It's odd that Singapore appears in the answer to the Social Security question but not in the answer to public sector employment.
Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, famously said, " If you pay peanuts, you will end up with monkeys." As a result, Singapore has one of the most highly compensated public sectors in the world. It is also has very high standards and has very little corruption.
This is a policy choice and one that the Singaporeans themselves talk about a lot.
Singapore also didn’t have the legacy of structural racism creating a permanent underclass like we do for which the state bears a lot of responsibility for creating.
Seems like that omits some extremely severe racial challenges. The state was born out of communal riots between Malays and ethnic Chinese and racial quota systems are deeply embedded in their society, in part because the 3 major groups had, and continue to have, such different Socio-economic backgrounds.
I mean it very much did, it had a recent history of violent race riots.
It was incredibly segregated,with huge racial differences and a racial civil war. Lee Kuan Yew survived a racial genocide (not from locals admittedly) by hiding in a shed.
The United States has a pretty permanent calcified underclass essentially beyond remediation, and Singapore does not.
Any sort of Singapore like policy has to get to the fact that this population doesn’t exist in Singapore and if it did, it wouldn’t for long through a couple carrots and a whole host of authoritarian sticks. Not quite apples to apples but they executed their way out of their gun- edited to say gun, not gum- and kidnapping) problem.
I say this as someone who loves Singapore and has spent a lot of time there. They have a solution set we just don’t have.
The United States has a calcified underclass that simply does not have meaningful membership in society, nor any social mobility, and which no real government intervention can change because at this point the causes are endogenous to the class.
This underclass is heterogenous, but the US is somewhat unique in that they are directly responsible for creating part of it with slavery and Jim Crow.
TBF this is something both republicans and democrats talk about A LOT.
Like I had a conversation with someone very high up in the administration who basically has argued for higher representative and civil servant pay his entire career.
The problem is voters think elected politicians make too much money, which is more money than they do
Sure government pay isn’t great (but outside of GS it’s fine). Representative pay and party rules basically disqualify anyone who isn’t really wealthy from running for the house
They have to maintain two residences to serve their local constituents and be in DC. They travel all the time and have long hours. They spend much of their time dialing for dollars. And sometimes people try to kill them. It’s a tough job.
They get paid three times the average salary for a job that is much more than three times as difficult as the average job.
If you're someone of above average intellectual ability, with strong people and communication skills, willing to work 7 day 70+ hour work weeks including substantial travel away from family, you would be hard pressed to not be making substantially more than a member of Congress, in most parts of the country easily double.
We don't need to increase their pay to a level where the primary motivation to become a member is the pay scale, but we should make it high enough that a person with the requisite skill isn't being asked to make a substantial material sacrifice for their family in order to take the job.
I make more than a Congressperson's salary in a middling cost-of-living city doing a vastly easier job that typically fits within 40 hours a week and requires me to travel 8-12 times a year.
I'd wager this is true of the large majority of the Americans commenting here.
I'd have to be completely insane to try to become a US congressional representative unless I came into a ton of money first... which is precisely the problem.
Do they not receive payment for their second home? In the UK the government pays rent on the cost of one of a house in London or a house in the constituency
The average person would not be a good choice for congress. You want smart, high-achieving people who have had successful careers (in politics, business, the military, etc) before they got there.
Find an ambitious smart 50 year old who's got three kids and a mortgage and a deep interest/commitment to politics. Maybe he's a lawyer, maybe he was a midlevel corporate executive, whatever. He can probably make considerably better money doing something other than running for congress. And he presumably feels like his obligations to get his kids through college and make sure he and his wife can retire to something other than a trailer park are more pressing than his desire to serve the country, so the offer is likely something like "leave your successful career to become a representative, take a $50K/year pay cut and lose all the expected income of your current career, spend the next few years maintaining two residences and bouncing between home and Washington DC, then you can have a couple terms as a representative, after which maybe you can be a lobbyist or something."
We should stick a zero on the end of the pay of every federal elected official and congressional staffer. The cost would be negligible but the benefits would be pretty big. We should also substantially increase civil service pay, but that actually does start costing real money since there are a lot of civil service employees.
It's crazy we are so reluctant to give politicians more pay. We believe so strongly in the idea that you should be able to get rich via talent we have relatively low marginal tax rates at the top but apparently actually running the country isn't something we think should be rewarded. Yet we still want them to be the kind of smart, articulate and educated people who could make a boatload in private Industry and then we get upset when they try to land a good job after they leave and worry about the influence corporations who hire their spouses and children have.
If we don't want them to be influenced by whoever takes them out to a fancy dinner pay them a million bucks a year so it isn't a concern. If that means they vote .1% better because they aren't worried about their next job that's great!
If we aren't willing to pay for it we get only the already wealthy and those likely to leave for a lobbying job running the country.
They’re paid a lot more than the voters are. It’s easily one of the best paying jobs in the US at 4x median, placing it in the 92nd percentile of earnings.
I’m pretty sure governments generally pay less than that. IIRC, the UK pays MPs only 3x the median.
It sounds like the UK gives a housing allowance for a London residence, while US congress members are expected to get their Washington residence with their own pay.
4x the median all people, but around 2x (or less, depending on your measure) for people at the peaks of their careers.
Get a job as a representative in my state house and it caps out (as the speaker) at under 40K. Unless you are a billionaire trying to skip to the end, these are the steps you take on your way up to being in the US Congress. C'est impossible.
In Texas, I think the legislature pays $7200 for 6 months of work. I think that's less than you would get for six months of full-time minimum-wage work.
US bureaucrats make more than French or Italian bureaucrats. Also, why do we want them paid generously when their only job is to execute the laws congress passes.
Because effective execution of the law is very important. Would you ask why we should pay firefighters well, if their only job is to execute the law? Or prosecutors? Or police officers?
Wait, do you think we should pay US bureaucrats market rate wages, or artificially low wages because "their only job is to execute the laws congress passes"?
You'll have to lead them out of the room, and then we can mention them. Problem is, they never forget how to get back in the room (or anything else). Also, you can't have non-discriminatory hiring when a white elephant will bankrupt you.
"Politicians play games with budgets to avoid bad financial optics" seems like common bad pattern. In Boston, we paid $100M in police overtime because (quoting my local Axios email):
Accurately budgeting for the real cost of police overtime would look like a massive increase to the BPD budget, and that would be hard to explain to residents, according to Wu.
"It would be seen as a 20 to 30 percent increase in that budget, which is not palatable, and it's hard to get that nuance out," Wu told the Globe this month.
Wu telling the Globe that she's concerned about the optics of ... accurately accounting for police expense? Seems very hard to build a high functioning government with this kind of silliness at the core.
It isn't *that* hard to explain a city budget. Philadelphia Mayor Parker does it at town halls with a PowerPoint full of nice graphics that explain where the city's money comes from and where it goes, and where she's proposing to make changes and why.
This reminds me... the State of the Union is such a snore. I haven't watched one since the Clinton administration. I'd like to see the President release a video summary of accomplishments the day before the SOTU, then do a presentation instead of just a speech. Steve Jobs style.
And our educated, lily-white proggies *hate* her for it, along with making religious references in speeches, supporting public safety in black neighborhoods, putting her name on public works projects (all of which had her predecessors names on them back in the day), focusing her housing policy on working- and middle-class families' needs, and having the gall to, you know, be doing a reasonable job of running this place without the surname "Gym."
Perfect, no, but a lot better than I expected after voting for the other gal, and enough that she's got my vote next May (not that it matters).
Thank Christ for middle-class black respectability politics.
I would expect precisely the same behavior from the PD in Charlotte or whatever (take your pick of red state city that bans collective bargaining).
Unions are a tool to get workers what they want; they are not the only one. Most of the time what workers want is good. Sometimes it's not. On the rare occasions when workers want bad things, unions will help them get them. So will those other tools. That doesn't mean we should get rid of unions, any more than it means we should, I dunno, ban vacation time because workers might spend it lobbying for shitty policies.
>Also as noted it's not like police in non-union states are agreeable to reform either
Respectfully, who gives af if any public employees are 'agreeable' to reform or not. Their job is to take orders from their employer- if they don't like those orders, they're certainly free to quit. The state needs to have a strict hierarchical relationship with the security services!
Imagine if someone said 'well that unit of Marines isn't agreeable to orders from the elected President. They feel like doing their own thing this week'. You can see what the problem is here, no?
Fair point, I was being flip, the message would be something like "We need to hire more police officers and civilian employees and probably raise their base pay" with the unstated bit being we need to cut down the (ridiculous) amount of over time they are reaping. And your point about striking is well taken, I do not like that we have so little leverage against police unions and that their interests are not aligned with the public's.
It always seems to me that the simple answer is that leftists see the people more likely to influence Democratic policy as the bigger threat to their path to power, thus the double standard there over getting their chance to later challenge Republican policy.
I think it is simpler, more fundamental, and more tragic than that. Matt wrote:
“progressives ... should just accept that basically all Democrats have preferences to the left of the status quo. If they want to move politics to the left, the way to achieve that is to help Democrats beat Republicans.”
Matt knows — has written elsewhere — they will never do that. A tragedy of democracy is that normal people will not emotionally accept the idea that other normal people have wildly different views on reality. Instead, they believe that governance should be easy and is made difficult by perfidy. The flavor of this specific to the Left is that they believe:
1. Government has been captured by the Right (at all times and places — in NYC this role is filled by the Council, Hochul, the police, etc.)
2. The People are naturally leftist, but imperfectly aware of their own leftism
3. We the self-aware Left therefore speak in the People’s true voice (to which they have imperfect access)
4. We the Left are therefore always and never the true vanguard of democracy — always the vanguard of what it should be and never the vanguard of what it is
I just finished up the Rest is History 4 parter on England in the 70s. The Labour Left wanted such extreme actions when they had razor thin margins (nationalize everything, ban imports, etc) and fought Prime Minister Callaghan whenever he tried to curtail debt fueled spending.
I think Burnham is being deliberately disingenuous. It's entirely possible to read everything he says as "we should pay off our debts so we're not subject to the bond market", but he says it in ways that the leftists he attracts aren't put off.
I don't know that he can get back into the surplus of the late 90s/early 00s, but I think he'd like to.
It’s kind of crazy that you have an executive who wants to consolidate power in the executive deciding to make the entire apparatus he governs basically Swiss cheese. Not only that but disgruntled and uninspired Swiss cheese at that.
Well, if one looks at the entire history of Trump's private sector life, the reality that is quite clear is he was always a staggerlingly bad executive, staggeringly bad, incapable of learning...
He's a masterful showman / marketer with near zero actual managerial savoir-faire, and it's been consistent since his first days in Real Estate and then into casinos, etc.
The idiots who gave him the show Apprentice deserve to be sent to a Gulag for the fundamental damage to the Republic they opened up by giving him his scamming opening to the wider American public.
The biggest hope for a post Trump future is driven by just how short sighted and bad at policy he is. He's also aggressively grabbed the other third rail of American politics by directly causing a spike in gas prices. I can't think of any other politician that wouldn't be extremely sensitive to that, and yet. It's headscratchingly dumb.
> At one point, the Israelis played for Mr. Trump a brief video that included a montage of potential new leaders who could take over the country if the hard-line government fell. Among those featured was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, now a Washington-based dissident who had tried to position himself as a secular leader who could shepherd Iran toward a post-theocratic government.
Matt had a very catty-but-accurate remark about this article, roundabout-suggesting that the reason it portrayed Vance so well is because Vance was the one controlling the narrative because Vance was the one leaking to the press.
It does not take a huge amount of human capital just to NOT do stupid things. [Hanania id right, but it's irellevant.]
It took more human capital to come up with psuedo rationales for the Bush/Trump1/Trump2 tax cuts and deficits, tariffs, and deportations policies than NOT to have done them.
Republicans would have an unbeatable electoral advantage if Trump had done literlaly nothing.
That is part of why I still would say Trump is a sultanist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanism) and not a fascist, notwithstanding that a lot of his flunkies these days are fascists.
It is funny that description works for both Starmer and Trump despite them having completely different policies, personalities and attitudes to government.
Ok, my sense is that Starmer is getting bad press and looking weak. How is he consolidating power? To me it looks like power is draining away from him by the day.
He and his people see a lot of that apparatus as hostile to them.
Think of Stalin purging the Red Army in the years between the wars. This wasn't because Stalin didn't want a strong army in some abstract sense, it was because he wanted to make sure he kept power. (And he was a charming combination of ruthless, paranoid, and bloodthirsty.)
And if you dare pointed out to Stalin that randomly murdering and deporting people adversely affected the performance of the Red Army you would soon be dead.
This hasn’t stopped him from bombing, jailing, deporting, travel-banning millions of people. As long as you have the security services with guns on your side, you can exercise a lot of power even with a much reduced bureaucracy.
Overseas war actions only infime minority of Americans give the slightest fuck about, foreign policy and action gets no real domestic political attention.
Banning travel to the US falls into the same space, no significant electorate really cares at all, falling into the Give No Real fucks space. Yes your views you think this is Worst Thing Evah, but most Americans give no fucks, right or wrong they give no fucks at all.
His deporting of illegal immigrants was and remains aligned with a broad majority support.
It is fundamentally indicative that the one area he has beat a retreat on is when his "security services" - ICE twats - went too far and unambigious native-born US citizens got killed, the support collapsed and despite his evil bastard Miller pushing, he had to beat a retreat and Miller has had to go silent even when he's had openings (and frankly the most dangerous creature in Trump world is Miller).
He has not been able to excercise extensive domestic power in reality - not by any proper authoritarian standard - this requires a degree of popularity and degree of showing payoff on actions, real payoffs. The leaking and spinning from his own WH in recent WSJ very clearly indicates even within the sycophant circles they know well the ship is taking on water.
Dan Drezner has perfect summary from more than a year ago, and is spot on for the fundamental error of Lefties in fact giving too much credit to Trumpian action rather than working to highlight his fundamental incapacity. https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-weakness-and-incompetence-of
Authoritarian regimes gain extra power from the acquisence from some combination of actual achievement in suppression, positive support in population that is not a narrow minority, and sense of inevability. Trump is not achieving that - except ironically with people like you.
He has enough state power still to ruin the lives of millions of people and kill thousands, despite weakening the bureaucracy; whether the median voter supports some of this or not is irrelevant to the question of how much state power Trump has.
you have galloped to move an utterly different subject.
Trump's ability to kill people overseas has about nothing to do overall with his ability to execute real authoritarian control in domestic US.
They are different subjects.
Your inability to distinguish between your concerns and domestic action leads to fundamentally fuzzy-headed nonsense.
There is very little to zero relatioship between what the comment was about - domestic power consoilidtion - implicity authoritarian action - and ability to deploy the vast US war machine to bomb Johnny Foreigner on various flimsy pretexts and whims.
Given zero Rally Round the Flag effect that is quite visible in the miserable ratings on even the war itself, and beyond on inflation and economy, Trump's impulsive destructive actions are in fact undermining his state capacity.
ETA: for maximum clarity - Orange Man is Doing Bad Things where he can get away with it is not synonym with Orange Man has set himself up for undertaking real state action for domestic power.
Orange man going bad incredibly harmful idiotic things using US bombers and missiles in the Carribean, in the Gulf is bad, but fundamentally says zero (in fact arguably less than zero) about his domestic state capacity. Less than zero as it rather arguably appeared Orange Man pivoted to bombing and killing and banning Johnny Foreigner because it's what he can get away with easily and as he has the attention span of a mole-rat and the organisational discipline of a decapited chicken. This is Bad. It is bad morally for whole range of moral systems, it is bad in self-interest of national self-interest as frittering away power and treasture (expensive missiles for completely trivial tactical booms that look nice to Orange Man on TV but achieve little on cost-benefit relative to strategic objective), it is bad actually for him politically
Non-MAGA should be taking these lessons, as Drezner was very correct on pointing more than a year ago (and we have seen play out). Losing breeds losing.
It makes Orange Man foolish play against Comey more foolish as his utterly foolish play against Powell.
All these things and his repeated fails say not more state capacity deployable, rather they show self-sabotage, own-goals.
While not happy per se about my own energy bill and possibility my flight to EU this summer to attend an energy conference is going to go through the roof or be cancelled.... I am happy about the election year incompetence (lemons into lemonade view).
I'm sure there are many billionaires who aren't causing problems. Substantial evidence of that is that I have no idea who they are. The guys kowtowing to the regime, not so much.
Agree that Wieners housing work is excellent, but on AI the distinction seems less clearly pro-Wiener.
Zachary Jones at One Thousand Means (onethousandmeans.substack.com) suggests that Public First PAC (the main pro AI regulation PAC that is supporting candidates like Alex Bores) should immediately stop spending against Saikat because he’s probably better than Scott for AI safety. He argues that Saikat has an explicit AI policy plan supporting specific safety regulations, while Wiener doesn’t appear to have federal AI-policy proposals on his website.
Saikat also probably understands the AI stuff better because not only does he have a computer science degree from Harvard, he has worked in tech (he was one of the first employees at Stripe).
While it was a lot of fun watching all the internal discord in MAGA world about the Epstein stuff, it really is a massive moral panic that is incredibly dumb and overblown.
Ro Khanna, btw, just tweeted this corrupt slopulist garbage yesterday:
"I stand with @Teamsters. We do not have planes without pilots. We need drivers on trucks for safety, edge cases, and inclement weather. AI should be for the people, not just billionaires. I will continue to fight for legislation to stand up for truck drivers that was vetoed. "
I don’t think the Epstein stuff counts as a “moral panic.” If anything the accountability for various people, including Trump, implicated in the very real underage sex trafficking he was engaged in has been nil.
"Underage sex trafficking" most of the women were sex workers in their 20s who voluntarily did sex work and are now being described as "survivors."
Apparently Epstein hired a hooker for himself who was like 17 at the time -- and he was rightly punished for that -- but the idea that prepubescent girls are being forcibly kidnapped and made to perform sex acts on a cabal of international elites is wrong despite being widely held. And that's why it's a moral panic.
Ok, that’s wonderful! So if everything is above board and everyone was a willing participant, why haven’t the full unredacted Epstein files been released already? What does anyone have to hide?
Are you not familiar with the dozens of underage girls who were lured to give Epstein massages that became sexual? Or the Virginia Giuffre allegations against Prince Andrew?
I agree that the public's beliefs of Epstein's crimes go way beyond what there's credible evidence for (and even beyond what could be postulated by grounded speculation.) But what's publicly known does go beyond "Epstein accidentally had sex with a 17 year old prostitute."
It's also fair to note that much of Epstein's terrible behavior falls just barely short of criminal. He was a horrible guy who used money to take advantage of vulnerable women and it's genuinely unnerving that so many rich and famous people associated with him. But, without the pedophilia angle, it wouldn't have become a moral panic.
Yeah, releasing the Epstein files made a bunch of guilt-by-association stories about prominent people and created bad incentives for the future wrt people being willing to talk to investigators and such. It was fun to watch Trump et al squirm and see sleazeballs like Summers get their comeuppance, but I think the net effect here was bad.
What matters is bringing MAGA down, not anything about its substance, which I’ll never know about (though it’s pretty obvious to me that Epstein was an intelligence operative running a honeypot). I couldn’t really care less about the acts involved but for their potential to bring down MAGA, but since that’s the most important thing the Epstein files were fairly important.
Scott Wiener is arguably the most effective legislator in the California Legislature right now. He would be an able successor to Nancy Pelosi. And he will be as left wing as necessary— there is no policy that would have a chance of passing in Congress where he would be to the right. Why not elect someone with a proven track record who matches the ideology of the district? Saikat would be more effective in the California Legislature with its Democratic super majority. He should demonstrate what he can do rather than buy his way into the seat.
Oh, I forgot that Saikat was the author of SB 1047 (killed by industry lobbying even after significant compromising) and SB 57 (narrowly passed after similar major watering-down). And these have been like...two out of maybe five total AI bills with actual teeth, anywhere in the nation, that weren't so terribly crafted that they'd run afoul of a constitutional challenge in some way. The opposition to both mostly came from OpenAI and a16z, whose own anti-AI regulation PAC, Leading The Future, is both an actual insane cartoon villain + led to the creation of the much-smaller Public First in response.
Meanwhile, Saikat's own mailer tells me he wants to tax AI companies to "fund a federal jobs guarantee, worker transition support, and a national plan to create new, high-wage industries and jobs." Classic everything bagel bullshit. Also, his FASA (Federal AI Safety Administration) plan is completely unworkable under the current administration, which has fought tooth and nail against almost all forms of transparency regulation, content labeling, slop spreading, etc. - as we've already seen with numerous stalled and failed state-level bills attempting these same things. The official Trump position remains a federal preemption moratorium on almost all AI regulations, to be superceded with a framework at the federal level - which is basically currently nothing, aside from a bit of sop to online child safety (and you know where they're really trying to go with this - age verification, stripping Section 230, etc.)
Furthermore, Saikat "will work to have the government buy up some of the major AI companies for pennies on the dollar and turn them into public infrastructure - dedicating computing power to curing rare diseases, modeling climate change, and advancing science [which it already does]" - He Admit It, he wants to nationalize private companies. The Trump admin just got done trying to de facto nationalize Anthropic via the supply chain risk designation + threat of Defense Production Act, and that shoe doesn't fit any better if it's on the left foot. Lastly, Saikat "will fight to make big corporations put labor on their boards, create a 32-hour work week, and tax the major AI companies [that the government owns now???] to fund a federal jobs guarantee and share AI wealth directly with taxpayers". So in addition to being a useless slop machine overbuilt on a hype bubble, AI is also so powerful that it'll cure cancer and solve climate, and we can turn it into an UBI money machine after buying the parts at fire sale prices. Uh huh.
What an idiot wannabe politician. Even without Wiener's legendary edge on housing, just on the narrow grounds of AI, I'd *still* vote Wiener because he's actually Done The Work here too. And no, I don't trust someone to understand AI just because they have a CS degree from Harvard (academia is way behind the curve on this topic) or because they've "worked in tech". Not if they run on pure vibes-powered hopium like this. Watch what people actually say and do, not what their paper qualifications are - or who they claim backs them when she actually doesn't, that being AOC.
Fear of crime by NIMBYs in affluent areas is exactly why we should be flexible towards (or even outright ignore) "affordable housing". People in nice places do not want people making 150% of the federal poverty level in their neighborhood. Build the fanciest apartments/condos in the nicest areas and charge a mint for them. Rely on moving chains to reduce the cost of housing for everyone else.
I don’t think you can make them diminish that greatly. Even poor people who follow every law are just so aesthetically and temperamentally different that people are extremely uncomfortable with the idea.
"To attract talented and committed public employees, we offer higher-skilled people lower pay but better benefits, notably very high job security and pensions compared with the private sector. This yields a mix of dedication, talent, and risk-aversion. Does this approach make sense to you? In this context, what limits, if any, should we place on public employee unionization?"
We don't do this. This is a lie born from a different generation of civil service. Part of the problem we have is we do get the government we pay for and the government isn't just a bit lower than the private sector with better benefits and job security. There is a massive gulf between the private sector and the government and the benefits are not better.
And it only gets worse the more you progress in your career which means the government loses its most experienced and competent (sometimes) employees to the private sector.
This is true for high-ranking jobs, but not as much so for middle and low-ranking ones. When I worked for the Feds, the thing I appreciated was that the lowest-ranked people - the people who would get no benefits beyond those required by law in the private sector - got decent benefits and better-than-private-sector pay (still difficult to live on in Boston). The health coverage I got as a mid-ranked person was much better than anything I have been offered in the private sector - admittedly, in a low-paying field. The higher you rank, the better you can do in the private sector.
Let me rephrase, I don't think the federal government lacks for entry level candidates. I think hiring freezes + USAJobs causes said problem but that is self imposed.
Eh for financial regulators pay is competitive with most financial services until very senior ranks, and even then there are pseudo privates like FINRA and Freddie Mac that stay competitive with industry.
What's notable about financial regulators? They operate outside the GS scale under FIRREA. FINRA isn't even a government agency, it benchmarks comp directly to the industry it regulates. Freddie and Fannie are explicitly benchmarked to private financial firms by FHFA.
You're describing what should be standard across the government and using it as evidence there's no problem. It's the exception.
I think I agree with you, but I would say for a lot of government there are jobs with no real private sector analogue… and once you do have a private sector analogue there’s also sorts of special pay magic to close the gap to industry.
It’s not enough, and it should be less agency dependent, but it’s also not fair to say that, like, DERA attorneys are slumming it at a gs-13
Fair, and I'd grant both points. DERA attorneys are SK scale, not GS, so they're closer to industry comp than the standard federal lawyer comparison suggests. That's the FIRREA carve-out doing real work. And yes, plenty of federal jobs (intelligence, certain prosecutorial niches, mission-specific regulatory roles) don't have a clean private analogue, which makes the comparison messier than just "fed pay vs market pay."
The "agency-dependent" framing is exactly the issue though. Whether you're slumming it depends entirely on whether Congress remembered to give your agency special pay authority. DERA, fine. SEC enforcement, fine. AUSA in main DOJ, GS-15 cap. Antitrust attorney at DOJ competing with white-shoe firms, GS-15 cap. NIH researcher competing with biotech, GS-15 cap (mostly). Patent examiner, special pay authority. Attorney at the same patent office doing rule writing, GS scale. The system is a patchwork of recognized exceptions rather than a coherent compensation structure, and which side of the line you fall on is largely accidental.
So I'd agree with your basic point but flip the framing. The exceptions prove the rule isn't working, not that the system is fine.
My favorite, most egregious example is the crazy DOD supplements people can get in cyber that basically are section dependent.
That’s because you can cross the street and go work for Google team zero (pick your company) at 600k a year in some positions, and maybe make 110 in others.
"The exceptions prove the rule isn't working, not that the system is fine."
I think I agree with your underlying point, but not this. The government is extremely large. I'm not sure a systematic rule across it is workable. Its seems more reasonable to me that the government will need a number of different rules based on very different roles it needs to fill.
Then you should have a established system for that flexibility as opposed to a patchwork of exceptions. I’m not saying expand the GS scale and lock everyone in. I’m saying the concept of a GS scale across an entire government doesn’t make sense which is why in certain areas you’ve seen these exceptions made but not in a consistent manner.
It’s not that massive, at least for federal government (state and local is another story). For lawyers, people think there’s a massive gap because of the starting salary difference between government lawyers and big firm lawyers but 90%+ of big firm lawyers burn out after a few years and end up at much lower-paying jobs at smaller firms or in companies where they make about the same or at most a little more than federal government lawyers, who by age 40 the typical private sector lawyer is not making much more than the typical federal government lawyer.
The BigLaw burnout thing doesn't really hold up. Yeah, plenty of associates leave by year 5-7, but most go in-house at big companies making $250K+ base with bonus and equity, not "about the same as a GS-15." The ones who land at small firms making federal-lawyer money are a real group but not the median outcome.
A senior federal attorney tops out around $200K with DC locality. Median Am Law 200 partner comp is well over $1M. Senior in-house counsel at large public companies are routinely $300-450K total comp at 40. That's not a "not much more" gap, that's a 2-3x gap, and it widens once you factor in bonuses (basically nonexistent in government), 401(k) matches that beat the TSP's 5%, and equity comp.
And lawyers are actually the closest case for your argument. For federal employees with master's or professional degrees, total compensation is below comparable private-sector workers, while it's higher for those with bachelor's or less. Federal pay is structurally compressed at the top, exactly where the talent the government most needs to attract sits.
One more thing: the wage gap isn't static. It's been above 20% every year since 2007, hit 27% in 2023, and federal raises have lagged private-sector wage growth almost every year for fifteen years. 2025's 2% raise against ~3.6% private wage growth widened it again. The "not that massive" framing assumes a snapshot of a gap that's been moving in one direction for two decades.
And Biden and Dems fucked over federal workers with his last COLA. They could have given Feds a boost, but instead they handed out awards during the lame duck that basically were “persecute and fire me Trump!” signs.
And people wonder why their whole “Trump is a threat to democracy and freedom” campaign message fell flat. They sure didn’t act like they thought that.
You seem like you have a specific axe to grind, but what I will say is that a one time COLA was not shifting the underlying issues with the federal labor force and their compensation packages.
People don't like paying more for the federal government. Full stop. DOGE and its even passing popularity is the best example of this. Personnel costs are not a major driver of federal spending and yet people bought into the idea it was lazy overpaid federal workers that were the problem.
The real problem for government is that Congress has created more paperwork requirements and more rights for the public to litigate via statute (or failing to preempt litigation by clearly legislating actions). Basically Congress feels like a bunch of lawyers who have created a massive make work program for lawyers.
If I am understanding you correctly, the argument is that Congress has progressively offloaded political conflict into procedural and litigation requirements. Every project gets a dozen veto points and line agencies become compliance shops rather than bodies that actually build or deliver things.
The "make-work program for lawyers" framing is too cynical though. Most of these procedures were created with real public-interest justifications: environmental review, due process, transparency. The problem is that they accumulate without anyone weighing marginal cost against marginal benefit, and they create a workforce whose comparative advantage is navigating procedure rather than doing the underlying work. That actually feeds back into the pay question, since the federal jobs that survive this dynamic are the ones where credentialing and procedural expertise matter, which selects against operational and technical talent.
100%. People don't believe me, even when I show them the numbers, that even if we fired all federal workers, it would barely make a dent in the budget. Also, wasteful spending probably varies by agency, but when I worked for the Feds, we were much more frugal than any private job I worked in. Probably to its detriment. Worker morale improves when there are little perks.
DOGE was a good example of theater being more popular than competence. Actual government reform would be worthwhile, but you need to know what you're doing, and the DOGE people overwhelmingly didn't.
I think most people acknowledge government reform would be a good thing but the idea that you can make government more efficient by just cutting personnel costs is a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives government spending
There was the thing where the not totally brain poisoned types who went to DOGE basically went, "well, there's some stuff at the margins and some bad policy, but there isn't hidden zillions to save here."
Meh, former big lawyer here, the vast majority of my fellow associates ended up at smaller firms making much less money. Plum in-house gigs are the exception and even there you probably aren’t making $250k+ base. I saw this job at OpenAI, probably the hottest and one of the highest-paid company in the world, and it pays $248-275k base: https://openai.com/careers/counsel-ai-policy-san-francisco/. $300k+ mid-career in-house mostly requires getting lucky with company stock. Most private companies match 3% or maybe 4% for 401k; 5% would be generous. Median AmLaw 200 partner comp is nowhere near $1m, maybe at the AmLaw 20. The AUSAs I know in bar association groups have similar living conditions to the private sector lawyers in those groups.
I don’t think lawyers are the closest case? They are one of the higher paid private sector positions; a lot of jobs where the alternative is academia have much smaller or even reversed gaps. What other positions did you have in mind?
Even if you stat at 100K, that almost double what I started out making a a public defender. I’ve worked at the state, federal and appellate levels- all as public defender. My salary never exceeded six figures.
That OpenAI job is for 5 years experience, so someone who’s maybe 30 at most, doesn’t include bonus (probably 20-30%) or equity, which isn’t tradeable now but probably doubles the total comp, and at public companies is equivalent to cash, and if you get promoted one level you can easily increase total comp by 50% or more. By the time you’re 40-50 you will be killing it.
You're working from bad numbers. Major Lindsey & Africa's 2024 Partner Compensation Survey, which is the industry-standard data on this, surveyed Am Law 200 partners specifically. Median was $800K, average was $1.4M, equity partners averaged $1.94M. So the median Am Law 200 partner is making $800K, not "nowhere near $1m." You've got the comparison backwards. Am Law 20 partners are way above $1M (Kirkland PPEP is over $9M). The $1m figure is actually a low estimate for AmLaw 200 partners on average.
The OpenAI listing you cite is evidence for the claim, not against it. $248-275K base is over $250K. And that's just base. OpenAI compensates heavily in PPUs/equity that bring total comp to $400K+ for that role. Looking at base only when comparing to BigLaw and federal misses the point because bonuses and equity are where the gap actually opens up.
On 401(k) match, you're comparing TSP (5%) to "most private companies." The relevant comparison for ex-BigLaw lawyers isn't most private companies, it's the kind of large public companies, big firms, and tech companies they actually end up at, which routinely match 5-7% with immediate vesting. TSP's vesting cliff for the FERS pension piece also matters.
The AUSA-bar-association comparison is selection bias. The private sector lawyers showing up to those events are disproportionately the ones who left BigLaw. The senior Kirkland partner pulling $5M isn't there.
You're right that lawyers are higher-paid than the average federal worker comparison and that academia-adjacent fields have smaller gaps. That's actually consistent with the broader point I was making, since most federal employees aren't academics. The structural compression at the top of the GS scale hits hardest exactly where the government most needs to compete with the private sector.
You’re the one who said $250k+ base, and OpenAI is one of the highest paid companies in the world. You look at a more typical big company like Walmart (which is still way better than where the average ex-biglaw associate ends up) and there are some senior roles that are above $250k but most are not: https://careers.walmart.com/us/en/results?searchQuery=Legal&careerareas=Corporate
The Kirkland partners are selection bias because that’s only tiny minority that is not fair to compare AUSAs to. It’s much fairer to compare “AUSAs I actually know” to “private sector lawyers I actually know.”
You also have to consider that these massive $1m+ private sector salaries are only in a few cities whereas AUSAs are all around the country.
No big firm I have worked at has provided any 401k match at all, and the health insurance was outrageously expensive too (I was actually on a marketplace plan as a junior associate because it was cheaper than the employer-based one).
Walmart is on the low end of Fortune 500 legal pay because of Bentonville. F500 senior counsel in NYC, Boston, or SF routinely clear $250K base. Picking the lowest-paying big employer to argue the gap isn't real is cherry-picking.
Your selection bias point cuts the wrong way. "Lawyers I know in bar association groups" filters for lawyers who do similar work and run in the same social circles as AUSAs. That's not a fair sample of where lawyers with similar credentials end up. Kirkland partners aren't outliers you can wave away, they're part of the actual distribution.
Geography is your strongest point and it's real. AUSAs in Des Moines aren't competing with NYC partners. But federal locality pay also flattens the federal side, so an AUSA in Manhattan makes roughly the same as one in Des Moines while their private-sector counterparts don't. Cuts both ways.
"Federal pay is structurally compressed at the top"
I suppose the leftist answer to this to force wage compression on the private sector through taxation. Which is presumably what happened in the 1950s-1970s?
I think a lot of voters' response to "Median Am Law 200 partner comp is well over $1M" is "that's a problem; we should fix that, not raise public-sector pay to keep up".
And these are the very voters you'd need to get on-side for top-end public-sector pay increases.
The implied mechanism is off. Federal pay was more competitive in that era partly because of explicit comparability laws (the Federal Pay Comparability Act of 1970 was passed because pay had already fallen behind in the late 1960s), and partly because the private sector wasn't yet generating the kind of top-end winner-take-all comp we see now in law, finance, and tech. The wage compression of that era came mostly from union density, sectoral wage norms, and lower returns to credentials, not directly from the tax code doing the work.
Marginal rates were nominally 70-91% but effective rates on top earners were nowhere near that because of deductions, capital gains treatment, and shelters. If high taxes were doing the compression directly, we'd expect to see the gap reopen sharply right when Reagan cut top rates in 1981. What you actually see is that the federal-private gap stayed manageable through the early 80s and exploded later, as the financialization of the economy and the BigLaw/MBA/tech compensation revolutions took hold. That's not a tax story, it's a labor market structure story.
So yes, public pay was more competitive then, but mostly because the private sector top end hadn't pulled away yet, not because taxes were holding it down.
On voter preferences, I think you're conflating two things. Voters do support marginal tax increases on top earners. They don't support the kind of confiscatory rates that would actually compress private-sector legal and finance pay down to public-sector levels. Those are different policies and only the first one polls well. The actual political constraint isn't that voters want to cap private pay, it's that they don't want to pay public employees more, full stop.
The deeper issue is that you can't run a functional regulatory state when the people you regulate significantly more than what your regulators do. This doesn't resolve by taxing the regulated industry more, it resolves by either paying regulators competitively or accepting regulatory capture as the steady state. The FIRREA carve-outs are Congress quietly acknowledging this for financial regulation. They just haven't extended the same logic to other agencies where the same dynamic applies.
Seems like you have an axe to grind against leftists. Not sure what I qualify as these days. Leftists seem to say I am center left and mods seem to say I am leftist so nobody loves me.
Also, you are just wrong on the voters you would need for top end public increases. The political coalition resisting public sector pay is the right, not the left. Starve-the-beast, "government is the problem," DOGE's popularity, decades of Republican messaging about lazy overpaid bureaucrats. None of that comes from the left. Federal worker unions are solidly Democratic-aligned and the progressive wing is the most reliable vote for federal pay increases that exists. If you tried to expand FIRREA-style pay flexibility across the government tomorrow, your hard "no" votes would be coming from House Republicans, not Bernie or AOC.
Just because I’m on this schtick lately, it bears reminding that the knowledge worker class has undertaken a lot of diffuse, nebulous rent-seeking to pump up returns to credentials. *A lot.*
We spend unconscionable amounts of infrastructure and public services budgets talking about delivering infrastructure and public services to the benefit of the opinion, planning, environmental, and engineering consultants.
Healthcare is a rat’s nest of rent-seeking on the part of capital and labor alike.
Higher education is increasingly structured to pump up humanities graduate employment by reducing students to debt peonage.
Public safety in urban spaces is a ship encrusted with non-profit barnacles impeding outcomes while costing tons of money.
There are a million examples of the professional-managerial class buttering its own bread, and everyone knows it in their bones. This is the largest reason why Democratic criticisms about the capital-owning class doing it simply do not land with the electorate.
Former appropriations staff here. I can tell you who is driving that override from 2013 on from personal experience and who is offering COLA adjustment amendments that get shot down. Hint: it aligns with the above
Yeah, I've occasionally (when I'm feeling depressed about my cases) looked at in-house positions in the Denver area and have never seen anything close to $250K other than general counsel for larger companies. Even deputy general counsel is going to be more like $175K.
Something that I found interesting about the comments about risk-aversion in the public sector is that it suggested to me that one reason European states have greater state capacity is that they are less attractive to risk-averse people because differential in job security between their public sectors and their large private sector employers is much lesser.
That's not because they have lower job security in their public sectors, but because they have much higher job security in their large private sector employers.
High-risk-tolerance Europeans tend to become independent contractors or found small businesses (employing 10 or fewer people gets you exempted from most regulations in most countries). But medium-risk-tolerance people spread across both private and public sectors.
I'd want to see some real research on this before endorsing it fully, but it seems like a worthwhile hypothesis: are European employment regulations part of why European state capacity is so much greater than American?
Sure, but our private sector capacity sucks too! At the very least worse than theirs - they don’t build their trains and rail lines in house, they contract it out!
Apparently the effect of selecting / self-sorting by personality (trait risk aversion) is stronger than the effect of changing behavior due to different circumstances.
Maybe that's not the whole story, though. There's also an asymmetry of risks. Do you have upside risks at your job, or only downside risks? If the federal government can't give you large bonuses, has limited ability to promote you, and can't promote you to a drastically higher base salary, your private upside from doing something extraordinary is gone. Conversely, your downside still exists if you take big risks against policy / standard operating procedure and you screw up.
“Apparently the effect of selecting / self-sorting by personality (trait risk aversion) is stronger than the effect of changing behavior due to different circumstances.”
This is a perfect description of my experience in the public sector.
Australia has a mandatory retirement savings scheme (superannuation) that works extremely well. Employers contribute 12-15% of your pre-tax pay to your super account. It’s tax advantaged, and since to accumulates over your career it’s easy to accumulate significant savings. This then eases the pension burden. Investing in an index fund means ~7% higher returns than what social security achieves - it’s ludicrous to only invest in treasuries.
Yes there’s some risk - but you can account for that by transitioning out of equities into safer investments as you approach retirement - which is standard.
The US government retirement system isn’t ideal but it’s roughly this, with the ability to allocate funds to roughly something like the S&P 500. The federal reserve system is MUCH BETTER, but it’s a similar principle.
The 401k system most employers have now is extremely generous and lets people generally have a ton of flexibility, but I don’t know why people don’t have a public option and the income limits on self managed IRAs are just so low
Doing this at scale in the US would *necessitate* that the huge infusion of capital actually produce an increase in real-world economic growth bordering on the revolutionary. Simply pumping up an asset bubble wouldn’t do; as people spend their paper wealth it would spike inflation.
It’s just a very, very difficult model to scale regardless of whether it’s done as a sovereign wealth fund with central management or fully individual accounts.
There is that. But isn't the rest of the world already also investing in US equities? And many US citizens are already investing via 401k and Roth plans which would be supplanted with a Singapore/Aussie style pension. I'm wondering what actual volumic effect an equity-centric pension plan would have when all is said and done.
The estimates I’ve seen are that if we mandated savings along the Aussie model as a partial replacement for Social Security, it’d introduce $50T or so of capital into asset markets over 20 years. That’s 40% of the *global* equities market.
And meanwhile the federal government would have to cover all existing Social Security outlays during that time out of general funds, since new contributions have been diverted to savings for the contributors.
Yeah realistically the issue is that if people are earning 9% returns instead of whatever T-Bills pay, monetary policy is going to need to become restrictive to clamp down on inflation once those people start trying to live much more prosperous retirements, because realistically the asset growth isn't going to create enough productive capacity to go around.
We haven't even really gotten to the boom in 401(k) funded retirements that will tell us whether *that* model was a success or failure yet, let alone whether we could scale it severalfold more.
Check back in a decade once all the elder Xers who never had substantial pensions start retiring and people publish analysis on their inflationary impact...
I would assume that we'd integrate 401(k) and IRA accounts into this system somehow, yes. I am unsure whether the figures I've seen are "on net" that accounts for this change or gross figures that do not, but even if they're gross, my understanding is that annual retirement contributions are somewhere south of $1T at present, so we'd be talking about well over doubling the total.
If those figures are already projections of the additional savings, then we're talking about tripling it.
According to google the total value of all defined contribution plans is $14 trillion, meanwhile social security pays out $1.6 trillion each year. I am not too sure what it would mean to eliminate Social Security and replace it with essentially a government run DC plan. I do think the social security/PAYGO framework is the more accurate way of accounting for people's retirement at a societal level. Since savings are actually claims on future production, it makes little sense to assume someone is entitled to a certain amount of consumption, if the country's productive capacity cannot support it for demographic or technological reasons.
Yea, I tend to think the idea of doing “let’s save for retirement” at scale just doesn’t work. The largest country by far that does is it Australia, at 0.4% of global population and ~1.5% of global economic output in PPP terms.
It would not contribute to a bubble because social security has been net outflow since 2010. $1.3 trillion in taxes is offset by $1.5 trillion in benefit payouts.
A true 401(k) style plan would give retirees more flexibility in selling, so that would change. But the government could automatically liquidate instead of leaving that up to the retiree.
If you put the remaining little pittance currently in the SSTF into the markets, fine. But that's not the proposal. The proposal is to basically have all current contributors into Social Security instead pay some fraction of that (ranging from a third to the entirety) into retirement accounts that are invested in the markets.
This would necessarily hugely increase the amount of money invested in equities (moving all SSTF contributions to private accounts would 3-5X the rate of existing retirement account deposits annually, or thereabouts), which is much more likely to inflate a bubble than to do anything else.
It would *also* require a huge sum of general revenues or debt issuance each year to cover the fact that there are no longer current contributions to Social Security to cover outlays for today's retirees.
It is, in short, completely unworkable, a fiction that holds up only if one first buys the fiction that contributors to Social Security are paying into a system that will invest the money and return it later, which is simply not true.
The only way to render our retirement/pension outlays sustainable is to ensure they're being paid into on the assumption of a slowly or not growing population and to engage in the immigration and pro-natalist policy necessary to make that assumption work.
No matter how you cut it, today's retirees are making claims on today's productive capacity; they cannot eat retirement savings or pension checks, it does not matter which.
Agree on the gap between current obligations vs funding capital accounts. Mechanistically, I see it as an account that automatically invests or withdraws from a basket of index funds. As an individual account holder you can log in to see account performance and make estimates for the future, but otherwise you have no control.
Edit: Maybe a synthesis is to start it for everyone under ~25 but also eliminate the cap on payroll taxes to help cover near term shortfalls. Make it a 40 year project.
To be clear, I am completely skeptical of the idea that there's any advantage to mandating retirement savings relative to funding retirement via taxing present-day workers. Retirement savings and pension checks do the exact same thing: they enable people to lay claim to the output of others after they stop generating output of their own. Economically speaking they are more or less equivalent, *unless* the invested savings is driving a productivity boom that expands output by the time the people who saved that money are spending it down.
I do not believe it to be possible that dumping ~40% of the global equities market capitalization into investment markets over a couple decades will do anything other than inflate an asset bubble. It will not improve outcomes and standards of living, is the point. Paper returns are not enough.
I get that, but from a political economy perspective it's practically impossible for politicians to rein in benefits. It's easier to blame things on the market, and it incentivizes politicians to focus more on long run productivity growth. The $39 trillion debt is a drag on that growth already, and it will only get worse as the trust fund's deficit grows.
For housing, the crime issue is an interesting angle. People don't say that directly to me when I talk to them, but I agree it is in the background. What also strikes me about NIMBYism, which is often left unsaid, is that home owners often don't want house prices to drop, and as Matt says, they have disproportionate power. Saying that you will lower the price of homes is going to get people against you.
That's probably true in some areas but, for example, when we lived in Fort Worth 2013-2023 the area was being built up like crazy (I think the fastest growing US metro at times) yet our house appreciated 400 percent in those ten years. Housing is so complex and is probably best treated as a regional solution than a blanket nationwide phenomenon. There's no shortage of houses in our small New Mexico town for example---I can count six houses sitting empty within a two block radius of ours and many more around town. What our town has plenty of is $15/20 per hr. jobs but a dearth of solid middle class salaries that can afford the relatively cheap prices. In the long run I tend to think the housing valuation will solve itself with the looming financial reset (which could be soon or keep being pushed down the road with more federal money printing as has been the case since 2008).
Yeah nobody wasn't the "flushing the crap" pain of the normal business cycle. And really, constantly propping up the economy with tax cuts and too much stimulus (no pain) has what has gotten us to this point. Pay now or pay later.
But reform of the anti-growth land use/building code/residency requirement morass will NOT lower house values. And I'm not persuaded that is the main motive for opposing them. I think a lot is just old fashioned concentrated (largely misperceived) costs and dispersed benefits.
Ok, so I was being a little unclear. YIMBY ideas are designed to reduce the price of houses and rent relative to wages. That can be done long-term by having wages grow faster. Whatever method you choose, people who want to make money when they sell their house will notice that.
I'm just skeptical that urbanism reforms (to include crime disorder prevention along with land use/building codes) WILL reduce statistically any homeowners value. Builders do not typically want to locate low-cost housing in high income residential areas. Converting a few SFH along a commercial corridor for a new mixed-use complex does not depress local house values.
So the argument is that we get cheaper rents/home purchases by having people move into apartment buildings/townhomes and we get this by converting single family homes into multi-family complexes? I do see how the math works out if this is the process, but I think this is difficult to explain to people even in a mathematical sense.
Im suer i happend fo some extent. It does not seem that hard toexplain, but the lower costs occur where in equilibrium they moved FROM. That’s not nexessarialy in the reforming jurisdiction.
On the indignation and leftist model, I think there is a case for it different from what Matt presents. I think the leftist critique of Trump as being cosmic vengeance has a point in the sense that he was clearly unqualified and not up to it and had numerous flaws and won anyway. There was clearly a great desire for change he tapped into. The political elite were not responding to political signals for change and so there was a strong signal sent by electing Trump in 2016. His poor governing got Biden elected, and Biden’s failures and inability to make change happen produced Trump’s re-election. In any normal political climate, Trump should not have won in 2024. The problem is that leftists think this means revolutionary socialism is now a possibility. I don’t think that is true unless the situation in the US gets much, much worse than it is now. Which will be on net worse for all of us.
The question about Israel assumes that a "good ally" of the United States is one who will bend to American will, rather than a country that partners with the US for mutual benefit. It's strange here that the apparently "anti-colonial" left has such a colonial view of US allies, and wants American allies to be client states rather than partners.
The Democrats seemed completely baffled that Biden couldn't convince Israel not to launch strikes against Hezbollah. However, they refused to try understand Israel's domestic politics, which Israel's leaders actually serve. At the time, Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, had been firing rockets at Israeli cities. Around 80,000 people were displaced from the north as their towns were being pummeled. Israel had avoided a large campaign against Hezbollah for a year at American request, but attacks kept worsening. The Israeli public demanded action, not just on the right but also on the left. What was baffling to me was that Democrats seemed unable to grasp why Israel felt it had to act.
Furthermore, Biden had not taken the Iranian threat seriously. It had unfrozen Iranian assets (which Iran could use for funding its terrorist proxies that are committed to attacking and killing Israelis), not for the large goal of curbing Iran's nuclear program, but for 5 prisoners. Is this America being a "good ally"? Israeli leaders knew they could not take the US seriously for help defending itself against Iran and its allies, so Israel needed to show strength and resolve.
Contrast that with the current situation. The US acted in partnership with Israel to strike Iran after repeated failed negotiations, showing commitment to Israel’s security. It supported action against Hezbollah. This time there was no feigned bewilderment about Israel’s actions, and Israel made real gains in degrading Hezbollah terror infrastructure. Now there is even talk in Lebanon about peace and normalization with Israel, which would be in Israel's interests. This creates political space for Israel to halt operations when it aligns with its partner’s interests.
Analysts in the US need to understand Israeli politics. Those calling to block military aid should recognize that some strands on the Israeli right also support that idea, believing US aid constrains Israel from winning wars. Without US support, Israel may feel more pressure to strike its enemies and less willingness to absorb attacks.
This continues to sound like a hostage situation rather than an alliance. Just like when the other guy proposed that Israel should align with and sell a bunch of American- and jointly-developed military technology to the PRC if the US doesn't do what it wants.
I would prefer Israel be *nothing* to the United States as we share virtually no common interests and Israel has very clearly treated its relationship with the US as a purely transactional one. There is no reason whatsoever in hell that the United States should give a flying fuck about Israeli perception of its own interests, because there is no benefit to the US national interest in doing so.
In that context, if we simply must have some kind of relationship, nothing less than "client state that jumps on demand and asks how high, to the millimeter, while on its way up" will suffice. Yet even that has no advantages for the United States, so I have no idea why we'd pursue it at all.
Israel and the United States share a lot of common interests: intelligence sharing, counterterrorism, regional stability, high tech collaborations, democratic values, security.
I agree when the purported American interest is "Israel accepts massive rocket attacks on its population centers from its neighbors who seek to eliminate it", the interests do indeed diverge.
You say, "there is no reason whatsoever in hell that the United States should give a flying fuck about Israeli perception of its own interests, because there is no benefit to the US national interest in doing so." Is this the attitude of a "good ally"?
What I am saying is that the Israel-US relationship should be a partnership based on mutual interests, benefit and security, not a superpower seeking to make smaller countries bend to its will.
We shouldn't be allies with *any* of the Arabs in the region, no matter what funny hats they wear. We don't need that sectarian violence and ethnic tension harshing the West's mellow.
I think we need a lot more dynamic pricing in the public sector but I don't know who to trust to set the prices.
I've mentioned before two jobs that are perpetually understaffed in the school district I worked for. One is higher level math jobs; most people who go in to education can't do calculus (sorry), and people who know how to do calculus usually have better options than working at a high school. Those jobs should pay more. The other perpetual understaffing is just the more difficult schools in any given district. If you figure a roughly constant % of teachers are sick every day, and the subs get to pick the jobs they want, for the same pay, most subs will choose the easiest schools, leaving the most difficult schools always some 3-4 staff members short, on top of every other problem they have. That seems like an easier fix. All you need is somebody with the skills of an emergency sub who is dedicated to one particular school.
They're related in that a lot of the workers being laid off (or expected to be laid off) from tech companies are going to be people with above-average high math skills. Yes, a lot of them won't be psychologically fitted for high school teaching, but it seems like there should be some "trickledown" effect on labor supply since a lot of the industries that those tech workers would have otherwise expected to move into are also theoretically going to be cutting back on hiring or going through layoffs too.
If any of those people were going to teach at all, intelligent 11th and 12th graders seems like the easiest transition for them to make.
Put me down as skeptical for the AI -> mass unemployment thesis in general. Maybe in specific industries, and not all at once, though I can't predict which industries.
Harry Turtledove has already written the alternate history where the left (in that world the Socialists) wins the 1928 election; the upshot is that they of course get routed in 1932, but that the right's policies are so fundamentally counterproductive to dealing with the depression that they just get returned to office anyway in 1936, after an even deeper Depression than we actually suffered.
I think this is a correct analysis. The question was always going to be how long it took before someone started seriously doing Keynesian counter-cyclical stimulus, and electing Smith in 1928 would have massively delayed that project.
Yea, a couple of us were chatting about this on the side and the conclusion was obvious: A Democrat winning in 1928 guarantees a Republican win in 1932, which means woefully pro-cyclical fiscal policy and no monetary policy to speak of, even if the nominee is (fairly intelligent and pragmatic) Herbert Hoover, which means that by 1936 we're in rough, rough shape, such that not only do the Democrats win but there's a very real chance that Socialists and agrarian left-populists hold the balance of power in Congress.
To riff on that... If that environment gets channeled productively then we probably have a more effective version of our world's New Deal, in which a bunch of useful stuff gets built and a bunch of income-compressing policy gets enacted and a period of 2-1/2 party politics.
If it breaks down in acrimony the next step is probably a complete mess in 1940 that results in a civil war featuring a very large revolutionary leftist fashion or an outright socialist victory at the ballot box that probably still provokes a (less messy) civil war.
How important was Keynesian-style stimulus to economic recovery in FDR's first term?* It tended to be *historically* big for the time (somewhat over 5% of GDP) but actually was no bigger than the deficits we're running now. Given the depth of the depression, I'm not convinced that that level of deficit spending really jumpstarted the economy. Most of FDR's actions were ameliorative to help people get by while the economy slowly recovered on its own mostly.
What really jumpstarted the economy were the absolutely humongous deficits needed in WW2.
*In the second term he went to austerity which was idiotic and that plunged the economy into recession. (Yes yes, a recession during a depression -- words are funny.)
"This is basically a large program for collective ownership of the means of production. The Bush administration had no interest in doing socialism, so instead their idea was basically to cut Social Security benefits and put some extra money into everyone’s 401(k) account."
Matt bravo on this for basically hinting that George W. Bush of all people in a way came closest achieving true Communism but backed off because he said "wait that's true Communism!"
But want to focus on this last statement "People would, on average, end up better off that way, but they would have a lot of exposure to idiosyncratic risk." Is this statement meant to show a) why GWB's privatization idea was good or b) this is why it would have been a terrible idea. I'm guessing b) or at least I'm hoping you're saying b) given what happened just 3 years later. Or heck what happened in March, 2020. I know the primary purpose of social security is to guard against the risk of old age poverty which used to be endemic in pre-modern times (there's a reason the old beggar is a stable of stories for time immemorial), but I sort of think it's underrated how much it also acts as a huge economic stabilizer in times of economic distress.
Ironically, a way to ensure new housing doesn't beget more crime is to build more expensive "luxury" housing. Just price the criminals out from the start.
There was a couple the other day looking for a home in the neighborhood. Looked like a nice family, couple of kids. Tony and Carmela if I recall. I'm excited about them moving in!
I didn't watch the show but I'd bet that in his non-working hours Tony was the most scrupulous, law-abiding person in the neighborhood. Why attract unneeded law enforcement attention? And if some idiot is attempting a series of break-ins on the street, well, let's just say he might have means for dealing with that without requiring bothering the police.
Which is to say, he'd probably be just the kind of neighbor you want to live in your very nice neighborhood.
Tony definitely mixed his business life and personal life. Among other things, he bankrupted the father of his daughter's friend and his goons threatened a soccer coach who was moving to another opportunity. He would be a scary neighbor to have.
It's odd that Singapore appears in the answer to the Social Security question but not in the answer to public sector employment.
Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, famously said, " If you pay peanuts, you will end up with monkeys." As a result, Singapore has one of the most highly compensated public sectors in the world. It is also has very high standards and has very little corruption.
This is a policy choice and one that the Singaporeans themselves talk about a lot.
Lee Kuan Yew hired the best public sector workers and then bathed them in air conditioning to create a modern administrative state
So much of Lee Kuan Yewism is just basic competence that somehow the rest of the world forgot.
P.S. He was a great leader but it was the 2nd wealthiest country in Asia and very well organised when he took power.
Singapore also didn’t have the legacy of structural racism creating a permanent underclass like we do for which the state bears a lot of responsibility for creating.
Seems like that omits some extremely severe racial challenges. The state was born out of communal riots between Malays and ethnic Chinese and racial quota systems are deeply embedded in their society, in part because the 3 major groups had, and continue to have, such different Socio-economic backgrounds.
I mean it very much did, it had a recent history of violent race riots.
It was incredibly segregated,with huge racial differences and a racial civil war. Lee Kuan Yew survived a racial genocide (not from locals admittedly) by hiding in a shed.
The United States has a pretty permanent calcified underclass essentially beyond remediation, and Singapore does not.
Any sort of Singapore like policy has to get to the fact that this population doesn’t exist in Singapore and if it did, it wouldn’t for long through a couple carrots and a whole host of authoritarian sticks. Not quite apples to apples but they executed their way out of their gun- edited to say gun, not gum- and kidnapping) problem.
I say this as someone who loves Singapore and has spent a lot of time there. They have a solution set we just don’t have.
What do you consider to be the calcified underclass in America? West Virginia? The entire population of Mississippi?
??? "The United States has a pretty permanent calcified underclass essentially beyond remediation,"
I know I'm being trolled, about what? The opioid epicemic? China shocked Rest belt? What?
“…permanent calcified underclass essentially beyond remediation…”
It’s our politics that is calcified. We’ve never tried the obvious solution—at least not in the modern era.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2015/03/31/singapore-a-fascinating-alternative-to-the-welfare-state/
Malay and Han diaspora relations….
And Tamil, who are the poorest group.
Yes, who were brought as indentured workers.
Yeah they suck. They weren’t slaves for 200 years!
??? "Like we do"
The United States has a calcified underclass that simply does not have meaningful membership in society, nor any social mobility, and which no real government intervention can change because at this point the causes are endogenous to the class.
This underclass is heterogenous, but the US is somewhat unique in that they are directly responsible for creating part of it with slavery and Jim Crow.
If you mean what I think you mean, I disagree.
For example, better policing could improve welfare and disrupt some social pathologies in low income urban areas.
Denser public transit (more smaller busses) could help peole get to jobs.
The EITC could be more of a wage subsidy than a family income suplment.
None of these is a panacea but there are probably others that pass cost-benfit tests tha I haven’t thought of.
TBF this is something both republicans and democrats talk about A LOT.
Like I had a conversation with someone very high up in the administration who basically has argued for higher representative and civil servant pay his entire career.
The problem is voters think elected politicians make too much money, which is more money than they do
I don't think politicians pay is the issue, it is that of their researchers and assistants.
A researcher and assistant might need to be BETTER compensated than the politician they work for.
They probably should be, it is a harder and less glamorous job and one with worse future employment opportunities.
Politician pay is a HUGE issue.
Sure government pay isn’t great (but outside of GS it’s fine). Representative pay and party rules basically disqualify anyone who isn’t really wealthy from running for the house
They get paid almost three times the average salary.
They have to maintain two residences to serve their local constituents and be in DC. They travel all the time and have long hours. They spend much of their time dialing for dollars. And sometimes people try to kill them. It’s a tough job.
They get paid three times the average salary for a job that is much more than three times as difficult as the average job.
If you're someone of above average intellectual ability, with strong people and communication skills, willing to work 7 day 70+ hour work weeks including substantial travel away from family, you would be hard pressed to not be making substantially more than a member of Congress, in most parts of the country easily double.
We don't need to increase their pay to a level where the primary motivation to become a member is the pay scale, but we should make it high enough that a person with the requisite skill isn't being asked to make a substantial material sacrifice for their family in order to take the job.
I make more than a Congressperson's salary in a middling cost-of-living city doing a vastly easier job that typically fits within 40 hours a week and requires me to travel 8-12 times a year.
I'd wager this is true of the large majority of the Americans commenting here.
I'd have to be completely insane to try to become a US congressional representative unless I came into a ton of money first... which is precisely the problem.
See you think they are paid enough, and you haven’t actually dug into what composes their cost of living- that’s fine, you’re the median voter.
The problem is as a rep you have to maintain two households in two places and fly back and forth- that eats up all th salary and more.
Do they not receive payment for their second home? In the UK the government pays rent on the cost of one of a house in London or a house in the constituency
I am a British politician, I am the opposite of the median American voter.
The average person would not be a good choice for congress. You want smart, high-achieving people who have had successful careers (in politics, business, the military, etc) before they got there.
Find an ambitious smart 50 year old who's got three kids and a mortgage and a deep interest/commitment to politics. Maybe he's a lawyer, maybe he was a midlevel corporate executive, whatever. He can probably make considerably better money doing something other than running for congress. And he presumably feels like his obligations to get his kids through college and make sure he and his wife can retire to something other than a trailer park are more pressing than his desire to serve the country, so the offer is likely something like "leave your successful career to become a representative, take a $50K/year pay cut and lose all the expected income of your current career, spend the next few years maintaining two residences and bouncing between home and Washington DC, then you can have a couple terms as a representative, after which maybe you can be a lobbyist or something."
We should stick a zero on the end of the pay of every federal elected official and congressional staffer. The cost would be negligible but the benefits would be pretty big. We should also substantially increase civil service pay, but that actually does start costing real money since there are a lot of civil service employees.
They do not get paid three times the average salary for comparably selective and difficult jobs.
It's crazy we are so reluctant to give politicians more pay. We believe so strongly in the idea that you should be able to get rich via talent we have relatively low marginal tax rates at the top but apparently actually running the country isn't something we think should be rewarded. Yet we still want them to be the kind of smart, articulate and educated people who could make a boatload in private Industry and then we get upset when they try to land a good job after they leave and worry about the influence corporations who hire their spouses and children have.
If we don't want them to be influenced by whoever takes them out to a fancy dinner pay them a million bucks a year so it isn't a concern. If that means they vote .1% better because they aren't worried about their next job that's great!
If we aren't willing to pay for it we get only the already wealthy and those likely to leave for a lobbying job running the country.
They’re paid a lot more than the voters are. It’s easily one of the best paying jobs in the US at 4x median, placing it in the 92nd percentile of earnings.
I’m pretty sure governments generally pay less than that. IIRC, the UK pays MPs only 3x the median.
It sounds like the UK gives a housing allowance for a London residence, while US congress members are expected to get their Washington residence with their own pay.
That would make them roughly equivalent as a multiple.
Personally, I think a housing allowance would be easier to justify than higher pay.
Australia and Canada also do some kind of housing allowance (the latter only if your primary residence is a certain distance from Ottawa)
Well say no more, clearly the UK is a model to emulate!
It’s just the thing I had to hand because, when I visited last April, I became obsessed with comparing wages, prices, rents, etc.
That and sitting in Trafalgar Square with the lions on Nelson’s column.
4x the median all people, but around 2x (or less, depending on your measure) for people at the peaks of their careers.
Get a job as a representative in my state house and it caps out (as the speaker) at under 40K. Unless you are a billionaire trying to skip to the end, these are the steps you take on your way up to being in the US Congress. C'est impossible.
Aren’t those state house jobs part time? Think they are in Texas.
Six months of the year, so you can DoorDash the other 6 months.
In Texas, I think the legislature pays $7200 for 6 months of work. I think that's less than you would get for six months of full-time minimum-wage work.
US bureaucrats make more than French or Italian bureaucrats. Also, why do we want them paid generously when their only job is to execute the laws congress passes.
Because effective execution of the law is very important. Would you ask why we should pay firefighters well, if their only job is to execute the law? Or prosecutors? Or police officers?
o don’t think we should pay firefighters well. i think they should be paid market rate wages
You're evading the issue, which is really about your assumption that competence in "only . . . execut[ing] the laws" is not particularly important.
Wait, do you think we should pay US bureaucrats market rate wages, or artificially low wages because "their only job is to execute the laws congress passes"?
i think the civil
service should pay non gaudy wages. plenty of professionals still make give figures and plenty more make very low six figures
" If you pay peanuts, you will end up with monkeys."
Shows what he knew. The elephants like the peanuts. You'll end up with elephants. And then no one will be able to mention them.
You'll have to lead them out of the room, and then we can mention them. Problem is, they never forget how to get back in the room (or anything else). Also, you can't have non-discriminatory hiring when a white elephant will bankrupt you.
In fairness, DWD's question on SS explicitly mentioned Singapore within it.
"Politicians play games with budgets to avoid bad financial optics" seems like common bad pattern. In Boston, we paid $100M in police overtime because (quoting my local Axios email):
Accurately budgeting for the real cost of police overtime would look like a massive increase to the BPD budget, and that would be hard to explain to residents, according to Wu.
"It would be seen as a 20 to 30 percent increase in that budget, which is not palatable, and it's hard to get that nuance out," Wu told the Globe this month.
Wu telling the Globe that she's concerned about the optics of ... accurately accounting for police expense? Seems very hard to build a high functioning government with this kind of silliness at the core.
It isn't *that* hard to explain a city budget. Philadelphia Mayor Parker does it at town halls with a PowerPoint full of nice graphics that explain where the city's money comes from and where it goes, and where she's proposing to make changes and why.
The irony of explaining how hard it is to communicate with the public ... to the Boston Globe.
Unfortunately this is no longer ironic, which is one of the problems.
True and fair. Tho a 41 year old mayor who can't "get that nuance out" in some other way probably doesn't have a super hot future in politics.
> PowerPoint full of nice graphics
This reminds me... the State of the Union is such a snore. I haven't watched one since the Clinton administration. I'd like to see the President release a video summary of accomplishments the day before the SOTU, then do a presentation instead of just a speech. Steve Jobs style.
And our educated, lily-white proggies *hate* her for it, along with making religious references in speeches, supporting public safety in black neighborhoods, putting her name on public works projects (all of which had her predecessors names on them back in the day), focusing her housing policy on working- and middle-class families' needs, and having the gall to, you know, be doing a reasonable job of running this place without the surname "Gym."
Perfect, no, but a lot better than I expected after voting for the other gal, and enough that she's got my vote next May (not that it matters).
Thank Christ for middle-class black respectability politics.
Why can’t the message be that Boston is overpaying for policing and needs to, you know, do something about it?
Presumably because if you send that message they'll go on an illegal strike again and all of your crime-rate gains will disappear.
Glad you've finally agreed with me & the other neoliberals on here that unions are in fact bad!
I would expect precisely the same behavior from the PD in Charlotte or whatever (take your pick of red state city that bans collective bargaining).
Unions are a tool to get workers what they want; they are not the only one. Most of the time what workers want is good. Sometimes it's not. On the rare occasions when workers want bad things, unions will help them get them. So will those other tools. That doesn't mean we should get rid of unions, any more than it means we should, I dunno, ban vacation time because workers might spend it lobbying for shitty policies.
Unions involving people that have the right to state violence are bad. I also don't think the army should have a union either.
If teachers do a soft strike, people don't die.
Also as noted it's not like police in non-union states are agreeable to reform either.
>Also as noted it's not like police in non-union states are agreeable to reform either
Respectfully, who gives af if any public employees are 'agreeable' to reform or not. Their job is to take orders from their employer- if they don't like those orders, they're certainly free to quit. The state needs to have a strict hierarchical relationship with the security services!
Imagine if someone said 'well that unit of Marines isn't agreeable to orders from the elected President. They feel like doing their own thing this week'. You can see what the problem is here, no?
Fair point, I was being flip, the message would be something like "We need to hire more police officers and civilian employees and probably raise their base pay" with the unstated bit being we need to cut down the (ridiculous) amount of over time they are reaping. And your point about striking is well taken, I do not like that we have so little leverage against police unions and that their interests are not aligned with the public's.
It always seems to me that the simple answer is that leftists see the people more likely to influence Democratic policy as the bigger threat to their path to power, thus the double standard there over getting their chance to later challenge Republican policy.
I think it is simpler, more fundamental, and more tragic than that. Matt wrote:
“progressives ... should just accept that basically all Democrats have preferences to the left of the status quo. If they want to move politics to the left, the way to achieve that is to help Democrats beat Republicans.”
Matt knows — has written elsewhere — they will never do that. A tragedy of democracy is that normal people will not emotionally accept the idea that other normal people have wildly different views on reality. Instead, they believe that governance should be easy and is made difficult by perfidy. The flavor of this specific to the Left is that they believe:
1. Government has been captured by the Right (at all times and places — in NYC this role is filled by the Council, Hochul, the police, etc.)
2. The People are naturally leftist, but imperfectly aware of their own leftism
3. We the self-aware Left therefore speak in the People’s true voice (to which they have imperfect access)
4. We the Left are therefore always and never the true vanguard of democracy — always the vanguard of what it should be and never the vanguard of what it is
I just finished up the Rest is History 4 parter on England in the 70s. The Labour Left wanted such extreme actions when they had razor thin margins (nationalize everything, ban imports, etc) and fought Prime Minister Callaghan whenever he tried to curtail debt fueled spending.
This hasn't changed. The UK Green Party keeps talking about screwing the bond market.
So does Andy Burnham despite being a competent and centrist ex-Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
I think Burnham is being deliberately disingenuous. It's entirely possible to read everything he says as "we should pay off our debts so we're not subject to the bond market", but he says it in ways that the leftists he attracts aren't put off.
I don't know that he can get back into the surplus of the late 90s/early 00s, but I think he'd like to.
To be fair, the Greens probably are too
The problem was that Marcia Williams could bring the whole thing tumbling down with one phone call. *holds up handbag*
I loved that one.
I do think there is a significant divergence between the tactics of militant trade unionists and the general far left.
The comment is more with internal discord between elected politicians. So much of the story mirrors the Build Back Better bullshit.
It’s kind of crazy that you have an executive who wants to consolidate power in the executive deciding to make the entire apparatus he governs basically Swiss cheese. Not only that but disgruntled and uninspired Swiss cheese at that.
Well, if one looks at the entire history of Trump's private sector life, the reality that is quite clear is he was always a staggerlingly bad executive, staggeringly bad, incapable of learning...
He's a masterful showman / marketer with near zero actual managerial savoir-faire, and it's been consistent since his first days in Real Estate and then into casinos, etc.
The idiots who gave him the show Apprentice deserve to be sent to a Gulag for the fundamental damage to the Republic they opened up by giving him his scamming opening to the wider American public.
As a friend who grew up in Queens said, "We have always known this about him. Too bad it is taking the rest of the country so long to figure it out."
Yup....
The biggest hope for a post Trump future is driven by just how short sighted and bad at policy he is. He's also aggressively grabbed the other third rail of American politics by directly causing a spike in gas prices. I can't think of any other politician that wouldn't be extremely sensitive to that, and yet. It's headscratchingly dumb.
To be fair, Bibi probably did have a well designed power point with lots of convincing picture and figures.
It wasn't a powerpoint. It was a video.
> At one point, the Israelis played for Mr. Trump a brief video that included a montage of potential new leaders who could take over the country if the hard-line government fell. Among those featured was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, now a Washington-based dissident who had tried to position himself as a secular leader who could shepherd Iran toward a post-theocratic government.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-war.html
Matt had a very catty-but-accurate remark about this article, roundabout-suggesting that the reason it portrayed Vance so well is because Vance was the one controlling the narrative because Vance was the one leaking to the press.
This makes Trump sound like a baby mystified by jangling keys…
He is well into his second childhood.
But that works both ways, I don't know how the Dems would fare if someone good a policy and politics like Rubio took over the GOP.
Rubio taking control in 2017 has access to human capital. Rubio taking over in 2029 has a party with scant human capital.
It does not take a huge amount of human capital just to NOT do stupid things. [Hanania id right, but it's irellevant.]
It took more human capital to come up with psuedo rationales for the Bush/Trump1/Trump2 tax cuts and deficits, tariffs, and deportations policies than NOT to have done them.
Republicans would have an unbeatable electoral advantage if Trump had done literlaly nothing.
It is going to be a problem, I think a GOP under Rubio will recruit a lot of previously apolitical lawyers and businessmen which does cause issues.
That’s not really true, there’s a solid reformicon group who held there nose and joined this admin post DOGE and a huge group on k street
That is part of why I still would say Trump is a sultanist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanism) and not a fascist, notwithstanding that a lot of his flunkies these days are fascists.
It is funny that description works for both Starmer and Trump despite them having completely different policies, personalities and attitudes to government.
Sorry, can you explain? How exactly is Starmer an autocrat who is consolidating power?
Neither me nor the original comment used the term autocrat.
Starmer is consolidating power in a No.10 operation which is in total crisis
Ok, my sense is that Starmer is getting bad press and looking weak. How is he consolidating power? To me it looks like power is draining away from him by the day.
He and his people see a lot of that apparatus as hostile to them.
Think of Stalin purging the Red Army in the years between the wars. This wasn't because Stalin didn't want a strong army in some abstract sense, it was because he wanted to make sure he kept power. (And he was a charming combination of ruthless, paranoid, and bloodthirsty.)
And if you dare pointed out to Stalin that randomly murdering and deporting people adversely affected the performance of the Red Army you would soon be dead.
The illusion of the competent dictator is just that, an illusion.
In the new budget they basically want to get rid of the GAO.
This hasn’t stopped him from bombing, jailing, deporting, travel-banning millions of people. As long as you have the security services with guns on your side, you can exercise a lot of power even with a much reduced bureaucracy.
Absolute nonsense.
His action areas are on the margins.
Overseas war actions only infime minority of Americans give the slightest fuck about, foreign policy and action gets no real domestic political attention.
Banning travel to the US falls into the same space, no significant electorate really cares at all, falling into the Give No Real fucks space. Yes your views you think this is Worst Thing Evah, but most Americans give no fucks, right or wrong they give no fucks at all.
His deporting of illegal immigrants was and remains aligned with a broad majority support.
It is fundamentally indicative that the one area he has beat a retreat on is when his "security services" - ICE twats - went too far and unambigious native-born US citizens got killed, the support collapsed and despite his evil bastard Miller pushing, he had to beat a retreat and Miller has had to go silent even when he's had openings (and frankly the most dangerous creature in Trump world is Miller).
He has not been able to excercise extensive domestic power in reality - not by any proper authoritarian standard - this requires a degree of popularity and degree of showing payoff on actions, real payoffs. The leaking and spinning from his own WH in recent WSJ very clearly indicates even within the sycophant circles they know well the ship is taking on water.
Dan Drezner has perfect summary from more than a year ago, and is spot on for the fundamental error of Lefties in fact giving too much credit to Trumpian action rather than working to highlight his fundamental incapacity. https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-weakness-and-incompetence-of
Authoritarian regimes gain extra power from the acquisence from some combination of actual achievement in suppression, positive support in population that is not a narrow minority, and sense of inevability. Trump is not achieving that - except ironically with people like you.
He has enough state power still to ruin the lives of millions of people and kill thousands, despite weakening the bureaucracy; whether the median voter supports some of this or not is irrelevant to the question of how much state power Trump has.
you have galloped to move an utterly different subject.
Trump's ability to kill people overseas has about nothing to do overall with his ability to execute real authoritarian control in domestic US.
They are different subjects.
Your inability to distinguish between your concerns and domestic action leads to fundamentally fuzzy-headed nonsense.
There is very little to zero relatioship between what the comment was about - domestic power consoilidtion - implicity authoritarian action - and ability to deploy the vast US war machine to bomb Johnny Foreigner on various flimsy pretexts and whims.
Given zero Rally Round the Flag effect that is quite visible in the miserable ratings on even the war itself, and beyond on inflation and economy, Trump's impulsive destructive actions are in fact undermining his state capacity.
ETA: for maximum clarity - Orange Man is Doing Bad Things where he can get away with it is not synonym with Orange Man has set himself up for undertaking real state action for domestic power.
Orange man going bad incredibly harmful idiotic things using US bombers and missiles in the Carribean, in the Gulf is bad, but fundamentally says zero (in fact arguably less than zero) about his domestic state capacity. Less than zero as it rather arguably appeared Orange Man pivoted to bombing and killing and banning Johnny Foreigner because it's what he can get away with easily and as he has the attention span of a mole-rat and the organisational discipline of a decapited chicken. This is Bad. It is bad morally for whole range of moral systems, it is bad in self-interest of national self-interest as frittering away power and treasture (expensive missiles for completely trivial tactical booms that look nice to Orange Man on TV but achieve little on cost-benefit relative to strategic objective), it is bad actually for him politically
Non-MAGA should be taking these lessons, as Drezner was very correct on pointing more than a year ago (and we have seen play out). Losing breeds losing.
It makes Orange Man foolish play against Comey more foolish as his utterly foolish play against Powell.
All these things and his repeated fails say not more state capacity deployable, rather they show self-sabotage, own-goals.
While not happy per se about my own energy bill and possibility my flight to EU this summer to attend an energy conference is going to go through the roof or be cancelled.... I am happy about the election year incompetence (lemons into lemonade view).
It's the pernicious corruption of corporate America that's more of a problem. But that ain't state capacity.
Ah the Billioniares are the Problem gambit.
I'm sure there are many billionaires who aren't causing problems. Substantial evidence of that is that I have no idea who they are. The guys kowtowing to the regime, not so much.
Agree that Wieners housing work is excellent, but on AI the distinction seems less clearly pro-Wiener.
Zachary Jones at One Thousand Means (onethousandmeans.substack.com) suggests that Public First PAC (the main pro AI regulation PAC that is supporting candidates like Alex Bores) should immediately stop spending against Saikat because he’s probably better than Scott for AI safety. He argues that Saikat has an explicit AI policy plan supporting specific safety regulations, while Wiener doesn’t appear to have federal AI-policy proposals on his website.
Saikat also probably understands the AI stuff better because not only does he have a computer science degree from Harvard, he has worked in tech (he was one of the first employees at Stripe).
Didn’t Matt do a whole thing about how politicians should have directional policies not plans?
Plans within plans!
re your question that was answered...what does Ro Khanna potential mean? That dude really sucks.
While it was a lot of fun watching all the internal discord in MAGA world about the Epstein stuff, it really is a massive moral panic that is incredibly dumb and overblown.
Ro Khanna, btw, just tweeted this corrupt slopulist garbage yesterday:
"I stand with @Teamsters. We do not have planes without pilots. We need drivers on trucks for safety, edge cases, and inclement weather. AI should be for the people, not just billionaires. I will continue to fight for legislation to stand up for truck drivers that was vetoed. "
I don’t think the Epstein stuff counts as a “moral panic.” If anything the accountability for various people, including Trump, implicated in the very real underage sex trafficking he was engaged in has been nil.
"Underage sex trafficking" most of the women were sex workers in their 20s who voluntarily did sex work and are now being described as "survivors."
Apparently Epstein hired a hooker for himself who was like 17 at the time -- and he was rightly punished for that -- but the idea that prepubescent girls are being forcibly kidnapped and made to perform sex acts on a cabal of international elites is wrong despite being widely held. And that's why it's a moral panic.
Ok, that’s wonderful! So if everything is above board and everyone was a willing participant, why haven’t the full unredacted Epstein files been released already? What does anyone have to hide?
Are you not familiar with the dozens of underage girls who were lured to give Epstein massages that became sexual? Or the Virginia Giuffre allegations against Prince Andrew?
I agree that the public's beliefs of Epstein's crimes go way beyond what there's credible evidence for (and even beyond what could be postulated by grounded speculation.) But what's publicly known does go beyond "Epstein accidentally had sex with a 17 year old prostitute."
It's also fair to note that much of Epstein's terrible behavior falls just barely short of criminal. He was a horrible guy who used money to take advantage of vulnerable women and it's genuinely unnerving that so many rich and famous people associated with him. But, without the pedophilia angle, it wouldn't have become a moral panic.
Rich men raping underage girls is a “moral panic”? Bruh
exactly what I mean -- what underage girls were being raped?
Yeah, releasing the Epstein files made a bunch of guilt-by-association stories about prominent people and created bad incentives for the future wrt people being willing to talk to investigators and such. It was fun to watch Trump et al squirm and see sleazeballs like Summers get their comeuppance, but I think the net effect here was bad.
What matters is bringing MAGA down, not anything about its substance, which I’ll never know about (though it’s pretty obvious to me that Epstein was an intelligence operative running a honeypot). I couldn’t really care less about the acts involved but for their potential to bring down MAGA, but since that’s the most important thing the Epstein files were fairly important.
Yeah, can't get on board with that; the Teamsters and their ludicrous rent seeking should be crushed.
Scott Wiener is arguably the most effective legislator in the California Legislature right now. He would be an able successor to Nancy Pelosi. And he will be as left wing as necessary— there is no policy that would have a chance of passing in Congress where he would be to the right. Why not elect someone with a proven track record who matches the ideology of the district? Saikat would be more effective in the California Legislature with its Democratic super majority. He should demonstrate what he can do rather than buy his way into the seat.
Oh, I forgot that Saikat was the author of SB 1047 (killed by industry lobbying even after significant compromising) and SB 57 (narrowly passed after similar major watering-down). And these have been like...two out of maybe five total AI bills with actual teeth, anywhere in the nation, that weren't so terribly crafted that they'd run afoul of a constitutional challenge in some way. The opposition to both mostly came from OpenAI and a16z, whose own anti-AI regulation PAC, Leading The Future, is both an actual insane cartoon villain + led to the creation of the much-smaller Public First in response.
Meanwhile, Saikat's own mailer tells me he wants to tax AI companies to "fund a federal jobs guarantee, worker transition support, and a national plan to create new, high-wage industries and jobs." Classic everything bagel bullshit. Also, his FASA (Federal AI Safety Administration) plan is completely unworkable under the current administration, which has fought tooth and nail against almost all forms of transparency regulation, content labeling, slop spreading, etc. - as we've already seen with numerous stalled and failed state-level bills attempting these same things. The official Trump position remains a federal preemption moratorium on almost all AI regulations, to be superceded with a framework at the federal level - which is basically currently nothing, aside from a bit of sop to online child safety (and you know where they're really trying to go with this - age verification, stripping Section 230, etc.)
Furthermore, Saikat "will work to have the government buy up some of the major AI companies for pennies on the dollar and turn them into public infrastructure - dedicating computing power to curing rare diseases, modeling climate change, and advancing science [which it already does]" - He Admit It, he wants to nationalize private companies. The Trump admin just got done trying to de facto nationalize Anthropic via the supply chain risk designation + threat of Defense Production Act, and that shoe doesn't fit any better if it's on the left foot. Lastly, Saikat "will fight to make big corporations put labor on their boards, create a 32-hour work week, and tax the major AI companies [that the government owns now???] to fund a federal jobs guarantee and share AI wealth directly with taxpayers". So in addition to being a useless slop machine overbuilt on a hype bubble, AI is also so powerful that it'll cure cancer and solve climate, and we can turn it into an UBI money machine after buying the parts at fire sale prices. Uh huh.
What an idiot wannabe politician. Even without Wiener's legendary edge on housing, just on the narrow grounds of AI, I'd *still* vote Wiener because he's actually Done The Work here too. And no, I don't trust someone to understand AI just because they have a CS degree from Harvard (academia is way behind the curve on this topic) or because they've "worked in tech". Not if they run on pure vibes-powered hopium like this. Watch what people actually say and do, not what their paper qualifications are - or who they claim backs them when she actually doesn't, that being AOC.
Fear of crime by NIMBYs in affluent areas is exactly why we should be flexible towards (or even outright ignore) "affordable housing". People in nice places do not want people making 150% of the federal poverty level in their neighborhood. Build the fanciest apartments/condos in the nicest areas and charge a mint for them. Rely on moving chains to reduce the cost of housing for everyone else.
"People in nice places do not want people making 150% of the federal poverty level in their neighborhood."
You are correct
But also, you can make these fears diminish if you actually enforce the laws and maintain public order.
I don’t think you can make them diminish that greatly. Even poor people who follow every law are just so aesthetically and temperamentally different that people are extremely uncomfortable with the idea.
It's more of an overtime sort of thing; generational.
"To attract talented and committed public employees, we offer higher-skilled people lower pay but better benefits, notably very high job security and pensions compared with the private sector. This yields a mix of dedication, talent, and risk-aversion. Does this approach make sense to you? In this context, what limits, if any, should we place on public employee unionization?"
We don't do this. This is a lie born from a different generation of civil service. Part of the problem we have is we do get the government we pay for and the government isn't just a bit lower than the private sector with better benefits and job security. There is a massive gulf between the private sector and the government and the benefits are not better.
And it only gets worse the more you progress in your career which means the government loses its most experienced and competent (sometimes) employees to the private sector.
This is true for high-ranking jobs, but not as much so for middle and low-ranking ones. When I worked for the Feds, the thing I appreciated was that the lowest-ranked people - the people who would get no benefits beyond those required by law in the private sector - got decent benefits and better-than-private-sector pay (still difficult to live on in Boston). The health coverage I got as a mid-ranked person was much better than anything I have been offered in the private sector - admittedly, in a low-paying field. The higher you rank, the better you can do in the private sector.
Yeah I don’t think this is controversial but I think the number of years into your career where you hit the break point is getting lower and lower.
I don’t think most people believe the federal government has an entry-level hiring problem
It does have an entry level problem. Many agencies are very gray and have suffered defacto hiring freezes for years.
Let me rephrase, I don't think the federal government lacks for entry level candidates. I think hiring freezes + USAJobs causes said problem but that is self imposed.
Eh for financial regulators pay is competitive with most financial services until very senior ranks, and even then there are pseudo privates like FINRA and Freddie Mac that stay competitive with industry.
What's notable about financial regulators? They operate outside the GS scale under FIRREA. FINRA isn't even a government agency, it benchmarks comp directly to the industry it regulates. Freddie and Fannie are explicitly benchmarked to private financial firms by FHFA.
You're describing what should be standard across the government and using it as evidence there's no problem. It's the exception.
I think I agree with you, but I would say for a lot of government there are jobs with no real private sector analogue… and once you do have a private sector analogue there’s also sorts of special pay magic to close the gap to industry.
It’s not enough, and it should be less agency dependent, but it’s also not fair to say that, like, DERA attorneys are slumming it at a gs-13
Fair, and I'd grant both points. DERA attorneys are SK scale, not GS, so they're closer to industry comp than the standard federal lawyer comparison suggests. That's the FIRREA carve-out doing real work. And yes, plenty of federal jobs (intelligence, certain prosecutorial niches, mission-specific regulatory roles) don't have a clean private analogue, which makes the comparison messier than just "fed pay vs market pay."
The "agency-dependent" framing is exactly the issue though. Whether you're slumming it depends entirely on whether Congress remembered to give your agency special pay authority. DERA, fine. SEC enforcement, fine. AUSA in main DOJ, GS-15 cap. Antitrust attorney at DOJ competing with white-shoe firms, GS-15 cap. NIH researcher competing with biotech, GS-15 cap (mostly). Patent examiner, special pay authority. Attorney at the same patent office doing rule writing, GS scale. The system is a patchwork of recognized exceptions rather than a coherent compensation structure, and which side of the line you fall on is largely accidental.
So I'd agree with your basic point but flip the framing. The exceptions prove the rule isn't working, not that the system is fine.
My favorite, most egregious example is the crazy DOD supplements people can get in cyber that basically are section dependent.
That’s because you can cross the street and go work for Google team zero (pick your company) at 600k a year in some positions, and maybe make 110 in others.
"The exceptions prove the rule isn't working, not that the system is fine."
I think I agree with your underlying point, but not this. The government is extremely large. I'm not sure a systematic rule across it is workable. Its seems more reasonable to me that the government will need a number of different rules based on very different roles it needs to fill.
Then you should have a established system for that flexibility as opposed to a patchwork of exceptions. I’m not saying expand the GS scale and lock everyone in. I’m saying the concept of a GS scale across an entire government doesn’t make sense which is why in certain areas you’ve seen these exceptions made but not in a consistent manner.
It’s not that massive, at least for federal government (state and local is another story). For lawyers, people think there’s a massive gap because of the starting salary difference between government lawyers and big firm lawyers but 90%+ of big firm lawyers burn out after a few years and end up at much lower-paying jobs at smaller firms or in companies where they make about the same or at most a little more than federal government lawyers, who by age 40 the typical private sector lawyer is not making much more than the typical federal government lawyer.
The BigLaw burnout thing doesn't really hold up. Yeah, plenty of associates leave by year 5-7, but most go in-house at big companies making $250K+ base with bonus and equity, not "about the same as a GS-15." The ones who land at small firms making federal-lawyer money are a real group but not the median outcome.
A senior federal attorney tops out around $200K with DC locality. Median Am Law 200 partner comp is well over $1M. Senior in-house counsel at large public companies are routinely $300-450K total comp at 40. That's not a "not much more" gap, that's a 2-3x gap, and it widens once you factor in bonuses (basically nonexistent in government), 401(k) matches that beat the TSP's 5%, and equity comp.
And lawyers are actually the closest case for your argument. For federal employees with master's or professional degrees, total compensation is below comparable private-sector workers, while it's higher for those with bachelor's or less. Federal pay is structurally compressed at the top, exactly where the talent the government most needs to attract sits.
One more thing: the wage gap isn't static. It's been above 20% every year since 2007, hit 27% in 2023, and federal raises have lagged private-sector wage growth almost every year for fifteen years. 2025's 2% raise against ~3.6% private wage growth widened it again. The "not that massive" framing assumes a snapshot of a gap that's been moving in one direction for two decades.
And Biden and Dems fucked over federal workers with his last COLA. They could have given Feds a boost, but instead they handed out awards during the lame duck that basically were “persecute and fire me Trump!” signs.
And people wonder why their whole “Trump is a threat to democracy and freedom” campaign message fell flat. They sure didn’t act like they thought that.
I am very grumpy.
You seem like you have a specific axe to grind, but what I will say is that a one time COLA was not shifting the underlying issues with the federal labor force and their compensation packages.
People don't like paying more for the federal government. Full stop. DOGE and its even passing popularity is the best example of this. Personnel costs are not a major driver of federal spending and yet people bought into the idea it was lazy overpaid federal workers that were the problem.
The real problem for government is that Congress has created more paperwork requirements and more rights for the public to litigate via statute (or failing to preempt litigation by clearly legislating actions). Basically Congress feels like a bunch of lawyers who have created a massive make work program for lawyers.
I am also just very grumpy.
Completely out of left field but I will bite.
If I am understanding you correctly, the argument is that Congress has progressively offloaded political conflict into procedural and litigation requirements. Every project gets a dozen veto points and line agencies become compliance shops rather than bodies that actually build or deliver things.
The "make-work program for lawyers" framing is too cynical though. Most of these procedures were created with real public-interest justifications: environmental review, due process, transparency. The problem is that they accumulate without anyone weighing marginal cost against marginal benefit, and they create a workforce whose comparative advantage is navigating procedure rather than doing the underlying work. That actually feeds back into the pay question, since the federal jobs that survive this dynamic are the ones where credentialing and procedural expertise matter, which selects against operational and technical talent.
100%. People don't believe me, even when I show them the numbers, that even if we fired all federal workers, it would barely make a dent in the budget. Also, wasteful spending probably varies by agency, but when I worked for the Feds, we were much more frugal than any private job I worked in. Probably to its detriment. Worker morale improves when there are little perks.
DOGE was a good example of theater being more popular than competence. Actual government reform would be worthwhile, but you need to know what you're doing, and the DOGE people overwhelmingly didn't.
I think most people acknowledge government reform would be a good thing but the idea that you can make government more efficient by just cutting personnel costs is a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives government spending
There was the thing where the not totally brain poisoned types who went to DOGE basically went, "well, there's some stuff at the margins and some bad policy, but there isn't hidden zillions to save here."
Meh, former big lawyer here, the vast majority of my fellow associates ended up at smaller firms making much less money. Plum in-house gigs are the exception and even there you probably aren’t making $250k+ base. I saw this job at OpenAI, probably the hottest and one of the highest-paid company in the world, and it pays $248-275k base: https://openai.com/careers/counsel-ai-policy-san-francisco/. $300k+ mid-career in-house mostly requires getting lucky with company stock. Most private companies match 3% or maybe 4% for 401k; 5% would be generous. Median AmLaw 200 partner comp is nowhere near $1m, maybe at the AmLaw 20. The AUSAs I know in bar association groups have similar living conditions to the private sector lawyers in those groups.
I don’t think lawyers are the closest case? They are one of the higher paid private sector positions; a lot of jobs where the alternative is academia have much smaller or even reversed gaps. What other positions did you have in mind?
Even if you stat at 100K, that almost double what I started out making a a public defender. I’ve worked at the state, federal and appellate levels- all as public defender. My salary never exceeded six figures.
That OpenAI job is for 5 years experience, so someone who’s maybe 30 at most, doesn’t include bonus (probably 20-30%) or equity, which isn’t tradeable now but probably doubles the total comp, and at public companies is equivalent to cash, and if you get promoted one level you can easily increase total comp by 50% or more. By the time you’re 40-50 you will be killing it.
You're working from bad numbers. Major Lindsey & Africa's 2024 Partner Compensation Survey, which is the industry-standard data on this, surveyed Am Law 200 partners specifically. Median was $800K, average was $1.4M, equity partners averaged $1.94M. So the median Am Law 200 partner is making $800K, not "nowhere near $1m." You've got the comparison backwards. Am Law 20 partners are way above $1M (Kirkland PPEP is over $9M). The $1m figure is actually a low estimate for AmLaw 200 partners on average.
The OpenAI listing you cite is evidence for the claim, not against it. $248-275K base is over $250K. And that's just base. OpenAI compensates heavily in PPUs/equity that bring total comp to $400K+ for that role. Looking at base only when comparing to BigLaw and federal misses the point because bonuses and equity are where the gap actually opens up.
On 401(k) match, you're comparing TSP (5%) to "most private companies." The relevant comparison for ex-BigLaw lawyers isn't most private companies, it's the kind of large public companies, big firms, and tech companies they actually end up at, which routinely match 5-7% with immediate vesting. TSP's vesting cliff for the FERS pension piece also matters.
The AUSA-bar-association comparison is selection bias. The private sector lawyers showing up to those events are disproportionately the ones who left BigLaw. The senior Kirkland partner pulling $5M isn't there.
You're right that lawyers are higher-paid than the average federal worker comparison and that academia-adjacent fields have smaller gaps. That's actually consistent with the broader point I was making, since most federal employees aren't academics. The structural compression at the top of the GS scale hits hardest exactly where the government most needs to compete with the private sector.
You’re the one who said $250k+ base, and OpenAI is one of the highest paid companies in the world. You look at a more typical big company like Walmart (which is still way better than where the average ex-biglaw associate ends up) and there are some senior roles that are above $250k but most are not: https://careers.walmart.com/us/en/results?searchQuery=Legal&careerareas=Corporate
The Kirkland partners are selection bias because that’s only tiny minority that is not fair to compare AUSAs to. It’s much fairer to compare “AUSAs I actually know” to “private sector lawyers I actually know.”
You also have to consider that these massive $1m+ private sector salaries are only in a few cities whereas AUSAs are all around the country.
No big firm I have worked at has provided any 401k match at all, and the health insurance was outrageously expensive too (I was actually on a marketplace plan as a junior associate because it was cheaper than the employer-based one).
Walmart is on the low end of Fortune 500 legal pay because of Bentonville. F500 senior counsel in NYC, Boston, or SF routinely clear $250K base. Picking the lowest-paying big employer to argue the gap isn't real is cherry-picking.
Your selection bias point cuts the wrong way. "Lawyers I know in bar association groups" filters for lawyers who do similar work and run in the same social circles as AUSAs. That's not a fair sample of where lawyers with similar credentials end up. Kirkland partners aren't outliers you can wave away, they're part of the actual distribution.
Geography is your strongest point and it's real. AUSAs in Des Moines aren't competing with NYC partners. But federal locality pay also flattens the federal side, so an AUSA in Manhattan makes roughly the same as one in Des Moines while their private-sector counterparts don't. Cuts both ways.
"Federal pay is structurally compressed at the top"
I suppose the leftist answer to this to force wage compression on the private sector through taxation. Which is presumably what happened in the 1950s-1970s?
I think a lot of voters' response to "Median Am Law 200 partner comp is well over $1M" is "that's a problem; we should fix that, not raise public-sector pay to keep up".
And these are the very voters you'd need to get on-side for top-end public-sector pay increases.
The implied mechanism is off. Federal pay was more competitive in that era partly because of explicit comparability laws (the Federal Pay Comparability Act of 1970 was passed because pay had already fallen behind in the late 1960s), and partly because the private sector wasn't yet generating the kind of top-end winner-take-all comp we see now in law, finance, and tech. The wage compression of that era came mostly from union density, sectoral wage norms, and lower returns to credentials, not directly from the tax code doing the work.
Marginal rates were nominally 70-91% but effective rates on top earners were nowhere near that because of deductions, capital gains treatment, and shelters. If high taxes were doing the compression directly, we'd expect to see the gap reopen sharply right when Reagan cut top rates in 1981. What you actually see is that the federal-private gap stayed manageable through the early 80s and exploded later, as the financialization of the economy and the BigLaw/MBA/tech compensation revolutions took hold. That's not a tax story, it's a labor market structure story.
So yes, public pay was more competitive then, but mostly because the private sector top end hadn't pulled away yet, not because taxes were holding it down.
On voter preferences, I think you're conflating two things. Voters do support marginal tax increases on top earners. They don't support the kind of confiscatory rates that would actually compress private-sector legal and finance pay down to public-sector levels. Those are different policies and only the first one polls well. The actual political constraint isn't that voters want to cap private pay, it's that they don't want to pay public employees more, full stop.
The deeper issue is that you can't run a functional regulatory state when the people you regulate significantly more than what your regulators do. This doesn't resolve by taxing the regulated industry more, it resolves by either paying regulators competitively or accepting regulatory capture as the steady state. The FIRREA carve-outs are Congress quietly acknowledging this for financial regulation. They just haven't extended the same logic to other agencies where the same dynamic applies.
Seems like you have an axe to grind against leftists. Not sure what I qualify as these days. Leftists seem to say I am center left and mods seem to say I am leftist so nobody loves me.
Also, you are just wrong on the voters you would need for top end public increases. The political coalition resisting public sector pay is the right, not the left. Starve-the-beast, "government is the problem," DOGE's popularity, decades of Republican messaging about lazy overpaid bureaucrats. None of that comes from the left. Federal worker unions are solidly Democratic-aligned and the progressive wing is the most reliable vote for federal pay increases that exists. If you tried to expand FIRREA-style pay flexibility across the government tomorrow, your hard "no" votes would be coming from House Republicans, not Bernie or AOC.
“lower returns to credentials”
Just because I’m on this schtick lately, it bears reminding that the knowledge worker class has undertaken a lot of diffuse, nebulous rent-seeking to pump up returns to credentials. *A lot.*
We spend unconscionable amounts of infrastructure and public services budgets talking about delivering infrastructure and public services to the benefit of the opinion, planning, environmental, and engineering consultants.
Healthcare is a rat’s nest of rent-seeking on the part of capital and labor alike.
Higher education is increasingly structured to pump up humanities graduate employment by reducing students to debt peonage.
Public safety in urban spaces is a ship encrusted with non-profit barnacles impeding outcomes while costing tons of money.
There are a million examples of the professional-managerial class buttering its own bread, and everyone knows it in their bones. This is the largest reason why Democratic criticisms about the capital-owning class doing it simply do not land with the electorate.
I don’t disagree with most of this but the difference is they get taxed on their income.
Like that’s the fundamental disconnect at least for me is what I would say a reasonable left leaning person.
I am definitely a beneficiary of managerial class salary inflation but although I make a lot of money, I make it in w2 income.
I don’t begrudge the capital class making a fuck ton of money. I begrudge the differentiated treatment
Congress or the White House often override automatic COLA adjustments for Feds. Generally in a direction that is bad for Feds.
Former appropriations staff here. I can tell you who is driving that override from 2013 on from personal experience and who is offering COLA adjustment amendments that get shot down. Hint: it aligns with the above
$250K+ is high for in-house, at least in Denver.
Can confirm, am in-house counsel in the Denver-Boulder area.
Yeah, I've occasionally (when I'm feeling depressed about my cases) looked at in-house positions in the Denver area and have never seen anything close to $250K other than general counsel for larger companies. Even deputy general counsel is going to be more like $175K.
I've seen them both and I'm 100% urging one of my kids to get a state government job.
Something that I found interesting about the comments about risk-aversion in the public sector is that it suggested to me that one reason European states have greater state capacity is that they are less attractive to risk-averse people because differential in job security between their public sectors and their large private sector employers is much lesser.
That's not because they have lower job security in their public sectors, but because they have much higher job security in their large private sector employers.
High-risk-tolerance Europeans tend to become independent contractors or found small businesses (employing 10 or fewer people gets you exempted from most regulations in most countries). But medium-risk-tolerance people spread across both private and public sectors.
I'd want to see some real research on this before endorsing it fully, but it seems like a worthwhile hypothesis: are European employment regulations part of why European state capacity is so much greater than American?
In other words why European private sector capacity is lower? :)
Seems like a worthwhile tradeoff to me, France and Spain can build trains.
Por que no los dos? :)
Sure, but our private sector capacity sucks too! At the very least worse than theirs - they don’t build their trains and rail lines in house, they contract it out!
If one had high job security, shouldn't that free them up to take big risks? Whats the downside? And yet, it doesn't seem to work that way!
Apparently the effect of selecting / self-sorting by personality (trait risk aversion) is stronger than the effect of changing behavior due to different circumstances.
Maybe that's not the whole story, though. There's also an asymmetry of risks. Do you have upside risks at your job, or only downside risks? If the federal government can't give you large bonuses, has limited ability to promote you, and can't promote you to a drastically higher base salary, your private upside from doing something extraordinary is gone. Conversely, your downside still exists if you take big risks against policy / standard operating procedure and you screw up.
“Apparently the effect of selecting / self-sorting by personality (trait risk aversion) is stronger than the effect of changing behavior due to different circumstances.”
This is a perfect description of my experience in the public sector.
Australia has a mandatory retirement savings scheme (superannuation) that works extremely well. Employers contribute 12-15% of your pre-tax pay to your super account. It’s tax advantaged, and since to accumulates over your career it’s easy to accumulate significant savings. This then eases the pension burden. Investing in an index fund means ~7% higher returns than what social security achieves - it’s ludicrous to only invest in treasuries.
Yes there’s some risk - but you can account for that by transitioning out of equities into safer investments as you approach retirement - which is standard.
The US government retirement system isn’t ideal but it’s roughly this, with the ability to allocate funds to roughly something like the S&P 500. The federal reserve system is MUCH BETTER, but it’s a similar principle.
The 401k system most employers have now is extremely generous and lets people generally have a ton of flexibility, but I don’t know why people don’t have a public option and the income limits on self managed IRAs are just so low
The 401 k system.Most people have right now is actually a lot less generous than previous pension system.So.
I'm not a fan of pension systems.I think 401 k's are better. But employers should be contributing similar amounts
Doing this at scale in the US would *necessitate* that the huge infusion of capital actually produce an increase in real-world economic growth bordering on the revolutionary. Simply pumping up an asset bubble wouldn’t do; as people spend their paper wealth it would spike inflation.
It’s just a very, very difficult model to scale regardless of whether it’s done as a sovereign wealth fund with central management or fully individual accounts.
There is that. But isn't the rest of the world already also investing in US equities? And many US citizens are already investing via 401k and Roth plans which would be supplanted with a Singapore/Aussie style pension. I'm wondering what actual volumic effect an equity-centric pension plan would have when all is said and done.
The estimates I’ve seen are that if we mandated savings along the Aussie model as a partial replacement for Social Security, it’d introduce $50T or so of capital into asset markets over 20 years. That’s 40% of the *global* equities market.
And meanwhile the federal government would have to cover all existing Social Security outlays during that time out of general funds, since new contributions have been diverted to savings for the contributors.
Yeah realistically the issue is that if people are earning 9% returns instead of whatever T-Bills pay, monetary policy is going to need to become restrictive to clamp down on inflation once those people start trying to live much more prosperous retirements, because realistically the asset growth isn't going to create enough productive capacity to go around.
We haven't even really gotten to the boom in 401(k) funded retirements that will tell us whether *that* model was a success or failure yet, let alone whether we could scale it severalfold more.
Check back in a decade once all the elder Xers who never had substantial pensions start retiring and people publish analysis on their inflationary impact...
If implemented though wouldn't it replace the current inflow into IRAs and somewhat offset that 40 percent?
I would assume that we'd integrate 401(k) and IRA accounts into this system somehow, yes. I am unsure whether the figures I've seen are "on net" that accounts for this change or gross figures that do not, but even if they're gross, my understanding is that annual retirement contributions are somewhere south of $1T at present, so we'd be talking about well over doubling the total.
If those figures are already projections of the additional savings, then we're talking about tripling it.
If so, what's the advantage?
According to google the total value of all defined contribution plans is $14 trillion, meanwhile social security pays out $1.6 trillion each year. I am not too sure what it would mean to eliminate Social Security and replace it with essentially a government run DC plan. I do think the social security/PAYGO framework is the more accurate way of accounting for people's retirement at a societal level. Since savings are actually claims on future production, it makes little sense to assume someone is entitled to a certain amount of consumption, if the country's productive capacity cannot support it for demographic or technological reasons.
Yea, I tend to think the idea of doing “let’s save for retirement” at scale just doesn’t work. The largest country by far that does is it Australia, at 0.4% of global population and ~1.5% of global economic output in PPP terms.
It would not contribute to a bubble because social security has been net outflow since 2010. $1.3 trillion in taxes is offset by $1.5 trillion in benefit payouts.
A true 401(k) style plan would give retirees more flexibility in selling, so that would change. But the government could automatically liquidate instead of leaving that up to the retiree.
If you put the remaining little pittance currently in the SSTF into the markets, fine. But that's not the proposal. The proposal is to basically have all current contributors into Social Security instead pay some fraction of that (ranging from a third to the entirety) into retirement accounts that are invested in the markets.
This would necessarily hugely increase the amount of money invested in equities (moving all SSTF contributions to private accounts would 3-5X the rate of existing retirement account deposits annually, or thereabouts), which is much more likely to inflate a bubble than to do anything else.
It would *also* require a huge sum of general revenues or debt issuance each year to cover the fact that there are no longer current contributions to Social Security to cover outlays for today's retirees.
It is, in short, completely unworkable, a fiction that holds up only if one first buys the fiction that contributors to Social Security are paying into a system that will invest the money and return it later, which is simply not true.
The only way to render our retirement/pension outlays sustainable is to ensure they're being paid into on the assumption of a slowly or not growing population and to engage in the immigration and pro-natalist policy necessary to make that assumption work.
No matter how you cut it, today's retirees are making claims on today's productive capacity; they cannot eat retirement savings or pension checks, it does not matter which.
Agree on the gap between current obligations vs funding capital accounts. Mechanistically, I see it as an account that automatically invests or withdraws from a basket of index funds. As an individual account holder you can log in to see account performance and make estimates for the future, but otherwise you have no control.
Edit: Maybe a synthesis is to start it for everyone under ~25 but also eliminate the cap on payroll taxes to help cover near term shortfalls. Make it a 40 year project.
To be clear, I am completely skeptical of the idea that there's any advantage to mandating retirement savings relative to funding retirement via taxing present-day workers. Retirement savings and pension checks do the exact same thing: they enable people to lay claim to the output of others after they stop generating output of their own. Economically speaking they are more or less equivalent, *unless* the invested savings is driving a productivity boom that expands output by the time the people who saved that money are spending it down.
I do not believe it to be possible that dumping ~40% of the global equities market capitalization into investment markets over a couple decades will do anything other than inflate an asset bubble. It will not improve outcomes and standards of living, is the point. Paper returns are not enough.
I get that, but from a political economy perspective it's practically impossible for politicians to rein in benefits. It's easier to blame things on the market, and it incentivizes politicians to focus more on long run productivity growth. The $39 trillion debt is a drag on that growth already, and it will only get worse as the trust fund's deficit grows.
Exactly this. Why don’t we do this?
For housing, the crime issue is an interesting angle. People don't say that directly to me when I talk to them, but I agree it is in the background. What also strikes me about NIMBYism, which is often left unsaid, is that home owners often don't want house prices to drop, and as Matt says, they have disproportionate power. Saying that you will lower the price of homes is going to get people against you.
That's probably true in some areas but, for example, when we lived in Fort Worth 2013-2023 the area was being built up like crazy (I think the fastest growing US metro at times) yet our house appreciated 400 percent in those ten years. Housing is so complex and is probably best treated as a regional solution than a blanket nationwide phenomenon. There's no shortage of houses in our small New Mexico town for example---I can count six houses sitting empty within a two block radius of ours and many more around town. What our town has plenty of is $15/20 per hr. jobs but a dearth of solid middle class salaries that can afford the relatively cheap prices. In the long run I tend to think the housing valuation will solve itself with the looming financial reset (which could be soon or keep being pushed down the road with more federal money printing as has been the case since 2008).
“Solving itself” could involve a lot of pain for people.
Yeah nobody wasn't the "flushing the crap" pain of the normal business cycle. And really, constantly propping up the economy with tax cuts and too much stimulus (no pain) has what has gotten us to this point. Pay now or pay later.
But reform of the anti-growth land use/building code/residency requirement morass will NOT lower house values. And I'm not persuaded that is the main motive for opposing them. I think a lot is just old fashioned concentrated (largely misperceived) costs and dispersed benefits.
Ok, so I was being a little unclear. YIMBY ideas are designed to reduce the price of houses and rent relative to wages. That can be done long-term by having wages grow faster. Whatever method you choose, people who want to make money when they sell their house will notice that.
I'm just skeptical that urbanism reforms (to include crime disorder prevention along with land use/building codes) WILL reduce statistically any homeowners value. Builders do not typically want to locate low-cost housing in high income residential areas. Converting a few SFH along a commercial corridor for a new mixed-use complex does not depress local house values.
So the argument is that we get cheaper rents/home purchases by having people move into apartment buildings/townhomes and we get this by converting single family homes into multi-family complexes? I do see how the math works out if this is the process, but I think this is difficult to explain to people even in a mathematical sense.
Im suer i happend fo some extent. It does not seem that hard toexplain, but the lower costs occur where in equilibrium they moved FROM. That’s not nexessarialy in the reforming jurisdiction.
On the indignation and leftist model, I think there is a case for it different from what Matt presents. I think the leftist critique of Trump as being cosmic vengeance has a point in the sense that he was clearly unqualified and not up to it and had numerous flaws and won anyway. There was clearly a great desire for change he tapped into. The political elite were not responding to political signals for change and so there was a strong signal sent by electing Trump in 2016. His poor governing got Biden elected, and Biden’s failures and inability to make change happen produced Trump’s re-election. In any normal political climate, Trump should not have won in 2024. The problem is that leftists think this means revolutionary socialism is now a possibility. I don’t think that is true unless the situation in the US gets much, much worse than it is now. Which will be on net worse for all of us.
The question about Israel assumes that a "good ally" of the United States is one who will bend to American will, rather than a country that partners with the US for mutual benefit. It's strange here that the apparently "anti-colonial" left has such a colonial view of US allies, and wants American allies to be client states rather than partners.
The Democrats seemed completely baffled that Biden couldn't convince Israel not to launch strikes against Hezbollah. However, they refused to try understand Israel's domestic politics, which Israel's leaders actually serve. At the time, Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, had been firing rockets at Israeli cities. Around 80,000 people were displaced from the north as their towns were being pummeled. Israel had avoided a large campaign against Hezbollah for a year at American request, but attacks kept worsening. The Israeli public demanded action, not just on the right but also on the left. What was baffling to me was that Democrats seemed unable to grasp why Israel felt it had to act.
Furthermore, Biden had not taken the Iranian threat seriously. It had unfrozen Iranian assets (which Iran could use for funding its terrorist proxies that are committed to attacking and killing Israelis), not for the large goal of curbing Iran's nuclear program, but for 5 prisoners. Is this America being a "good ally"? Israeli leaders knew they could not take the US seriously for help defending itself against Iran and its allies, so Israel needed to show strength and resolve.
Contrast that with the current situation. The US acted in partnership with Israel to strike Iran after repeated failed negotiations, showing commitment to Israel’s security. It supported action against Hezbollah. This time there was no feigned bewilderment about Israel’s actions, and Israel made real gains in degrading Hezbollah terror infrastructure. Now there is even talk in Lebanon about peace and normalization with Israel, which would be in Israel's interests. This creates political space for Israel to halt operations when it aligns with its partner’s interests.
Analysts in the US need to understand Israeli politics. Those calling to block military aid should recognize that some strands on the Israeli right also support that idea, believing US aid constrains Israel from winning wars. Without US support, Israel may feel more pressure to strike its enemies and less willingness to absorb attacks.
This continues to sound like a hostage situation rather than an alliance. Just like when the other guy proposed that Israel should align with and sell a bunch of American- and jointly-developed military technology to the PRC if the US doesn't do what it wants.
I would prefer Israel be *nothing* to the United States as we share virtually no common interests and Israel has very clearly treated its relationship with the US as a purely transactional one. There is no reason whatsoever in hell that the United States should give a flying fuck about Israeli perception of its own interests, because there is no benefit to the US national interest in doing so.
In that context, if we simply must have some kind of relationship, nothing less than "client state that jumps on demand and asks how high, to the millimeter, while on its way up" will suffice. Yet even that has no advantages for the United States, so I have no idea why we'd pursue it at all.
Israel and the United States share a lot of common interests: intelligence sharing, counterterrorism, regional stability, high tech collaborations, democratic values, security.
I agree when the purported American interest is "Israel accepts massive rocket attacks on its population centers from its neighbors who seek to eliminate it", the interests do indeed diverge.
You say, "there is no reason whatsoever in hell that the United States should give a flying fuck about Israeli perception of its own interests, because there is no benefit to the US national interest in doing so." Is this the attitude of a "good ally"?
What I am saying is that the Israel-US relationship should be a partnership based on mutual interests, benefit and security, not a superpower seeking to make smaller countries bend to its will.
I buy the commercial relations. I buy absolutely *none* of the rest of it, it reads like an "NCIS" fan-fiction.
That ship has sailed for all but the rightmost third of my generation and basically everyone younger than me.
We shouldn't be allies with *any* of the Arabs in the region, no matter what funny hats they wear. We don't need that sectarian violence and ethnic tension harshing the West's mellow.
Hezbollah is a good example, but there are others where Israel bent to US demands, including many operations in Gaza.
This common notion that Israel is the tail wagging the dog is simply not true.
100%
I think we need a lot more dynamic pricing in the public sector but I don't know who to trust to set the prices.
I've mentioned before two jobs that are perpetually understaffed in the school district I worked for. One is higher level math jobs; most people who go in to education can't do calculus (sorry), and people who know how to do calculus usually have better options than working at a high school. Those jobs should pay more. The other perpetual understaffing is just the more difficult schools in any given district. If you figure a roughly constant % of teachers are sick every day, and the subs get to pick the jobs they want, for the same pay, most subs will choose the easiest schools, leaving the most difficult schools always some 3-4 staff members short, on top of every other problem they have. That seems like an easier fix. All you need is somebody with the skills of an emergency sub who is dedicated to one particular school.
If sorted by recency, your and Edward's post about AI leading to layoffs in the tech sector are adjacent.
Thank you for leaving this observation on both comments lol
I'm not 100% how they're related but I appreciate it
They're related in that a lot of the workers being laid off (or expected to be laid off) from tech companies are going to be people with above-average high math skills. Yes, a lot of them won't be psychologically fitted for high school teaching, but it seems like there should be some "trickledown" effect on labor supply since a lot of the industries that those tech workers would have otherwise expected to move into are also theoretically going to be cutting back on hiring or going through layoffs too.
Oh gotcha!
If any of those people were going to teach at all, intelligent 11th and 12th graders seems like the easiest transition for them to make.
Put me down as skeptical for the AI -> mass unemployment thesis in general. Maybe in specific industries, and not all at once, though I can't predict which industries.
Harry Turtledove has already written the alternate history where the left (in that world the Socialists) wins the 1928 election; the upshot is that they of course get routed in 1932, but that the right's policies are so fundamentally counterproductive to dealing with the depression that they just get returned to office anyway in 1936, after an even deeper Depression than we actually suffered.
I think this is a correct analysis. The question was always going to be how long it took before someone started seriously doing Keynesian counter-cyclical stimulus, and electing Smith in 1928 would have massively delayed that project.
Yea, a couple of us were chatting about this on the side and the conclusion was obvious: A Democrat winning in 1928 guarantees a Republican win in 1932, which means woefully pro-cyclical fiscal policy and no monetary policy to speak of, even if the nominee is (fairly intelligent and pragmatic) Herbert Hoover, which means that by 1936 we're in rough, rough shape, such that not only do the Democrats win but there's a very real chance that Socialists and agrarian left-populists hold the balance of power in Congress.
To riff on that... If that environment gets channeled productively then we probably have a more effective version of our world's New Deal, in which a bunch of useful stuff gets built and a bunch of income-compressing policy gets enacted and a period of 2-1/2 party politics.
If it breaks down in acrimony the next step is probably a complete mess in 1940 that results in a civil war featuring a very large revolutionary leftist fashion or an outright socialist victory at the ballot box that probably still provokes a (less messy) civil war.
How important was Keynesian-style stimulus to economic recovery in FDR's first term?* It tended to be *historically* big for the time (somewhat over 5% of GDP) but actually was no bigger than the deficits we're running now. Given the depth of the depression, I'm not convinced that that level of deficit spending really jumpstarted the economy. Most of FDR's actions were ameliorative to help people get by while the economy slowly recovered on its own mostly.
What really jumpstarted the economy were the absolutely humongous deficits needed in WW2.
*In the second term he went to austerity which was idiotic and that plunged the economy into recession. (Yes yes, a recession during a depression -- words are funny.)
FDR’s admin did things that helped and things that harmed recovery. Such a hodgepodge of policies, some with contradictory goals.
"This is basically a large program for collective ownership of the means of production. The Bush administration had no interest in doing socialism, so instead their idea was basically to cut Social Security benefits and put some extra money into everyone’s 401(k) account."
Matt bravo on this for basically hinting that George W. Bush of all people in a way came closest achieving true Communism but backed off because he said "wait that's true Communism!"
But want to focus on this last statement "People would, on average, end up better off that way, but they would have a lot of exposure to idiosyncratic risk." Is this statement meant to show a) why GWB's privatization idea was good or b) this is why it would have been a terrible idea. I'm guessing b) or at least I'm hoping you're saying b) given what happened just 3 years later. Or heck what happened in March, 2020. I know the primary purpose of social security is to guard against the risk of old age poverty which used to be endemic in pre-modern times (there's a reason the old beggar is a stable of stories for time immemorial), but I sort of think it's underrated how much it also acts as a huge economic stabilizer in times of economic distress.
Ironically, a way to ensure new housing doesn't beget more crime is to build more expensive "luxury" housing. Just price the criminals out from the start.
Affordable housing is old housing. Put the rich in the new housing, let the less affluent buy the 50 year old homes.
There was a couple the other day looking for a home in the neighborhood. Looked like a nice family, couple of kids. Tony and Carmela if I recall. I'm excited about them moving in!
I didn't watch the show but I'd bet that in his non-working hours Tony was the most scrupulous, law-abiding person in the neighborhood. Why attract unneeded law enforcement attention? And if some idiot is attempting a series of break-ins on the street, well, let's just say he might have means for dealing with that without requiring bothering the police.
Which is to say, he'd probably be just the kind of neighbor you want to live in your very nice neighborhood.
Tony definitely mixed his business life and personal life. Among other things, he bankrupted the father of his daughter's friend and his goons threatened a soccer coach who was moving to another opportunity. He would be a scary neighbor to have.
Hmm. I'm inclined to put more blame on the writers than Tony for this, however.
1. Please find time to watch it!
2. It's true no one ever got whacked in his living room
3. He might ask me to hold on to a package for a month after I invite him to a round of golf?
I've tried twice and got about four episodes in season 1 both times.
Clearly, there's something wrong with me and I must take full responsibility for this failure.