I can’t forgive Bill Clinton for his corruption. He pioneered abusing the pardon system, for one, amongst other financial scandals. This did long term damage to the Democratic Party. People will argue that both parties are the same, both are corrupt, and point to Clinton (and certain jailed governors and congress people), and while Democrats don’t stand by all corrupt members they did stand by and defend Clinton.
Thanks for answering my question. I think the average reader just can't imagine how dumb real politics is. I was at an election count yesterday and about 5% of people just ticked the first three names on the ballot paper (turnout was below 30% and it was the only ballot paper they received).
I think the Spirit stuff misses the point entirely. Airlines in general aren't a good industry. Their returns on capital are bad, and just about every carrier has been through bankruptcy a few times over the last few decades. Deregulation has certainly delivered for customers-- flying is perhaps a worse experience than it was a few decades ago: seats are smaller, meals are crummier (and aren't complimentary), etc., but fares are an order of magnitude lower and so flying is no longer something restricted to the rich.
But Spirit's gone under because it has long delivered an unusually crappy product at a price that isn't low enough to tolerate how crappy it is. Other low cost carriers like Southwest have generally competed on delivering a passable experience at a lower price point; Spirit has competed by delivering a terrible experience while nickel and diming customers at every step by charging (and charging a lot) for things that other airlines include in base fares. And so customer satisfaction was through the floor, and anyone that could find an alternative to flying Spirit did. It's gone, and good riddance.
Now, was there value destroyed by the FTC blocking JetBlue's ability to buy them? And the answer is... probably not really? There wasn't some significant going concern value in the legacy business that a merger was going to rescue-- JetBlue was buying planes, gates, and contracts with pilots and flight staff. But those planes, gates and employees are still there, and will be purchased out of bankruptcy at an efficient price. And if there's demand for flights to fill the segment of the market that Spirit was servicing, odds are some other airline will step in and fill it (and will probably do so with a business model that isn't "pay $100 to be stuffed in the equivalent of a flying cattle car, but another $150 to bring a bag, and $5 if you want a cup of water."
It is underrated how toxic it is that Republicans gleefully laugh at any blue state problems,and then ignore any blue state or city successes. The memeification and political grandstanding is bad enough, and im not sure if it is upstream or downstream of "real america" discourse. But I truly hate it. It makes all of us worse off.
In my more charitable moments I try to reframe “people are idiots” as “people don’t have the time or inclination to be informed about politics and government”, particularly given the far remove most of us have from the actual practice of governance.
In my less charitable moments I just listen to NOFX’s “Idiots Are Taking Over” on repeat.
Delta spends 19.31 cents to fly a seat 1 mile and to do that it charges 17.76 cents*. American spends 17.76 cents per seat mile for which it charges 16.58 cents. The tickets are already priced below the cost to operate the flight - how much lower are people expecting them to go?
* How does Delta make money? It made $8.2 billion selling Delta miles to America express.
Sorry to be hyper specific, but saying that greater efficiency wouldn't have translated into lower prices if firms have market power drives me crazy. It's just not true. Firms aren't forced to lower their prices when their costs go down. They do it to make more money by selling more units.
A firm that's maximizing its profits will be basically indifferent to raising or lowering its price by a very small amount. Say it's charging $10, has costs if $5, and at that price it sells 10 units, making $50 in profits. If it lowers the price by say $1, it will sell more units, say 2 more, and make whatever the difference is between the new price and its costs on the new sales, here 2 x $4 = $8. But it also loses $1 on every sale that it would have made anyway at the higher price, -$1 * 10 = -$10. So it would lose $2 in profit and it doesn't do it.
Now lower the firm's costs from $5 to $3 per unit and do it again. The loss from lowering the price by $1 is the same, -$10. But now the gain is $9 - $3 = $6 per unit x 2 units = $12. Instead of losing $2 in profits from lowering prices now it will gain $2 in profits. So it will lower prices.
The whole language of "passing on" us frankly unhelpful, because it's not about giving something up. The firm lowers prices because it makes more money by doing that.
For some reason even very intelligent people seem to keep making this mistake. It seems generally rooted in the belief that you'll sell the number of units you are selling no matter what. But there aren't real markets that work that way. Demand slopes downward, and there's always more to sell.
(And before someone jumps in to say firms in competitive industries face more elastic demand so have more to gain, that's both not true in equilibrium -- they raise price until they face the same elastic demand -- and also not relevant. The degree of cost pass through is determined by how fast the elasticity changes as you move down the demand curve.)
The Democratic Virginia state legislature and governor should increase the number of judges on the Virginia Supreme Court, pack the Virginia Supreme Court with favorable Democratic judges, then Democrats can sue to reinstate the recent gerrymandering state ballot initiative, Democrats would presumably win the case, and then the redrawing of the House districts would happen in Democrats’ favor before the 2026 House election. If there were any lawsuits against the court packing, they would presumably be heard by the packed court itself.
"By the same token, Republicans appear to me to be obsessed with the political power of the far left. If that’s your big concern about America, you have an obligation to do what every other major center-right political party on Earth has done and reconcile yourself to a universal-health-care system. And you have to try to actually win elections in the places where the far left is most plausibly going to win political power. Ideas like “crime is bad” and “it would be nice to pay lower taxes” have extremely broad appeal, but Republicans are preventing themselves from running on those ideas in a huge swath of states by pairing them with politically toxic baggage."
As Tom Steyer amusingly hinted at the CA gov debate recently with a sudden emphasis on fiscal austerity, the US directly emulating the public health care of other European countries would involve a major cut, of probably 1.5% GDP or 450 billion a year, in health care spending right now. This is because the EU-OECD average is actually lower[1], not higher, than the US on public health care spending as a fraction of the economy.
I am no liberal or moderate voter whisperer. However, I have a hunch that the GOP campaigning on a whole new system where we cut health care spending by 450 billion a year and enroll everyone in it will actually not come across more reasonable to the median voter.
But let's split the difference and have the GOP chill out about Medicare spending instead, so the US spends more on health care instead of suddenly significantly less like Steyer recommends to his fiscal hawk voters. I believe this has happened. Do liberals believe the GOP of 2026 is more reasonable than the GOP of 2012 or 1996? I am currently trying to find one. I'll let you know when I do.
The final point I'd make is quite simple; the American center-left is actually mostly in charge of the deep blue cities the Republicans love to roast. This is because "deep blue" does not really translate to "hardcore MAGA but for Democrats" the way "deep red" does. Democrats are just a less ideological coalition. So when Republicans are busy mocking deep blue cities as radical socialist hellscapes, what they're doing is loudly propagandizing an actual point, which is moderate Democrats do run lots of things and the results are quite mixed.
I do agree with Matt Republicans should try to become more competitive in cities. Maybe they can nominate an amoral socially moderate billionaire from Queens, NYC to change the image of the party and steadily narrow their NY governor race margins for the last decade in a notable way unlike California. But I do not think "look what you made me do" will work out, either for Republicans or Democrats. There's no way of getting around it; many moderate Democrats like Mamdani. Many moderate Democrats are open to voting for someone like him in DC.
I liked the interview the Central Air podcast did with Gary Leff (writes a blog on the airline industry) this week on Spirit. Apparently everyone thought Spirit was going to liquidate back around December, before jet fuel prices spiked.
I would absolutely love to visit Japan! My parents have been there, and my karate teachers go there semi-regularly-ish to visit our sister dojo in Tokyo. This year is that dojo's 95th anniversary! They're going to have a big celebration.
Slow Borers who have been to Japan, what are your impressions? Recommendations?
Oh and of airfare note, when I was booking in 2009 from SFO I noticed that the cheaper route was thru LAX, but direct fares from LAX were $300 cheaper so I would be paying that just to fly to LAX. A little risky, but I individually booked SFO to LAX on Virgin America for $125 round-trip, and then LAX to Tokyo (just the one airport at the time), so total of around $900.
Great transit and reasonable food. (Ramen everywhere.)
I'd recommend visiting an onsen in the countryside.
The Takaragawa Onsen Osenkaku is outside Tokyo just a couple of hours by high-speed rail & then bus. Stay in the original building (the Japanese stay in the new concrete high-rise). The woodwork is very attractive but you'll have to sleep on a mat and share a bathroom except you're likely to have it all to yourself. You're just above the rushing river so that's nice.
Traditional dinner is a must but tell them to skip the bear soup because really. (The bears are kept in cages across the river, and it's just sad.) There's also a shrine just across the bridge (pedestrian) that's interesting to see.
Skip Japanese breakfast unless you really like natto.
My impression - Japan was the first non-western first world country. If you go to Germany or France or the UK there is a western sameness about them. They each have their differences compared to the US and each other, but they aren't that different.
Japan, on the other hand, is very different in look and feel, culture, customs, etc. But all in a very advanced first world way.
Edo-Tokyo museum. Their collection on the Meiji era is the best historical treatment of those years that I've seen, and nearly all of the exhibits are bilingual English-Japanese.
On a more whimsical note, there's also the Cup O Noodles factory...
I was a teenager in Canada in the 90s, so I wasn't paying close attention to US politics, but was Clinton really that good at governing, or did he just have the great good fortune to be in office while America was riding high (the immediate aftermath of the Cold War/the fall of the USSR, the End of History, great economy, mostly sunny/optimistic national outlook in the pre-9/11 days)?
Also, I flew Spirit Airlines once a few years ago, and it sucked, they charged you for *everything* other than your butt in the seat, and they deserved to go bankrupt.
As to your first paragraph, I really think the answer is the latter or that is more good fortune than anything else. I'm more with Gary Gerstle in political orders analysis than great individuals. I'd also go further and I'd say it's not a coincidence that our three greatest presidents: Washington, FDR and Lincoln, emerged during times of great crises and uncertainty. It was precisely those circumstances that allowed those figures to emerge. Similarly, the new deal political order lasted as long as it did, because the rest of Europe and the Pacific Theater were bombed out and it took until the 1970's for them to rebuild. The only reason America could continue the New Deal policies until the 1970's was because we did not have to compete with other nations economically. I don't want to poo-poo great presidents and policies but I really think history is far more contingent than anything else and a lot of "success" is really just luck, good fortune and timing . Trying to replicate unique circumstances that led to success is a fool's errand because it was the circumstances beyond people's control that led to success not the actions that people took because the circumstances allowed them to.
ETA: Imagine that somehow, through magic/Dr. Strange lends me the Time Stone/whatever, I swap Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter chronologically, so that Clinton is POTUS in the late 70s and Carter is POTUS in the 90s.
What is the verdict of history on Clinton and Carter in this scenario? Does Clinton, through sheer power of personal charisma, manage to win in 1980 despite the Iran crisis and fuel shortages and everything? Do we speak glowingly about Carter as this noble, morally upright man who also presided over America's Golden Age of the 90s?
I can’t forgive Bill Clinton for his corruption. He pioneered abusing the pardon system, for one, amongst other financial scandals. This did long term damage to the Democratic Party. People will argue that both parties are the same, both are corrupt, and point to Clinton (and certain jailed governors and congress people), and while Democrats don’t stand by all corrupt members they did stand by and defend Clinton.
Thanks for answering my question. I think the average reader just can't imagine how dumb real politics is. I was at an election count yesterday and about 5% of people just ticked the first three names on the ballot paper (turnout was below 30% and it was the only ballot paper they received).
Manhattan Institute was encouraging pogroms against Haitians two years ago
I guess you have to hand it to OKC for having the best player and deepest roster
I think the Spirit stuff misses the point entirely. Airlines in general aren't a good industry. Their returns on capital are bad, and just about every carrier has been through bankruptcy a few times over the last few decades. Deregulation has certainly delivered for customers-- flying is perhaps a worse experience than it was a few decades ago: seats are smaller, meals are crummier (and aren't complimentary), etc., but fares are an order of magnitude lower and so flying is no longer something restricted to the rich.
But Spirit's gone under because it has long delivered an unusually crappy product at a price that isn't low enough to tolerate how crappy it is. Other low cost carriers like Southwest have generally competed on delivering a passable experience at a lower price point; Spirit has competed by delivering a terrible experience while nickel and diming customers at every step by charging (and charging a lot) for things that other airlines include in base fares. And so customer satisfaction was through the floor, and anyone that could find an alternative to flying Spirit did. It's gone, and good riddance.
Now, was there value destroyed by the FTC blocking JetBlue's ability to buy them? And the answer is... probably not really? There wasn't some significant going concern value in the legacy business that a merger was going to rescue-- JetBlue was buying planes, gates, and contracts with pilots and flight staff. But those planes, gates and employees are still there, and will be purchased out of bankruptcy at an efficient price. And if there's demand for flights to fill the segment of the market that Spirit was servicing, odds are some other airline will step in and fill it (and will probably do so with a business model that isn't "pay $100 to be stuffed in the equivalent of a flying cattle car, but another $150 to bring a bag, and $5 if you want a cup of water."
It is underrated how toxic it is that Republicans gleefully laugh at any blue state problems,and then ignore any blue state or city successes. The memeification and political grandstanding is bad enough, and im not sure if it is upstream or downstream of "real america" discourse. But I truly hate it. It makes all of us worse off.
In my more charitable moments I try to reframe “people are idiots” as “people don’t have the time or inclination to be informed about politics and government”, particularly given the far remove most of us have from the actual practice of governance.
In my less charitable moments I just listen to NOFX’s “Idiots Are Taking Over” on repeat.
In terms of ULCC:
Delta spends 19.31 cents to fly a seat 1 mile and to do that it charges 17.76 cents*. American spends 17.76 cents per seat mile for which it charges 16.58 cents. The tickets are already priced below the cost to operate the flight - how much lower are people expecting them to go?
* How does Delta make money? It made $8.2 billion selling Delta miles to America express.
Sorry to be hyper specific, but saying that greater efficiency wouldn't have translated into lower prices if firms have market power drives me crazy. It's just not true. Firms aren't forced to lower their prices when their costs go down. They do it to make more money by selling more units.
A firm that's maximizing its profits will be basically indifferent to raising or lowering its price by a very small amount. Say it's charging $10, has costs if $5, and at that price it sells 10 units, making $50 in profits. If it lowers the price by say $1, it will sell more units, say 2 more, and make whatever the difference is between the new price and its costs on the new sales, here 2 x $4 = $8. But it also loses $1 on every sale that it would have made anyway at the higher price, -$1 * 10 = -$10. So it would lose $2 in profit and it doesn't do it.
Now lower the firm's costs from $5 to $3 per unit and do it again. The loss from lowering the price by $1 is the same, -$10. But now the gain is $9 - $3 = $6 per unit x 2 units = $12. Instead of losing $2 in profits from lowering prices now it will gain $2 in profits. So it will lower prices.
The whole language of "passing on" us frankly unhelpful, because it's not about giving something up. The firm lowers prices because it makes more money by doing that.
For some reason even very intelligent people seem to keep making this mistake. It seems generally rooted in the belief that you'll sell the number of units you are selling no matter what. But there aren't real markets that work that way. Demand slopes downward, and there's always more to sell.
(And before someone jumps in to say firms in competitive industries face more elastic demand so have more to gain, that's both not true in equilibrium -- they raise price until they face the same elastic demand -- and also not relevant. The degree of cost pass through is determined by how fast the elasticity changes as you move down the demand curve.)
The Democratic Virginia state legislature and governor should increase the number of judges on the Virginia Supreme Court, pack the Virginia Supreme Court with favorable Democratic judges, then Democrats can sue to reinstate the recent gerrymandering state ballot initiative, Democrats would presumably win the case, and then the redrawing of the House districts would happen in Democrats’ favor before the 2026 House election. If there were any lawsuits against the court packing, they would presumably be heard by the packed court itself.
No. That would be/require essentially a coup d'etat.
We're just going to have to go back and redo the whole thing. Sorry-- there is no better answer.
"By the same token, Republicans appear to me to be obsessed with the political power of the far left. If that’s your big concern about America, you have an obligation to do what every other major center-right political party on Earth has done and reconcile yourself to a universal-health-care system. And you have to try to actually win elections in the places where the far left is most plausibly going to win political power. Ideas like “crime is bad” and “it would be nice to pay lower taxes” have extremely broad appeal, but Republicans are preventing themselves from running on those ideas in a huge swath of states by pairing them with politically toxic baggage."
As Tom Steyer amusingly hinted at the CA gov debate recently with a sudden emphasis on fiscal austerity, the US directly emulating the public health care of other European countries would involve a major cut, of probably 1.5% GDP or 450 billion a year, in health care spending right now. This is because the EU-OECD average is actually lower[1], not higher, than the US on public health care spending as a fraction of the economy.
I am no liberal or moderate voter whisperer. However, I have a hunch that the GOP campaigning on a whole new system where we cut health care spending by 450 billion a year and enroll everyone in it will actually not come across more reasonable to the median voter.
But let's split the difference and have the GOP chill out about Medicare spending instead, so the US spends more on health care instead of suddenly significantly less like Steyer recommends to his fiscal hawk voters. I believe this has happened. Do liberals believe the GOP of 2026 is more reasonable than the GOP of 2012 or 1996? I am currently trying to find one. I'll let you know when I do.
The final point I'd make is quite simple; the American center-left is actually mostly in charge of the deep blue cities the Republicans love to roast. This is because "deep blue" does not really translate to "hardcore MAGA but for Democrats" the way "deep red" does. Democrats are just a less ideological coalition. So when Republicans are busy mocking deep blue cities as radical socialist hellscapes, what they're doing is loudly propagandizing an actual point, which is moderate Democrats do run lots of things and the results are quite mixed.
I do agree with Matt Republicans should try to become more competitive in cities. Maybe they can nominate an amoral socially moderate billionaire from Queens, NYC to change the image of the party and steadily narrow their NY governor race margins for the last decade in a notable way unlike California. But I do not think "look what you made me do" will work out, either for Republicans or Democrats. There's no way of getting around it; many moderate Democrats like Mamdani. Many moderate Democrats are open to voting for someone like him in DC.
As for the conservative Slow Boring; point taken.
[1] pdf file page 199, yeah I love busting this guy out thanks for asking: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/06/government-at-a-glance-2025_70e14c6c/0efd0bcd-en.pdf
I liked the interview the Central Air podcast did with Gary Leff (writes a blog on the airline industry) this week on Spirit. Apparently everyone thought Spirit was going to liquidate back around December, before jet fuel prices spiked.
I would absolutely love to visit Japan! My parents have been there, and my karate teachers go there semi-regularly-ish to visit our sister dojo in Tokyo. This year is that dojo's 95th anniversary! They're going to have a big celebration.
Slow Borers who have been to Japan, what are your impressions? Recommendations?
Oh and of airfare note, when I was booking in 2009 from SFO I noticed that the cheaper route was thru LAX, but direct fares from LAX were $300 cheaper so I would be paying that just to fly to LAX. A little risky, but I individually booked SFO to LAX on Virgin America for $125 round-trip, and then LAX to Tokyo (just the one airport at the time), so total of around $900.
Great transit and reasonable food. (Ramen everywhere.)
I'd recommend visiting an onsen in the countryside.
The Takaragawa Onsen Osenkaku is outside Tokyo just a couple of hours by high-speed rail & then bus. Stay in the original building (the Japanese stay in the new concrete high-rise). The woodwork is very attractive but you'll have to sleep on a mat and share a bathroom except you're likely to have it all to yourself. You're just above the rushing river so that's nice.
Traditional dinner is a must but tell them to skip the bear soup because really. (The bears are kept in cages across the river, and it's just sad.) There's also a shrine just across the bridge (pedestrian) that's interesting to see.
Skip Japanese breakfast unless you really like natto.
I guess I should post a note about everything.
Fascinating, thank you! (Definitely no bear soup for me)
My impression - Japan was the first non-western first world country. If you go to Germany or France or the UK there is a western sameness about them. They each have their differences compared to the US and each other, but they aren't that different.
Japan, on the other hand, is very different in look and feel, culture, customs, etc. But all in a very advanced first world way.
Edo-Tokyo museum. Their collection on the Meiji era is the best historical treatment of those years that I've seen, and nearly all of the exhibits are bilingual English-Japanese.
On a more whimsical note, there's also the Cup O Noodles factory...
I was a teenager in Canada in the 90s, so I wasn't paying close attention to US politics, but was Clinton really that good at governing, or did he just have the great good fortune to be in office while America was riding high (the immediate aftermath of the Cold War/the fall of the USSR, the End of History, great economy, mostly sunny/optimistic national outlook in the pre-9/11 days)?
Also, I flew Spirit Airlines once a few years ago, and it sucked, they charged you for *everything* other than your butt in the seat, and they deserved to go bankrupt.
As to your first paragraph, I really think the answer is the latter or that is more good fortune than anything else. I'm more with Gary Gerstle in political orders analysis than great individuals. I'd also go further and I'd say it's not a coincidence that our three greatest presidents: Washington, FDR and Lincoln, emerged during times of great crises and uncertainty. It was precisely those circumstances that allowed those figures to emerge. Similarly, the new deal political order lasted as long as it did, because the rest of Europe and the Pacific Theater were bombed out and it took until the 1970's for them to rebuild. The only reason America could continue the New Deal policies until the 1970's was because we did not have to compete with other nations economically. I don't want to poo-poo great presidents and policies but I really think history is far more contingent than anything else and a lot of "success" is really just luck, good fortune and timing . Trying to replicate unique circumstances that led to success is a fool's errand because it was the circumstances beyond people's control that led to success not the actions that people took because the circumstances allowed them to.
ETA: Imagine that somehow, through magic/Dr. Strange lends me the Time Stone/whatever, I swap Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter chronologically, so that Clinton is POTUS in the late 70s and Carter is POTUS in the 90s.
What is the verdict of history on Clinton and Carter in this scenario? Does Clinton, through sheer power of personal charisma, manage to win in 1980 despite the Iran crisis and fuel shortages and everything? Do we speak glowingly about Carter as this noble, morally upright man who also presided over America's Golden Age of the 90s?
Re pragmatism for conservatives: have we been following Spencer Pratt’s anti-Yimby yimbyism?
https://spencerpratt.substack.com/p/the-phantom-housing-crisis?r=2&utm_medium=ios
I flew from LAX to Tokyo and then Tokyo to Dulles in 2023. The Tokyo to Dulles flight was an hour shorter!