As the beginning of this post notes, I’ll be a bit less active in the comment section this week. I’m traveling around vietnam! If anyone has any recs for Saigon and Hanoi lemme know. I’ll also be around vinh hy
Go get yourself some bespoke tailored suits. You'll save a fortune, it'll almost be like the trip is paying for itself. You can bring in some photos from a magazine or printed from the internet if you want, and they'll copy them to a T.
In Hanoi, Loading T Café was a neat little spot (and there's a great pastry place on the ground floor). The train street is gimmicky but mostly lives up to the hype (I didn't do as much in Hanoi since my partner had a stomach bug).
The Cafe Apartment in Saigon is neat, and the War Remnants Museum is worthwhile. If you like vegetarian food there's a great little spot called TuLi KuSu.
I don’t know if it was classical food poisoning, or something like norovirus that you can pick up from a surface and that alcohol-based hand sanitizer is unfortunately not great at killing. Despite super paranoid handwashing I got the same thing a couple of days later.
Absolutely drink many, many Hanoi egg coffees (cà phê trứng). Utterly delicious (and I'm a tea drinker!), and nowhere else in my opinion (even other parts of Vietnam) makes them quite the same.
Oh, and be careful crossing the street anywhere in that country. The scooter/moped culture is off the charts.
Anyway, you're in for a treat. Vietnam is a super cool destination. Hanoi in particular retains this amazingly intense, old world ambience, and this time of the year it's perfect for extensive urban hiking because the weather has cooled off. (Saigon AFAIK is pretty much always hot and muggy).
If you have a couple days in Hanoi, go out to Ha Long Bay and take a small cruise, or even private charter, and spend one night on the water (sunrise among the karst islands is spectacular), with some kayaking thru caves and climbing to the top of an island for the view. Possibly a visit to a floating village if you can do it while avoiding the crowds.
In Hanoi proper, if you feel like treating yourself, I recommend the Hotel Metropole ($300-$500 per night); expensive but it has understated French colonial luxury, with plenty of rosewood, mahogany, and white marble, in the center of Hanoi next to B-52 Lake and lots of great restaurants, plus the daily Jane Fonda bunker tour is only for guests.
The Hanoi Hilton tour is interesting for how small the US focus is, plus both John McCain and Kerry visited and commemorated their reconciliation with the Vietnamese people. The Vietnamese Military History Museum was fascinating and comprehensive in 2015; apparently it moved to a new home in Hanoi last year, so hopefully the presentation has improved somewhat.
ETA: Despite the unfortunate sounding name,"kem cốm" (green rice ice cream) is worth trying at least once; I think it's fantastic and you've now reminded me that I have to make a trip to Eden Center here in the DMV soon.
What's the reason that raising interest rates is better than raising taxes for lowering inflation? If both actions pull money out of the economy, then why not raise taxes instead of raising interest rates? Then we get the benefit of a lower deficit and lower costs for financing credit cards and houses and cars. Seems like a better tactic. What am I missing?
All of this is well and good, but it ignores the fact that the vast majority of progressives don’t understand economics in the slightest and more importantly, they don’t care to understand.
They reject mainstream economic theory as part and parcel of a neoliberal sellout to “capitalism”.
It doesn’t matter if the reason for cutting deficits comes from Keynes or from monetarists like Milton Friedman — if it’s not about spending more (as opposed to giving away money as tax cuts), they are not interested.
Which also means they will take up the mantle of Keynes when it suits them, but they don’t have the intellectual consistency or grounding in economic theory to champion the flip side of Keynesian spending in a recession in a period of high unemployment and stagnant growth.
Which is all well and good. But the larger question that remains unaddressed is how to get progressives accepting and governing from vanilla macroeconomic theory.
Placing tariffs on food items is just dumb. Placing tariffs on bananas, something we can’t grow on our own, is criminally stupid.
Deflation caused by a recession or a depression is hard on people. What will happen if we do not address our deficits and debt is a fiscal and monetary crisis. That will be extremely deflationary.
Lowering gas prices and removing tariffs on food may help improve perceptions of the economy, but likely not much. People are complaining of high costs that are already here.
Without an economic collapse, prices are not coming down except through competition.
Trump made promises he couldn’t keep. In the end, people do not want to be lied to. Trump’s problem is he can’t be honest about where we are.
"But there isn’t really that much to the “affordability” issue other than trying to make inflation and interest rates lower, so it’s worth taking seriously. Maybe there will be a recession or a war or something else that knocks this off the agenda. But as long as the cost of living is the number one issue on voters’ minds, it’s smart to think about actually workable ideas for addressing it."
Counter-hypothesis: Poll respondents see reports of 20 or sometimes 50% tariffs, experience rising grocer prices, and conclude that Trump isn't fighting for them. Maybe possibly they sense the cost problems with deporting workers who labor in jobs the native born don't want.
A deep-dive into the polling would help. As it is, people or being asked questions they haven't thought through carefully, so a reach for facile cynicism isn't unexpected.
I'm not convinced that a shift from 3.0% to 2.5% inflation (on its way to 2.0%) would bring huge benefits in either opinions or elections. Yes, I'm wary of believing convenient things, but I'm also wary of the sort of accepted wisdom I quoted above.
- "raise taxes a little just to trim the deficit and let the poors enjoy maybe 150 basis points lower rates on the 10 year for a few years in their debt-ridden lives until next time something unexpected happens and a new round 10-20 trillion $ of emergency deficit spending and bank bailouts sends the DOW to 100,000! while erasing all of the prior deficit reductions"
Now that Trump has recklessly won an election on a platform to reduce prices and not merely control inflation, has that become a permanent feature of our politics? Will the GOP repeat it in the midterms? Will Democrats have to parrot the same promise or risk being seen as the inflationary party -- even if the voters know that neither party can deliver on it?
I think this idea is correct but also provide Republicans with fiscal space usually leads them to tax cuts and more deficits or maybe they'll find their way back to deficits are bad?
Going back to boring policy messaging would require Democrats to stop attacking Trump on many corruptions and abuses of power. I'm not sure that they can resist doing that leading up to the mid-terms.
About that spat between G. Elloitt Morris and MY, was Morris's point that the effect of moderation is small relative to the s.d. so it's not worth worrying about or taking advantage of? The articles were paywalled, so I want really able to see his argument.
I think it's just that the effect of moderation is small relative to the s.d. (but not zero), period, end of sentence. What one does with that factual information is reflective of one's political point of view and willingness to live with aspects of the current status quo.
The basic disagreement isn't even how much moderation effect there is (everybody agrees its 1.5 to 2.5 points), but the real disagreement is what counts as moderation, how other factors also effect it, and how able individual politicians are able to even mark themselves as moderate without hurting themselves in other ways.
Like, my somewhat 'split the middle' view is it is entirely possible for somebody in a R+6 district or whatever to make enough votes and statements that upset the left-leaning base to make it clear to the median voter you're not One Of Them, but you're stuck at the Congressional level and you're also the first to be gone in a wave.
OTOH, I've seen no actual evidence you can be a 'moderate' by those measures and be a successful statewide or nationwide candidate once you're in actual office. Because outside of very specific situations (ie. somewhere like MS or LA for Dems, somewhere like VT for the GOP), you need enough of your base to actually be motivated to turn out and vote.
Now, ironically, a 'moderate' statewide candidate could probably be helped by Presidential turnout, but the issue is, the likely more liberal/conservative nationwide candidate will hurt you because those swing voters will be reminded what the party base actually stands for.
I think there's plenty of evidence of statewide candidates winning as a perceived check on the excesses of the majority party at the state level. Kansas is as rock-ribbed a Republican state as exists anywhere in the country (since 1916 Dems have carried it only in the wave elections of 1932, 1936 and 1964) and Laura Kelly has done fine.
At the federal level (HOR/Sen), it's a different story and ticket-splitting basically only exists due to downballot lag at this point.
But Laura Kelly while more moderate is not as performatively and explicitly moderate as people claim you need to win in Kansas - now this in part due to Brownbacknomics scaring suburban Republicans into not trusting the state GOP for a bit.
Obviously, yes, she's not AOC or even Matt's favorite Senator, Chris Van Hollen and a variety of Democrats ran to the right of Kamala, like Reuben Gallego, but I don't think Gallego would've won by a larger margin if he moved even farther to the right on other issues.
I can't really be held accountable for what "people claim" but my point is just that there is a fundamental difference between how moderate you need to be to win a governorship and how moderate you need to be to win (or, in nearly every case, lose by a slightly closer margin) a Senate race. It's fairly possible to win an opposite-party governorship when the opposition is all or most of a. federally dragged, b. state dragged (i.e. they've been in power at the state level for a long time), c. viewed as somewhat corrupt, and d. the minority-party candidate is at least somewhat more moderate than the party median. It's almost impossible to win a Senate race that way outside of a wave election.
Can someone recommend a solid book/article/information piece/explainer re subsidies going to farmers, e.g., how we got to where we are and what, if any, ways in which the current situation is problematic? Thanks in advance.
It's 30+ years out of date, but P.J. O'Rourke's "Parliament of Whores" has a chapter on farm subsidies that covers how we got to 1990 or so, that might still be useful for historical context. (A quick Google search suggests that, at least as recently as 2018, the USDA was using the same price parity model that O'Rourke was mocking decades earlier: https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2019/05/considering-policy-reversion-the-parity-paradox.html )
My recollection of this, the last time I did one of those "balance the budget" games, was that it was shockingly easy to pay for the whole progressive wish list as long as you were willing to cut obviously stupid spending (farm subsidies are indeed a great choice for such) and raise taxes on the rich. Doing so is a persuasion problem, not a math problem. The US is a rich country and we can afford to, e.g., spend a few billion a year making sure people who are the victims of wage theft can recover what's owed to them.
The department that really needs to be DOGEd is the Defense Department. Left-wing governments now know that the right will not maintain their international commitments anyway so we now need to move to a model where we shovel money and equipment out the door during Dem administrations that Republicans can't claw back. Actual US-centric expenditures should be cut to the level of, at most, China and Russia combined (PPP; it'd be more in nominal terms).
I say we meet the voters where they are and run on a platform of redenominating the dollar by about a 3:2 ratio. Immediate 33% reduction in housing, grocery and childcare prices! No actual catastrophic deflation! The 33% fall in wages can be blamed on billionaires, or perhaps on illegal immigrant billionaires if we want to meet Trump voters halfway.
>Progressives have done a lot of good reporting on the many problems with Medicare Advantage... So if it’s bad — cut it.<
Absolutely. Not that Republicans won't try (I'd guess with some success) to accuse Democrats of cutting Medicare. But it's about the lowest hanging fruit of deficit reduction I can think of.
Well, there are arguments you can use to counter the inevitable GOP critique, and "fraud" is one of them. I don't think you can count on success, though (but you can hope for it): millions of older voters access certain benefits through the Medicare Advantage program. Moreover, the GOP charge that Democrats are cutting Medicare will literally be true in this case.
The thing is, though, if you look at the big picture, delivering broad-based, low inflation prosperity is ultimately what will enable Democrats to win subsequent elections if they manage to take back power in 2028 (at least that's my take). And so you can't avoid anything and everything that might make you pay some political price. And to me, cutting (ideally eliminating) Medicare Advantage is just too important and effective a policy change not to pursue it.
I don't really understand the theory that lower budget deficit will reduce inflation. The Fed controls inflation by controlling NGDP. What is Matt's counter theory and has he run it by Scott Sumner?
It's true the Fed can attempt to counter the effects of deficit spending (which injects demand into the economy) via monetary policy. So, a sufficiently determined central bank could hold down inflation in the face of persistent large deficits. But we'll pay a price in terms of reduced prosperity, fewer jobs, and so forth. It seems clear enough to me that if we want prosperity AND lower inflation we need to curb federal borrowing.
As the beginning of this post notes, I’ll be a bit less active in the comment section this week. I’m traveling around vietnam! If anyone has any recs for Saigon and Hanoi lemme know. I’ll also be around vinh hy
Love seven bridges if you need a beer. Take a risk and have some street BBQ. Though I'd skip the seafood.
For Ho Chi Mihn.
Go get yourself some bespoke tailored suits. You'll save a fortune, it'll almost be like the trip is paying for itself. You can bring in some photos from a magazine or printed from the internet if you want, and they'll copy them to a T.
Comments section’s about to get spicier than a whole bowl of Bun Bo Hue.
Honestly, not even that spicy.
When you are in Saigon you have to post this quote ""Saigon, shit. I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm going to
wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour,
it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing...
I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce.
When I was here I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I
could think of was getting back into the jungle.
I've been here a week now. Waiting for a mission, getting
softer. Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker. And every minute Charlie squats in the bush he gets stronger.
Each time I look around the walls move in a little tighter." ;)
In Hanoi, Loading T Café was a neat little spot (and there's a great pastry place on the ground floor). The train street is gimmicky but mostly lives up to the hype (I didn't do as much in Hanoi since my partner had a stomach bug).
The Cafe Apartment in Saigon is neat, and the War Remnants Museum is worthwhile. If you like vegetarian food there's a great little spot called TuLi KuSu.
I'm about to go to Vietnam in a week, any tips from your partner's experience to avoid food poisoning?
I don’t know if it was classical food poisoning, or something like norovirus that you can pick up from a surface and that alcohol-based hand sanitizer is unfortunately not great at killing. Despite super paranoid handwashing I got the same thing a couple of days later.
Absolutely drink many, many Hanoi egg coffees (cà phê trứng). Utterly delicious (and I'm a tea drinker!), and nowhere else in my opinion (even other parts of Vietnam) makes them quite the same.
Oh, and be careful crossing the street anywhere in that country. The scooter/moped culture is off the charts.
Anyway, you're in for a treat. Vietnam is a super cool destination. Hanoi in particular retains this amazingly intense, old world ambience, and this time of the year it's perfect for extensive urban hiking because the weather has cooled off. (Saigon AFAIK is pretty much always hot and muggy).
If you have a couple days in Hanoi, go out to Ha Long Bay and take a small cruise, or even private charter, and spend one night on the water (sunrise among the karst islands is spectacular), with some kayaking thru caves and climbing to the top of an island for the view. Possibly a visit to a floating village if you can do it while avoiding the crowds.
In Hanoi proper, if you feel like treating yourself, I recommend the Hotel Metropole ($300-$500 per night); expensive but it has understated French colonial luxury, with plenty of rosewood, mahogany, and white marble, in the center of Hanoi next to B-52 Lake and lots of great restaurants, plus the daily Jane Fonda bunker tour is only for guests.
The Hanoi Hilton tour is interesting for how small the US focus is, plus both John McCain and Kerry visited and commemorated their reconciliation with the Vietnamese people. The Vietnamese Military History Museum was fascinating and comprehensive in 2015; apparently it moved to a new home in Hanoi last year, so hopefully the presentation has improved somewhat.
ETA: Despite the unfortunate sounding name,"kem cốm" (green rice ice cream) is worth trying at least once; I think it's fantastic and you've now reminded me that I have to make a trip to Eden Center here in the DMV soon.
+1 Metropole hotel. At least go for tea if you already have lodging planned.
Woah cool. Food reviews please!
What's the reason that raising interest rates is better than raising taxes for lowering inflation? If both actions pull money out of the economy, then why not raise taxes instead of raising interest rates? Then we get the benefit of a lower deficit and lower costs for financing credit cards and houses and cars. Seems like a better tactic. What am I missing?
All of this is well and good, but it ignores the fact that the vast majority of progressives don’t understand economics in the slightest and more importantly, they don’t care to understand.
They reject mainstream economic theory as part and parcel of a neoliberal sellout to “capitalism”.
It doesn’t matter if the reason for cutting deficits comes from Keynes or from monetarists like Milton Friedman — if it’s not about spending more (as opposed to giving away money as tax cuts), they are not interested.
Which also means they will take up the mantle of Keynes when it suits them, but they don’t have the intellectual consistency or grounding in economic theory to champion the flip side of Keynesian spending in a recession in a period of high unemployment and stagnant growth.
Which is all well and good. But the larger question that remains unaddressed is how to get progressives accepting and governing from vanilla macroeconomic theory.
Placing tariffs on food items is just dumb. Placing tariffs on bananas, something we can’t grow on our own, is criminally stupid.
Deflation caused by a recession or a depression is hard on people. What will happen if we do not address our deficits and debt is a fiscal and monetary crisis. That will be extremely deflationary.
Lowering gas prices and removing tariffs on food may help improve perceptions of the economy, but likely not much. People are complaining of high costs that are already here.
Without an economic collapse, prices are not coming down except through competition.
Trump made promises he couldn’t keep. In the end, people do not want to be lied to. Trump’s problem is he can’t be honest about where we are.
"But there isn’t really that much to the “affordability” issue other than trying to make inflation and interest rates lower, so it’s worth taking seriously. Maybe there will be a recession or a war or something else that knocks this off the agenda. But as long as the cost of living is the number one issue on voters’ minds, it’s smart to think about actually workable ideas for addressing it."
Counter-hypothesis: Poll respondents see reports of 20 or sometimes 50% tariffs, experience rising grocer prices, and conclude that Trump isn't fighting for them. Maybe possibly they sense the cost problems with deporting workers who labor in jobs the native born don't want.
A deep-dive into the polling would help. As it is, people or being asked questions they haven't thought through carefully, so a reach for facile cynicism isn't unexpected.
I'm not convinced that a shift from 3.0% to 2.5% inflation (on its way to 2.0%) would bring huge benefits in either opinions or elections. Yes, I'm wary of believing convenient things, but I'm also wary of the sort of accepted wisdom I quoted above.
If Dems cannot agree on anything else other than
- "raise taxes a little just to trim the deficit and let the poors enjoy maybe 150 basis points lower rates on the 10 year for a few years in their debt-ridden lives until next time something unexpected happens and a new round 10-20 trillion $ of emergency deficit spending and bank bailouts sends the DOW to 100,000! while erasing all of the prior deficit reductions"
they should all just resign now.
Now that Trump has recklessly won an election on a platform to reduce prices and not merely control inflation, has that become a permanent feature of our politics? Will the GOP repeat it in the midterms? Will Democrats have to parrot the same promise or risk being seen as the inflationary party -- even if the voters know that neither party can deliver on it?
I think this idea is correct but also provide Republicans with fiscal space usually leads them to tax cuts and more deficits or maybe they'll find their way back to deficits are bad?
The only suggestion I would have is to not announce you are lighter on moderation.
Too late - clothing optional commenting is in effect!
Highly Progressive comments only!
Going back to boring policy messaging would require Democrats to stop attacking Trump on many corruptions and abuses of power. I'm not sure that they can resist doing that leading up to the mid-terms.
About that spat between G. Elloitt Morris and MY, was Morris's point that the effect of moderation is small relative to the s.d. so it's not worth worrying about or taking advantage of? The articles were paywalled, so I want really able to see his argument.
I think it's just that the effect of moderation is small relative to the s.d. (but not zero), period, end of sentence. What one does with that factual information is reflective of one's political point of view and willingness to live with aspects of the current status quo.
The basic disagreement isn't even how much moderation effect there is (everybody agrees its 1.5 to 2.5 points), but the real disagreement is what counts as moderation, how other factors also effect it, and how able individual politicians are able to even mark themselves as moderate without hurting themselves in other ways.
Like, my somewhat 'split the middle' view is it is entirely possible for somebody in a R+6 district or whatever to make enough votes and statements that upset the left-leaning base to make it clear to the median voter you're not One Of Them, but you're stuck at the Congressional level and you're also the first to be gone in a wave.
OTOH, I've seen no actual evidence you can be a 'moderate' by those measures and be a successful statewide or nationwide candidate once you're in actual office. Because outside of very specific situations (ie. somewhere like MS or LA for Dems, somewhere like VT for the GOP), you need enough of your base to actually be motivated to turn out and vote.
Now, ironically, a 'moderate' statewide candidate could probably be helped by Presidential turnout, but the issue is, the likely more liberal/conservative nationwide candidate will hurt you because those swing voters will be reminded what the party base actually stands for.
I think there's plenty of evidence of statewide candidates winning as a perceived check on the excesses of the majority party at the state level. Kansas is as rock-ribbed a Republican state as exists anywhere in the country (since 1916 Dems have carried it only in the wave elections of 1932, 1936 and 1964) and Laura Kelly has done fine.
At the federal level (HOR/Sen), it's a different story and ticket-splitting basically only exists due to downballot lag at this point.
But Laura Kelly while more moderate is not as performatively and explicitly moderate as people claim you need to win in Kansas - now this in part due to Brownbacknomics scaring suburban Republicans into not trusting the state GOP for a bit.
Obviously, yes, she's not AOC or even Matt's favorite Senator, Chris Van Hollen and a variety of Democrats ran to the right of Kamala, like Reuben Gallego, but I don't think Gallego would've won by a larger margin if he moved even farther to the right on other issues.
I can't really be held accountable for what "people claim" but my point is just that there is a fundamental difference between how moderate you need to be to win a governorship and how moderate you need to be to win (or, in nearly every case, lose by a slightly closer margin) a Senate race. It's fairly possible to win an opposite-party governorship when the opposition is all or most of a. federally dragged, b. state dragged (i.e. they've been in power at the state level for a long time), c. viewed as somewhat corrupt, and d. the minority-party candidate is at least somewhat more moderate than the party median. It's almost impossible to win a Senate race that way outside of a wave election.
Can someone recommend a solid book/article/information piece/explainer re subsidies going to farmers, e.g., how we got to where we are and what, if any, ways in which the current situation is problematic? Thanks in advance.
It's 30+ years out of date, but P.J. O'Rourke's "Parliament of Whores" has a chapter on farm subsidies that covers how we got to 1990 or so, that might still be useful for historical context. (A quick Google search suggests that, at least as recently as 2018, the USDA was using the same price parity model that O'Rourke was mocking decades earlier: https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2019/05/considering-policy-reversion-the-parity-paradox.html )
My recollection of this, the last time I did one of those "balance the budget" games, was that it was shockingly easy to pay for the whole progressive wish list as long as you were willing to cut obviously stupid spending (farm subsidies are indeed a great choice for such) and raise taxes on the rich. Doing so is a persuasion problem, not a math problem. The US is a rich country and we can afford to, e.g., spend a few billion a year making sure people who are the victims of wage theft can recover what's owed to them.
The department that really needs to be DOGEd is the Defense Department. Left-wing governments now know that the right will not maintain their international commitments anyway so we now need to move to a model where we shovel money and equipment out the door during Dem administrations that Republicans can't claw back. Actual US-centric expenditures should be cut to the level of, at most, China and Russia combined (PPP; it'd be more in nominal terms).
I say we meet the voters where they are and run on a platform of redenominating the dollar by about a 3:2 ratio. Immediate 33% reduction in housing, grocery and childcare prices! No actual catastrophic deflation! The 33% fall in wages can be blamed on billionaires, or perhaps on illegal immigrant billionaires if we want to meet Trump voters halfway.
(I’m only about 80% kidding)
>Progressives have done a lot of good reporting on the many problems with Medicare Advantage... So if it’s bad — cut it.<
Absolutely. Not that Republicans won't try (I'd guess with some success) to accuse Democrats of cutting Medicare. But it's about the lowest hanging fruit of deficit reduction I can think of.
Pretty easy rejoinder to those arguments that you're actually strengthening the program by getting rid of the fraudsters who are stealing from it.
Well, there are arguments you can use to counter the inevitable GOP critique, and "fraud" is one of them. I don't think you can count on success, though (but you can hope for it): millions of older voters access certain benefits through the Medicare Advantage program. Moreover, the GOP charge that Democrats are cutting Medicare will literally be true in this case.
The thing is, though, if you look at the big picture, delivering broad-based, low inflation prosperity is ultimately what will enable Democrats to win subsequent elections if they manage to take back power in 2028 (at least that's my take). And so you can't avoid anything and everything that might make you pay some political price. And to me, cutting (ideally eliminating) Medicare Advantage is just too important and effective a policy change not to pursue it.
I don't really understand the theory that lower budget deficit will reduce inflation. The Fed controls inflation by controlling NGDP. What is Matt's counter theory and has he run it by Scott Sumner?
It's true the Fed can attempt to counter the effects of deficit spending (which injects demand into the economy) via monetary policy. So, a sufficiently determined central bank could hold down inflation in the face of persistent large deficits. But we'll pay a price in terms of reduced prosperity, fewer jobs, and so forth. It seems clear enough to me that if we want prosperity AND lower inflation we need to curb federal borrowing.