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.
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
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 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.
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).
Ro Khanna almost single handedly, along with Thomas Massie, ensured that the whole Epstein controversy got consistent National headlines by introducing actual legislation and then convincing the most psychotic rightists like Nancy Mace and MTG to sign on so they could get a majority. This then forced Trump to capitulate and all Rs voted for the bill. He also used some obscure procedural gimmick to not let members leave until they voted and used another loophole to make sure Mike Johnson couldn’t prevent him from bringing the Epstein legislation on the floor.
Agree Ro Khanna is terrible on wealth taxes and stuff but he’s a very useful person to have in Congress since he teams up often with the most unhinged rightists to find common ground on issues that he knows will create divisions within MAGA.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is funny that description works for both Starmer and Trump despite them having completely different policies, personalities and attitudes to government.
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).
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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!
In retrospect not privatizing social security was perhaps the biggest political mistake of that era (like, worse than going to war in Iraq).
Retirees "would be subject to idiosyncratic risk" but they'd also be *much* richer than they are today, our fiscal situation would be *much* healthier, and the economy likely would have had marginally higher growth due to all the capital injections. I guess subjecting some people to some small idiosyncratic risk wasn't worth it! Great job guys.
The problem is how to get there from the status quo, especially after a major recession just a few years later would spook the hell out of people regarding the stock market. The best case scenario I can see is to slam a huge portion of stimulus into covering the shortfall for existing retirees, while everyone else is able to buy low.
yes the specific unlucky cohort who would have retired in 2008 -- the worst possible time since the great depression -- would have had to delay their retirement by like 2-3 years to completely recoup their losses.
Is the argument that once a century some people will have to delay retirement by a couple years and therefore making everyone else better off isn't worth it?
The problem is that current contributions pay for current retirees. If you hand out “retirement accounts” with some fraction of the net present value of their past contributions you need to draw on general revenues for decades to close the gap.
The other problem is that this blob of money we’re talking about would be a sizable fraction of global equity markets. If all it does is inflate an asset bubble this won’t work. It *must* produce a genuine increase in economic growth, and it is just completely unclear how well that would work in practice.
The whole taxes versus mandatory savings thing strikes me as a distinction without a difference in the end--the result of both is that the government does not trust citizens to have sufficient assets when they become less productive, so they take away some of their earnings to take care of the people that are less productive in the here and now. The only question is what is done with investing the money harvested.
On the one hand, it seems correct to me that a portfolio that was more diversified than just US Treasury bonds would come out better. But on the other hand, if you're going to try to personalize those accounts, then that either requires a massive influx of funds via taxation or stimulus to cover for existing retirees, or, as Matt says, to cut current benefits.
Environment and crime seem too vague of questions to ask, as I suspect that instead of considering reduced fossil fuel consumption or raw crime rates, they're more considering angles of conservation and disorder.
And what's with cost of groceries polling so low, even less positively with those two? That's something where supply is not a concern at all. Is it baked in with people just being grumpy about inflation in general?
Beef prices are high. I noted some products I regularly buy have gone up a fair amount since Dear Larder was anointed. In particular whole bean specialties coffee is now $2-$3 more.
Somewhat surprised you believe that people care within a community care about "new jobs" enough to support housing development in their community unless the individual is in an industry where those jobs will be created. People are pro-housing . . . in the neighboring town.
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.
"At the same time, the Biden administration still had pretty limited leverage to make Israel cut a deal and end the war in Gaza before Election Day 2024. Republicans controlled Congress and would have united against Biden"
And done what? Declare that he was being mean to Israel? What **exactly** could they do if Biden used the Leahy Law to stop weapons to Israel and joined the UN resolutions condemning them?
Forget about all that, What could Republicans do if Biden just said "Israel is committing a genocide and should killing Palestinians"
He didn't because he's a fanatical zionist who didn't want to use ANY leverage to make Israel stop
Presumably, win the 2024 election by a larger margin.
That may or may not be true as a factual matter (although I think it is; I'm like 70-80% confident that a more pro-Palestinian policy would have lost more votes than it gained) but it is certainly true that we came within an incredibly close shave of losing the Senate not just for a few cycles but for generations, and so the downside risk of losing 2024 by a larger margin was very real.
I should add, lest I be accused of "fanatical zionism" by folks not familiar with my body of work, that I don't think active support of Israel is popularity-optimizing either; I think the equilibrium point is complete disengagement and neutrality, which in practice would be a much more pro-Palestinian policy than current policy baseline but would violate all sorts of rhetorical shibboleths the Palestinian Cause people are constantly invoking.
I'm 82% confident it would have gained more votes so I win (is that how it works?)
Regardless, you agree then that Matt's point about Republicans controlling Congress is wrong. You're saying (with less confidence than me) it would affect the election, not real time events
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?
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!
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.
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.
In fairness, DWD's question on SS explicitly mentioned Singapore within it.
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 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.
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.
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).
re your question that was answered...what does Ro Khanna potential mean? That dude really sucks.
Ro Khanna almost single handedly, along with Thomas Massie, ensured that the whole Epstein controversy got consistent National headlines by introducing actual legislation and then convincing the most psychotic rightists like Nancy Mace and MTG to sign on so they could get a majority. This then forced Trump to capitulate and all Rs voted for the bill. He also used some obscure procedural gimmick to not let members leave until they voted and used another loophole to make sure Mike Johnson couldn’t prevent him from bringing the Epstein legislation on the floor.
Agree Ro Khanna is terrible on wealth taxes and stuff but he’s a very useful person to have in Congress since he teams up often with the most unhinged rightists to find common ground on issues that he knows will create divisions within MAGA.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
It is funny that description works for both Starmer and Trump despite them having completely different policies, personalities and attitudes to government.
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).
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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!
In retrospect not privatizing social security was perhaps the biggest political mistake of that era (like, worse than going to war in Iraq).
Retirees "would be subject to idiosyncratic risk" but they'd also be *much* richer than they are today, our fiscal situation would be *much* healthier, and the economy likely would have had marginally higher growth due to all the capital injections. I guess subjecting some people to some small idiosyncratic risk wasn't worth it! Great job guys.
What makes you so sure trillions of capital could have been put to good use?
The problem is how to get there from the status quo, especially after a major recession just a few years later would spook the hell out of people regarding the stock market. The best case scenario I can see is to slam a huge portion of stimulus into covering the shortfall for existing retirees, while everyone else is able to buy low.
yes the specific unlucky cohort who would have retired in 2008 -- the worst possible time since the great depression -- would have had to delay their retirement by like 2-3 years to completely recoup their losses.
Is the argument that once a century some people will have to delay retirement by a couple years and therefore making everyone else better off isn't worth it?
The problem is that current contributions pay for current retirees. If you hand out “retirement accounts” with some fraction of the net present value of their past contributions you need to draw on general revenues for decades to close the gap.
The other problem is that this blob of money we’re talking about would be a sizable fraction of global equity markets. If all it does is inflate an asset bubble this won’t work. It *must* produce a genuine increase in economic growth, and it is just completely unclear how well that would work in practice.
The whole taxes versus mandatory savings thing strikes me as a distinction without a difference in the end--the result of both is that the government does not trust citizens to have sufficient assets when they become less productive, so they take away some of their earnings to take care of the people that are less productive in the here and now. The only question is what is done with investing the money harvested.
On the one hand, it seems correct to me that a portfolio that was more diversified than just US Treasury bonds would come out better. But on the other hand, if you're going to try to personalize those accounts, then that either requires a massive influx of funds via taxation or stimulus to cover for existing retirees, or, as Matt says, to cut current benefits.
Environment and crime seem too vague of questions to ask, as I suspect that instead of considering reduced fossil fuel consumption or raw crime rates, they're more considering angles of conservation and disorder.
And what's with cost of groceries polling so low, even less positively with those two? That's something where supply is not a concern at all. Is it baked in with people just being grumpy about inflation in general?
Beef prices are high. I noted some products I regularly buy have gone up a fair amount since Dear Larder was anointed. In particular whole bean specialties coffee is now $2-$3 more.
Wait'll you hear what it's done to lobster tail prices!
Somewhat surprised you believe that people care within a community care about "new jobs" enough to support housing development in their community unless the individual is in an industry where those jobs will be created. People are pro-housing . . . in the neighboring town.
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.
"At the same time, the Biden administration still had pretty limited leverage to make Israel cut a deal and end the war in Gaza before Election Day 2024. Republicans controlled Congress and would have united against Biden"
And done what? Declare that he was being mean to Israel? What **exactly** could they do if Biden used the Leahy Law to stop weapons to Israel and joined the UN resolutions condemning them?
Forget about all that, What could Republicans do if Biden just said "Israel is committing a genocide and should killing Palestinians"
He didn't because he's a fanatical zionist who didn't want to use ANY leverage to make Israel stop
Presumably, win the 2024 election by a larger margin.
That may or may not be true as a factual matter (although I think it is; I'm like 70-80% confident that a more pro-Palestinian policy would have lost more votes than it gained) but it is certainly true that we came within an incredibly close shave of losing the Senate not just for a few cycles but for generations, and so the downside risk of losing 2024 by a larger margin was very real.
I should add, lest I be accused of "fanatical zionism" by folks not familiar with my body of work, that I don't think active support of Israel is popularity-optimizing either; I think the equilibrium point is complete disengagement and neutrality, which in practice would be a much more pro-Palestinian policy than current policy baseline but would violate all sorts of rhetorical shibboleths the Palestinian Cause people are constantly invoking.
I'm 82% confident it would have gained more votes so I win (is that how it works?)
Regardless, you agree then that Matt's point about Republicans controlling Congress is wrong. You're saying (with less confidence than me) it would affect the election, not real time events