would pay its alumni to take lower paying but prestigious government jobs over more lucrative private work in order to build a better and more powerful network. They went from being an average player to dominating as a result. I can't decide if an organization doing that in the US would be great or terrible...
Top law schools do this to some extent by paying for internships at NGOs and government during the summers when most students are working for big law firms.
I'm a little leery of assuming that we can scale up the governing methods of a densely populated authoritarian city-state (population 5.6 million, a bit smaller than the philadelphia+camden metro area) up to the size of the USA, never mind the scale of the tax increase we'd need to pass to fund this approach.
Just to be clear, I agree that it would be great to have a genuine conservative party angling for "good value for public money, then return the excess to the taxpayer" instead of a so-called "conservative party" angling for "kleptocratic handouts for these few groups, then return unfunded tax reductions to our already-wealthy donor base".
But your IRS example is the worst possible supporting point. A genuine conservative party should *want* people to follow the law, pay the taxes they're legally required to, and be punished if they don't. All the moreso if the rates are already low enough to avoid distortion for top earners.
The serious answer is to simplify the regulatory environment in which these agencies operate. IRS is a disaster because our patchwork quilt of a tax code is a disaster.
I think some of the problem can also be tied to the meaning behind things like “she has a plan for that” from Elizabeth Warren. Not only were those plans frequently one or two page aspirational documents recycled from think tanks, they were also often contradictory. The fawning of the left leaning press over her primary candidacy led to a complete lack of scrutiny of that, driven in part by journalists overwhelmingly supporting Warren, and the other candidates picked up on that messaging strategy by copying most of those plans, even though it was merely the having-a-plan that got good coverage not necessarily the goodness of the plan in question. Retrospective reflection on that from someone like Matt or Josh Barro who wasn’t all in on Warren as the savior of America might be helpful to the democrats in the future, but I’m not holding my breath that anyone in power would listen.
This was one of the things that drove me bananas about Warren’s campaign. And then to make it worse, if you pointed out that her plans were contradicting each other or based on wishful thinking, you were supposedly not real bright because Warren was the smart candidate.
“Even for someone who is capable of rigorous analysis, most people find it more pleasant to get along than to have fights.”
We noticed a generational thing in my line of work a few years ago. The younger people had no ability to tell anyone anything that they didn’t want to hear. The youngsters made our business a lot nicer because they simply would not stay in contentious environments that the oldsters always took for granted, so adjustments have been made and things are much less confrontational.
The flip side to that turned out to be a problem similar to what you describe. Roles that exist to critique, refine and even reject weren’t doing it. Which can actually lead quite quickly to other people getting away with unethical or even illegal behavior.
I would note that this is tied up with the social media dogpiling that happens. Disagreement used to mean a disagreement among a few people. Now the masses can be mobilized so a small disagreement can blow up into something much, much worse.
Yeah, that's a big part of why I stick to a pretty strict no-tweeting policy. A few likes aren't worth the (admittedly small) risk getting piled on by Internet randoms over an off-the-cuff post. I'd rather make my arguments at greater length and with more time to refine them, so I mostly just use Twitter to read what other people have to say.
I've noticed this among my own generation. It seems you have to be for something or against it, you can't be for something and have criticisms. It was hard to get my peers to debate politics because no one wanted to argue. Once they got into a discussion they couldn't stop themselves becoming emotional so they decided to just not have the discussion. Which just means you never learn to handle your emotions during a discussion. In groups it can be a little hard to get people's real opinions because no one wants to hurt each other's feelings, but I haven't found it to be debilitating. It only takes a couple of people to be willing to start and other people chime in.
this is interesting because the frequently noted (anecdotally at least) is that Gen Z is much more openly hostile to authority figures/bosses. Is this purely dispositional and does not apply to substantive disagreement/analysis?
Nail. Head. I direct a policy center and we are often called upon to wonk out on a proposal. We strive for objectivity but often we say amongst ourselves, “what on earth were they thinking?” And journalists seem more inclined to repeat the PR boiler plate that comes from one party or another. My hypothesis on why Paul Ryan earned the moniker “policy wonk” is that compared to other members of Congress and compared to the journalists that covered policy, the bar for being a wonk had gotten pretty low. I also blame academia because few journals leave space for detailed analyses of tax and policy implications, wanting more general, big headline journal articles using cutting edge statistical techniques. You won’t get tenure using Excel in a tax simulation although that’s how policy often best reveals itself.
I share your Paul Ryan theory! When people are impressed that a high-ranking public official can...show a powerpoint with some numbers in it, the bar is indeed low. I also think the poor quality of journalism is a huge part of this problem, and I'm not sure whether it's the quality of the journalists, their incentives, or some combination.
Does your team every try to understand the source of the failures? Are the proposals created by people who lack the chops to do it, or are they trying to appeal to certain Congress members with idiosyncratic ideas, or something else entirely?
That’s a really good question. Sometimes a bill or order is boilerplate from something put out by a think tank. In one case I can think of it resembled parts of a senator’s stump speech although that senator wasn’t in the committee that was considering the bill. In either case, we just do the analysis. In one case, we did a tax analysis of a proposal that never made it out of committee and it surprised me because the end result just seemed like it so greatly benefited the other party, politically, who could use it against the majority if it passed. That was one case where I thought to myself, “has nobody run the numbers on this and seen who actually gets hit?” We just run the numbers, but it is surprising sometimes that it seems like others aren’t. Politicians always inflate benefits and harms, that isn’t a surprise. What’s surprising is that the people scrutinizing the assertions don’t know the details as well as they used to. The Trump and Biden administrations have asserted things about policy that make me go, “wait, what?” And while I read opinions about the grand themes, I’m not hearing as much discussion of minor but important details from either academics or journalists, other than our host, of course.
Coalition-building is all well and good, but issuing a blank check to everyone within the coalition isn’t.
Let’s face it, some parts of any coalition are going to be wildly unrealistic, even outright delusional. And others are going to be self-centered to the point of robbing the public blind.
And that’s precisely what happened to BBB. It reads precisely like too much deference was given to several “pet issues” cliques and then a hefty dose of rent and patronage was piled atop.
None of it came across as good policy because really only the child tax credit and the climate provisions were, in the end.
Back when it was a more commonplace thing, the patronage was spread so widely as to serve as lubricant rather than bribe. Now it's down to roughly 4 core constituencies on the Democratic side and just 1-2 on the GOP, which makes it look a lot more like rent-seeking and less like wheeling and dealing.
The problem is all in syndrome. Anything that you do to criticize a program is automatically perceived as being against the goal.
The goal being a copycat of a Nordic style social democracy. I suspect many of those staffers if you got them drinking a beer and asked them if they had a magic wand that could magically replace our institutions and Constitution and laws with Sweden’s, they would say yes.
It’s not just that, look at that child care provisions that would’ve actually raised costs for some. Anyone who brought this up was automatically assumed to be against child care at all.
It’s related to when people have immigration discussions. The only correct answer is to have more of everybody. If people trying to discuss less undocumented migration versus more skill based immigration they are tagged as wrong. Note. I just use this is an example not as something that I believe. It just seems to be a subject that should be able to be debated.
Finally, I love the point he made about governing being hard. Yes it is, and maybe our institutions aren’t the most conducive to a certain sort of progressive change. But it is what it is. But this is also the reason why I always rolled my eyes when Democrats talked about the demographic tidal wave that would sweep over the country and give them decades of ruling power. This will never happen… Because whoever is in power will always get the blame, and the population will automatically shift to balance the two parties somewhere close to 5050. We are seeing that with Hispanics right now as they start to link conservative.
As always, I dictated this song my phone while laying in bed. I’ll try and correct any errors later. Go easy on me.
I was about to hop in the shower and I thought of one more point. I’ve noticed lately that mats online Twitter abuse now comes overwhelmingly from the left. 7 to 10 years ago, he was the favorite target of conservatives. The reason is Matt has that contrarian streak, which means he doesn’t fall into the all in syndrome I mentioned above. So if he is not 100% for them, he is against them.
On another note, I actually think that a lot of the intellectual pundits I follow like Noah Smith and him and others are actually pretty good about analyzing the individual proposals. It’s the party activists that are the ones who don’t seem to have any sort of flexibility.
2 quick things somewhat related to your closing points here:
1: Twitter leftists and progressives seem to have convinced themselves that people like Matt totally drive the policy conversation and it would be helpful if they realized otherwise.
2: Matt's politics are functionally "to the left" of where we've ended up in terms of policy from the Biden administration and the Dem congress, and the Twitter leftists/progressives would probably be happier if Matt actually drove the policy we end up with.
Those two points seem to contradict each other, yet they seem to me to be totally correct.
And specifically to point number 2. No one ever seems to like to accept compromise. Even though leftists would be happier with Matts policies... unless its 100% of what they get, they can't admit it because that =s defeat in their mind.
Ironically, I seem the same thing in some right leaning issues.
Yeah there's definitely a mindset "on both sides", if you will, that anything other than 100% victory is a defeat. Similarly there's a view of how you can never "accept the other side's framing" or "give ground".
Like, I guess from a rhetorical standpoint that can be the "correct" mindset to take in a debate or whatever, but the problem I think I'm seeing is that people seem to basically buy into their own propaganda and actually believe those things, which is counterproductive.
Honestly, I only really respect people that can make a sincere argument for opposing views. I for instance could make a well reasoned argument for any policy position on any side of any issue assuming it’s one that is with reasonable mainstream. Abortion. Pro-life. Gun Control. No gun control. Open Borders. Build a Wall. Eliminate Public Schools. No Vouchers. Eliminate Electoral College. Keep it. Literally can argue any side of any argument sincerely.
If someone can’t do that… I tend not to give their arguments much credence.
The desire to remake America in the image of Europe strikes me as a bit strange. If people really want to live in a country with a social democratic economy, why not just move to Norway or Sweden? Odds are if you're the type of college-educated American who's likely to hold those beliefs, they'll probably take you.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with America and I'd just like to tax the rich a bit more to pay for stuff like an expanded CTC, raise the minimum wage, expand Medicaid, and stop locking people up for using weed.
Have you actually contacted the Norwegian or Swedish embassy for your naturalization papers? Not as easy as you think. And what's with this site's obsession with the CTC? 90% new dads among it's readership. It's really becoming a bore.
As someone who loved expat life it's not something that's easy to do on an ongoing basis in most countries. Maybe Scandinavia is easier to make a go of it than I've heard but even finding American life oppressive in many respects it's not super easy to just permanently leave.
Like I could find a job teaching English tomorrow if I could go into this space but they can throw up a series of legal obstacles and ways to make it difficult to make these spaces home.
I honestly wonder if the crowd who wants the USA to become like Europe actually understands the size of the tax burden even the lower middle class pays in most European countries. With polls here showing even the most committed people are only willing to pay a few hundred more dollars per year to fund a Green New Deal, there is no way European-level taxes will fly over here.
I think this is wrong. The US has a tax system designed to make you write a check which annoys everyone when they pay their taxes and fuels the Republican Party. Europe's tax system relies heavily on the VAT, which no one notices unless you're really pissed that your carrots cost 20 cents more than they would have if you moved to the US and enjoyed the benefits of freedom and your God-given right to guns. I haven't noticed a huge wave moving across the Atlantic in my life-time, and having spent quite a bit of time in Europe with my French wife I'd say that extra 20 cents for your carrots is well spent. That said, gas is much more expensive in Europe, which fueled the Gillet Jaune protests. But isn't it the dream of every right-thinking Democrat to price everyone out of their car and back onto their velo with their baguette and beret. To save the planet.
It's a pretty high bar to leave your support system and go somewhere you would have to learn a new language without even knowing if you could get a job. And most Democrats who think this way are already upper middle class. If I want to rewrite the tax policy to help poor people, moving to another rich country doesn't accomplish any of my goals. A more interesting question might be how much of their own money does such a person donate to charity? Why do Democrats need the government to do it for them? But that's a question for psychologists, not pundits.
My parents both came here as kids because their parents wanted better economic opportunities. That entailed leaving their support systems, adapting to a new language, and not being certain about getting a new job. Plenty of people make the same decision every year when they choose to immigrate to America for a better life, so why can't Americans who are dissatisfied with their current quality of life do the same? If people really believe the Nordic countries would provide them with superior economic opportunities, they can put their money where their mouths are. It might not be easy but if you really believe it's a better opportunity then go and take the same risk my grandparents did with far fewer resources on hand. Otherwise, stop the cheap talk.
To put it another way, if you're a US citizen who wants to live in a social democracy moving to Iceland is much easier than trying to rewrite the American social compact.
What your parents did was a good choice for you and your kids and probably a bad choice for their home country. America has gained a great deal by absorbing the most industrious people from all over the world and I think that the rest of the world has somewhat suffered as a result of the brain drain.
When an organization has small to medium sized problems, people should put in the work to reform it. When those problems grow too big to be fixed from within, leaving will make you happier and will show others that things have declined who might otherwise shrug off your concerns. America has far more poverty and far less upward mobility than just about any of our WEIRD peers. That is a problem. But since there is no mass exodus of people to Europe, I think it's pretty clear that people shouting on Twitter do not actually see this as big a problem as their rhetoric suggests.
On the other hand, telling people that if they don't like it they can leave is a pretty tired old trope that Democrats and Rebublicans have both used against each other to try to minimize concerns and silence dissent. It's like telling workers that they can leave their jobs if they don't get paid enough as a way to say that stagnant wages aren't actually a problem and we don't need trade unions. Technically that's true, but it's also true that unions drastically improve people's lives. It would be a lot easier to find a new job then to convince your fellow workers to form a union. That doesn't mean it's the best option.
From the way you reacted I can tell that you took offense at the idea of middle class white people complaining it's too hard to immigrate when your parents managed it with significantly fewer resources at their disposal. I get that. But I never said that I wanted to make us into a Nordic style country nor did I say that I had any interest in leaving even if it was easy. I also already said that I think most of the people who make this argument (once again, not me) are upper-middle class and wouldn't actually benefit from moving, so I fail to understand why you needed to lecture me by reiterating the same point I already made. American McDonald's workers likely have no idea that their Swedish counterparts make $30 an hour. More of them probably would try to move if they realized. I don't work at McDonald's and luckily I make more than $30 an hour. But if McDonald's workers want to make more than $8 an hour then I don't think they should have to move to Sweden to get it. We don't have to rewrite the constitution in order to support trade unions. The reason people talk so much about the Nordic countries is just to point out that you can pay McDonald's workers $30 an hour and society doesn't come to a crashing halt. That doesn't mean I want to pay them $30 an hour or replicate anything else about them, it just means that I don't think our economy will collapse if Seattle raises the minimum wage to $15. Single payer health care is not something I support but opponents will often say that it would carry a $300 Trillion dollar price tag to scare people into thinking it would ruin us to even think about implementing such a thing. When they say that it's pretty handy to see that Europeans all have some form of this and none of them are going bankrupt. Telling me I can move there if I hate my health care so much is a pretty banal counterargument.
I think many of those people want other people to live in that environment though - ie they believe it would be good for Americans. I think that's a quite different issue than looking for better opportunities for oneself. But yes, the subset that talk about their own opportunities should certainly do so.
Semi-related, I I have a friend who did his Fulbright in Denmark and the government gave him $500k for his startup (and free health insurance and all that).
I understand the argument that the Nordic model is better and there are certainly some aspects of it that I would like us to adopt. But I think looking at the choices actual immigrants make is telling. Like, if you asked a group of potential immigrants from, say, Ukraine or Ethiopia or what have you whether they would like to live in Denmark or America I think the large majority would choose us. There's a reason that some immigrants will choose to wait longer and get the chance move to America rather than go straight to Canada even though they have a more generous welfare state! And I have a strong hunch that it's because America is really great — we're the richest country in the world and while we have some problems, as any place does, most regular people here are doing quite well and are happy with the quality of life, and I count myself among them.
This is a good point but I'm not sure I agree. I think a big part of why people choose us is that they know other people who have already done it. We accepted so many immigrants over the years that lots of people know someone who already moved, meaning that you might know someone who moved here and probably don't know anyone who moved to Canada. It also means there might be a support network waiting for you. High schools in Everett, WA have an abnormally high number of graduates who want to become Engineers because everyone there knows someone who works for Boeing.
Another reason people might make that choice is that they've never heard of Raj Chetty and have no idea they would be better off in other countries. No one is talking about the Canadian dream or the Norwegian dream even though you would be better off as a poor person in one of those countries.
Another reason is media. Japan is very high on my list of countries to visit and if they weren't so ethnocentric I would certainly consider expatriating there after retirement. Why them instead of Singapore or Germany or anywhere else? Because I have consumed a large amount of Japanese media and it has made me very interested in their culture. I would probably be treated better as a tourist if I visited South Korea and there are lots of arguments that could be made that they are a better choice. But I know more about Japan than South Korea so I would feel more comfortable going there. America dominates the media landscape.
I also think America is really great and I think that those immigrants are totally right to come here. But I don't think their choice is a very persuasive argument for our economic model's superiority any more than I think the politician who wins the most votes is always the best choice.
Actually if I could take one thing from Nordic countries, it wouldn't be the tax code. It would be the rules on collective bargaining that allow bargaining across a whole industry. Matt should write more about that.
It's quite cold and dark in winter (though also true for big parts of the US) and things are very expensive. And of course it's very hard to actually integrate into those societies without being a native speaker. But mostly I'd say status quo bias.
Your description of the loss of rigorous policy analysis by Democrats really bothers me. I got a BA in public affairs and almost chose to go to the Kennedy School and seek to become one of the people conducting rigorous policy analysis at a high a level in government. But my girlfriend (now wife) was in NYC, so I went to law school in NYC instead and ended up as a Wall Street corporate finance lawyer. This has left me with little time to inform myself about politics and policy to the degree necessary to do my own rigorous analysis of what’s really going on. But the thought that Democrats have more-or-less thrown rigor away is painful to learn. Why believe that government can improve lives if one doesn’t strain to act based on rigorous analysis? Are we just another party that picks its policy issues based on superstition, hidden biases and crowd mentality? Perhaps this has been obvious to everyone else reading the daily papers. Perhaps Larry Summers’ inflation warning should have tipped me off two years ago. But I didn’t get it. I am digesting it now, thanks to you. I am grateful to you for focusing on the point. But it really , really depresses me.
Seems like you could have gone to a SUNY school or another school in New York and gotten an MPA and worked on city/state-level rigorous policy analysis? You gotta do you to live in NYC, and the cost of living there is so outrageous that it makes sense that one wants to only be a lawyer or a doctor to make ends meet, but NYC and the state of New York have problems with coalition brain even under one-party rule and could sure use some bright people. This is where I sometime wonder if our problems as a country come down to the best and the brightest choosing to make a ton of money when the best and the brightest in used to open settlement houses in the Progressive era or ran New Deal agencies in the 1930s or worked in the space program in the 1950s.
I went to a fancy undergrad school and now I'm a high school teacher in a cheap city. Feels good, man.
As an MPP holder, the pool of jobs doing "rigorous policy analysis" at the city or state level is incredibly small. I'm sure it's bigger in NYC but I guarantee the ratio of degree holders to jobs is still very unfavorable.
Also, I think most urban people wildly overate the capacity and interest of most local governments to handle complex policy discussions. I work with a lot of small local governments on their finances and you can't get a lot of them to do many things that seem extremely basic because the staff is so small without the skills necessary and the elected officials don't care. Basically, I think local policy analysis is really restricted to major cities.
I'm not sure that the party has thrown rigour out the window, but they are clearly below where they should be. It would be interesting to try to evaluate how rigour in politics has changed over time and I suspect that we would still be better off than much of our history. Doesn't mean we can't do better. And people were screaming about inflation in 2009 who were so obviously wrong. It's always easy to forget the thousand predictions that don't come true and focus on the one that does.
Seems related to Scott Alexander’s “conflict theory vs. mistake theory.” To a conflict theorist, self-criticism is pointless- suboptimal policy is never really the biggest problem. The technocrats (mistake theorists), on the other hand, think that suboptimal policy is essentially the entire problem, but they’re out of power now.
Except that with numerical answers -- and policy is almost always about the numbers -- rightness comes in degrees.
Getting the approximately right answer is super important. Getting a few more decimal places worth of rightness is often not worth the effort. Indeed, it may be positively counterproductive, when debates de minimis lead to political stagnation and delay.
This is one source of impatience with insider critiques. One group puts forward a concrete, imperfect, but achievable proposal, and then the smarty-pants snipe at its minor flaws. Sometimes Coalition Brain is just the good sense to take more or less one half a loaf instead of arguing over millicrumbs and getting no loaf at all.
I think there’s two phases here. Once the plan is in an actual bill that is getting debated and voted on, that’s probably right. But he’s talking about the earlier phase, when the plan is just some think tank proposal developing for a decade and maybe getting introduced every year by a backbencher looking to make a name for themself but not actually debated. That’s the time to modify it.
One of the things I do for my job is review the code of other engineers (and they review mine)
Sometimes a part of the review is:
"I think this part you're writing here is potentially inefficient. I don't know whether the tradeoff to fix it is worth it, but please note this and _consider_ it"
If you don't let the smarty-pants tell you what the flaws _are_, how can you decide which are worth fixing and which aren't? There's always the possibility that something blindingly obvious was missed - it seems like it shouldn't be, but we've all done it.
Yes, I think MY's post also complains about omnibus initiatives that try to satisfy unrelated constituencies (eg a green energy group also trying to make a racial justice pitch).
But that strikes me as a problem that is quite unconnected to issues of accuracy and approximation.
(The post is a bit of an omnibus complaint, if you like, or a complaint about a coalition of independent forces that stand in the way of progressive accomplishments.)
I wonder from the beginning why all the political energy was focused on child care and pre-kay subsidies and not on the Child Tax Credit. Designing a program is intrinsically hard, writing checks is easy.
Personally, if BBB was just climate stuff and the CTC, I would've been ecstatic. Unfortunately, the CTC was one of the less popular parts of the bill. People are very skeptical of giving less fortunate people cash, even if in-kind transfers create a load of problems.
There were two sentences in this piece that stood out to me as truths that an increasing number on the left simply won't admit and perhaps don't believe and it's our own version of disinformation (admittedly of a far less serious and dangerous kind than on the right). (1) "Simply refusing to prioritize doesn’t change the fact that building a full European-scale welfare state would require very large, politically implausible tax increases." This drove me insane in the 2020 primary, the pretending that the wealth taxes on super rich people we don't even know would get us to Norway or Sweden when they have way higher taxes on consumption that fund their welfare states because we were destined to then disappoint people terribly (especially young people who were feeling the Bern) when this could never be accomplished politically in the US, not because of Joe Manchin, but because there is no real support for a VAT. (2) "Loan relief for recent law school grads will directly press up housing costs for working-class renters; you can’t just call it all stimulus." Isn't this the kind of claim that makes the twitter left hate MY so much. I think it's true, but I feel like you would not be able to get the NYT to acknowledge this in such stark terms.
The problem is we have a body politic that wants money for nothin and the cheques for free. Rather than helping people in need, we hand out massive amounts of PPP money to people who don't need it, farm subsidies to Cargill, and massive amounts of subsidies to the military industrial complex.
When people see all that grift, how does it *not* become a free for all where you have tradeoffs for the politically unconnected and "unlimited free shit" for people with enough money to pay a lobbyist?
Dating back to FDR the core insight of the Democratic Party has been that corporations have too much power, and it is the job of government to step in and provide a counterbalance in favor of the little guy. I think this insight remains true and very useful, but on the left it has become an increasingly totalizing form of analysis, that corporations and wealthy people are the only agent preventing the correct or humane policy across a whole slew of issues. This has led to helpless and blinkered thinking on issues where Democrats need to ask for tradeoffs.
1. On climate change, the obstacle to cutting greenhouse gas emissions is clearly the general population that basically wants no climate policy that will cost anything.
Democrats and left aligned interests have tended to blame corporations (100 companies, etc) or the financial sector (Raskin fed appointment) for missing policy as opposed to trying to pass the maximum clean energy policy that will be tolerated by the people.
2. On paid childcare, the obstacle is actually hiring enough people to run centers that can accept all the subsidies we hand out. Corporations and rich people would be in favor of more people working and being able to afford daycare.
3. On the pandemic, public health policy is really not that well aligned with "capitalism." More socialist Sweden notoriously did minimal Covid interventions, and having a completely nationalized health system did not spare the UK from tons of cases/deaths (indeed their pandemic politics don't seem all that different from ours though maybe they have fewer anti-vaxxers). But since it's an argument Democrats are keen to listen to, I've seen tons of people blaming "capitalism" in a generic sense and "employers" for getting rid of NPIs...
There are a lot of issues similar to this, but my overall point is that generally what you should look for is a way to actually solve the problem at hand rather than tie the problem to greedy corporations. In some cases (like the 2008 financial crisis and union busting) corporations are the actual problem. But in many other cases, they are not. And attempting to loop the issue of mask wearing or climate change to "corporate greed" is not going to help identify a solution that works.
In my career, so much of the value I've seen the most valuable employees contribute has come in the form of "kicking the tires" on ideas that other people just assume have been vetted or analyzed by someone else.
I see this all over the place: a story gets accepted without the details ever being really looked at. An example in the mainstream media was when Ron Rosenstein wrote that memo that Trump cited in firing James Comey. Most news reports described it as calling for Comey to be fired, which if you actually read the memo, Rosenstein was clearly careful not to do. Here and there, reports in the same exact publications acknowledged this, but there was no reconciliation of the contradiction. Maybe this was a small oversight, but it struck me at the time: everyone could read the document, and it just kind of didn't matter that what the reports assumed it said wasn't true.
I just thought, All right, I'm going to publish this, and if we're going to go out with a bang, so be it. I had access to The New York Times and I thought I might as well end my career in The New York Times. I submitted the piece and I got lucky with an editor who didn't want me to hem and haw. I said, "Just think through this. It's not something that requires an advanced degree. It's a respiratory disease. We have the CDC and the WHO saying wear a mask if you're sick. Now we have tons of papers saying that there's pre- or asymptomatic spread. So on face value, you don't even know when you're sick and spreading it, so there should be no debate about this. I understand the mask shortage, but that's something we can talk about. Trust the public. Let's talk about the shortage and how to deal with it."
I think part of the problem is that nobody wants to be seen as a 'complainer'. You see this in all avenues of work. People don't want to be seen as arrogantly thinking they know more than senior people with many years of experience.
Right now, there are many projects being undertaken across the world, large and small, that the people working at the bottom of said projects know are totally misbegotten. Sometimes they will raise objections and will be told to shut up, because >who are you to say this?<. Most of the time, they will keep their heads down and try to get on with it.
I somehow learned about the Zumwalt Class destroyer program that the US Navy has had a huge problem with (it wanted to build 32, but only built 3 compromised ships) . It turns out, according to the linked article, that the Navy were trying to combine the latest ship designs with cutting edge weapons systems straight out of R&D. How could anybody have seriously thought this was the right approach?
Live by the omnibus bill; die by the omnibus bill. We have lost a lot by trading committee work on understandable bills for total leadership control. Maybe the secret congress still does some of the old style of lawmaking, but it seems that spending bills are now strictly partisan and they are worse for it.
Getting rid of earmarks was a mistake. They were essentially a rounding error on the budget but worked very well for negotiation purposes, gave reps and senators something they could tell constituents what they had done, and also gave them more power in committees and over leadership.
i hear this a lot but I am doubtful that it would make much difference at this point. In 2022 voters are just not voting based on what is actually delivered to their districts. Ben Nelson successfully secured the "Cornhusker Kickback" for Nebraska in the ACA negotiations and people in Nebraska hated it.
I agree with this. Earmarks are better than no earmarks but I doubt it makes a big difference.
Earmarks don't help w/ voters, but they probably help getting budgets and other big stuff passed slightly easier.
also earmarks are back. they were included in the last omnibus package.
Excellent and important point! The top-down dynamic also makes so much of the day-to-day work of lawmakers kind of meaningless; I wonder whether that contributes to the performance-over-actual-work character of today's politicians.
I wish that journalists would dig into this big picture, and the harm it does, more, rather than finding random stupid things to highlight (they don't seem highlight the actually good things that somehow make it into giant bills very often).
Does this go back to filibuster reform being necessary?
I still think I'm going to be happy (in the long run) if Republicans end up abolishing the filibuster even if I'm unhappy in the short run and wish Democrats had done it _this_ time.
I think the filibuster will be gone whenever a party has 50 or greater but less than 60 votes to do something it really wants to do. There were a couple close calls for the GOP in 2017-2018, and Democrats in 2021-2022, but so far the votes just weren't there.
This analogy..... wow dude. Just wow
You are just digging yourself deeper & deeper here buddy. Calling in Graham to investigate
My view is the Filibuster will go when a:
1. Party has something it really want to do.
2. Party core voters really want it, not just activists.
3. Party has unified government.
4. Party has at least 54 Senators but not more than 57.
Those are the conditions you need to get rid of the filibuster. For that reason I don't think it is going anywhere.
As a Democrat one lesson I'm drawing from 2021 is neither Progressives or Moderates really care that much about reversing the structural biases in the Senate. Very clearly progressives prioritized passing BBB over pushing for more states.
I feel like there's at least a reasonable take that the opposite dynamic is real too. Where there are limited agenda items that would pass with bipartisan support that never come for a vote because of all-or-nothing coalition brain.
I think that's right, but I think my fear with most filibuster "reform" is that it seems to simply be concerned with lowering the bar for passing the all-or-nothing coalition bills, when I think the real goal should be to disaggregate the individual policies to be voted on.
Ooh, I like this distinction. I wonder if there could be a rule change that takes the process into account. Put the brakes on single party bills that no one has read, but lower the bar for more manageable bills. Not sure how to make that distinction — bills from committee? Bills from bipartisan working groups?
Being partisan isn't a problem, as long as there are intra-party trade-offs and negotiations.
The problem that Matt is raising, I think, is that there aren't.
Committee bills require a filibuster proof majority. The filibuster is the reason why omnibus bills have become the main source of polarized legislation.
They also can't do bipartisan spending bills as they only have a limited number of filibuster exempt bills, due to the stupid rules of Senate.
If we allowed an infinite number of filibuster exempt spending bills we could see a return to the committee process and potentially see "odd coalition" bills, like Romney's child tax credit bill but Manchin votes against it.
This is where it would be helpful to have a Conservative party and media apparatus with real ideas around government, rather than one that solely exists to trigger the libs.
There is a legitimate crisis in state capacity across our government. To name a tiny example, it takes the IRS 18 months to answer a letter. The Democrat solution is to septuple the IRS budget to hire auditors to chase down minor tax discrepancies. The Republican solution is to abolish the IRS. How about we just have a party that tries to get them to open the mail punctually and go from there?
Same problem exists wrt 3 year immigration court waits, 9 month passport turnaround, continued shutdown of social security services. Small c conservative good governance is highly in demand right now!
I might not always (ever?) agree with a more serious Conservative party, but it is unhealthy for that role to be played solely by Joe Manchin and Susan Collins across the entire government.
“ The Democrat solution is to septuple the IRS budget to hire auditors to chase down minor tax discrepancies.”
This is, frankly, a ridiculous caricature.
Increased numbers of skilled, trained personnel is *precisely* the fix for what ails the IRS (both customer service and policing tax fraud by the wealthy) state DOT design work (like CalTrans’ HSR debacle), and policing.
It’s not the fix for teaching or a bunch of other things, but the quoted statement is patently ridiculous.
I am obviously being a little glib (the GOP also has no serious plan to abolish IRS) but I don’t agree at all with your characterization or your prescription.
There’s a reasonable argument to be made that modestly increased staffing and an adjusted budget could improve IRS functions, but that was patently not the proposed direction of the reform. BBB nearly tripled IRS budget with the express aim of raising revenue. The fiction that this would only come from large cases is insulting when EITC irregularities are so much more common.
The idea that you should throw more money and bodies at an agency, ignore whatever problems they face and give them an ambitious new mandate has been Democratic policy for at least a half decade. It’s bad! It makes government worse and undermines the foundation that new programs depend on.
“BBB nearly tripled IRS budget with the express aim of raising revenue.”
Good! Everyone in this field, public or private, knows that tax receipts are a good 20% lower than they should be based on GDP and income data and the information released by publicly traded companies. By necessity, the vast majority of this tax gap stems from the complex tax returns of the top 5% or so of the income distribution.
“The fiction that this would only come from large cases is insulting when EITC irregularities are so much more common.”
Forgive me, but “fiction, my ass”.
The average EITC irregularity is worth several hundred dollars; the rampant fraud occurring at the top, several orders of magnitude more, which more than makes up for its (perhaps, unproven assertion there) lower absolute frequency.
The only way one should oppose this is if they're in favor of allowing the wealthy to commit rampant tax fraud without consequence.
As for “new mandate”, lolz. The IRS’s entire remit is to enforce the tax code. The GOP got away with its own version of “Defund the Police”, time to end that.
The problem is that it is 100 times easier to train people to find EITC discrepancies than to hire people who are qualified to do deep-dive auditing in the returns of multimillionaires. That level of hiring encourages the former even if we'd like it to be the latter
I mean... do both, as the IRS once did?
The skills exist, we formerly employed them, and we can obviously cultivate them again.
I'm not going to take "but disproportionate impact!!!!" as a reason not to *enforce the fucking law*.
I would happily apply this same theory of enforcement to literally everything else, from automating enforcement of traffic violations, confiscating vehicles from unlicensed/insured drivers, to blanketing high-crime areas in cameras until the cost-benefit analysis for all but the stupidest, most impulsive morons says "don't do it!"
Funding the tax police is a proven way to increase revenues. I should know--I am the (local) tax police in Philadelphia. (Not alone, of course. Just a cog in the machine.) My job exists because the City decided to get serious about tax enforcement during the 2010s, and the result has been dramatically higher collection rates on all taxes that received extra enforcement resources. (I don't have the figures offhand, but it was impressive.) Inversely, collections numbers for City water service went down drastically during the pandemic because of a moratorium on active collections. (This was all revealed during the recent water rate setting last year.) Using enforcement tools is key to getting taxes (and other government claims) paid, and it takes money to actually exercise them. It's true that at a certain point you reach the point of diminishing marginal returns, but the evidence suggests the IRS is nowhere near there.
"I am the (local) tax police in Philadelphia."
I am envisioning Robo-Kareem slamming through a front door of a small contractor guns blazing...
In the end, to a slowly cooling corpse: "You didn't file your damned BIRT forms three years ago, asshole."
Lol. We contract that out.
Actually, the last comment reminds me, how far out of control does the city let an unpaid real estate tax bill get before sending something to sheriff's auction?
Ya, that's what the Sheriff is for.
We'll see how they get on taking that uninsured driver's stuff this month, btw, before moving onto the house if need be.
Interesting! The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department has also struggled historically with collections. Because it's a huge and very old system, serving (IIRC) at least 40% of the state, this has been a big problem for a while. I don't know much about what's going on with it now, but in 2013/14, when I wrote a paper on it, they were in the process grappling with the situation and trying to increase collections and align rates to the realities of providing the service. This is around the time that Flint decided to go its own way.
I'm not an expert on this, and obviously it was a complex situation. But I'd love to see this kind of evidence published somewhere to help make the case for strategies that can work for other systems. You should write about it if permitted by your COI rules!
It was spun off into a new authority (at least broadly) during the bankruptcy so that the infrastructure is owned by the whole region precisely because of the 40% figure you cited. Plenty of good Freep articles on the subject and years of open records since.
Thanks, I will check those out! Could be an interesting research project during my current phase of underemployment...
I'm a bit tangential to that side of things, I just absorbed information I heard colleagues discussing after the rate case ended. (Read: If I know about the effect on revenues, the information is already public lol.) The primary active collections actions that were suspended during the pandemic were shutoff of service and new lawsuits, which are kind of obvious tools for a utility to encourage people to pay (especially shutoff). The effect on the increase in enforcement on Philadelphia tax collections (both hiring more lawyers and using previously-neglected tools like sheriff's sale, license revocation, and sequestration) to make collections was well documented before I arrived. (It was in the Inquirer.)
Ugly thought for the day:
We can have fiscal policy that aims at and largely achieves full employment in the private sector.
Or we can have a civil service that is staffed with competent, motivated and qualified professionals.
But it’s probably going to be very difficult to have both at the same time, unless we want to commit the government to competing with the likes of Google and Morgan Stanley on salaries.
And it’s going to be flat out _impossible_ to have that as long as we have a de facto national consensus that both internal migration and external immigration are bad, thereby depressing the number of prime-age adults in the workforce generally and especially in places where the government likes to hire people.
In addition to noting the Singapore example that Frigid raises, I'll also point out that *dispersing the damned bureaucracy* would make it a much more attractive employer even at current pay scales.
But overall, yes, we're always going to be playing catch-up to some degree.
The only alternatives to America's "let the private sector be so productive that we can afford for the public sector to suck" are Singapore's "pay the civil service private sector wages but hang them for corruption", which is my preference but politically impossible, and Western Europe's "So thoroughly fetter the labor market that private sector employment has no advantages relative to public", which no one who is above the bottom quintile of the income distribution should ever want.
Astralcodexten had an interesting tidbit tucked away in an article about Xi Jinping where Tsinghua University would pay its alumni to take lower paying but prestigious government jobs over more lucrative private work in order to build a better and more powerful network. They went from being an average player to dominating as a result. I can't decide if an organization doing that in the US would be great or terrible...
Tsinghua has always been a top-tier school, so "average player" is pretty far off-base.
At best, it meaningfully increased its presence in the halls of power from an already fairly high level.
Top law schools do this to some extent by paying for internships at NGOs and government during the summers when most students are working for big law firms.
I'm a little leery of assuming that we can scale up the governing methods of a densely populated authoritarian city-state (population 5.6 million, a bit smaller than the philadelphia+camden metro area) up to the size of the USA, never mind the scale of the tax increase we'd need to pass to fund this approach.
Just to be clear, I agree that it would be great to have a genuine conservative party angling for "good value for public money, then return the excess to the taxpayer" instead of a so-called "conservative party" angling for "kleptocratic handouts for these few groups, then return unfunded tax reductions to our already-wealthy donor base".
But your IRS example is the worst possible supporting point. A genuine conservative party should *want* people to follow the law, pay the taxes they're legally required to, and be punished if they don't. All the moreso if the rates are already low enough to avoid distortion for top earners.
The serious answer is to simplify the regulatory environment in which these agencies operate. IRS is a disaster because our patchwork quilt of a tax code is a disaster.
I think some of the problem can also be tied to the meaning behind things like “she has a plan for that” from Elizabeth Warren. Not only were those plans frequently one or two page aspirational documents recycled from think tanks, they were also often contradictory. The fawning of the left leaning press over her primary candidacy led to a complete lack of scrutiny of that, driven in part by journalists overwhelmingly supporting Warren, and the other candidates picked up on that messaging strategy by copying most of those plans, even though it was merely the having-a-plan that got good coverage not necessarily the goodness of the plan in question. Retrospective reflection on that from someone like Matt or Josh Barro who wasn’t all in on Warren as the savior of America might be helpful to the democrats in the future, but I’m not holding my breath that anyone in power would listen.
This was one of the things that drove me bananas about Warren’s campaign. And then to make it worse, if you pointed out that her plans were contradicting each other or based on wishful thinking, you were supposedly not real bright because Warren was the smart candidate.
“Even for someone who is capable of rigorous analysis, most people find it more pleasant to get along than to have fights.”
We noticed a generational thing in my line of work a few years ago. The younger people had no ability to tell anyone anything that they didn’t want to hear. The youngsters made our business a lot nicer because they simply would not stay in contentious environments that the oldsters always took for granted, so adjustments have been made and things are much less confrontational.
The flip side to that turned out to be a problem similar to what you describe. Roles that exist to critique, refine and even reject weren’t doing it. Which can actually lead quite quickly to other people getting away with unethical or even illegal behavior.
Yeah, there does seem to be a growing spirit of conflict-aversion across a wide stretch of society.
I would note that this is tied up with the social media dogpiling that happens. Disagreement used to mean a disagreement among a few people. Now the masses can be mobilized so a small disagreement can blow up into something much, much worse.
Yeah, that's a big part of why I stick to a pretty strict no-tweeting policy. A few likes aren't worth the (admittedly small) risk getting piled on by Internet randoms over an off-the-cuff post. I'd rather make my arguments at greater length and with more time to refine them, so I mostly just use Twitter to read what other people have to say.
I've noticed this among my own generation. It seems you have to be for something or against it, you can't be for something and have criticisms. It was hard to get my peers to debate politics because no one wanted to argue. Once they got into a discussion they couldn't stop themselves becoming emotional so they decided to just not have the discussion. Which just means you never learn to handle your emotions during a discussion. In groups it can be a little hard to get people's real opinions because no one wants to hurt each other's feelings, but I haven't found it to be debilitating. It only takes a couple of people to be willing to start and other people chime in.
this is interesting because the frequently noted (anecdotally at least) is that Gen Z is much more openly hostile to authority figures/bosses. Is this purely dispositional and does not apply to substantive disagreement/analysis?
Nail. Head. I direct a policy center and we are often called upon to wonk out on a proposal. We strive for objectivity but often we say amongst ourselves, “what on earth were they thinking?” And journalists seem more inclined to repeat the PR boiler plate that comes from one party or another. My hypothesis on why Paul Ryan earned the moniker “policy wonk” is that compared to other members of Congress and compared to the journalists that covered policy, the bar for being a wonk had gotten pretty low. I also blame academia because few journals leave space for detailed analyses of tax and policy implications, wanting more general, big headline journal articles using cutting edge statistical techniques. You won’t get tenure using Excel in a tax simulation although that’s how policy often best reveals itself.
I share your Paul Ryan theory! When people are impressed that a high-ranking public official can...show a powerpoint with some numbers in it, the bar is indeed low. I also think the poor quality of journalism is a huge part of this problem, and I'm not sure whether it's the quality of the journalists, their incentives, or some combination.
Does your team every try to understand the source of the failures? Are the proposals created by people who lack the chops to do it, or are they trying to appeal to certain Congress members with idiosyncratic ideas, or something else entirely?
That’s a really good question. Sometimes a bill or order is boilerplate from something put out by a think tank. In one case I can think of it resembled parts of a senator’s stump speech although that senator wasn’t in the committee that was considering the bill. In either case, we just do the analysis. In one case, we did a tax analysis of a proposal that never made it out of committee and it surprised me because the end result just seemed like it so greatly benefited the other party, politically, who could use it against the majority if it passed. That was one case where I thought to myself, “has nobody run the numbers on this and seen who actually gets hit?” We just run the numbers, but it is surprising sometimes that it seems like others aren’t. Politicians always inflate benefits and harms, that isn’t a surprise. What’s surprising is that the people scrutinizing the assertions don’t know the details as well as they used to. The Trump and Biden administrations have asserted things about policy that make me go, “wait, what?” And while I read opinions about the grand themes, I’m not hearing as much discussion of minor but important details from either academics or journalists, other than our host, of course.
Your last sentence implies you are seeing this across the ideological spectrum. Am I reading that fairly?
Coalition-building is all well and good, but issuing a blank check to everyone within the coalition isn’t.
Let’s face it, some parts of any coalition are going to be wildly unrealistic, even outright delusional. And others are going to be self-centered to the point of robbing the public blind.
And that’s precisely what happened to BBB. It reads precisely like too much deference was given to several “pet issues” cliques and then a hefty dose of rent and patronage was piled atop.
None of it came across as good policy because really only the child tax credit and the climate provisions were, in the end.
Back when it was a more commonplace thing, the patronage was spread so widely as to serve as lubricant rather than bribe. Now it's down to roughly 4 core constituencies on the Democratic side and just 1-2 on the GOP, which makes it look a lot more like rent-seeking and less like wheeling and dealing.
The problem is all in syndrome. Anything that you do to criticize a program is automatically perceived as being against the goal.
The goal being a copycat of a Nordic style social democracy. I suspect many of those staffers if you got them drinking a beer and asked them if they had a magic wand that could magically replace our institutions and Constitution and laws with Sweden’s, they would say yes.
It’s not just that, look at that child care provisions that would’ve actually raised costs for some. Anyone who brought this up was automatically assumed to be against child care at all.
It’s related to when people have immigration discussions. The only correct answer is to have more of everybody. If people trying to discuss less undocumented migration versus more skill based immigration they are tagged as wrong. Note. I just use this is an example not as something that I believe. It just seems to be a subject that should be able to be debated.
Finally, I love the point he made about governing being hard. Yes it is, and maybe our institutions aren’t the most conducive to a certain sort of progressive change. But it is what it is. But this is also the reason why I always rolled my eyes when Democrats talked about the demographic tidal wave that would sweep over the country and give them decades of ruling power. This will never happen… Because whoever is in power will always get the blame, and the population will automatically shift to balance the two parties somewhere close to 5050. We are seeing that with Hispanics right now as they start to link conservative.
As always, I dictated this song my phone while laying in bed. I’ll try and correct any errors later. Go easy on me.
I was about to hop in the shower and I thought of one more point. I’ve noticed lately that mats online Twitter abuse now comes overwhelmingly from the left. 7 to 10 years ago, he was the favorite target of conservatives. The reason is Matt has that contrarian streak, which means he doesn’t fall into the all in syndrome I mentioned above. So if he is not 100% for them, he is against them.
On another note, I actually think that a lot of the intellectual pundits I follow like Noah Smith and him and others are actually pretty good about analyzing the individual proposals. It’s the party activists that are the ones who don’t seem to have any sort of flexibility.
2 quick things somewhat related to your closing points here:
1: Twitter leftists and progressives seem to have convinced themselves that people like Matt totally drive the policy conversation and it would be helpful if they realized otherwise.
2: Matt's politics are functionally "to the left" of where we've ended up in terms of policy from the Biden administration and the Dem congress, and the Twitter leftists/progressives would probably be happier if Matt actually drove the policy we end up with.
Those two points seem to contradict each other, yet they seem to me to be totally correct.
And specifically to point number 2. No one ever seems to like to accept compromise. Even though leftists would be happier with Matts policies... unless its 100% of what they get, they can't admit it because that =s defeat in their mind.
Ironically, I seem the same thing in some right leaning issues.
Yeah there's definitely a mindset "on both sides", if you will, that anything other than 100% victory is a defeat. Similarly there's a view of how you can never "accept the other side's framing" or "give ground".
Like, I guess from a rhetorical standpoint that can be the "correct" mindset to take in a debate or whatever, but the problem I think I'm seeing is that people seem to basically buy into their own propaganda and actually believe those things, which is counterproductive.
Honestly, I only really respect people that can make a sincere argument for opposing views. I for instance could make a well reasoned argument for any policy position on any side of any issue assuming it’s one that is with reasonable mainstream. Abortion. Pro-life. Gun Control. No gun control. Open Borders. Build a Wall. Eliminate Public Schools. No Vouchers. Eliminate Electoral College. Keep it. Literally can argue any side of any argument sincerely.
If someone can’t do that… I tend not to give their arguments much credence.
The desire to remake America in the image of Europe strikes me as a bit strange. If people really want to live in a country with a social democratic economy, why not just move to Norway or Sweden? Odds are if you're the type of college-educated American who's likely to hold those beliefs, they'll probably take you.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with America and I'd just like to tax the rich a bit more to pay for stuff like an expanded CTC, raise the minimum wage, expand Medicaid, and stop locking people up for using weed.
Have you actually contacted the Norwegian or Swedish embassy for your naturalization papers? Not as easy as you think. And what's with this site's obsession with the CTC? 90% new dads among it's readership. It's really becoming a bore.
One of the contrarian positions I share with Matt is that reducing poverty is in fact good
As someone who loved expat life it's not something that's easy to do on an ongoing basis in most countries. Maybe Scandinavia is easier to make a go of it than I've heard but even finding American life oppressive in many respects it's not super easy to just permanently leave.
Like I could find a job teaching English tomorrow if I could go into this space but they can throw up a series of legal obstacles and ways to make it difficult to make these spaces home.
I honestly wonder if the crowd who wants the USA to become like Europe actually understands the size of the tax burden even the lower middle class pays in most European countries. With polls here showing even the most committed people are only willing to pay a few hundred more dollars per year to fund a Green New Deal, there is no way European-level taxes will fly over here.
I think this is wrong. The US has a tax system designed to make you write a check which annoys everyone when they pay their taxes and fuels the Republican Party. Europe's tax system relies heavily on the VAT, which no one notices unless you're really pissed that your carrots cost 20 cents more than they would have if you moved to the US and enjoyed the benefits of freedom and your God-given right to guns. I haven't noticed a huge wave moving across the Atlantic in my life-time, and having spent quite a bit of time in Europe with my French wife I'd say that extra 20 cents for your carrots is well spent. That said, gas is much more expensive in Europe, which fueled the Gillet Jaune protests. But isn't it the dream of every right-thinking Democrat to price everyone out of their car and back onto their velo with their baguette and beret. To save the planet.
Also that VAT isn't really apparent to you since it's already included in the price that's displayed, not tacked on after.
It's a pretty high bar to leave your support system and go somewhere you would have to learn a new language without even knowing if you could get a job. And most Democrats who think this way are already upper middle class. If I want to rewrite the tax policy to help poor people, moving to another rich country doesn't accomplish any of my goals. A more interesting question might be how much of their own money does such a person donate to charity? Why do Democrats need the government to do it for them? But that's a question for psychologists, not pundits.
My parents both came here as kids because their parents wanted better economic opportunities. That entailed leaving their support systems, adapting to a new language, and not being certain about getting a new job. Plenty of people make the same decision every year when they choose to immigrate to America for a better life, so why can't Americans who are dissatisfied with their current quality of life do the same? If people really believe the Nordic countries would provide them with superior economic opportunities, they can put their money where their mouths are. It might not be easy but if you really believe it's a better opportunity then go and take the same risk my grandparents did with far fewer resources on hand. Otherwise, stop the cheap talk.
To put it another way, if you're a US citizen who wants to live in a social democracy moving to Iceland is much easier than trying to rewrite the American social compact.
What your parents did was a good choice for you and your kids and probably a bad choice for their home country. America has gained a great deal by absorbing the most industrious people from all over the world and I think that the rest of the world has somewhat suffered as a result of the brain drain.
When an organization has small to medium sized problems, people should put in the work to reform it. When those problems grow too big to be fixed from within, leaving will make you happier and will show others that things have declined who might otherwise shrug off your concerns. America has far more poverty and far less upward mobility than just about any of our WEIRD peers. That is a problem. But since there is no mass exodus of people to Europe, I think it's pretty clear that people shouting on Twitter do not actually see this as big a problem as their rhetoric suggests.
On the other hand, telling people that if they don't like it they can leave is a pretty tired old trope that Democrats and Rebublicans have both used against each other to try to minimize concerns and silence dissent. It's like telling workers that they can leave their jobs if they don't get paid enough as a way to say that stagnant wages aren't actually a problem and we don't need trade unions. Technically that's true, but it's also true that unions drastically improve people's lives. It would be a lot easier to find a new job then to convince your fellow workers to form a union. That doesn't mean it's the best option.
From the way you reacted I can tell that you took offense at the idea of middle class white people complaining it's too hard to immigrate when your parents managed it with significantly fewer resources at their disposal. I get that. But I never said that I wanted to make us into a Nordic style country nor did I say that I had any interest in leaving even if it was easy. I also already said that I think most of the people who make this argument (once again, not me) are upper-middle class and wouldn't actually benefit from moving, so I fail to understand why you needed to lecture me by reiterating the same point I already made. American McDonald's workers likely have no idea that their Swedish counterparts make $30 an hour. More of them probably would try to move if they realized. I don't work at McDonald's and luckily I make more than $30 an hour. But if McDonald's workers want to make more than $8 an hour then I don't think they should have to move to Sweden to get it. We don't have to rewrite the constitution in order to support trade unions. The reason people talk so much about the Nordic countries is just to point out that you can pay McDonald's workers $30 an hour and society doesn't come to a crashing halt. That doesn't mean I want to pay them $30 an hour or replicate anything else about them, it just means that I don't think our economy will collapse if Seattle raises the minimum wage to $15. Single payer health care is not something I support but opponents will often say that it would carry a $300 Trillion dollar price tag to scare people into thinking it would ruin us to even think about implementing such a thing. When they say that it's pretty handy to see that Europeans all have some form of this and none of them are going bankrupt. Telling me I can move there if I hate my health care so much is a pretty banal counterargument.
I think many of those people want other people to live in that environment though - ie they believe it would be good for Americans. I think that's a quite different issue than looking for better opportunities for oneself. But yes, the subset that talk about their own opportunities should certainly do so.
Semi-related, I I have a friend who did his Fulbright in Denmark and the government gave him $500k for his startup (and free health insurance and all that).
I understand the argument that the Nordic model is better and there are certainly some aspects of it that I would like us to adopt. But I think looking at the choices actual immigrants make is telling. Like, if you asked a group of potential immigrants from, say, Ukraine or Ethiopia or what have you whether they would like to live in Denmark or America I think the large majority would choose us. There's a reason that some immigrants will choose to wait longer and get the chance move to America rather than go straight to Canada even though they have a more generous welfare state! And I have a strong hunch that it's because America is really great — we're the richest country in the world and while we have some problems, as any place does, most regular people here are doing quite well and are happy with the quality of life, and I count myself among them.
This is a good point but I'm not sure I agree. I think a big part of why people choose us is that they know other people who have already done it. We accepted so many immigrants over the years that lots of people know someone who already moved, meaning that you might know someone who moved here and probably don't know anyone who moved to Canada. It also means there might be a support network waiting for you. High schools in Everett, WA have an abnormally high number of graduates who want to become Engineers because everyone there knows someone who works for Boeing.
Another reason people might make that choice is that they've never heard of Raj Chetty and have no idea they would be better off in other countries. No one is talking about the Canadian dream or the Norwegian dream even though you would be better off as a poor person in one of those countries.
Another reason is media. Japan is very high on my list of countries to visit and if they weren't so ethnocentric I would certainly consider expatriating there after retirement. Why them instead of Singapore or Germany or anywhere else? Because I have consumed a large amount of Japanese media and it has made me very interested in their culture. I would probably be treated better as a tourist if I visited South Korea and there are lots of arguments that could be made that they are a better choice. But I know more about Japan than South Korea so I would feel more comfortable going there. America dominates the media landscape.
I also think America is really great and I think that those immigrants are totally right to come here. But I don't think their choice is a very persuasive argument for our economic model's superiority any more than I think the politician who wins the most votes is always the best choice.
Actually if I could take one thing from Nordic countries, it wouldn't be the tax code. It would be the rules on collective bargaining that allow bargaining across a whole industry. Matt should write more about that.
It's quite cold and dark in winter (though also true for big parts of the US) and things are very expensive. And of course it's very hard to actually integrate into those societies without being a native speaker. But mostly I'd say status quo bias.
Your description of the loss of rigorous policy analysis by Democrats really bothers me. I got a BA in public affairs and almost chose to go to the Kennedy School and seek to become one of the people conducting rigorous policy analysis at a high a level in government. But my girlfriend (now wife) was in NYC, so I went to law school in NYC instead and ended up as a Wall Street corporate finance lawyer. This has left me with little time to inform myself about politics and policy to the degree necessary to do my own rigorous analysis of what’s really going on. But the thought that Democrats have more-or-less thrown rigor away is painful to learn. Why believe that government can improve lives if one doesn’t strain to act based on rigorous analysis? Are we just another party that picks its policy issues based on superstition, hidden biases and crowd mentality? Perhaps this has been obvious to everyone else reading the daily papers. Perhaps Larry Summers’ inflation warning should have tipped me off two years ago. But I didn’t get it. I am digesting it now, thanks to you. I am grateful to you for focusing on the point. But it really , really depresses me.
Funnily enough, Summers was also wrong
He had said (paraphrasing, I suppose) 33% chance of stagflation, 33% chance of recession, 33% chance of rapid growth with no surge in inflation
We got rapid growth with a surge in inflation 🤷🏿♂️
Seems like you could have gone to a SUNY school or another school in New York and gotten an MPA and worked on city/state-level rigorous policy analysis? You gotta do you to live in NYC, and the cost of living there is so outrageous that it makes sense that one wants to only be a lawyer or a doctor to make ends meet, but NYC and the state of New York have problems with coalition brain even under one-party rule and could sure use some bright people. This is where I sometime wonder if our problems as a country come down to the best and the brightest choosing to make a ton of money when the best and the brightest in used to open settlement houses in the Progressive era or ran New Deal agencies in the 1930s or worked in the space program in the 1950s.
I went to a fancy undergrad school and now I'm a high school teacher in a cheap city. Feels good, man.
As an MPP holder, the pool of jobs doing "rigorous policy analysis" at the city or state level is incredibly small. I'm sure it's bigger in NYC but I guarantee the ratio of degree holders to jobs is still very unfavorable.
Also, I think most urban people wildly overate the capacity and interest of most local governments to handle complex policy discussions. I work with a lot of small local governments on their finances and you can't get a lot of them to do many things that seem extremely basic because the staff is so small without the skills necessary and the elected officials don't care. Basically, I think local policy analysis is really restricted to major cities.
I'm not sure that the party has thrown rigour out the window, but they are clearly below where they should be. It would be interesting to try to evaluate how rigour in politics has changed over time and I suspect that we would still be better off than much of our history. Doesn't mean we can't do better. And people were screaming about inflation in 2009 who were so obviously wrong. It's always easy to forget the thousand predictions that don't come true and focus on the one that does.
Seems related to Scott Alexander’s “conflict theory vs. mistake theory.” To a conflict theorist, self-criticism is pointless- suboptimal policy is never really the biggest problem. The technocrats (mistake theorists), on the other hand, think that suboptimal policy is essentially the entire problem, but they’re out of power now.
"Getting the right answer matters!"
Except that with numerical answers -- and policy is almost always about the numbers -- rightness comes in degrees.
Getting the approximately right answer is super important. Getting a few more decimal places worth of rightness is often not worth the effort. Indeed, it may be positively counterproductive, when debates de minimis lead to political stagnation and delay.
This is one source of impatience with insider critiques. One group puts forward a concrete, imperfect, but achievable proposal, and then the smarty-pants snipe at its minor flaws. Sometimes Coalition Brain is just the good sense to take more or less one half a loaf instead of arguing over millicrumbs and getting no loaf at all.
I think there’s two phases here. Once the plan is in an actual bill that is getting debated and voted on, that’s probably right. But he’s talking about the earlier phase, when the plan is just some think tank proposal developing for a decade and maybe getting introduced every year by a backbencher looking to make a name for themself but not actually debated. That’s the time to modify it.
One of the things I do for my job is review the code of other engineers (and they review mine)
Sometimes a part of the review is:
"I think this part you're writing here is potentially inefficient. I don't know whether the tradeoff to fix it is worth it, but please note this and _consider_ it"
If you don't let the smarty-pants tell you what the flaws _are_, how can you decide which are worth fixing and which aren't? There's always the possibility that something blindingly obvious was missed - it seems like it shouldn't be, but we've all done it.
Editing, in general, is underrated.
Consider revising to "In general, editing is underrated."
But isn't one of the problems with Coalition Brain its current inability to accept the good over the unachievable perfect?
Yes, I think MY's post also complains about omnibus initiatives that try to satisfy unrelated constituencies (eg a green energy group also trying to make a racial justice pitch).
But that strikes me as a problem that is quite unconnected to issues of accuracy and approximation.
(The post is a bit of an omnibus complaint, if you like, or a complaint about a coalition of independent forces that stand in the way of progressive accomplishments.)
Fair point! I guess I see Coalition Brain as lacking that good sense too often...
I wonder from the beginning why all the political energy was focused on child care and pre-kay subsidies and not on the Child Tax Credit. Designing a program is intrinsically hard, writing checks is easy.
Personally, if BBB was just climate stuff and the CTC, I would've been ecstatic. Unfortunately, the CTC was one of the less popular parts of the bill. People are very skeptical of giving less fortunate people cash, even if in-kind transfers create a load of problems.
There were two sentences in this piece that stood out to me as truths that an increasing number on the left simply won't admit and perhaps don't believe and it's our own version of disinformation (admittedly of a far less serious and dangerous kind than on the right). (1) "Simply refusing to prioritize doesn’t change the fact that building a full European-scale welfare state would require very large, politically implausible tax increases." This drove me insane in the 2020 primary, the pretending that the wealth taxes on super rich people we don't even know would get us to Norway or Sweden when they have way higher taxes on consumption that fund their welfare states because we were destined to then disappoint people terribly (especially young people who were feeling the Bern) when this could never be accomplished politically in the US, not because of Joe Manchin, but because there is no real support for a VAT. (2) "Loan relief for recent law school grads will directly press up housing costs for working-class renters; you can’t just call it all stimulus." Isn't this the kind of claim that makes the twitter left hate MY so much. I think it's true, but I feel like you would not be able to get the NYT to acknowledge this in such stark terms.
The problem is we have a body politic that wants money for nothin and the cheques for free. Rather than helping people in need, we hand out massive amounts of PPP money to people who don't need it, farm subsidies to Cargill, and massive amounts of subsidies to the military industrial complex.
When people see all that grift, how does it *not* become a free for all where you have tradeoffs for the politically unconnected and "unlimited free shit" for people with enough money to pay a lobbyist?
"Money for nothing and cheques for free"
Nice.
"You gotta move that PPP money..."
Dating back to FDR the core insight of the Democratic Party has been that corporations have too much power, and it is the job of government to step in and provide a counterbalance in favor of the little guy. I think this insight remains true and very useful, but on the left it has become an increasingly totalizing form of analysis, that corporations and wealthy people are the only agent preventing the correct or humane policy across a whole slew of issues. This has led to helpless and blinkered thinking on issues where Democrats need to ask for tradeoffs.
1. On climate change, the obstacle to cutting greenhouse gas emissions is clearly the general population that basically wants no climate policy that will cost anything.
Democrats and left aligned interests have tended to blame corporations (100 companies, etc) or the financial sector (Raskin fed appointment) for missing policy as opposed to trying to pass the maximum clean energy policy that will be tolerated by the people.
2. On paid childcare, the obstacle is actually hiring enough people to run centers that can accept all the subsidies we hand out. Corporations and rich people would be in favor of more people working and being able to afford daycare.
3. On the pandemic, public health policy is really not that well aligned with "capitalism." More socialist Sweden notoriously did minimal Covid interventions, and having a completely nationalized health system did not spare the UK from tons of cases/deaths (indeed their pandemic politics don't seem all that different from ours though maybe they have fewer anti-vaxxers). But since it's an argument Democrats are keen to listen to, I've seen tons of people blaming "capitalism" in a generic sense and "employers" for getting rid of NPIs...
There are a lot of issues similar to this, but my overall point is that generally what you should look for is a way to actually solve the problem at hand rather than tie the problem to greedy corporations. In some cases (like the 2008 financial crisis and union busting) corporations are the actual problem. But in many other cases, they are not. And attempting to loop the issue of mask wearing or climate change to "corporate greed" is not going to help identify a solution that works.
In my career, so much of the value I've seen the most valuable employees contribute has come in the form of "kicking the tires" on ideas that other people just assume have been vetted or analyzed by someone else.
I see this all over the place: a story gets accepted without the details ever being really looked at. An example in the mainstream media was when Ron Rosenstein wrote that memo that Trump cited in firing James Comey. Most news reports described it as calling for Comey to be fired, which if you actually read the memo, Rosenstein was clearly careful not to do. Here and there, reports in the same exact publications acknowledged this, but there was no reconciliation of the contradiction. Maybe this was a small oversight, but it struck me at the time: everyone could read the document, and it just kind of didn't matter that what the reports assumed it said wasn't true.
Another great example: Zeynep Tufekci. She has said: (source: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/938808#vp_5 )
I just thought, All right, I'm going to publish this, and if we're going to go out with a bang, so be it. I had access to The New York Times and I thought I might as well end my career in The New York Times. I submitted the piece and I got lucky with an editor who didn't want me to hem and haw. I said, "Just think through this. It's not something that requires an advanced degree. It's a respiratory disease. We have the CDC and the WHO saying wear a mask if you're sick. Now we have tons of papers saying that there's pre- or asymptomatic spread. So on face value, you don't even know when you're sick and spreading it, so there should be no debate about this. I understand the mask shortage, but that's something we can talk about. Trust the public. Let's talk about the shortage and how to deal with it."
I think part of the problem is that nobody wants to be seen as a 'complainer'. You see this in all avenues of work. People don't want to be seen as arrogantly thinking they know more than senior people with many years of experience.
Right now, there are many projects being undertaken across the world, large and small, that the people working at the bottom of said projects know are totally misbegotten. Sometimes they will raise objections and will be told to shut up, because >who are you to say this?<. Most of the time, they will keep their heads down and try to get on with it.
I somehow learned about the Zumwalt Class destroyer program that the US Navy has had a huge problem with (it wanted to build 32, but only built 3 compromised ships) . It turns out, according to the linked article, that the Navy were trying to combine the latest ship designs with cutting edge weapons systems straight out of R&D. How could anybody have seriously thought this was the right approach?
https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/surface-navy-association/2021/01/11/heres-the-us-navys-plan-to-stop-its-string-of-shipbuilding-failures/