You are absolutely correct that the Cares Act (and, from my standpoint as a lawyer that advises employers, in particular the PPP) was an absolute success story. What gravels me on the left is the drumbeat of stories saying "I can't believe that Betsy DeVos's sister's company got PPP loan forgiveness!!" (made up example). Stop naming and shaming. Unless these companies committed actual fraud (an defamatory accusation that should not be thrown around lightly), they had their loan forgiven because they actually retained and paid their employees through the worst parts of the pandemic. Whether they work for an employer you like or hate, that is a very good thing, and I know personally of scores of employers that only stayed open and kept paying workers because of this help. When coupled with the expanded UI, it was a godsend that saved our economy. Good news.
It wasn't just "the left" spreading these inane memes and citing examples of this or that "undeserving" entity getting in on the act. Plenty of people on right are soi-disant heroic libertarians who claim to believe that government subsidies are invariably a bad idea, and from them I learned of numerous OUTRAGEOUS! examples of corrupts progressive people and firms receiving handouts.
Tend to agree. It's easy to generate a headline that goes about like "{company people hate} got a loan for {big amount Y} and you won't believe what they did with the money {insert dumb T&E expense deep in dumb clickbait listicle}".
People had to implement this under the gun in a giant hurry under an administration that is prone to grift. Of course this was going to happen. Something something practicalities are messy.
I do think there was probably some waste in PPP. It's not just made-up examples. Large corporations did get hundreds of billions (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/CARES_Act_Sankey_Diagram.png) that I think they didn't need and probably could've done without. I think the key point is that this wrong doesn't unmake the right of the expanded UI or stimulus checks. Things can be both wrong and right about a bill, and if we focus on the wrong, we lose the chance to campaign on things that were just like the right
It wasn't just "the left" spreading these inane memes and citing examples of this or that "undeserving" entity getting in on the act. Plenty of people on right are soi-disant heroic libertarians who claim to believe that government subsidies are invariably a bad idea, and from them I learned of numerous OUTRAGEOUS! examples of corrupts progressive people and firms receiving handouts.
So if Matt is naturally dyspeptic but doesn't share the general progressive tendency to see the glass as half-empty, it must not be a question of personality types. In that case, where does the tendency come from?
As it happens I know one of the people who trashed Matt on Twitter for pointing out that the macroeconomy was in good shape after the CARES Act. In a previous life this person was a blogger and though very progressive, also quite empirically minded. After some personal trauma/drama they've now decided to immerse themselves in far-left activism and their political writing has been reduced to drive-by snark on social media. I wouldn't have said they were sunny before, but now their negativity is so intense that they've changed their position on gun control (because radicals need to arm themselves for the coming civil war).
What motivates people to change this way? I'm guessing that in this case it's a desire to conform to a new group of friends and social contacts who share the negative outlook... but I don't think this kind of negativity was always expected on the left. From what little I know about socialist and communist movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they produced optimism in their members: maybe because the movements were inspired by Marxism and Marxism promises that the workers will win in the end. I don't think the decline of Marxism has been generally bad for progressives, but it does seem possible that it's allowed the left's affect to become more gloomy.
i posted another comment about this but -- "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer is very good. despite many flaws in the book he describes this kind of psychology very astutely. he claims that mediocre artists and intellectuals, who are merely somewhat talented, are particularly prone to joining mass movements, when they are confronted by the fact that their creative efforts aren't that good.
failure and frustration in life drive people towards extreme, apocalyptic thinking -- social contacts just influence which millenarian ideology people sign up for. with a different background and friend group this person might have become a sedevacantist or militia guy instead.
as for why negativity vs. positivity -- I think that probably is just personality. Sort of a William James thing -- people who have religious awakenings, even within the same faith, can either be "sick souls" or "healthy minded" depending on their temperament.
That sounds right in the case I was thinking of. Kicked out of previous career due to anger management issues, switched to new career which they don't actually like, now much more focused on activism than on avoiding a second career wipeout, and consoled by the thought that it doesn't matter anyway because the apocalypse is coming.
So I’m basically sold on the idea that most humans have an innate negativity bias. If I understand it correctly, humans tend to need four “good” things to happen for it to balance out the effect of one “bad” thing.
But if humans have a negativity bias, how can we explain it when groups of people seem cheery?
Well, I think people need social institutions to weigh against their natural biases. I think people are highly social and that our social impulses will override some of our biases if we are put into the right group.
In short: I think we have too few social institutions which are focused on achieving good political and social ends with a smile on. I think that some faith-based organizations did this for us for a while, but the increasing secularization of the left has basically ended all of that.
As a happy atheist, I have never been more attracted to liberal denominations of Christianity. Unfortunately, those denominations are bleeding members while more rigid denominations of Christianity are actually increasing their membership....
I used to scoff at conservatives who accused progressives of Marxism but now I can see their point. I think Marxism is the end result of the nihilism, not the source of it per se, but you end up at “burn the whole thing to the ground” either way.
Hmm... I don't know if I see it that way. It seems to me that Marxism is optimistic because it guarantees that the good guys will win in the end (it's a secularized form of Christianity, in other words). I wouldn't call it a nihilistic doctrine at all. If today's progressives are nihilistic it might be because they don't have that kind of faith to support them.
Interesting perspective. I'm in the middle of "The Righteous Mind" and have been thinking a lot about motivated reasoning. The good/bad binary (and the idea that the thinker is always one of the good guys) is powerfully motivating... to the point that arming yourself or even instigating a civil war gets justified as "good."
I still scoff at them because Marxism gets thrown around as a slur in a not-particularly-careful or accurate way. But I think you're right - you can get from "the glass is half empty" to "the glass is mostly empty" to "throw it all out and start again", and "throw it all out and start again" is the pitch that conservatives are temperamentally the most allergic to.
If lefties hadn't spent eight years shitting all over everything Obama accomplished, surely it would have changed enough votes in 2016 to spare us Trump. That's how criminally irresponsible it is.
If the Obama Administration had pushed for a larger stimulus or cracked down harder on Wall Street, surely it could have changed enough votes in 2016 to spare us Trump. Some of the left's arguments do have merit.
I know someone who got laid off a while back and didn't file for unemployment. They thought it was shameful. I was like, "WTF? It's insurance. You paid the premiums and not you need to make a claim. Your theory would be like walking out and finding that a try had crushed your car and not making an insurance claim because you should have noticed that rotten limb." He was like, "Oh, I never thought about it that way."
I think universality and better marketing would go a long way toward achieving progressive goals. Keeping in mind I mean marketing that appeals to persuadable swing voters not dyed in the wool progressives.
Now I'm just imagining a world where more people correctly perceive of social benefits as insurance, but then don't use them because they assume there's a deductible...
This is framed as a feature of progressives, or the left. Is it really different than the right? You don't see the Tea Party celebrating 1/2 wins either, they go crazy making sure they get all or nothing.
Idealogues of any belief system measure policy against the ideal and find it wanting.
Not sure if I agree with this. Many stated goals of the Trump era -- build the wall, repeal Obamacare, end the deficit(?), etc. -- were clearly not accomplished and there doesn't seem to be a conservative backlash to Trump on his inability to deliver there. (Except for, like, Ann Coulter)
The right wing gives up on policy all the time - they just do it quietly. The left isn't as good at lying about their policy goals even when it'd work.
The right monetizes the glass being half empty - in "American Carnage" Tim Alberta details the deteriorating relationship between outside conservative groups that fundraise by telling their base that the house is on fire and the House Republican leadership under Baynor, which faced constant insurrection from their right flank.
I’m actually really glad to see both Dem politicians and Trump embrace the “money printer go brrr” mentality. The more of this sort of popular welfare state expansion we get, the more ridiculous the inevitable GOP pivot to austerity will look.
This is how someone would think if they actually believed, as Matt said in a previous post, that we need a bigger social safety net. Well played, Michael S.
I do not think the $2,000 mass checks can be called "welfare."
Instead, if enacted, they will make it more difficult to do targeted, thus substantive, welfare like expanding unemployment benefits, SNAP, and earned income payments.
The $1,200 checks previously didn't stop $300 UI this week. Papers from Dems saying unemployed people in a pandemic were getting overpaid cut the check from $600 to $300. Dems not supporting a larger safety net is, however, a real issue.
It probably depends on what we are borrowing for. I would think that investing in things that grow the economy is good. What bothers me (and probably other people) about complaining about the debt is it often seems like a way for well-off people to argue that we shouldn’t help people who are struggling. As long as we are putting money into things that keep the economy afloat or help it grow, it’s probably a worthwhile investment.
No, it's not a problem. Debt servicing as a % of GDP is pretty low. A $100,000 mortgage at 20% interest is a problem; a $500,000 mortgage at 1% interest is not a problem.
Well, debt incurred now with 30 or even 10 year T bills won't be affected. Newly incurred debt will pay higher interest rates. At that point we investigate cutting spending or raising taxes.
Ten years isn’t very far down the road and that’s what bothers me about this sort of blasé thinking. Ten years ago debt held by the public was under 40% of GDP. Today it’s over 100%.
Matt doesn't believe its a problem. Krugman doesn't believe its a problem. Overweight guy from Berkeley doesn't think its a problem. Do you believe its a problem? Or is it just a problem when regular joe-schmoe is getting it? If not that, then why is it suddenly a problem worthy of bringing up Republican talking points?
Isn't every country similarly printing money at the moment? If everyone who can credibly print money at the same time does so, I don't see the issue.
Granted, it becomes who gets the most productivity out of the printed money. During a pandemic, helicoptering money to earners under 100K and helping small businesses stay afloat seems like a good short term use.
Longer term, you want the money to go into infrastructure and other things that drive productivity. And that's the rub, as it seems the US is wholly terrible at doing that now with any level of efficiency and return on capital.
Taking on debt is not printing money. And I fail to seed why we should be giving borrowed money to people just because they make less than $100K. Or any other amount if their income was not affected by the pandemic.
Here's your mental model: "huge swaths of America are already only solvent if interest rates stay near zero. Major corporations and municipalities can't roll over 10y debt at 5%. Isn't it unfair that the federal government is denied the opportunity to leverage itself the same way, when they're the only ones who can't default?"
2K to everybody doesn't make a lot of sense - true. But my impression is that Democrats in the here and now are "embracing" the concept mainly to try and help their Georgia colleagues win their Senate races.
The Democrats embrace of this strikes me as entirely tactical - Pelosi saw Trump fling poop at his own party and is just making it more difficult for them to paper over the rift.
That $75k point is about the 85th percentile of personal income. Is that the sweet spot for broad enough to count as universal, but targeted enough to not piss anyone off with benefits for the rich?
I'm fine with it. I don't think poor people are actually making that argument, however. Why would they care if someone making $200,000 gets $1,000 after tax? The point of the cap isn't to keep support with the poor but to reduce support from the upper class. My wife is pissed we don't get a check.
The argument's not for poor people, who frankly don't have that much of a voice in politics. It's for the middle class, who would see stories about Gates/Bezos/Musk/etc./etc. getting a check and be pissed off that their tax dollars were going to fund a billionaire. "Just another example of the government not knowing what it's doing", this type of voter might say. For what it's worth, *I* don't think this is something that we need to worry about a ton, but clearly a lot of people on the center-left/establishment Dems do think it is, and I'm trying to get at why they might think that way.
I'm just not sure I've heard a lot of lefties saying that the cap is critical for them to support (links would be appreciated though). The poor aren't influential in politics. But the upper middle class is and not including them reduces support for checks. Which is the actual point of having a cap.
Giving $450B in supplemental UI works out to $45K check per unemployed person. Giving it to an additional 215M Americans who aren't unemployed and therefore are far less likely to be hard up enough to spend it and stimulate the economy works out to $2K check per person. What's the better use of the money?
I was thinking the $2,000 will cost more like $600B versus $174B currently planned for stimulus checks. The $300 in UI costs $120B. Are you arguing for a $900 per week payment or are you arguing for just spending less? Why should unemployed make 3x what they were making pre-pandemic (instead of the 2x they made with $600)? Seems like if you are going to spend more that direct rebates starting with the poorest and working up is the best spend. Or do you live in NY/California and want payments to reduce your property taxes? :-)
The incremental cost of going from $600 checks to $2000 checks is the $450B ($463B is what I saw the price tag at if you're being picky) that I'm quoting. Giving a massive lump sum payment to folks who got laid off due to the pandemic seems more beneficial to the economy and human welfare than churning out slightly bigger checks to folks who kept their jobs during the pandemic. A flat payment to everyone with an arbitrary cut off at the "I'm wealthy but don't know it because my neighbors have bigger cars than me" income threshold is certainly not anywhere close to "best spend".
So, your idea is more money for UI above the $600. That’s an idea with the only problem that everyone has rejected. Support for local governments and bigger checks is also there. The question is do you want to spend more or not. You seem to be a no. This just seems contrary to what Matt has argued pretty persuasively. I agree with him that we should be spending more. Too many veto points now for state and local, but about 5 votes away from bigger checks.
I think that's a fairly non-creative way to view policy proposals that are actively being debated (as opposed to cheerleading already implemented but imperfect policy wins that Matt discusses above). The conversation of this thread is in relation to how spending an additional $450B on a non-targeted fiscal stimulus effort is likely to reduce the pot of money that a Biden administration could potentially extract out of Congress for better (as in decent, not perfect) policy by a good amount. I agree with Dave's point on this matter and I assume you don't.
Genuine question: What's to stop Dems from pivoting to focusing on emphasizing the UI benefits once Biden is in charge and trying to get things done? True, you can't force rose twitter ppl to do this, but you could probably get someone like Ilhan Omar (quoted in the article) to tweet about how great some proposed UI change is.
I think the $2,000 could make some swing voters justifiably nervous that a Democratic majority might be dangerous. As much as I dislike the two R GA candidates, it makes me nervous.
And there will be payback, by the Republicans, regardless, because the Democrats put the Republicans in a very uncomfortable position by endorsing Trump's proposal.
The 'deal" may be that McConnell allows some selected Republicans to vote for the $2,000 and in return there is a promise of absolute solidarity going forward.
The 2k debate could be good for Dems. It could put Loeffler and Perdue in an awkward position where some of their voters want the checks and others think it would be hypocritical for an R to vote for it. If they vote against it, it perpetuates the corruption narrative, where they are only trying to help themselves. If they vote for it, then there’s no difference between D’s and R’s and the Dems for in favor of more gov’t assistance all along anyway. Obviously, we don’t really know but it’s possible this is positive for Warnock and Ossoff.
Were McConnell and the Republicans going to play nice and cooperate with the Democrats if they hadn't pushed for the $2k? I don't think Mitch really thinks he owes them any favors ever, and is always going to push as hard of a line as he can, so why not jam him up a bit when you have the chance?
Isn't this what Republicans always say about tax cuts? It's framed as "we'll make sure the government doesn't take money out of your pocket", but substantively it's the same thing. I guess the substance maybe doesn't matter as much as the framing here, though?
How many voters *at the margins* are worried about inflationary risk vs. would like to put $2000 in their pockets and will punish Perdue/Loeffler if they vote against it? (I really don't know the answer.)
As for payback for putting McConnell in an uncomfortable position, I think you're gaming it out too far. Future Republican intransigence will not be predicated on what happens now.
Except, it's Trump who started this with "not big enough, $2000" - without that I'd agree 100% that the Democrats throwing out bigger numbers makes the Republican campaign tactic of 'if they get the Senate then they'll go nuts" seem a little more real. But with Trump saying yes to more and the Senate saying no, I don't know where a Georgia voter ends up?
It’s most likely to be remembered as about Trump since he’s the president, the most visible proponent, and the guy who will put his name on the checks.
First, and trivially, Konczal's point is silly. It's hard for Democrats/ the Left to run on legislation that was passed by a Republican Senate and signed into law by a Republican President.
More importantly, and in the context of Matt's point, I fear that the underlying problem is that the Democrats/the Left suffer from too much empathy, especially from an electoral point of view. Empathy is a *great* thing from a governing point of view! But I'm afraid it leads to Democrats sending mixed messages to the voting public.
I don't think Democrats could ever run a Reaganesque "Morning in America" campaign, no matter how much good Democratic governing does. It's instinctual for Democrats to *always* remember and note that no matter how much good we've done, some people continue to suffer and others are in danger of being left behind. How many times have we heard Democratic politicians say "Under us, unemployment is down! . . . . However . . . millions continue to worry about how to pay their bills, get enough food to eat etc etc etc."
This empathy is noble and in fact undergirds the Left's ameliorative drive in their policy making, in a way that would never occur to the Right. But I think not acknowledging clear successes without hemming and hawing and adding caveats hurts electorally. Most people don't pay too much attention to politics and tend to follow well-worn grooves in voting. You have to blast a message loudly and clearly for it to get through and change people's minds. I think that's why "Morning in America" approaches really work well, if they're not absurdly out of synch with reality. It's a lesson Democrats need to learn.
I'm not sure your first point is trivial. It strikes me as highly unlikely that the GOP will fight claims of "ownership" over the CARES act and the average voter isn't enough of a political maven to have a clear view of the process steps involved, democratic achievements even as a single branch of govt still count.
Not big on twitter. Who thinks Dems are the ones capping it at $600? Seems like David Perdue and the stock market lady to me. Now Dems probably would act different if Perdue and the stock market lady voted yes, but that's not where we are currently at. Trump is definitely squeezing them pretty hard to say yes, but they haven't to date.
I would be happy for people on the left to rediscover the virtues of incrementalism. If we get a public option for the ACA then we can see how efficient it is and judge whether it is outperforming the private market. We can also get a sense of whether it becomes a way to politicize medical care (I think one of the potential pitfalls of MFA that is not talked about is how it might lead to efforts for social conservatives to try and exclude care like gender affirmative care or abortion that are currently covered in many states under employer plans). I guess that I am officially old because I am pretty weary of hearing from young people that only major structural change can improve things. I think that what we learned from the enhanced UI was that a lot of people just don't earn enough from work to get by and if we boosted wages for workers we would all be more secure.
I agree completely that incrementalism is usually the way to go. We couldn't even predict the consequences of the ACA! And that's a 1000-page law; M4A would need to be at least a few multiples of that.
Being around young people from time to time, one thing I think that I have noticed is that their agitation is in part because they think they have nothing to lose from major structural change. Whereas us olds who already get insurance through our employers and have a growing retirement account are too invested in the system as it exists (from their perspective).
I think Hoffer's "The True Believer" is a key text for understanding why politics is the way it is these days. A lot of people are frustrated and unhappy, and feel a sense of dread and hopelessness in their personal lives, and they cope by externalizing it into politics. Then they dream of a millenarian movement that will solve the political problem, and also somehow solve their personal problems too.
It feels like we were already hitting a peak of this behavior and then pandemic isolation just completely blew things up.
(It's not just politics either -- politics is really common but the same psychological pressures can be vented into stuff like k-pop or Star Wars fandom too... it's pretty obvious when you see how politically radical teenagers treat esoteric Marxist ideologies as identity markers alongside their favorite media properties.)
My guess is that people who subscribe to this newsletter are way less prone than average to be true believers. They probably have more professional success, and are more able to be contented with modest achievements, and have an easier time with interpersonal relationships than, say, your average Chapo Trap House listener.
Of course the historical analysis in Hoffer's book is pretty terrible. Much of it is either based on inaccurate sources or just obviously wrong. But he really did grasp something about the desperate psychology of frustrated people (I think possibly from personal experience).
I think politics in the US will remain completely insane until this tendency abates. People need community involvement and useful, mundane work they can be proud of -- I think when you give this to someone, political extremism dissipates really quickly. A less tractable problem is that social media amplifies frustrated individuals, simply because they are more willing and have more time to sit and post all day.
Contemporary rhetoric on the left spends SO much time on intra-elite debates. Thus, you could imagine the biggest result of looking at CARES was that it was followed by increased inequality, as opposed to helping people who are impoverished or would've been. The focus on the rich is fine as a means of taxation, but it does seem to get to obsession level and blurs the goalposts.
On the note of catastrophism as politics: I think the right has a bit to blame for this. They use this technique, and it works with their reactionary voters. The amount of time my conservatives family spends talking about AOC is alarming, you would think she was actually president! Turning up the volume normalizes that, and I think a lot of progressives react in-kind. It's different, because it's issues based, but it's still a kind of thinking that exhausts energy in completely unproductive ways.
I agree that there is probably a personality type among progressives that insists that everything is awful, but I think there is probably a strategic consideration at play as well. To admit that things got better might undermine the case for additional action. To admit that the CARES act didn’t consist of one $1200 check undermines your standing to fight for $2000 this time, by this measure. In this case it’s probably a bad tactic- the current fight is essentially to continue a successful program that ended too soon- but I think the impulse to never declare victory is embedded in the strategy of preparing for the next battle.
The problem with this strategy in politics - *especially* digital politicking on social media - is that there is no fog of war. Everybody of every political stripe can see the facts and then see your rhetoric.
People who don't consume activism all day notice the gap between reality and rhetoric and just assume you are lying because you are either crazy, an idiot, or a brazen liar.
Do people really know? I think most casual observers assume that all of the money was wasted because everyone keeps say so. This is probably a good strategy for the right who wants to undermine the ability of government to ever do anything but it seems like a trap for the left.
This sounds like the most plausible narrative of how all this cashes out. Progressives who don’t tout victories make their own policies look terrible. “Congress spent $2 trillion and all I got was” is the start of a conservative t-shirt. No matter how you finish it, you’re still adding to the ubiquity of their rhetoric.
The result is that conservative case looks like consensus because even the proponents of progressive policy agree that we spent a lot of money to achieve nothing. “Why would we spend more or let these admitted failures make policy” is the question progressive kvetching sets up.
If non-progressive Dems weren't terrified of progressive Dems, maybe they could argue for their policies on the merits. But they are terrified, because they know voters are increasingly unsatisfied, and in the one-dimensional frame, that means you either get replaced by a Republican or a progressive.
If we hadn't spent so long boiling all politics down to a one-dimensional left-right spectrum despite its inadequacies, maybe we'd have communication strategies that escape this trap.
People know about enhanced UI if they know anybody who is unemployed right now. Casual observers who don't even know anybody who lost their job in the pandemic don't really have skin in the game anyway and IMO are probably treating their left-wing politics as a sports team to support.
I'm unemployed right now and people who know me don't necessarily know about enhanced UI because I don't talk about it – for a middle-aged professional there's more stigma around being unemployed.
(Also, thanks to the cap on UI I have been taking home 1/4 of my pre-layoff salary, though with the CARES act it surged to 1/2. But I had a good salary in 2019, so no $1200 checks for me!)
That's a fair and interesting point. I'll simply note that in a low-trust society, we can't expect politics to reflect our circumstances if we can't honestly discuss with our peers how policy impacts our circumstances. This challenges other aspects of policymaking (eg. sexual assault).
It goes the other way, too—progressives looking to attack Democrats will borrow conservative talking points. I was told last night by someone with a red rose in their Twitter handle that CARES was bad because it had too much “pork.”
It depends on the charity of the observer. There are always ignorant people doing politics, even in Congress, in both parties. Plenty of folks think it presumptuous to decide somebody is a liar when they might just be ignorant.
Like Matt mentioned, it’s also that constantly being negative is psychologically exhausting. We all have stressful lives (that could be made easier by a more expansive welfare state with better labor regulations!). Very few people want to spend their time hearing about how everything is awful. We want to celebrate sometimes and generally feel like things are OK.
Also, why vote for Democrats if they are always saying that they failed?
Your main point -- and it's a good one! -- is that progressives would help their causes by celebrating incremental progress, and by abandoning the attitude that such a celebration entails a lack of concern for the work still to be done.
I.e., we do not need to minimize a problem in order to recognize progress towards its solution.
Applying that model to global warming means, for instance, that we can recognize the brilliant news about reductions in the cost of solar energy, without minimizing the real danger that we face.
Unfortunately, that is not the model you follow in this paragraph. You don't celebrate progress, and you do (inaccurately, I believe) minimize the problem we face:
"And of course you see this on climate change, which is legitimately A Bad Thing but where the most keyed-up activists want you to believe it’s literally an existential threat to continued human existence."
How about, "we can recognize the great progress being made on alternative energy without denying that global warming is a threat to continued human existence."
Because, from what I read, it really is.
So, that paragraph seems discordant with your overall point. But it's a good point!
Until climate activists embrace Nuclear energy with the same fervor as Solar and Wind, I will continue to discount their views on the 'existential threat' from climate change.
Climate activists have embraced nuclear just fine. The Obama administration's "all of the above" energy plan embraced the last "next gen" nuclear technology with tens of billions of dollars of subsidies for the failed Vogtle and V.C Summer plants.
Currently, the nuclear power industry doesn't have an economically viable and mass deployable technology to offer. If we wanted to go all-in on a massive nuclear buildout today, there just isn't an economically viable solution available.
Still, funding for the next "next gen" nuclear approach is very broadly supported by both parties. The spending bill passed last week with bipartisan support gave advanced nuclear $8 billion in subsidies, compared to $4 billion for solar and wind.
So other than sustained rounds of billions and billions of dollars in subsidies, what's missing from their embrace?
Many climate organizations (350.org, for example) take a squishy stance and say some version of “study it, but it isn’t a solution” then spend 99% of their advocacy on wind and solar.
The amounts specified in the most recent bill aren't the total amount. For additional context, I suggest this, which shows the subsidy amounts for Solar and Wind outstripping Nuclear by a wide margin.
That article reads more like activist propaganda than journalism.
In addition to comparing subsidies on a per MWh produced basis, which of course makes the incumbent look much better, it narrowly focuses on just tax credits and leaves out loan guarantees, state level subsidies, waste disposal subsidies, research funding, and the Price-Anderson liability subsidy.
So it reaches its conclusion that nuclear gets less subsidies than wind and solar by ignoring almost all nuclear subsidies.
I prefer to just subsidize all zero CO2 technologies equally via a revenue neutral tax on net CO2 emissions and let the market decide which technologies to employ.
Personally, since I do think that the research supports that the effects of climate change will be catastrophic within the next 50 years unless we can sufficiently mitigate it. And because of that, I think that we should take essentially an “all measures short of war” type approach. I think that the lady from 3rd way made a good case on the weeds for continued maintenance of nuclear at a minimum, and probably continued investment in them (especially if the environmental justice concerns of nuclear waste can be mitigated). I would mostly like to see them as a transition, so that we could pivot to other forms of power as we better control emissions, but I think nuclear is a good option for the medium term.
As a bit of a tangent, I’m also skeptical of the design of a carbon tax, but the ETS works well and so if something like the Baker-Shultz plan can pass Congress with durable bipartisan support, I say pass it! I might like to see the dividend phased out for higher income individuals and have more of that money diverted to clean energy subsidies or something, but I think that might be good!
I think we should also pursue ambitious multilateral policies that establish a common clean energy standard, with harsh tariffs for high-polluting countries that don’t comply.
Heck, if Biden declared a national emergency in his third year of office to begin immediately upgrading the energy grid, I might think he’s on tenuous legal authority and that he’s been possessed by Bernie Sanders, but I’d think it was a good policy.
So I don’t think that, just because someone supports solar and wind more than nuclear, their commitment to fighting climate change should be underestimated. And I personally feel like Matt sometimes tend to sound like he’s minimizing the very real and potentially catastrophic risks of climate change, at the expense of making fun of some of the most histrionic claims of imminent human extinction.
He isn't "minimizing" he is accurately observing that the hyperbole and extremism some activists engage in is highly counterproductive.
We will develop policies and technology to manage the climate. We ought to do more now, and our grandchildren will pay the price for our failure to do that, but the politics of this is what it is and too much of the activism on this and other progressive issues is counterproductive as it pushes away non-progressives (and pushes out some progressives!) which hurts the cause.
Given the really shitty economics of nuclear energy, it's seems perfectly reasonable to embrace it with less fervor than forms of energy whose cost is rapidly declining.
How much of the shitty economics has to do with NIMBY opposition throwing up roadblocks versus inherent costs of generating the energy? Feels like the same pressures taking down solar at scale could apply to nuclear if you were able to mass produce the same components (maybe that's not possible, hence my point being moot in that case)
Imo, it's not that nuclear shouldn't be in our quiver, it's that it's not yet clear if it can help us. There's more inventing to do before we can know.
Today's technology is too expensive and also it doesn't mix well on a grid with intermittent renewables because nuclear can't economically adjust its output to respond to grid conditions or follow load. If nuclear was cheap we'd just deal with that inflexibility, just like we deal with the intermittency of wind and solar. But nuclear is both expensive and inflexible, and imo that's a fatal combination for now.
Here's a link with current costs of various generation technologies:
If you scroll down you can see that under the right conditions, building new wind and solar can be cheaper than just the operating costs for an already paid for nuclear plant.
As someone who wants to end global warming as soon as humanly possible, I never cease to be amazed at how said activists shoot their whole cause in the foot by not embracing nuclear. I suspect there are still too many ex-hippies living in the 70s anti-nuclear scene still hanging around who are in various kinds of leadership positions.
Gates is making some great progress with Thorium reactors that have a far safer profile, and they get zero looks from people because nuclear is seen as a bogeyman.
Even if one thinks that nuclear is really just not economic, waste disposal is too difficult, etc. still it would see like a good rhetorical strategy to "embrace" it in principle.
Well, I think we should discount "existential threat" even if the group DID "embrace" nuclear energy. And I do not think "embracing" one technology more than another is correct either. We need a procedure that weighs the discounted expected values present value of costs costs and benefits across the probability distribution in order to decide on policy. I think the best framework for that is an estimation of a trajectory for a price of net CO2 emissions.
Couldn't agree more - clearly it's different for older people who lived through Three Mile Island, but that's the only major domestic incident and it's kind of small potatoes. Chernobyl isn't a great example because of lax Soviet standards in that area; Fukushima is a better one but the main takeaway there seems to be "don't build nuclear plants in tsunami zones". Cost-effectiveness of nuclear vs. proper renewables is a legitimate argument but I don't see it made that much - granted, I may be missing the places where it's made.
The amazing thing about Fukushima is that many reactors got hit with a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami and only one with early (=bad) safety features melted down.
But yes, don’t put nuclear plants in tsunami zones is a good rule for nuclear power.
"It won't literally kill all of us" is a fair point I guess, I don't think anyone really believes that, but many people seem to think it won't get much worse, and don't seem to be aware that all the stuff that's happening currently... Fires in Australia/Africa/US, drought, species extinction by loss of habitat, etc. And all this is now the best case scenario. If we stopped burning fossil fuels today, all these things would still be happening for at least everyone's lifetime.
I live in Seattle, and experienced the 2 continuous weeks of smoke this past summer. If that becomes an every other year sort of thing, I'm outta here, and so are a lot of other people. Is that a good thing? We won't literally go extinct in Seattle, some people will move, some will adapt, and some will die from respiratory issues, and maybe some cancers, caused by the smoke. Is this sort of reality nothing to be all worked up about?
Right - I think part of the problem with current progressive rhetoric is that we're not convincing an audience that is really skeptical to our arguments. So if we go in with "climate change is going to end human life on Earth" - that's...relatively easy to poke holes in, because that's a worst worst worst case outcome that would require a bunch of possible things to all go wrong.
So the argument ends up being a nitpicky debate about something that shouldn't even be the main focus.
Better to lead with the things that are way more probable and _still_ should be on our radar - disruptive population relocation, investment losses as our existing infrastructure gets destroyed, everything being on fire a lot, as you have had to experience.
The combination of the worst possible outcome combined with the most drastic possible response (we all live like ascetics to cut our personal carbon footprint) is just an impossible sell ... we know this from failing to sell it. The great has become the enemy of the good.
The post I was replying to said, "How about, 'we can recognize the great progress being made on alternative energy without denying that global warming is a threat to continued human existence.'"
I think "continued human existence" is a pretty clear phrase -- that poster seems to believe it will literally kill all of us, or at least the vast majority.
Your overall point just applies the stock/flow distinction to political rhetoric. A statement about a flow is not a statement about a stock. "This problem just got a bit smaller/bigger" is entirely orthogonal to "This is a small/big problem".
And it's an unfortunate tic of progressive rhetoric to confuse them: "so you say there's been flow in the right direction: you must think the stock is at the optimal level, you heartless bastard, you!"
But, again, applied to the case of global warming, that means that your comments about two estimates of the stock ("it's a big problem but not that big") really don't illustrate your point about stocks vs flows, and tend to undermine it.
Matt You’re going to burn out if you try to maintain 2029’s writing schedule indefinitely! Pace yourself in 2021: two substantial posts a week plus short informal posts about things you see or read.
I think he’s just unfettered from organizational concerns and trying to deliver for the crowd that made it possible. I for one am enjoying the eruption with no expectation that it will continue apace. Best case, he’s entering a Frank Zappa-esque season of productivity.
He's a small business and has already hired one staff member (maybe an editor later), plus Substack's advance apparently has to be paid back for a year.
"Yglesias’s newsletter, “Slow Boring,” has a readership that includes more than six thousand paid subscribers, and he is making twenty-seven thousand dollars a month. (Yglesias opted to receive a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar advance from Substack, which, in return, will take eighty-five per cent of the subscription revenue from his first year. In his second year, Substack’s commission will revert to ten per cent.)"
Exactly right. And of course by focusing on the UI component of the social safety net you are giving money to those with the greatest marginal propensity to spend. Maximising your bang for the buck.
Not to mention all of the intangibles that arise from this policy (lower crime rates, lower aggregate healthcare costs, etc).
It is a mystery to me too why we didn't make more of the success of this program, though I suspect that it had something to do with the establishment left's seemingly paralysing fear of confronting the GOP's mendacious propaganda around "generous" unemployment payments creating disincentives for people to return to work.
The view that generous UI creates negative disincentives is held by a large swath of the electorate, and Dems need some of those votes. My brother-in-law owns a small business that makes specialty temperature sensors. He and my sister lived in abject terror of the increased UI benefits. They quickly figured out that most of their employees would make more money on CARES Act UI than continued employment. Ultimately, their employees stayed (in part proving Matt’s point above). They have also had a few people stop working after putting in 20 weeks (the minimum needed to work at a location in their state) in order to collect UI. Most people don’t do this, but there are just enough to make that the focus of more conservative-leaning folks.
>> They have also had a few people stop working after putting in 20 weeks (the minimum needed to work at a location in their state) in order to collect UI.
I don't think this scenario is plausible, at least in most states. When someone files for unemployment, the state verifies with the employer that the employee was laid off. Employees can't just quit and collect unemployment.
But they can go to work and not do anything until they are fired. In my sister’s telling: (1) the employee stops doing any real work on week 21, (2) after repeated consultations/chances to improve, they fire the employee, and then (3) when the state asks to verify, they have to fill out a “book” of forms to document that the person really quit-in-place/was fired for cause. While this is rare, I suspect a lot of small/medium-sized businesses have encountered this once (watch out Slow Boring, Inc.), which is then used to rebut any macro-level evidence that UI expansion is actually good.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there is plenty of unchecked fraud, but it seems unlikely that there's enough fraud to affect the macro picture. Maybe I'm wrong, but massive fraud would require a lot of people to knowingly lie on forms and risk jail time. It just doesn't seem that likely. Most people are law abiding if they know there may be consequences for illegal activity.
Also, employers are pretty well incentivized to prevent fraudulent unemployment claims because I think in most states unemployment insurance premiums are connected to an employer's claim history.
I’m sure the macro impacts of such fraud/gaming the system are minimal at best, but they erode support for increased UI benefits among business owners and you’re going to have to address that to get more support for expanding UI.
This! You might have a hundred employees who never cause any problems, but if you have one that really screws things up, that's the one you remember and influences your perspective more than all the others.
In normal times, I believe the cost an employer has to pay for unemployment insurance is a function of how many claims its had against it. So the incentives are lined up pretty well in normal times.
Some states may also offer rewards to employers for ratting out x-employees who ultimately get convicted of fraud.
I have no idea whether any of that is true but, if I conceded it, I’d just point out that you can believe the brother-in-law is a liar or you can believe he’s overlooking part of a process. In my experience, overlooking is common no matter what the incentives are.
I think he was honest about the facts/process (as expanded in another reply below), but I also believe he pays low wages and I don’t think he provides health insurance - limiting his pool of potential employees to a group that is more likely to try to commit UI fraud/gaming. He should also do a better job of interviewing/reference checking. However, I suspect his view of expanded UI, based on an incident or two, is probably shared by a lot of small/medium business owners and you’re going to have to deal with that if you want expanded UI.
You are absolutely right, Aaron. A large swathe of the electorate believes that generous UI benefits create perverse incentives. It does not follow, however, that the Democrats need to pander to these voters to secure their votes. This reasoning precisely illustrates the point that I am making about the Dems' unwillingness to confront GOP lies. The Left time and again allows the GOP to dictate the nomenclature and the terms of the debate when they need to be addressing these issues with fact based argument. Economists at Yale exposed the GOP myth of perverse incentives for what it was several months ago (https://news.yale.edu/2020/07/27/yale-study-finds-expanded-jobless-benefits-did-not-reduce-employment) yet the Left is still allowing the GOP to discuss the shape of future proposals in the context of generous UI driving perverse incentives. It is literally their go to argument whenever the question of expanded federal UI benefits are discussed.
Insofar as your brother-in-law's concerns go, I am never one to denigrate or question someone's lived experience and so am not going to specifically address that point (and it seems to have been litigated below at length in any event). I will say that it is a big world and anecdotal exceptions can be found to most "rules" or beliefs. The risk is generalizing on the basis of a single observation.
Thank you again for taking the time and for your thoughtful reply.
Stupid question: did your brother-in-law consider one-time incentive pay to counter-balance the lure of going to the CARES act? I realize that if we had generally higher UI, this would just turn into upward wage pressure and we'd have a discussion about whether your brother should pay more and/or whether his business has any margin for it.
But in this case, we've had a very weird dynamic where the lowest paid workers who are still working are often having to go work "in the world" while "knowledge workers" just work from home. So as a society we could collectively call a temporary pay bump a sort of "hazardous duty" pay and it would come with the expectation that it goes away when the pandemic winds down and isn't a permanent increase in cost.
I believe did something (either a bonus or temporary bump in salary) in reaction to the CARES Act, which he billed as recognition to his employees that they were "essential" workers (his company provides temperature sensors to crematoriums, among other uses, so they were an "essential" business under his state's rules and kept operating). So you are quite right, there was upward wage pressure in this case.
Right - this gets to how weird our social safety net is - in that business is involved...sometimes.
I think a progressive would look at this and say "the system works!" - unemployed people get money and essential workers get some money to be essential and your BIL has chipped in in sort of a paternalistic "businesses take care of their community" way.
But your BIL would not be wrong in asking "are other businesses having to shoulder some of the social safety net burden directly" - or are there idiosyncratic differences between sectors or between sizes of businesses that create arbitrary (or potentially systematically) unfair differences in the burden placed on employeers.
My meta-view on all of this is that we'd be better off if the social safety network were more government and less employment based, so that employers weren't faced with weird incentives WRT how big to grow the business, whether to hire W-2 workers or independent contractors, what kind of benefits to provide, etc.
Your BIL might _still_ be hosed by temporary upward pressure on wages, but at least that wouldn't be on top of other things that make life better for big businesses than small ones.
This really is the big problem with the way the UI benefits are structured, but why does it have to be a flat benefit instead of "add enough to get total UI benefit to 80% of pre-unemployment pay"? My understanding is that it's structured that way because states' UI systems are incredibly poorly designed and can't handle percents, only flat numbers - this sounds crazy, so maybe I'm missing something? But if true, the fault here seems to lie with those states less than Congress, so it'd be nice if conservatives had some interest in making government not just lean but also efficient to avoid weird outcomes like that.
In retrospect, what should have happened was just full wage replacement up to some threshold - perhaps 75K or so, paired with a bunch of "this is not your fault, we will make you whole" messaging. I'd guess that would have at least been more palatable to some of small business owners like your brother in law.
Assuming good faith here with people making the legislative sausage, it feels like they were pushing out the simplest thing that would work with the UI systems we have, imperfect as it may be.
That said, there is an entire different class of small business owner who would pay their employees zero if they could get away with it. In their mind, any UI is too generous.
You are absolutely correct that the Cares Act (and, from my standpoint as a lawyer that advises employers, in particular the PPP) was an absolute success story. What gravels me on the left is the drumbeat of stories saying "I can't believe that Betsy DeVos's sister's company got PPP loan forgiveness!!" (made up example). Stop naming and shaming. Unless these companies committed actual fraud (an defamatory accusation that should not be thrown around lightly), they had their loan forgiven because they actually retained and paid their employees through the worst parts of the pandemic. Whether they work for an employer you like or hate, that is a very good thing, and I know personally of scores of employers that only stayed open and kept paying workers because of this help. When coupled with the expanded UI, it was a godsend that saved our economy. Good news.
It wasn't just "the left" spreading these inane memes and citing examples of this or that "undeserving" entity getting in on the act. Plenty of people on right are soi-disant heroic libertarians who claim to believe that government subsidies are invariably a bad idea, and from them I learned of numerous OUTRAGEOUS! examples of corrupts progressive people and firms receiving handouts.
They still crow about Solyndra today.
Good point. And Government Motors!
Tend to agree. It's easy to generate a headline that goes about like "{company people hate} got a loan for {big amount Y} and you won't believe what they did with the money {insert dumb T&E expense deep in dumb clickbait listicle}".
People had to implement this under the gun in a giant hurry under an administration that is prone to grift. Of course this was going to happen. Something something practicalities are messy.
I do think there was probably some waste in PPP. It's not just made-up examples. Large corporations did get hundreds of billions (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/CARES_Act_Sankey_Diagram.png) that I think they didn't need and probably could've done without. I think the key point is that this wrong doesn't unmake the right of the expanded UI or stimulus checks. Things can be both wrong and right about a bill, and if we focus on the wrong, we lose the chance to campaign on things that were just like the right
It wasn't just "the left" spreading these inane memes and citing examples of this or that "undeserving" entity getting in on the act. Plenty of people on right are soi-disant heroic libertarians who claim to believe that government subsidies are invariably a bad idea, and from them I learned of numerous OUTRAGEOUS! examples of corrupts progressive people and firms receiving handouts.
So if Matt is naturally dyspeptic but doesn't share the general progressive tendency to see the glass as half-empty, it must not be a question of personality types. In that case, where does the tendency come from?
As it happens I know one of the people who trashed Matt on Twitter for pointing out that the macroeconomy was in good shape after the CARES Act. In a previous life this person was a blogger and though very progressive, also quite empirically minded. After some personal trauma/drama they've now decided to immerse themselves in far-left activism and their political writing has been reduced to drive-by snark on social media. I wouldn't have said they were sunny before, but now their negativity is so intense that they've changed their position on gun control (because radicals need to arm themselves for the coming civil war).
What motivates people to change this way? I'm guessing that in this case it's a desire to conform to a new group of friends and social contacts who share the negative outlook... but I don't think this kind of negativity was always expected on the left. From what little I know about socialist and communist movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they produced optimism in their members: maybe because the movements were inspired by Marxism and Marxism promises that the workers will win in the end. I don't think the decline of Marxism has been generally bad for progressives, but it does seem possible that it's allowed the left's affect to become more gloomy.
i posted another comment about this but -- "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer is very good. despite many flaws in the book he describes this kind of psychology very astutely. he claims that mediocre artists and intellectuals, who are merely somewhat talented, are particularly prone to joining mass movements, when they are confronted by the fact that their creative efforts aren't that good.
failure and frustration in life drive people towards extreme, apocalyptic thinking -- social contacts just influence which millenarian ideology people sign up for. with a different background and friend group this person might have become a sedevacantist or militia guy instead.
as for why negativity vs. positivity -- I think that probably is just personality. Sort of a William James thing -- people who have religious awakenings, even within the same faith, can either be "sick souls" or "healthy minded" depending on their temperament.
That sounds right in the case I was thinking of. Kicked out of previous career due to anger management issues, switched to new career which they don't actually like, now much more focused on activism than on avoiding a second career wipeout, and consoled by the thought that it doesn't matter anyway because the apocalypse is coming.
So I’m basically sold on the idea that most humans have an innate negativity bias. If I understand it correctly, humans tend to need four “good” things to happen for it to balance out the effect of one “bad” thing.
But if humans have a negativity bias, how can we explain it when groups of people seem cheery?
Well, I think people need social institutions to weigh against their natural biases. I think people are highly social and that our social impulses will override some of our biases if we are put into the right group.
In short: I think we have too few social institutions which are focused on achieving good political and social ends with a smile on. I think that some faith-based organizations did this for us for a while, but the increasing secularization of the left has basically ended all of that.
As a happy atheist, I have never been more attracted to liberal denominations of Christianity. Unfortunately, those denominations are bleeding members while more rigid denominations of Christianity are actually increasing their membership....
I used to scoff at conservatives who accused progressives of Marxism but now I can see their point. I think Marxism is the end result of the nihilism, not the source of it per se, but you end up at “burn the whole thing to the ground” either way.
Hmm... I don't know if I see it that way. It seems to me that Marxism is optimistic because it guarantees that the good guys will win in the end (it's a secularized form of Christianity, in other words). I wouldn't call it a nihilistic doctrine at all. If today's progressives are nihilistic it might be because they don't have that kind of faith to support them.
Interesting perspective. I'm in the middle of "The Righteous Mind" and have been thinking a lot about motivated reasoning. The good/bad binary (and the idea that the thinker is always one of the good guys) is powerfully motivating... to the point that arming yourself or even instigating a civil war gets justified as "good."
I still scoff at them because Marxism gets thrown around as a slur in a not-particularly-careful or accurate way. But I think you're right - you can get from "the glass is half empty" to "the glass is mostly empty" to "throw it all out and start again", and "throw it all out and start again" is the pitch that conservatives are temperamentally the most allergic to.
If lefties hadn't spent eight years shitting all over everything Obama accomplished, surely it would have changed enough votes in 2016 to spare us Trump. That's how criminally irresponsible it is.
If the Obama Administration had pushed for a larger stimulus or cracked down harder on Wall Street, surely it could have changed enough votes in 2016 to spare us Trump. Some of the left's arguments do have merit.
This seems a bit unfair, no? I don't think swing voters are the type to say "ah, Obamacare wasn't enough, so I ain't voting for Hillary!"
I know someone who got laid off a while back and didn't file for unemployment. They thought it was shameful. I was like, "WTF? It's insurance. You paid the premiums and not you need to make a claim. Your theory would be like walking out and finding that a try had crushed your car and not making an insurance claim because you should have noticed that rotten limb." He was like, "Oh, I never thought about it that way."
I think universality and better marketing would go a long way toward achieving progressive goals. Keeping in mind I mean marketing that appeals to persuadable swing voters not dyed in the wool progressives.
Now I'm just imagining a world where more people correctly perceive of social benefits as insurance, but then don't use them because they assume there's a deductible...
This is framed as a feature of progressives, or the left. Is it really different than the right? You don't see the Tea Party celebrating 1/2 wins either, they go crazy making sure they get all or nothing.
Idealogues of any belief system measure policy against the ideal and find it wanting.
Not sure if I agree with this. Many stated goals of the Trump era -- build the wall, repeal Obamacare, end the deficit(?), etc. -- were clearly not accomplished and there doesn't seem to be a conservative backlash to Trump on his inability to deliver there. (Except for, like, Ann Coulter)
The right wing gives up on policy all the time - they just do it quietly. The left isn't as good at lying about their policy goals even when it'd work.
The right monetizes the glass being half empty - in "American Carnage" Tim Alberta details the deteriorating relationship between outside conservative groups that fundraise by telling their base that the house is on fire and the House Republican leadership under Baynor, which faced constant insurrection from their right flank.
True. But why would one want to emulate the tactical decisions of the Tea Party if one isn't an idealogue that intends to always claim defeat?
Excellent post, especially at a time when so many voices are misrepresenting the current debate over$2,000 for almost everyone.
I predict that the Democrats' embrace of this misguided (because non-targeted) measure will make it that much tougher for Biden to get things done.
I’m actually really glad to see both Dem politicians and Trump embrace the “money printer go brrr” mentality. The more of this sort of popular welfare state expansion we get, the more ridiculous the inevitable GOP pivot to austerity will look.
This is how someone would think if they actually believed, as Matt said in a previous post, that we need a bigger social safety net. Well played, Michael S.
I do not think the $2,000 mass checks can be called "welfare."
Instead, if enacted, they will make it more difficult to do targeted, thus substantive, welfare like expanding unemployment benefits, SNAP, and earned income payments.
The $1,200 checks previously didn't stop $300 UI this week. Papers from Dems saying unemployed people in a pandemic were getting overpaid cut the check from $600 to $300. Dems not supporting a larger safety net is, however, a real issue.
Do you for some reason believe the national debt is not a problem?
It probably depends on what we are borrowing for. I would think that investing in things that grow the economy is good. What bothers me (and probably other people) about complaining about the debt is it often seems like a way for well-off people to argue that we shouldn’t help people who are struggling. As long as we are putting money into things that keep the economy afloat or help it grow, it’s probably a worthwhile investment.
"It probably depends on what we are borrowing for. I would think that investing in things that grow the economy is good."
Borrowing in order to give me a $2,000 check is not growing anything other than my bank account.
"...the debt is it often seems like a way for well-off people to argue that we shouldn’t help people who are struggling."
I think borrowing in order to deal with the economic disruptions caused by COVID is necessary. Borrowing to create helicopter money is not.
What if w deal with the economic disruptions caused by COVID by creating helicopter money?
That would be wasteful and unwise.
No, it's not a problem. Debt servicing as a % of GDP is pretty low. A $100,000 mortgage at 20% interest is a problem; a $500,000 mortgage at 1% interest is not a problem.
See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S
And what happens to that Fred chart when interest rates go way up?
Well, debt incurred now with 30 or even 10 year T bills won't be affected. Newly incurred debt will pay higher interest rates. At that point we investigate cutting spending or raising taxes.
Ten years isn’t very far down the road and that’s what bothers me about this sort of blasé thinking. Ten years ago debt held by the public was under 40% of GDP. Today it’s over 100%.
Everybody is betting on the Fed keeping interest rates low indefinitely. Which do you think is more likely:
- Congress changes the Federal Reserve Act to empower the Fed to keep rates low, or
- Fed intentionally triggers mass insolvencies (including EM sovereign borrowers) by raising rates.
"Everybody is betting on the Fed keeping interest rates low indefinitely."
Exactly: They're gambling and assuming there will be a bailout if the bet goes sideways.
"Congress changes the Federal Reserve Act to empower the Fed to keep rates low"
Congress does not have the power to set the rate of inflation. All they can do is pretend.
Matt doesn't believe its a problem. Krugman doesn't believe its a problem. Overweight guy from Berkeley doesn't think its a problem. Do you believe its a problem? Or is it just a problem when regular joe-schmoe is getting it? If not that, then why is it suddenly a problem worthy of bringing up Republican talking points?
I'm sort of disappointed no one came to the overweight guy's defense. Only guy to ever IP block me.
Krugman has literally said that the size of the national debt cannot be a problem no matter how large it gets and no matter what interest rates are?
Isn't every country similarly printing money at the moment? If everyone who can credibly print money at the same time does so, I don't see the issue.
Granted, it becomes who gets the most productivity out of the printed money. During a pandemic, helicoptering money to earners under 100K and helping small businesses stay afloat seems like a good short term use.
Longer term, you want the money to go into infrastructure and other things that drive productivity. And that's the rub, as it seems the US is wholly terrible at doing that now with any level of efficiency and return on capital.
Taking on debt is not printing money. And I fail to seed why we should be giving borrowed money to people just because they make less than $100K. Or any other amount if their income was not affected by the pandemic.
Well, that part about interest rates answers your question, right? Interest rates are extremely low right now.
Right now, yes. What about when that changes?
Here's your mental model: "huge swaths of America are already only solvent if interest rates stay near zero. Major corporations and municipalities can't roll over 10y debt at 5%. Isn't it unfair that the federal government is denied the opportunity to leverage itself the same way, when they're the only ones who can't default?"
2K to everybody doesn't make a lot of sense - true. But my impression is that Democrats in the here and now are "embracing" the concept mainly to try and help their Georgia colleagues win their Senate races.
The Democrats embrace of this strikes me as entirely tactical - Pelosi saw Trump fling poop at his own party and is just making it more difficult for them to paper over the rift.
Why is $2,000 misguided? Not targeted? It's capped at $75,000. I guess you just don't believe in a larger safety net.
That $75k point is about the 85th percentile of personal income. Is that the sweet spot for broad enough to count as universal, but targeted enough to not piss anyone off with benefits for the rich?
I'm fine with it. I don't think poor people are actually making that argument, however. Why would they care if someone making $200,000 gets $1,000 after tax? The point of the cap isn't to keep support with the poor but to reduce support from the upper class. My wife is pissed we don't get a check.
The argument's not for poor people, who frankly don't have that much of a voice in politics. It's for the middle class, who would see stories about Gates/Bezos/Musk/etc./etc. getting a check and be pissed off that their tax dollars were going to fund a billionaire. "Just another example of the government not knowing what it's doing", this type of voter might say. For what it's worth, *I* don't think this is something that we need to worry about a ton, but clearly a lot of people on the center-left/establishment Dems do think it is, and I'm trying to get at why they might think that way.
I'm just not sure I've heard a lot of lefties saying that the cap is critical for them to support (links would be appreciated though). The poor aren't influential in politics. But the upper middle class is and not including them reduces support for checks. Which is the actual point of having a cap.
Giving $450B in supplemental UI works out to $45K check per unemployed person. Giving it to an additional 215M Americans who aren't unemployed and therefore are far less likely to be hard up enough to spend it and stimulate the economy works out to $2K check per person. What's the better use of the money?
I was thinking the $2,000 will cost more like $600B versus $174B currently planned for stimulus checks. The $300 in UI costs $120B. Are you arguing for a $900 per week payment or are you arguing for just spending less? Why should unemployed make 3x what they were making pre-pandemic (instead of the 2x they made with $600)? Seems like if you are going to spend more that direct rebates starting with the poorest and working up is the best spend. Or do you live in NY/California and want payments to reduce your property taxes? :-)
The incremental cost of going from $600 checks to $2000 checks is the $450B ($463B is what I saw the price tag at if you're being picky) that I'm quoting. Giving a massive lump sum payment to folks who got laid off due to the pandemic seems more beneficial to the economy and human welfare than churning out slightly bigger checks to folks who kept their jobs during the pandemic. A flat payment to everyone with an arbitrary cut off at the "I'm wealthy but don't know it because my neighbors have bigger cars than me" income threshold is certainly not anywhere close to "best spend".
So, your idea is more money for UI above the $600. That’s an idea with the only problem that everyone has rejected. Support for local governments and bigger checks is also there. The question is do you want to spend more or not. You seem to be a no. This just seems contrary to what Matt has argued pretty persuasively. I agree with him that we should be spending more. Too many veto points now for state and local, but about 5 votes away from bigger checks.
I think that's a fairly non-creative way to view policy proposals that are actively being debated (as opposed to cheerleading already implemented but imperfect policy wins that Matt discusses above). The conversation of this thread is in relation to how spending an additional $450B on a non-targeted fiscal stimulus effort is likely to reduce the pot of money that a Biden administration could potentially extract out of Congress for better (as in decent, not perfect) policy by a good amount. I agree with Dave's point on this matter and I assume you don't.
Good point, Matt!
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1343978830697013250
Genuine question: What's to stop Dems from pivoting to focusing on emphasizing the UI benefits once Biden is in charge and trying to get things done? True, you can't force rose twitter ppl to do this, but you could probably get someone like Ilhan Omar (quoted in the article) to tweet about how great some proposed UI change is.
I think the $2,000 could make some swing voters justifiably nervous that a Democratic majority might be dangerous. As much as I dislike the two R GA candidates, it makes me nervous.
And there will be payback, by the Republicans, regardless, because the Democrats put the Republicans in a very uncomfortable position by endorsing Trump's proposal.
The 'deal" may be that McConnell allows some selected Republicans to vote for the $2,000 and in return there is a promise of absolute solidarity going forward.
The 2k debate could be good for Dems. It could put Loeffler and Perdue in an awkward position where some of their voters want the checks and others think it would be hypocritical for an R to vote for it. If they vote against it, it perpetuates the corruption narrative, where they are only trying to help themselves. If they vote for it, then there’s no difference between D’s and R’s and the Dems for in favor of more gov’t assistance all along anyway. Obviously, we don’t really know but it’s possible this is positive for Warnock and Ossoff.
Were McConnell and the Republicans going to play nice and cooperate with the Democrats if they hadn't pushed for the $2k? I don't think Mitch really thinks he owes them any favors ever, and is always going to push as hard of a line as he can, so why not jam him up a bit when you have the chance?
You may be right about that.
Comments like below (from the NYT today) increase my nervousness about the Democrats.
“You send me and Reverend Warnock to the Senate and we will put money in your pocket,” Mr. Ossoff said.
Isn't this what Republicans always say about tax cuts? It's framed as "we'll make sure the government doesn't take money out of your pocket", but substantively it's the same thing. I guess the substance maybe doesn't matter as much as the framing here, though?
How many voters *at the margins* are worried about inflationary risk vs. would like to put $2000 in their pockets and will punish Perdue/Loeffler if they vote against it? (I really don't know the answer.)
As for payback for putting McConnell in an uncomfortable position, I think you're gaming it out too far. Future Republican intransigence will not be predicated on what happens now.
Except, it's Trump who started this with "not big enough, $2000" - without that I'd agree 100% that the Democrats throwing out bigger numbers makes the Republican campaign tactic of 'if they get the Senate then they'll go nuts" seem a little more real. But with Trump saying yes to more and the Senate saying no, I don't know where a Georgia voter ends up?
I assume people think this will increase the chances of winning the GA senate races.
I think it helps Dems if the 2 sitting R Senators vote naye.
I doubt it.
It’s most likely to be remembered as about Trump since he’s the president, the most visible proponent, and the guy who will put his name on the checks.
First, and trivially, Konczal's point is silly. It's hard for Democrats/ the Left to run on legislation that was passed by a Republican Senate and signed into law by a Republican President.
More importantly, and in the context of Matt's point, I fear that the underlying problem is that the Democrats/the Left suffer from too much empathy, especially from an electoral point of view. Empathy is a *great* thing from a governing point of view! But I'm afraid it leads to Democrats sending mixed messages to the voting public.
I don't think Democrats could ever run a Reaganesque "Morning in America" campaign, no matter how much good Democratic governing does. It's instinctual for Democrats to *always* remember and note that no matter how much good we've done, some people continue to suffer and others are in danger of being left behind. How many times have we heard Democratic politicians say "Under us, unemployment is down! . . . . However . . . millions continue to worry about how to pay their bills, get enough food to eat etc etc etc."
This empathy is noble and in fact undergirds the Left's ameliorative drive in their policy making, in a way that would never occur to the Right. But I think not acknowledging clear successes without hemming and hawing and adding caveats hurts electorally. Most people don't pay too much attention to politics and tend to follow well-worn grooves in voting. You have to blast a message loudly and clearly for it to get through and change people's minds. I think that's why "Morning in America" approaches really work well, if they're not absurdly out of synch with reality. It's a lesson Democrats need to learn.
I'm not sure your first point is trivial. It strikes me as highly unlikely that the GOP will fight claims of "ownership" over the CARES act and the average voter isn't enough of a political maven to have a clear view of the process steps involved, democratic achievements even as a single branch of govt still count.
Spot on that the Republicans trying to keep ownership of an expensive bill that grew the welfare state temporarily is...unlikely.
And you can also just take credit for something you went along with that wasn't your idea - see also Bill Clinton and "welfare reform". :-)
I expect to see the following post combination roughly 100 times on Twitter today:
1. Of course more unemployment is good, Matt is such a hack for saying obvious things.
2. Can't believe we're only gonna get $600 Democrats are the worst.
Not big on twitter. Who thinks Dems are the ones capping it at $600? Seems like David Perdue and the stock market lady to me. Now Dems probably would act different if Perdue and the stock market lady voted yes, but that's not where we are currently at. Trump is definitely squeezing them pretty hard to say yes, but they haven't to date.
Interesting.
https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-blog/house-approval-of-2000-stimulus-veto-override-sets-up-tough-day-for-loeffler-perdue/HYSEBHKSW5AMNGNREKMZM7745Q/
I would be happy for people on the left to rediscover the virtues of incrementalism. If we get a public option for the ACA then we can see how efficient it is and judge whether it is outperforming the private market. We can also get a sense of whether it becomes a way to politicize medical care (I think one of the potential pitfalls of MFA that is not talked about is how it might lead to efforts for social conservatives to try and exclude care like gender affirmative care or abortion that are currently covered in many states under employer plans). I guess that I am officially old because I am pretty weary of hearing from young people that only major structural change can improve things. I think that what we learned from the enhanced UI was that a lot of people just don't earn enough from work to get by and if we boosted wages for workers we would all be more secure.
I agree completely that incrementalism is usually the way to go. We couldn't even predict the consequences of the ACA! And that's a 1000-page law; M4A would need to be at least a few multiples of that.
Being around young people from time to time, one thing I think that I have noticed is that their agitation is in part because they think they have nothing to lose from major structural change. Whereas us olds who already get insurance through our employers and have a growing retirement account are too invested in the system as it exists (from their perspective).
I think Hoffer's "The True Believer" is a key text for understanding why politics is the way it is these days. A lot of people are frustrated and unhappy, and feel a sense of dread and hopelessness in their personal lives, and they cope by externalizing it into politics. Then they dream of a millenarian movement that will solve the political problem, and also somehow solve their personal problems too.
It feels like we were already hitting a peak of this behavior and then pandemic isolation just completely blew things up.
(It's not just politics either -- politics is really common but the same psychological pressures can be vented into stuff like k-pop or Star Wars fandom too... it's pretty obvious when you see how politically radical teenagers treat esoteric Marxist ideologies as identity markers alongside their favorite media properties.)
My guess is that people who subscribe to this newsletter are way less prone than average to be true believers. They probably have more professional success, and are more able to be contented with modest achievements, and have an easier time with interpersonal relationships than, say, your average Chapo Trap House listener.
Of course the historical analysis in Hoffer's book is pretty terrible. Much of it is either based on inaccurate sources or just obviously wrong. But he really did grasp something about the desperate psychology of frustrated people (I think possibly from personal experience).
I think politics in the US will remain completely insane until this tendency abates. People need community involvement and useful, mundane work they can be proud of -- I think when you give this to someone, political extremism dissipates really quickly. A less tractable problem is that social media amplifies frustrated individuals, simply because they are more willing and have more time to sit and post all day.
Contemporary rhetoric on the left spends SO much time on intra-elite debates. Thus, you could imagine the biggest result of looking at CARES was that it was followed by increased inequality, as opposed to helping people who are impoverished or would've been. The focus on the rich is fine as a means of taxation, but it does seem to get to obsession level and blurs the goalposts.
On the note of catastrophism as politics: I think the right has a bit to blame for this. They use this technique, and it works with their reactionary voters. The amount of time my conservatives family spends talking about AOC is alarming, you would think she was actually president! Turning up the volume normalizes that, and I think a lot of progressives react in-kind. It's different, because it's issues based, but it's still a kind of thinking that exhausts energy in completely unproductive ways.
I agree that there is probably a personality type among progressives that insists that everything is awful, but I think there is probably a strategic consideration at play as well. To admit that things got better might undermine the case for additional action. To admit that the CARES act didn’t consist of one $1200 check undermines your standing to fight for $2000 this time, by this measure. In this case it’s probably a bad tactic- the current fight is essentially to continue a successful program that ended too soon- but I think the impulse to never declare victory is embedded in the strategy of preparing for the next battle.
The problem with this strategy in politics - *especially* digital politicking on social media - is that there is no fog of war. Everybody of every political stripe can see the facts and then see your rhetoric.
People who don't consume activism all day notice the gap between reality and rhetoric and just assume you are lying because you are either crazy, an idiot, or a brazen liar.
Do people really know? I think most casual observers assume that all of the money was wasted because everyone keeps say so. This is probably a good strategy for the right who wants to undermine the ability of government to ever do anything but it seems like a trap for the left.
This sounds like the most plausible narrative of how all this cashes out. Progressives who don’t tout victories make their own policies look terrible. “Congress spent $2 trillion and all I got was” is the start of a conservative t-shirt. No matter how you finish it, you’re still adding to the ubiquity of their rhetoric.
The result is that conservative case looks like consensus because even the proponents of progressive policy agree that we spent a lot of money to achieve nothing. “Why would we spend more or let these admitted failures make policy” is the question progressive kvetching sets up.
If non-progressive Dems weren't terrified of progressive Dems, maybe they could argue for their policies on the merits. But they are terrified, because they know voters are increasingly unsatisfied, and in the one-dimensional frame, that means you either get replaced by a Republican or a progressive.
If we hadn't spent so long boiling all politics down to a one-dimensional left-right spectrum despite its inadequacies, maybe we'd have communication strategies that escape this trap.
This is so well said!
People know about enhanced UI if they know anybody who is unemployed right now. Casual observers who don't even know anybody who lost their job in the pandemic don't really have skin in the game anyway and IMO are probably treating their left-wing politics as a sports team to support.
I'm unemployed right now and people who know me don't necessarily know about enhanced UI because I don't talk about it – for a middle-aged professional there's more stigma around being unemployed.
(Also, thanks to the cap on UI I have been taking home 1/4 of my pre-layoff salary, though with the CARES act it surged to 1/2. But I had a good salary in 2019, so no $1200 checks for me!)
That's a fair and interesting point. I'll simply note that in a low-trust society, we can't expect politics to reflect our circumstances if we can't honestly discuss with our peers how policy impacts our circumstances. This challenges other aspects of policymaking (eg. sexual assault).
being dismissive of enhanced UI is infuriating, being in the restaurant business, I know dozens of people for whom the enhanced UI was a life saver
It goes the other way, too—progressives looking to attack Democrats will borrow conservative talking points. I was told last night by someone with a red rose in their Twitter handle that CARES was bad because it had too much “pork.”
It depends on the charity of the observer. There are always ignorant people doing politics, even in Congress, in both parties. Plenty of folks think it presumptuous to decide somebody is a liar when they might just be ignorant.
Like Matt mentioned, it’s also that constantly being negative is psychologically exhausting. We all have stressful lives (that could be made easier by a more expansive welfare state with better labor regulations!). Very few people want to spend their time hearing about how everything is awful. We want to celebrate sometimes and generally feel like things are OK.
Also, why vote for Democrats if they are always saying that they failed?
Your main point -- and it's a good one! -- is that progressives would help their causes by celebrating incremental progress, and by abandoning the attitude that such a celebration entails a lack of concern for the work still to be done.
I.e., we do not need to minimize a problem in order to recognize progress towards its solution.
Applying that model to global warming means, for instance, that we can recognize the brilliant news about reductions in the cost of solar energy, without minimizing the real danger that we face.
Unfortunately, that is not the model you follow in this paragraph. You don't celebrate progress, and you do (inaccurately, I believe) minimize the problem we face:
"And of course you see this on climate change, which is legitimately A Bad Thing but where the most keyed-up activists want you to believe it’s literally an existential threat to continued human existence."
How about, "we can recognize the great progress being made on alternative energy without denying that global warming is a threat to continued human existence."
Because, from what I read, it really is.
So, that paragraph seems discordant with your overall point. But it's a good point!
Until climate activists embrace Nuclear energy with the same fervor as Solar and Wind, I will continue to discount their views on the 'existential threat' from climate change.
Climate activists have embraced nuclear just fine. The Obama administration's "all of the above" energy plan embraced the last "next gen" nuclear technology with tens of billions of dollars of subsidies for the failed Vogtle and V.C Summer plants.
Currently, the nuclear power industry doesn't have an economically viable and mass deployable technology to offer. If we wanted to go all-in on a massive nuclear buildout today, there just isn't an economically viable solution available.
Still, funding for the next "next gen" nuclear approach is very broadly supported by both parties. The spending bill passed last week with bipartisan support gave advanced nuclear $8 billion in subsidies, compared to $4 billion for solar and wind.
So other than sustained rounds of billions and billions of dollars in subsidies, what's missing from their embrace?
A few examples:
Sierra Club of Mass. Existential Threat, but close down Nuclear and oppose transmission lines for Hydro: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/27/16935382/climate-change-ugly-tradeoffs
Green America, statement against Nuclear Power
https://www.greenamerica.org/fight-dirty-energy/amazon-build-cleaner-cloud/10-reasons-oppose-nuclear-energy
Greenpeace statement against Nuclear Power
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/issues/nuclear/
Sierra Club “unequivocally opposed to Nuclear Power”: https://www.sierraclub.org/nuclear-free
Many climate organizations (350.org, for example) take a squishy stance and say some version of “study it, but it isn’t a solution” then spend 99% of their advocacy on wind and solar.
Again though, what specific things are not getting funded right now that you think should be?
Is $8 billion in bipartisan support for experimental reactor designs, double what solar and wind got, not enough of an embrace?
The amounts specified in the most recent bill aren't the total amount. For additional context, I suggest this, which shows the subsidy amounts for Solar and Wind outstripping Nuclear by a wide margin.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2021/12/27/why-is-solar-energy-getting-250-times-more-in-federal-tax-credits-than-nuclear/?sh=4673798a21cf
That article reads more like activist propaganda than journalism.
In addition to comparing subsidies on a per MWh produced basis, which of course makes the incumbent look much better, it narrowly focuses on just tax credits and leaves out loan guarantees, state level subsidies, waste disposal subsidies, research funding, and the Price-Anderson liability subsidy.
So it reaches its conclusion that nuclear gets less subsidies than wind and solar by ignoring almost all nuclear subsidies.
I prefer to just subsidize all zero CO2 technologies equally via a revenue neutral tax on net CO2 emissions and let the market decide which technologies to employ.
Personally, since I do think that the research supports that the effects of climate change will be catastrophic within the next 50 years unless we can sufficiently mitigate it. And because of that, I think that we should take essentially an “all measures short of war” type approach. I think that the lady from 3rd way made a good case on the weeds for continued maintenance of nuclear at a minimum, and probably continued investment in them (especially if the environmental justice concerns of nuclear waste can be mitigated). I would mostly like to see them as a transition, so that we could pivot to other forms of power as we better control emissions, but I think nuclear is a good option for the medium term.
As a bit of a tangent, I’m also skeptical of the design of a carbon tax, but the ETS works well and so if something like the Baker-Shultz plan can pass Congress with durable bipartisan support, I say pass it! I might like to see the dividend phased out for higher income individuals and have more of that money diverted to clean energy subsidies or something, but I think that might be good!
I think we should also pursue ambitious multilateral policies that establish a common clean energy standard, with harsh tariffs for high-polluting countries that don’t comply.
Heck, if Biden declared a national emergency in his third year of office to begin immediately upgrading the energy grid, I might think he’s on tenuous legal authority and that he’s been possessed by Bernie Sanders, but I’d think it was a good policy.
So I don’t think that, just because someone supports solar and wind more than nuclear, their commitment to fighting climate change should be underestimated. And I personally feel like Matt sometimes tend to sound like he’s minimizing the very real and potentially catastrophic risks of climate change, at the expense of making fun of some of the most histrionic claims of imminent human extinction.
He isn't "minimizing" he is accurately observing that the hyperbole and extremism some activists engage in is highly counterproductive.
We will develop policies and technology to manage the climate. We ought to do more now, and our grandchildren will pay the price for our failure to do that, but the politics of this is what it is and too much of the activism on this and other progressive issues is counterproductive as it pushes away non-progressives (and pushes out some progressives!) which hurts the cause.
Tariffs on high CO2 content items would be better than the same tariff on all imports from countries w/o a carbon tax.
Given the really shitty economics of nuclear energy, it's seems perfectly reasonable to embrace it with less fervor than forms of energy whose cost is rapidly declining.
How much of the shitty economics has to do with NIMBY opposition throwing up roadblocks versus inherent costs of generating the energy? Feels like the same pressures taking down solar at scale could apply to nuclear if you were able to mass produce the same components (maybe that's not possible, hence my point being moot in that case)
Imo, it's not that nuclear shouldn't be in our quiver, it's that it's not yet clear if it can help us. There's more inventing to do before we can know.
Today's technology is too expensive and also it doesn't mix well on a grid with intermittent renewables because nuclear can't economically adjust its output to respond to grid conditions or follow load. If nuclear was cheap we'd just deal with that inflexibility, just like we deal with the intermittency of wind and solar. But nuclear is both expensive and inflexible, and imo that's a fatal combination for now.
Here's a link with current costs of various generation technologies:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
If you scroll down you can see that under the right conditions, building new wind and solar can be cheaper than just the operating costs for an already paid for nuclear plant.
Thanks for the link... helped answer my own question upthread :)
As someone who wants to end global warming as soon as humanly possible, I never cease to be amazed at how said activists shoot their whole cause in the foot by not embracing nuclear. I suspect there are still too many ex-hippies living in the 70s anti-nuclear scene still hanging around who are in various kinds of leadership positions.
Gates is making some great progress with Thorium reactors that have a far safer profile, and they get zero looks from people because nuclear is seen as a bogeyman.
Even if one thinks that nuclear is really just not economic, waste disposal is too difficult, etc. still it would see like a good rhetorical strategy to "embrace" it in principle.
Well, I think we should discount "existential threat" even if the group DID "embrace" nuclear energy. And I do not think "embracing" one technology more than another is correct either. We need a procedure that weighs the discounted expected values present value of costs costs and benefits across the probability distribution in order to decide on policy. I think the best framework for that is an estimation of a trajectory for a price of net CO2 emissions.
Couldn't agree more - clearly it's different for older people who lived through Three Mile Island, but that's the only major domestic incident and it's kind of small potatoes. Chernobyl isn't a great example because of lax Soviet standards in that area; Fukushima is a better one but the main takeaway there seems to be "don't build nuclear plants in tsunami zones". Cost-effectiveness of nuclear vs. proper renewables is a legitimate argument but I don't see it made that much - granted, I may be missing the places where it's made.
The amazing thing about Fukushima is that many reactors got hit with a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami and only one with early (=bad) safety features melted down.
But yes, don’t put nuclear plants in tsunami zones is a good rule for nuclear power.
The idea that climate change is actually s that to civilisation's existence or might cause humans to go extinct is not well supported by science or as far as I know any serious climate model. Vox did a thing on this: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/13/18660548/climate-change-human-civilization-existential-risk
"It won't literally kill all of us" is a fair point I guess, I don't think anyone really believes that, but many people seem to think it won't get much worse, and don't seem to be aware that all the stuff that's happening currently... Fires in Australia/Africa/US, drought, species extinction by loss of habitat, etc. And all this is now the best case scenario. If we stopped burning fossil fuels today, all these things would still be happening for at least everyone's lifetime.
I live in Seattle, and experienced the 2 continuous weeks of smoke this past summer. If that becomes an every other year sort of thing, I'm outta here, and so are a lot of other people. Is that a good thing? We won't literally go extinct in Seattle, some people will move, some will adapt, and some will die from respiratory issues, and maybe some cancers, caused by the smoke. Is this sort of reality nothing to be all worked up about?
Right - I think part of the problem with current progressive rhetoric is that we're not convincing an audience that is really skeptical to our arguments. So if we go in with "climate change is going to end human life on Earth" - that's...relatively easy to poke holes in, because that's a worst worst worst case outcome that would require a bunch of possible things to all go wrong.
So the argument ends up being a nitpicky debate about something that shouldn't even be the main focus.
Better to lead with the things that are way more probable and _still_ should be on our radar - disruptive population relocation, investment losses as our existing infrastructure gets destroyed, everything being on fire a lot, as you have had to experience.
The combination of the worst possible outcome combined with the most drastic possible response (we all live like ascetics to cut our personal carbon footprint) is just an impossible sell ... we know this from failing to sell it. The great has become the enemy of the good.
The post I was replying to said, "How about, 'we can recognize the great progress being made on alternative energy without denying that global warming is a threat to continued human existence.'"
I think "continued human existence" is a pretty clear phrase -- that poster seems to believe it will literally kill all of us, or at least the vast majority.
That’s true, but then again Matt was posting the other day (yesterday?) about the importance of not dismissing tail risks.
Put differently:
Your overall point just applies the stock/flow distinction to political rhetoric. A statement about a flow is not a statement about a stock. "This problem just got a bit smaller/bigger" is entirely orthogonal to "This is a small/big problem".
And it's an unfortunate tic of progressive rhetoric to confuse them: "so you say there's been flow in the right direction: you must think the stock is at the optimal level, you heartless bastard, you!"
But, again, applied to the case of global warming, that means that your comments about two estimates of the stock ("it's a big problem but not that big") really don't illustrate your point about stocks vs flows, and tend to undermine it.
Matt You’re going to burn out if you try to maintain 2029’s writing schedule indefinitely! Pace yourself in 2021: two substantial posts a week plus short informal posts about things you see or read.
I think he’s just unfettered from organizational concerns and trying to deliver for the crowd that made it possible. I for one am enjoying the eruption with no expectation that it will continue apace. Best case, he’s entering a Frank Zappa-esque season of productivity.
I had to refresh my memory after posting this—dude released *62* albums during his lifetime, not to speak of all the posthumous ones:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Zappa_discography
I guess you weren’t around for Matt’s blogging days
He's making $500k a year annualized. Doctors that make $500k work a lot of hours. Pretty much their whole life.
Matt inadvertently making the argument that high marginal wages increase one's productive output
He's a small business and has already hired one staff member (maybe an editor later), plus Substack's advance apparently has to be paid back for a year.
I wonder what those advances look like. Scott Alexander described it as something like "extremely generous."
The New Yorker article said he got a $250k advance: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/is-substack-the-media-future-we-want?currentPage=all
From that article:
"Yglesias’s newsletter, “Slow Boring,” has a readership that includes more than six thousand paid subscribers, and he is making twenty-seven thousand dollars a month. (Yglesias opted to receive a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar advance from Substack, which, in return, will take eighty-five per cent of the subscription revenue from his first year. In his second year, Substack’s commission will revert to ten per cent.)"
Substack apparently made a good call.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was more than what he was making at Vox.
I would assume he had some equity at Vox as a co-founder, though I don't know what Vox's current finances are like.
He does pace himself. Every other post is a one liner open thread.
Exactly right. And of course by focusing on the UI component of the social safety net you are giving money to those with the greatest marginal propensity to spend. Maximising your bang for the buck.
Not to mention all of the intangibles that arise from this policy (lower crime rates, lower aggregate healthcare costs, etc).
It is a mystery to me too why we didn't make more of the success of this program, though I suspect that it had something to do with the establishment left's seemingly paralysing fear of confronting the GOP's mendacious propaganda around "generous" unemployment payments creating disincentives for people to return to work.
The view that generous UI creates negative disincentives is held by a large swath of the electorate, and Dems need some of those votes. My brother-in-law owns a small business that makes specialty temperature sensors. He and my sister lived in abject terror of the increased UI benefits. They quickly figured out that most of their employees would make more money on CARES Act UI than continued employment. Ultimately, their employees stayed (in part proving Matt’s point above). They have also had a few people stop working after putting in 20 weeks (the minimum needed to work at a location in their state) in order to collect UI. Most people don’t do this, but there are just enough to make that the focus of more conservative-leaning folks.
>> They have also had a few people stop working after putting in 20 weeks (the minimum needed to work at a location in their state) in order to collect UI.
I don't think this scenario is plausible, at least in most states. When someone files for unemployment, the state verifies with the employer that the employee was laid off. Employees can't just quit and collect unemployment.
But they can go to work and not do anything until they are fired. In my sister’s telling: (1) the employee stops doing any real work on week 21, (2) after repeated consultations/chances to improve, they fire the employee, and then (3) when the state asks to verify, they have to fill out a “book” of forms to document that the person really quit-in-place/was fired for cause. While this is rare, I suspect a lot of small/medium-sized businesses have encountered this once (watch out Slow Boring, Inc.), which is then used to rebut any macro-level evidence that UI expansion is actually good.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there is plenty of unchecked fraud, but it seems unlikely that there's enough fraud to affect the macro picture. Maybe I'm wrong, but massive fraud would require a lot of people to knowingly lie on forms and risk jail time. It just doesn't seem that likely. Most people are law abiding if they know there may be consequences for illegal activity.
Also, employers are pretty well incentivized to prevent fraudulent unemployment claims because I think in most states unemployment insurance premiums are connected to an employer's claim history.
I’m sure the macro impacts of such fraud/gaming the system are minimal at best, but they erode support for increased UI benefits among business owners and you’re going to have to address that to get more support for expanding UI.
This! You might have a hundred employees who never cause any problems, but if you have one that really screws things up, that's the one you remember and influences your perspective more than all the others.
Thanks - this helps my own understanding of the dynamics a lot.
It’s plausible if the employer doesn’t answer requests for information, which is probably common.
It's tough to say.
In normal times, I believe the cost an employer has to pay for unemployment insurance is a function of how many claims its had against it. So the incentives are lined up pretty well in normal times.
Some states may also offer rewards to employers for ratting out x-employees who ultimately get convicted of fraud.
I have no idea whether any of that is true but, if I conceded it, I’d just point out that you can believe the brother-in-law is a liar or you can believe he’s overlooking part of a process. In my experience, overlooking is common no matter what the incentives are.
I think he was honest about the facts/process (as expanded in another reply below), but I also believe he pays low wages and I don’t think he provides health insurance - limiting his pool of potential employees to a group that is more likely to try to commit UI fraud/gaming. He should also do a better job of interviewing/reference checking. However, I suspect his view of expanded UI, based on an incident or two, is probably shared by a lot of small/medium business owners and you’re going to have to deal with that if you want expanded UI.
You are absolutely right, Aaron. A large swathe of the electorate believes that generous UI benefits create perverse incentives. It does not follow, however, that the Democrats need to pander to these voters to secure their votes. This reasoning precisely illustrates the point that I am making about the Dems' unwillingness to confront GOP lies. The Left time and again allows the GOP to dictate the nomenclature and the terms of the debate when they need to be addressing these issues with fact based argument. Economists at Yale exposed the GOP myth of perverse incentives for what it was several months ago (https://news.yale.edu/2020/07/27/yale-study-finds-expanded-jobless-benefits-did-not-reduce-employment) yet the Left is still allowing the GOP to discuss the shape of future proposals in the context of generous UI driving perverse incentives. It is literally their go to argument whenever the question of expanded federal UI benefits are discussed.
Insofar as your brother-in-law's concerns go, I am never one to denigrate or question someone's lived experience and so am not going to specifically address that point (and it seems to have been litigated below at length in any event). I will say that it is a big world and anecdotal exceptions can be found to most "rules" or beliefs. The risk is generalizing on the basis of a single observation.
Thank you again for taking the time and for your thoughtful reply.
Hi Aaron,
Stupid question: did your brother-in-law consider one-time incentive pay to counter-balance the lure of going to the CARES act? I realize that if we had generally higher UI, this would just turn into upward wage pressure and we'd have a discussion about whether your brother should pay more and/or whether his business has any margin for it.
But in this case, we've had a very weird dynamic where the lowest paid workers who are still working are often having to go work "in the world" while "knowledge workers" just work from home. So as a society we could collectively call a temporary pay bump a sort of "hazardous duty" pay and it would come with the expectation that it goes away when the pandemic winds down and isn't a permanent increase in cost.
I believe did something (either a bonus or temporary bump in salary) in reaction to the CARES Act, which he billed as recognition to his employees that they were "essential" workers (his company provides temperature sensors to crematoriums, among other uses, so they were an "essential" business under his state's rules and kept operating). So you are quite right, there was upward wage pressure in this case.
Right - this gets to how weird our social safety net is - in that business is involved...sometimes.
I think a progressive would look at this and say "the system works!" - unemployed people get money and essential workers get some money to be essential and your BIL has chipped in in sort of a paternalistic "businesses take care of their community" way.
But your BIL would not be wrong in asking "are other businesses having to shoulder some of the social safety net burden directly" - or are there idiosyncratic differences between sectors or between sizes of businesses that create arbitrary (or potentially systematically) unfair differences in the burden placed on employeers.
My meta-view on all of this is that we'd be better off if the social safety network were more government and less employment based, so that employers weren't faced with weird incentives WRT how big to grow the business, whether to hire W-2 workers or independent contractors, what kind of benefits to provide, etc.
Your BIL might _still_ be hosed by temporary upward pressure on wages, but at least that wouldn't be on top of other things that make life better for big businesses than small ones.
This really is the big problem with the way the UI benefits are structured, but why does it have to be a flat benefit instead of "add enough to get total UI benefit to 80% of pre-unemployment pay"? My understanding is that it's structured that way because states' UI systems are incredibly poorly designed and can't handle percents, only flat numbers - this sounds crazy, so maybe I'm missing something? But if true, the fault here seems to lie with those states less than Congress, so it'd be nice if conservatives had some interest in making government not just lean but also efficient to avoid weird outcomes like that.
In retrospect, what should have happened was just full wage replacement up to some threshold - perhaps 75K or so, paired with a bunch of "this is not your fault, we will make you whole" messaging. I'd guess that would have at least been more palatable to some of small business owners like your brother in law.
Assuming good faith here with people making the legislative sausage, it feels like they were pushing out the simplest thing that would work with the UI systems we have, imperfect as it may be.
That said, there is an entire different class of small business owner who would pay their employees zero if they could get away with it. In their mind, any UI is too generous.
I’m reading Obama’s A Promised Land and this post fits in well with the main ideas of that book.