To give some concrete examples from an outsider's perspective for Matt's argument: I'm a German energy journalist, and for years the open secret among German companies was that the US is actually way behind when it comes to clean energy. That's partly because US fossil fuels are so cheap, partly because of legislative gridlock, and partly because Republicans hate clean energy for culture war reasons and would rather placate their rich donors from the fossil fuels industry.
For that reason, the US has always been an exciting market for the German energy and greentech industry. There is a small company from southern Germany, for example, that provides digital grid upgrades for utilities in Utah, thus bringing down energy prices. It's a great success that noone really knows about! But the German-led projects that were in the pipeline before Trump came along were way bigger than that. Among them
A giant offshore windpark on the East coast by German energy company RWE
A wind turbine plant in Iowa
An electrolyzer plant for green hydrogen in Houston
Solar plants in Illinois and North Carolina
A high-speed rail project by Siemens connecting LA to Las Vegas
A plant for recycling batteries in Ohio
A plant for electric trucks by Daimler
The IRA greatly encouraged German companies to pursue those projects, obviously because there were subsidies to grab, but also because it served as a signal that the United States were finally ready to reach their potential. But then came Trump, and a lot of those projects, if not most of them, are in limbo now. Trump straight-up forbid offshore wind projects on the East coast, for example, which RWE now says makes them wary about any US-based projects in the future, since they had already lined up the permits.
That's why I fear the damage from Trump's corruption and culture war brainrot will be even bigger than Matthew describes here. Not only will electricity prices go up, not only will jobs be lost, not only will global warming be accelerated, not only will more people die because of air pollution - the US will also lose a lot of trust from exactly those foreign companies that it desperately needs to get back into the game. Solar, grids and batteries in particular will be decisive in the future, and right now the US is behind in all three.
I also want to offer an outsider's perspective, because when I see the words "Germany" and "energy" together I feel severe anxiety about my parents' bank account (I now live in the US but my parents still live in the EU).
First, offshore wind in particular faced many challenges even before Trump. Examples:
Second, at some point I had compared my electricity bill here in the US with the electricity bill of a good friend back home (who also happens to be an engineer specialized in power systems). My friend's cost per kWh was about 3x mine at that time, even though salaries in the EU are lower than salaries in the US. Americans have much higher electricity consumption (I have been to Phoenix and Miami and Atlanta and Houston and Los Angeles in spring/summer, and AC is really necessary!), and having lived here for a while now I find it unlikely that they would go towards German electricity costs without a fight.
Third, the US state that installs the most renewable generation annually for the past few years is, I think, Texas. Republicans are fighting a stupid culture war (I wholeheartedly agree on this!), but in Secret Congress and red states have shown willingness to invest in renewables provided that the economics make sense.
I don't want to be too negative on my continent of birth. There are things that Europe does better than the US (like healthcare!). But energy is not one of them.
PS: None of this is an endorsement of Trump's policies. Every serious analyst that I have seen as well as even Republican Members of Congress do sound the alarm about these policies, and I think this is happening for a reason.
edit: Just to clarify my intentions a bit more, I live in the US on a visa. You don't need to pay close attention to US news to understand that it's ...ummm... unlikely that I am blindly supporting MAGA.
I struggle to understand what your response has to do with my post. Of course offshore wind has faced headwinds before, of course the German energy system is far from perfect. I've never claimed otherwise. German electricity is indeed much more expensive than in the US, 1) because we put a lot of taxes on energy and 2) because our energy system has been fossil-based for decades, and fossil-based energy is more expensive in Europe than the US - vastly more so since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The increasing share of renewables is bringing the prices down, but that's a long process, especially considering renewables necessitate a one-time investment in the form of grid expansion.
But that's exactly my point: Since fossil fuels are so much cheaper in the US, the incentives to switch to a carbon-neutral energy system are much weaker. But those incentives still exist, even in the US! And that's where foreign investment and project management come into play.
The fact that they (narrowly) failed is cause for optimism, however. I don't think even Trump could stop solar expansion, because the business case for that is way too obvious.
My two main points were that: a) I doubt that German (or European in general, really) perspectives can be really helpful when it comes to the US energy sector, and b) that a lot of the issues here aren’t Trump-specific but would have existed even under a Harris administration. I used to have a smug attitude towards my American friends here about how we enlightened Europeans protect the environment that they destroy, but not anymore. I now have huge doubts about the viability of the European clean energy sector. Sorry if I didn’t explain it very well before. Does this make a bit more sense?
PS: Texas Republicans aren’t trying to kneecap the industry. Just look at their abortion laws to see that all sorts of crazy ideas can become law there for ideological reasons. Instead, when it comes to solar, they are permitting new installations at record numbers (and the bill failed unlike the crazy abortion bills).
Technocratic neoliberals have a tendency to look at any policy regime and think "Ahh, the technological advances that have come from this policy regime are good so the policy regime must be good."
They do it regarding Germany, Japan, South Korea, China...
But the reality is that Germany's Energiewende has both A) produced impressive (if still immature) technology stacks) and B) been cripplingly horrible for consumers and many industries outside those which develop and sell those specific technologies.
China's industrial policy has A) led to huge advances in Chinese productive capabilities, B) required massive transfers from the ordinary citizenry, and C) diverted state capacity and financing from any effort to improve QoL, public services, and soft infrastructure like medical or old-age provision, thus D) causing immense structural tensions with its trading partners.
There's every reason to believe that Germany would be better off had it just built a dozen new nuclear power plants at a quarter the explicit cost of the Energiewende and a tenth of its opportunity costs, if not less, and that China would be better off if it were not "investing" 10% of GDP into manufacturing subsidy but instead plowing it into social services and social security provision.
When you consider only ends, and neither means nor counterfactuals, then of course these policy regimes look great. They aren't.
Always love to get lectured with grossly wrong figures about points I wasn't even making from people who read like two articles about Germany in the WSJ opinion section
Look man, all I was trying to offer was a perspective from someone who talks to those companies on the daily on how their confidence in the US market has waned thanks to Trump's policies and what the consequences of that will be for America. If that makes you want to go on some weird tangent about Germany's energy policy, fine. But please do that somewhere else and don't waste my time
You are welcome to articulate which figures are "grossly wrong" there.
Actually, I'll do it for you... there is a single "figure," which is that a dozen nuclear power plants would have cost a fourth as much as the entire Energiewende's direct costs. Said costs are estimated at 500-700B Euros, call it US$650B at the midrange.
Based on the various fuck-ups that western countries have had with greenfield nuclear power plants in the last few decades, it's safe to assume that the first two units of a 12-unit building program will cost around US$15-20B, and that the last two could easily get to 50% above South Korean costs, closer to US$7.5B, due to the learning curve. If we take the US$20B figure, that brings the total program cost to around US$165B for a dozen reactors, almost exactly a quarter of the direct cost of the Energiewende (under rather unfavorable assumptions to boot)!
That you could then, you know, keep building them for cheap is just icing on the cake. In fact, it's the very icing promised by the Energiewende in the first place, indeed by all industrial policy: the government subsidizes a sector to develop technology, acquire know-how, and reach scale, then that sector is profitable both privately and in terms of tax receipts and employment!
It's just that the Energiewende has carried even more daunting indirect costs that have made the whole endeavor a net negative for German industry, her citizenry, and the public purse.
Almost any counterfactual program of public investment would have been better, whether it was nuclear power, rebuilding your passenger rail network, or almost anything else.
Okay, but then wouldn't it be great if the US could benefit from that impressive technology stack without the downsides? These German companies weren't proposing to write energy policy in the US, they were going to build wind turbines and solar panels.
Great comment(s) but please don't fall into this trap of saying Texas is "about to surpass California in renewable generation." (Noah Smith is terrible on this.) It's superficially true but highly misleading. Texas consumes more than twice as much electricity as California (and even more per capita) because it is really hot and has some really high-demand industries, like petrochemicals. As a percentage of total demand, California continues to easily surpass Texas. One reason California isn't building more renewable generation (or contracting for more, because unlike Texas, it is connected to other states' grids) is that there's really not much more demand to satisfy via renewables. In the middle of the day, it's not unusual for fossil fuels to account for less than 5% of California's demand. (In Texas yesterday it was over 60%).
The big growth area for California remains battery storage for evening demand peaks. And the use of batteries has been skyrocketing in California. Within the past four years, it's gone from basically nothing to covering as much as 30% of evening demand (when renewables are quiescent). And it keeps growing.
So good for Texas, but they're still behind us here in California. Sorry for the diatribe but I see this highly misleading claim being put forward all the time.
"I have this facility that demands a lot of electricity, and I'll put it in Texas which produces more from renewables." sounds like a win for Texas, no?
My main thought here is that Europe is pushing its factories to China and then celebrates the reductions in European emissions, and that doesn't sound like a net gain for the planet...
People aren't locating factories in Texas rather than California because there's not enough electricity in California.
EV demand is higher in CA than TX, just for example. I have no doubt that as demand grows in California, more renewable supply will be brought on line. What makes you think otherwise?
Probably the CEC environmental reviews under CEQA which are more rigorous than NEPA and also local use restrictions for new site permitting requirements. Within CA it's easier / faster to increase output within an existing site (i.e., nat gas) than build a net new clean energy site.
EDIT: These site permitting challenges are one of the reasons they import so much energy (84GWh or 30% of total consumption).
You're still wrong about this, and Noah is still right, because California is not an autarky. Until California ceases consuming electricity and products made with electricity from other states, simply not building power and claiming the mix is higher is irrelevant.
Your claim that % of power is more important amount of power is easily disproven by claiming that because I put some solar powered lights in my front yard, I am doing more for green power generation than California (there is no gas turbine in my back yard).
Joshua, I've tried really hard to parse your answer as a response to my argument and I guess I'm not smart enough because I just failed to make much sense of it. Are you suggesting that California build everything it needs? And if your lights are solar powered and don't draw from a dirty grid, isn't that exactly what carbon reduction is all about?
What I’m saying is that as long as California participates in the national and global economy, simply not building power and buying products produced by power from elsewhere means that the fraction of their power that is green is not a meaningful comparison. Much like how my house might have 100% green power generation on premises but buys goods delivered by Amazon and runs its refrigerator on power delivered from elsewhere, a large amount of California’s GDP and consumption involve power generation elsewhere. Money that Apple makes in Cupertino relies on datacenters in Texas and iPhone assembly powered by coal in China.
My front yard is lit by cheapo solar-powered lights. But the proper denominator is not “power produced on my property,” which would give a misleading 100% renewable ratio, it is “power that contributes to my production and consumption.”
I agree with Noah Smith on this. California and Texas share the same Earth. The absolute amount of CO2 emitting energy that is replaced with zero-emmissions energy is important, not the per capita numbers.
What Texas has done so far is great; I hope its government doesn't screw it up.
But what California has done so far is more effective because it's getting rid of almost all of the carbon emitting under its control. Texas still has a ways to go there. (More batteries, Texas!)
Grrr. This talking point just won't die, but imo it's mostly wrong.
In 2022 1/2 of France's nuclear fleet went offline unexpectedly for most of the year and France was a net electricity importer at a time when Europe needed their nuclear output the most. Who's to say that Germany's even older fleet wouldn't have had its own reliability challenges?
But lets assume the fleet runs fine and consider the counterfactual. How much would per kwh rates in Germany have changed if they kept the plants open instead of closing them? Perhaps surprisingly, ChatGPT thinks keeping the plants open would have resulted in a 1.3 euro cents per kWh INCREASE in rates, even factoring in the price spikes from the Russian gas shutoff.
Here's the actual ChatGPT session for this:
Consider the counterfactual of germany not shuttering plants after fukushima. What impact would that have made on the cost of electricity in 2022-2025? Consider the likely generation mix in the counterfactual as well as the cost of substitutes for nuclear like coal that filled the gap.
ChatGPT said:
If Germany had not shut down its nuclear plants after Fukushima, and those reactors continued operating through 2022–2024:
💶 Estimated Economic Impact
Total electricity cost savings (2022–2024):
€30 billion across the 3-year period
Per-kWh cost difference (2022 levels):
About €0.02/kWh less (i.e., 2 euro cents/kWh cheaper electricity)
📊 Assumptions Behind This Estimate:
~100 TWh/year of generation lost from early nuclear shutdowns
Replaced mainly by coal and gas, which had very high prices during the energy crisis (~€150/MWh vs. ~€50/MWh for nuclear)
German annual electricity consumption: ~500 TWh/year
What This Means Practically:
The average pre-tax retail electricity price in Germany was ~€0.32–€0.36/kWh in 2022. If nuclear stayed online, prices could have been ~€0.02 lower per kWh, or roughly 5–6% cheaper.
You said:
does this include the costs of keeping these plants running including one-time maintainance/refurbs that many of these plants needed? If not, please amortize those costs into the rate calculations
ChatGPT said:
Once we account for refurbishment and ongoing maintenance costs of keeping Germany’s nuclear reactors online:
🛠️ Adjusted Economic Impact
Refurbishment cost: €10 billion over 3 years (~€1B/reactor × 10 reactors)
Amortized cost per kWh: €0.033/kWh
Adjusted cost impact (2022–2024):
Instead of saving €0.02/kWh, this scenario would now result in a net cost increase of €0.013/kWh (1.3 euro cents per kWh higher)
Total adjusted net cost (not savings):
€20 billion more expensive over 3 years, after maintenance costs are included
📌 Conclusion
Had Germany kept its nuclear plants running without major modernization, it could have saved money. But if significant maintenance and refurbishments were needed (as widely expected for many reactors), the result would likely have been higher total electricity costs overall, not lower
A ~1.3¢/kWh increase in effective rates vs. current policy, purely from amortized upgrade costs
In Texas the new capacity can just interconnect wherever snd transmission will come, which is much different than any other ISO. This works particularly well in west Texas, but I don’t see this to be an example that every state can follow, including every state in a multi-state market due to cost allocation. And anyway, ERCOT still has a lot of problems.
From the outside it looks as if almost every aspect of the Energiewende has been a near-unmitigated disaster, so forgive me if I just flat out refuse to accept the outsider's perspective on this at all.
I don't disagree with all of it; Trump's policies are uniformly quite bad and this will be no exception, but... I don't care to be lectured at regarding energy or consumer welfare by Germans, of all people, ROFL.
I tend to think it's possible to look specifically at the merits of individual aspects of the German system and pass judgment on each of them separately based on the facts and evidence, rather than dismissing everything the guy says because he's German.
That's a good comment, and I think it may help me further clarify my disagreement with Florian. I think that the merits of the German energy sector can't translate well to an American environment.
One non-energy example: I find the amount of metal detectors in the US ridiculous. If I pointed out how much easier it is to enter event venues in Europe, most of you would (correctly) point out that the availability of guns is much lower there, so that's not really a sector where the US can easily copy the EU.
One non-energy example that is closer to the energy sector: Last summer I spent some time chatting with a PhD student at a leading German university. German privacy laws restrict the amount of information that a utility can directly access for each individual customer, and he was working on techniques to extract information useful to the system operator from limited data. This guy was trying to estimate with a lot of coding and a lot of data analytics something that (my understanding is) utilities can directly measure in the US.
It's things like that (and what I've already said in previous comments) that make me pretty skeptical about the merits of copying even parts of what Germans are doing. It's a totally different environment.
That was rather the point, I think for these points to be taken as "good," one has to ignore the reality of exactly how badly German energy policy has failed.
The fact that individual German firms have technological capabilities that American ones do not is almost irrelevant to this argument.
I love the definition, I am... less confident... that Germany is through making mistakes and has actually learned the relevant lessons.
We're talking about a country which, over the last two years, has preferred to re-activate coal-fired power plants instead of extant, mothballed, well-preserved nuclear plants.
An Italian company was going to build a $300 million dollar electric cable factory with 150 permanent manufacturing jobs on the site of a closed, half-torn down coal plant that is currently used as a scrap yard in the distressed city of Fall River, MA. The factory alone would’ve increased Fall River’s property taxes by 30%!
The factory was meant to provide cables for the Northeast offshore wind industry. In MA alone 2.4 GW is being built and another 3.2 GW was planned.
But along comes Trump and the company cancels their factory. Ironically Fall River narrowly voted for Trump-the first GOP win in over a century. Just absolute self-sabotage.
I think there's a lot of nuance in those examples you list that don't really have anything to do with Trump. Some are just bad investments that Americans shouldn't waste money on (offshore wind, green hydrogen, electric trucks). Solar will be fine where it makes sense without IRA. But Siemens HSR has incredible upside - Brightline West is a big deal that could very likely spark a boom in other routes and isn't partisan at all. If successful, it's the type of industrial investment Trump would even loan to (esp with reputable partners like Fortress and Siemens). The point is, much of the IRA-dependent green stuff will fail, and deservedly so, but overall, German heavyweights like Siemens/VW/Mercedes will more than offset that. And they'll be heavily concentrated in red states with more fossil fuels.
Reading this post sort of makes me think there was section missing. Matt sort of comes to the edge of saying “you can’t explain kneecapping the energy provisions without talking about the super reactionary culture turn Trumpists have taken”. And then doesn’t. I almost feel like if Matt conceded that Trumpists social issues agenda is also hideously unpopular would undermine his message to Democrats to moderate on social issues.
So I’ll do it. I’ve come around a lot in the last 10 years (God has it been that long) to the idea that whatever you think the motivations or thinking is behind what Trump does or what his sycophants say, the real answer is way stupider than you think.
And if there is one overarching sentiment that guides Trumpism it this; Manly man man man, grrr, big dick, manly man man man.
That’s it. Honest to god I truly don’t think the motivations for what undergirds what Trump says, what Trumpism is goes beyond that in way too many cases or situations.
To the post at hand. All of this unnecessary gutting of clean energy provisions seems secondarily driven by rewarding fossil fuel interests, but honestly more to do with green energy is associated with being weak and feminine. And coal, gas and oil are manly. The workers who work in the latter industries are largely male. And it’s considered “tough”, “dirty” “real man” work. Solar panels and wind are “girly girl” weak.
It’s idiotic, it’s retrograde, it’s cartoonishly oafish. And yet honestly think this is what stripping out these clean energy provisions are all about.
I've said this before, but hoisting a turbine blade the size of a city block into place in the middle of the rolling ocean is manly man work. So is climbing a ladder onto someone's roof to bolt in solar panels in the blistering heat.
The girly girl work is when the local HOA starts a catfight and sues to stop a project. Make that go away instead.
Also everyone in the coal industry is just pressing buttons on an electric dashboard watching the work get done by some machine through a video feed. The pickaxes are long gone (thank goodness).
(Disclaimer: I would prefer to live in an ungendered society, but I'm also a male who owns the box set of Modern Marvels. Also Atticus Finch is my male role model and I don't mean to impugn lawyers.)
It's funny that railing against offshore wind was part of RFK Jr.'s crank turn. For all of their bluster, being afraid of vaccines (or no! an itty bitty needle!), seed oils, and wind turbines obstructing your oceanfront view aren't exactly the most masculine qualities.
I think about all of this in relation to my continuous point that the other basic explanation for so so much of everything is the "everything was better in the good ole days" mindset.
And of course part of the problem is too many of the people who recognize this are themselves part of the problem or have "solutions" that are worse than the problem.
I'm thinking specifically about Ross Douthat. Something has gone wrong in our culture where we can't seemingly think of new ideas for movies (everything is superhero or reboots), concerts are dominated by older acts and there is a general lack of forward momentum culturally. So of course the reason is because we have deviated from the path of super reactionary Catholicism and we need everyone to go back to that. So what we need is actually even more "back in the good ole days" culture and policy.
I know this isn't strictly the thesis of his last book or writings. He's too smart to put anything like that in writing. But honest to God, I really think I've summed his thinking and writing last few years pretty well.
An additional thought about Douthat, a co-religionist who's ideas aggravate me to the point I need to consider penance in response: his super reactionary Catholicism would have been considered extreme even at the height of Catholic observance in this country. He reminds me of the way over the top practitioners in my town/parish who even my uncle, a priest, described as religious fanatics.
The good old days he missed but longs for weren't anything like he imagines.
It's worth pointing out he's a convert. His understanding of being Catholic seems to be more an intellectual/political project than it is for people who grew up in Irish, Italian, Polish, or Latin Catholic families, where it's part of the family background and wider cultural context. It's not the Catholicism of the kids I grew up with complaining about having to go to CCD after school.
He also has (I am not a Catholic, not an expert, so take that with a grain of salt) a very inaccurate view of Catholic doctrine and beliefs. There was a very funny letter to the New Yorker by the former President of Georgetown pointing this out a while back. Just kinda bizarre that this is his whole thing and there isn't a lot of intellectual backing, I suspect that it's because people aren't used to arguing about it.
Why do you consider his Catholicism super reactionary and extreme? My very limited understanding was that among the observers who care there's a liberal faction and conservative faction and that he's well within the mainstream of the conservative faction, not trending into Catholic weirdo territory with the Latin mass, etc, like MBD or even further like Matthew Walther.
At the stage production my wife and I most recently went to ("Life of Pi"), I entertained myself during the intermission by counting up how many of the shows listed for next season were (i) adaptations of a work from another medium (mostly film) or (ii) sequels to/revivals of earlier stage productions, and came up with 14 of 18 shows fitting one of those criteria. (Also, I have to acknowledge I've seen "Back to the Future: The Musical," which my wife got tickets to for our whole family, and, while it was serviceable, I did spend the entire time feeling like the Ryan Reynolds "But why?" GIF was playing in my head.)
When I walked out of Sinners in the movie theater (a great original movie) I saw posters for a new Naked Gun, Final Destination, and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
[Emperor Palpatine voice] Goood… goooood! Buy tickets to the next Disney live action CGI remake, and the journey to the fall of Western pop culture will be complete!
Everything Everywhere All at Once was a good example of that. I was definitely thinking of that movie when I watched Sinners, even though it doesn’t really fit that description.
I really want to hear Douthat’s take on Sinners, after seeing him talk about left art and right art and the ways one can appreciate good original art with a different political point of view from one’s own.
My read is that in the main part of the movie we have four separate moral centers - the characters in the juke joint (representing traditional musical culture), the vampires (representing the capitalist music industry), the church (which sees music as a danger), and the KKK (which sees black people as a danger). The end scene seems to show the main character living somewhere between the first two.
I think the vampires are homogenizing but I'm not sure they're capitalist -- the "shared pain / shared knowledge" aspect is so intrinsically communitarian that my read of them was in the vein of cultural appropriation more generally, with the movie cultivating a deliberately ambiguous take on whether segregating traditions to allow allopatric speciation to flourish (exemplified by the super-white Irish and bluegrass music as contrasted with the basically purely African American blues tradition) was necessarily better than syncretism by dint of making the vampires' pitch so compelling. Conversely, if anyone is capitalist it seems like Smoke, who's in the position of explicitly trying to determine the solvency of the juke joint.) Also Rammick's stated motivation for converting Sammie is his desire to use Sammie's abilities to recommune with his deceased relatives -- a fairly concrete / instrumental and clearly sympathetic (but not particularly homogenizing) desire. Although I hadn't considered the specific music industry read heretofore - I'll have to chew on it more!
My view of the church was that that was a kind of token edgy-atheism / "Christianity is a conqueror's / white man's religion" insert (and not great writing for that reason). Sammie's father isn't developed much past a strawman (except I guess inasmuch as his forewarning about music was kinda right, but c'mon, no viewer is going to side with the hellfire and brimstone preacher *against* the blues) and the spiritual center of the movie is Annie, who very much represents a non-Christian-inflected spirituality. The anti-Christian take seemed particularly driven home with respect to Rammick reciting the Lord's Prayer and ironically "baptizing" Sammie while noting that while it was a comfort it had been uttered by the men who took his (Rammick's) father's land -- the implication is that religion is just empty words rather than treating Christian piety as anathema to vampires in the way that the Western canon traditionally does (e.g. crosses as among the vampire-repellents). Here, instead we have juju bags.
By whom? Certainly not by the NYT readers, judging by the number of comments that say "Why is this hack still on the NYT payroll" and "he makes me want to cancel my subscription" and such.
Ideology aside, there are many columnists in America who are more interesting intellectually, better prose stylists, or both.
Heck, I'll take David French or David Brooks over Ross Douthat any day of the week.
I, for one, would not take Brooks over Douthat (at least pre-latter-days Douthat). Douthat writes actual takes from his sort of 'would-be-center-rightist-except-also-super-tradCath' idiosyncratic perspective. Which, as Walter would say, is at least an ethos. The fault with him as a token conservative stand-in is that he doesn't really represent any kind of meaningful political constituency.
I find Brooks' output to much better approximate the center-rightist version of GPT-3 AI slop and (back when I read him semi-regularly) would pretty often find myself finishing a column and immediately regretting it, thinking "I am dumber for having read this."
By Andrew Sullivan, Scott Sumner, possibly Steve Bannon (IIRC lol). Really anyone with a modicum of intellectual discernment would realize it...it's not exactly a high bar (best columnist that is). You can also tell by the deference he's given by his colleagues on podcasts and often times by the guests.
The problem I have with Douthat is that most of his columns don't pass the basic test of "could this be written to more clearly exposit the point he is trying to make?" The columns, if written more clearly, would be less attractive and pleasurable to read, but they fail as columns. The purpose of column-writing prose is to deliver the underlying point as clearly and unequivocally as possible; writing a column should force the columnist to clarify exactly what their point is in order to do so.
Douthat writes well, he's a fine prose stylist. But that's the thing that is wrong with his columns. Columns should be boring in a literary sense; the prose should be "transparent" (to steal a term from literary criticism) because the purpose of the column is not prose.
But Trump and the people like this don't know these things, because they're not interested in the details of what modern labor is like. They're just thinking of old videos showing men at work and saying "yeah, that's cool and manly, let's go back to that" without really realizing that we don't send burly men with pickaxes down to the coal seams anymore. It's skin-deep, all vibes, retirees and lawyers musing about how other people should work.
I basically agree with this. I think if you want a fancier wrapping for it you could say that Trumpism is - and always has been - an explicitly *nostalgic* political project, to a much greater extent than even normal Republican politics.
The bit about coal miners being 'manly' is clearly correct, he has given more than one speech where he's made that subtext into very literal text.
Also conservatives like doing the opposite of whatever liberals want, because they don't like liberals and therefore do like it when liberals are angry, sad, or otherwise upset.
Yeah this is the better explanation. Nuclear power and digging extremely deep holes are pretty manly, but liberals think they're good so Republicans don't.
All gendered explanations are reductive, but isn't it also the case that prizing 'feminine' values of proceduralism, consensus, and equity is, to some extent, how we got here? Arguably the EV charging and other investments would have benefited from some he-man, just-get-it-done energy that would have given dems something tangible to take to the voters. You could say, at its best the abundance agenda is pretty manly and resolute - maybe that's why the groups (overwhelmingly run by women) are fighting it so hard. We can either embrace Ezra's version of masculinity or Trump's - but the dem's old order that saw David Hogg ejected because he messed up the numerically correct gender allocation of leadership posts at the dnc needs to go.
Good point, at least more of that machoism than we'd like to think (also explains the behavior around Covid--vaccines are feminine, letting immune systems tough it out is manly).
The weird thing is that the anti-vaccine movement grew out of crunchy mom culture in the UK. It used to be most prominent among the hippies with MFAs. Being scared of needles isn't manly!
Used to be that Ann Arbor and Boulder had the lowest vaccination rates in the country (whatever that means, I have no idea how that stat is constructed). Doubt that’s true anymore
Aww, thanks! I’ll be there in spirit. I’m actually moving her to NYC on a road trip (one last hurrah before 3 years long-distance/before the national parks degrade).
It's funny to see rich people who think working class people also want their kids to be working class. My grandpa drove a truck and my dad was an electrician - they sure as shit didn't want me doing either job.
Their perspective is that men are men when they do "dirty jobs" like mining coal and drilling oil, and there's nothing dirty about installing a wind turbine.
Because this is a family site, I will not refer to the psychological implications of seeing the oil first shoot out of the well when the drill first hits paydirt.
I assure anyone that welding a beautiful seam with flux core is dirty so unless they're riveting the bloody things together it's getting gross when you put them together.
I had a meeting with my local DTC communications committee on Tuesday and naturally immigration came up. An honor roll, soccer star, graduating at the age of 16 years old kid was picked up by ICE along with his father after a routine courthouse check-in and they were overnighted to Texas where they are being held. It sucks. It's fucking awful.
What I had to keep reminding my co committee members was that the zeitgeist right now is not in our favor on this topic. The argument should lead with concerns about due process, bad faith treatment of those cooperating with the process already (the absolutely ghoulish ICE practice of camping outside courthouses and whisking people away after routine hearings), and maybe some Dreamer-adjacent rhetoric and some super sympathetic local cases (ie a beloved member of the community who has been here forever and runs a populat business). What you can't do is lead with concepts related to legal status not mattering, insisting those here illegally have a right to stay, etc. Another thing I am pushing is for them (all of us where nice white libs) to actually talk to the working class Hispanics in our town about what's going on. One member said that the "local Hispanic community must be terrified of going out right now" which was news to me because at the Catholic church bazaar I went to on Wednesday the tamales and birria tacos were on point and the place was slammed.
Anyways. How to link this to today's post. I feel a bit like this post and the Politix podcast are pissing up a rope. I think Beutler has a point about *making* something an issue rather than passively waiting for the right issue to come around. To your point this legislation is going to have huge impact in the near and mid term of the country. I think the synthesis here is you both need to put in an effort to make something an issue, but something about the zeitgeist determines what issues can ever gain traction. And the problem right now is despite tremendous amounts of Fucking Around there has been shockingly little Finding Out while Trump has been in office. I am starting to appreciate your point about how it might have been better to have lost in 2020 - the Finding Out would have been clearly a Trump issue. Until the Finding Out can be clearly tied to Trump's Fucking Around, stuff like Congressional legislation is too abstract, not visceral enough for the low info voters watching tiktok all day or infinite scrolling their For You slop on X. What they see is anarchists burning Waymos and flying Mexican flags.
Dems had the Juice in 2004-2006 because Bush was clearly starting to Find Out. I've said it before, but I still believe that this phase of Fucking Around is going to have a potentially catastrophic Finding Out. But until Finding Out hits we need to think hard about how we can best shift the frame in the way it can be shifted.
Yea, my conversations with the more sane conservatives in my life have consisted of laying groundwork that I’ll be able to reference later if and as things break because of actions taken now.
“Why does curtailing China’s market distortions require tariffs on Canada?”
“Why is the House proposing to significantly increase the deficit?”
“What’s up with pulling funding for nuclear?”
Brief conversation in which they admit this makes no sense, then I let it lay fallow.
The weird thing about most of the conservatives I know is that they are just rich to insanely rich highly educated guys who are sort of temperamentally pro immigration.
My blue collar Irish relations who have switched to Trump, well, they’re not people who are interested in policy, they have completely incoherent views (to the extent they have them), and so these discussions are worse than pointless. They do, however, have a roughly anti immigrant stance- none of the ones they know, let’s be clear, all those guys are hard working honest people. That being said, it’s pretty clear from the group chat that kidnapping kids from elementary schools is absolutely turning these guys off. We all have elementary school age kids and grandkids
I know of reporting that says ICEshowed up at an elementary school saying they had parental permission to pick up kids. I also know my uncle went straight to “ICE is kidnapping kids”
My personal belief is there’s no way they’d be dumb enough to do that, but Stephen miller was dumb enough to leave his wife alone with Musk so who knows
As I said, "more sane." My dad is a gun nut but otherwise not too invested in justifying every horrible thing Trump says or does, and so he doesn't bother.
I am hoping that these seeds will bloom, but they require pain and suffering that Americans can readily understand as being the fault of Trump for us to benefit.
As much as I hate to say it, I am kind of with Matt on being an immigration doomer right now. We have lost the argument. Deportations are popular. Protesting ICE raids only help the admin. It's a completely cooked situation and I hate it.
This is where the majority of the public is on the issue. The more time I spend in the comment section here, the more I realize that a large portion of the SB readers appear to be far left activists. Oh well, if they want JD Vance for president in 2028 they should continue with this this nonsense. Here is the hoping the next democratic candidate is a centrist.
Outsourcing your principles to majority opinion is unbelievably cucked. I used to be a Republican and would switch back just as easily if Democrats became the party of craven populism. I hate populism more than I hate losing elections.
My principle is that I've yet to hear an even halfway convincing ethical argument against expanding immigration on humanitarian grounds. It seems pretty clear that the opposition is hiding behind layman's "wisdom" to rationalize/excuse their moral laziness
"Voters don't like moralizing."
If you abandon morals the second they're unpopular, then you don't really have any morals. And if that's the new political reality, you're wasting your time on anything that isn't self-serving hedonism.
I think ICE camping outside courthouses and arresting those complying with a legal process are operating in bad faith and in ways that will ultimately be counterproductive if illegal immigrants go back to 90s style hiding vs some degree of monitoring.
Because "in the country illegally" is not a thing. The INA lays out the specifics of who is authorized to enter and stay in the US under what conditions. And one does not imply the other. You can enter the US legally on a visa and then overstay it or violate its terms. You can also enter illegally and then be granted legal status. All that happens at a court, in front of a judge. These are not criminal trials because they are not criminal offenses.
Quite often, ICE is detaining lawful residents obeying lawful court orders and then putting them in (privately run) detention centers while they work to strip them of said lawful status so they can deport them. Of course, skipping those court appearances is often grounds for deportation so people---who may have been here for years, working, paying taxes and be married to US citizens and have US citizen children---are given the choice of going to court and risking being stuffed into a van by a militarized federal immigration force or risking their legal status by skipping it.
I would say the point is that people showing up to a routine court house appointment have some reason to believe they might be allowed to be here. The ones that don't aren't getting scheduled hearings.
Last week, ICE showed up at the immigration court in Downtown Miami and arrested a few people when they showed up for their regular check-in with authorities. The follow-up stories about the reason for those arrests didn’t get nearly as much attention as the initial story: ICE wasn’t grabbing everyone who showed up for their appointment, but only the ones who had committed crimes since being granted temporary status.
I think you have it backwards. ICE is not detaining people illegally until a judge says so. Up until then, they are just abusing their authority. They could stuff me in a van right now and claim my ID is fake or that facial recognition matched me for a person with a deportation order.
If you enter the country without a visa, you are not in the country illegally until a judge says so. You might be able to apply for asylum, parole, deferred action, etc. Same goes if you violate the terms of a visa. I suppose once you receive a deportation order you could be considered "in the country illegally" but then those aren't really the people showing up for a court appearance.
“If you enter the country without a visa, you are not in the country illegally until a judge says so”
Dunno if you’re just badly misinformed or engaging in sophistry, but:
“8 U.S. Code § 1325 - Improper entry by alien
Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.“
I suppose one could also say you can murder someone and it’s not technically illegal until you’ve been convicted. But that’s silly.
Sure, but other parts of the INA can supersede § 1325 --- or whatever the word is, I'm not a lawyer. Like § 209 which allows you to enter an asylum claim which, if deemed (presumably by a judge) credible, prohibits DHS from removing you.
And no, you cannot murder someone legally because that is the definition of the word murder. You can, however, kill someone legally. You can even "murder" someone in the colloquial sense legally and "get away with murder".
I don't feel like I'm making a weird abstract argument here. Laws amend and supersede other laws and things may be illegal or against the law, but until a judge rules on which part of what law applies, you have not actually broken the law in any meaningful or consequential sense.
Yes, being here illegally is real. I don't deny it. I think the camping outside of courthouses is bad faith on behalf of the government for changing the terms of their interactions, and ultimately counterproductive for ICE. In reality they don't have the resources (as of today) to chase all undocumented immigrants down if those immigrants stop cooperating to any degree and basically go back into 90s style hiding.
The checkin could have been related to asylum claim processing, some kind of TPS, or some kind of monitoring before a hearing that can lead to deportation. We don't know the specifics of the case that my DTC discussed.
If they have made asylum claims the law states they are due some degree of hearing and a decision. If the Trump admin juiced up the processing capacity and deported all of those with illegitimate asylum claims them that'd be fine. If they are here out and out illegally they can be deported.
It's really something to see Trump's approval ratings bounce back to an almost normal level as Liberation Day fades into the background.
Basically, people are fine with Trump, and will continue to be fine with him only if and until his actions hit their pocketbooks directly. You'd think people would have *some* pride in being Americans and all of what that means and would be at least somewhat horrified by his bull in a china shop/horse loose in a hospital administration, but nope.
So, sure, protest and all that. Maybe his numbers will dip a point or so. But until his incompetence, malfeasance and ugliness hits home for them personally, it's all good, man.
"Around, stuff like Congressional legislation is too abstract, not visceral enough for the low info voters watching tiktok all day or infinite scrolling their For You slop on X. What they see is anarchists burning Waymos and flying Mexican flags."
I've said this before but I live in Florida and this describes probably 85% of my friends, almost all of whom are college graduates, many of which are lawyers and all of which are well off. In my circle, most people are seeing these protests as a bunch of lawless antagonizers with no respect for the rule of law - they don't see that these protests/riots are based on a draconian immigration policy. Fair or not, the images coming from these incidents are not good for Dems, although I'm not sure what Dems can do about it.
I'm so sick of this attitude where, whenever a protest is for left-wing causes, the entire Democratic party is personally responsible for each and every person who crosses the line - even when the Republican president is intentionally escalating the situation, trying to goad somebody into going too far. While, whenever a protest is for right-wing causes, it's just people gathering peacefully, even when they do get violent or destroy property (e.g. 1/6). The complete and total double-standard regarding protests is disgusting. It's essentially a world where the first amendment applies only to conservatives.
I also just think it's a little too early to get the bill into the popular consciousness. No matter how many rallies you hold, it isn't going to grab the interest of normal people who aren't political junkies until the final vote is maybe a couple weeks away.
The public is solidly against the bill. Quinnipiac has it has 27/53 approve/disapprove. Do you think that will stop the Republicans? I don't.
The only protests that *might* matter would be those involving diehard Trump supporters in rural areas. Whatever one might think about that, that's certainly out of our control or influence.
In the end, Republicans are going to Republican, and we'll see just how bad it is. If it's bad enough, then they'll be punished at the polls at some point.
how many weeks away do you think the final vote is? (not a rhetorical question, i just can't tell by looking at the coverage... i got the impression they want to get it done by july 4th at the latest, but what is stopping it from happening sooner?)
i find the divergence between how matt and ezra are taking this moment in quite curious. i would argue that ezra's approach is ``everything matters lol''.
“I do want to flag that progressives are allowed to organize protests against looming Medicaid cuts, not just immigration enforcement.”
Are centrists also allowed to organise protests? Why don’t you, or anyone else perturbed by the current state of affairs, try to organise one against this bill?
Lol I think that must be true for so many of these accounts who seem to be able to throw 20+ comments on every SB article within half an hour of its publication 😂
Matt generally drops the article in my lunch break, so you get 30-40 minutes of my comments then and then I come back three hours later after I finish work. (I'm in europe)
No no my friend, that's having a four year old, not being unemployed haha we've already been up for hours and are fully caffeinated by the time MattY drops the daily fix
Seems like the more efficient way to do it would be to persuade people attending the ICE protests to hold up signs saying "Also The Medicaid Cuts Are Bad."
If Matt is concerned about optics, he might want to consider the intraparty optics of progressives being out on the streets opposing Trump while the moderates are doing PowerPoint presentations at WelcomeFest complaining about BlueSky posters.
Moderates routinely get outhustled by radicals and then complain said radicals have disproportionate influence in politics. I would say they're too invested in proceduralism over taking action but that might be too on the nose.
Trump gives my many, many, many friends in oil and gas extraction an ulcer. They do not want what he thinks they want (there aren’t meaningful external constraints on production). They cannot give him what he wants (unlimited supply- they’ll go out of business in a pretty tight space already).
Theres some heterogeneity based on where peoples’ wells are but the economics of fracking just dont work the way Trump thinks it does.
Trump demands mutual economically exclusive outcomes. Large increases in production and lower prices. And all he is doing is driving down global economic activity and thus prices.
I do wonder- I know a lot of people in the industry- but it seems like they have really really big problems with how complex financing is for extraction right now, and despite having people at energy who know this and come from the industry there’s nothing anyone is even willing to try to unfuck that industry.
This mess is gonna collapse private equity, if anything does.
If you really want to lower costs for the oil and gas industry, getting rid of the tariffs on their equipment would be a good place to start. And, according to a podcast I listened so, unblocking solar and wind development so they can power their drilling equipment with cheaper renewable energy would also help. Giving away more federal land does almost nothing, as the oil industry already has pretty much all the land they want, and they're not even using most of it because it's not economical.
I have some genuine questions about the "change the topic" messaging strategy suggested here and in some other articles.
1. Does changing the topic work? I usually agree with Matt when he says Democrats can't distract everyone from their cultural views by just going full tilt on socialism. But this seems like the same strategy -- he wants to distract everyone from the thing on the news by getting everyone to yell about Medicaid instead.
I understand healthcare is Trump's weakest issue, but I'm not sure what to make of this. Imagine World War III were taking place, and a political party has an unpopular approach to World War III but a popular approach to an issue that's less pressing in voters' minds (say, regulation of insurance companies). Would screaming about insurance regulation every day help that party or make it look stupid?
2. Even if we grant that changing the topic works, do people typically respond to these types of economic forecasts? They didn't really seem to respond to, e.g., this bill will bring down inflation! We even called it the Inflation Reduction Act!
I think maybe for this type of messaging to be effective, you have to wait until the economic consequences are apparent. If this bill doesn't have a big effect on the pocketbooks of likely voters (not necessarily Medicaid recipients...), then it won't work. Furthermore, if it does have such a detrimental effect, people will actually be angry, so Democrats won't have to rely on changing the topic.
The Trump administration really makes following politics kind of a bummer. Just a constant stream of dumb things and lies for like, no particular reason.
To put it in the context of rooftop solar right now if BBB is passed into law we'd be looking at the market shrinking from the current world where tons of people go solar for the economic reasons (and through various incentives and leasing models many moderate to low income people can go solar as well), to one where people who go solar are largely like Matt: well to do homeowners who can write a big check because they believe in taking action on the climate issue and can afford to make a big payment now for long term savings.
Suffice to say the market for the former is much larger than the market for the later and so you'll see a major contraction in the whole industry.
Does rooftop solar really warrant subsidy of this sort?
I think the answer is very clearly no.
Now if you ask this about heat pumps, which have in response to the subsidy and research incentives improved hugely on both performance and price in just a few years, then yes. Battery cell production, virtual peaker installation, and R&D? Yes. EV charging infrastructure? Yes.
But solar power is a largely mature technology with gradually improving performance and scale, and its manufacture and utility-scale installation are profitable without subsidy.
Why we should subsidize the *least efficient* mode of installing and connecting solar power is beyond me.
Sure, though my preference would be to sit down with our allies and agree on a common framework to confront the main actor behind that dumping. But I am open to some industrial policy framework in support of highly automated manufacturing here.
I am just questioning the specifics of why we'd subsidize *rooftop solar* of all things.
I just put in solar panels and a lot of battery capacity. And I tend to agree with you. I'm happy to get my tax credit, but putting in my 17 panels on my roof is *way* more expensive than adding 17 more panels to some huge solar farm out in the desert. As long as the grid becomes more renewables/battery-based (like here in CA), rooftop solar isn't that critical. Ultimately, I did it for reasons of vanity, virtue signaling and (big one) keeping the power on after the Big One.
I don’t know, especially at least for me “home battery that really durably replaces an emergency generator” would be worth WAY more than solar (I have a very, very low energy bill for some reason, solar gets me next to nothing without storage)
There is room for subsidies, there’s probably not room for an interesting paper on the political economy of “why solar?” But it does interest me that there are subsidies for that and less for other things
I read somewhere that rooftop solar is more efficient than it seems because it doesn't require new transmission capacity - the energy is generated right there where most of it is being used. Utility solar may be cheap as far as panel installation goes, but the transmission lines required to connect all that capacity to the grid are not only expensive, but tend to get mired in years and years of endless red tape (because nobody wants new, ugly, high-voltage transmission lines in their backyard).
"Why we should subsidize the *least efficient* mode of installing and connecting solar power is beyond me."
In an ideal world where we could build large-scale solar projects quickly and easily, you might have a point.
In the real world, where my choices are "get some solar panels installed on my roof, which I own and which local rules allow me to do" or "wait and hope that the proposed local solar installation will manage to run the gauntlet of environmental impact review/a hundred concerned NIMBYs making noise about how the solar installation is bad and will ruin their community," the former sometimes looks more attractive than the latter, but it is only an option for people who can shell out $30k out of pocket, and that is, needless to say, a small minority of people.
Again, solar installations are capacity constrained. Every cell that isn’t installed on a roof will get installed elsewhere at present and for the foreseeable future, so this is flat out untrue.
"(and through various incentives and leasing models many moderate to low income people can go solar as well), to one where people who go solar are largely like Matt: well to do homeowners who can write a big check because they believe in taking action on the climate issue and can afford to make a big payment now for long term savings."
If solar is so cheap and easy now, why does it need incentives and market distortions to be installed?
Because most people can't afford to write a big check up front to savings that are realized over a 5-20 year timeline. It's like telling a low income renter "Just buy a house with cash up front and stop throwing away money on rent or a mortgage, what's so hard about that?" (Which by the way is why home ownership is heavily subsidized by the federal government, if it wasn't far fewer people could afford to own their own home)
People buy cars they can't afford to write a big check for all the time. If the deal is win win and the homeowner is going to save all this money with solar, the solar is being installed on the collateral the bank needs to underwrite a loan, why wouldn't the solar company just lend the money to the homeowner if it's such a good deal? Car companies all have finance arms.
There are a bunch of lending programs. I haven’t really thought about the optimal financing structure but there are various ways to get your solar panels “paid for.”
As for car companies and captive financing… industry practices have whipsawed back and forth since the collapse of GMAC (which became Ally). But that’s tangential.
How heavily is homeownership actually subsidized by the federal government? The median homeowner, and probably the 75th percentile one, do not use the mortgage interest deduction, which is the main focus of these conversations.
I’ve been completely unable to find an accounting of what direct or opportunity costs are associated with federal market-making activities for long-term fixed-interest rate mortgages, which are the main finger on the scale in this sector.
It's massively indirectly subsidized via a variety of mechanisms, the whole idea of a 20 year mortgage was invented as a government backed policy after World War 2, before then you had a "market" system where mortgages where only for a few years and were largely for the rich.
I am aware of the history, I am trying to understand the magnitude of the subsidies or the opportunity cost and I have never been able to find *anything*.
Beyond the fact that everyone refers to it as "massive."
Because you are paying for the infrastructure. Internet would be unaffordable if every house had to pay to run wires from the ISP to their house. But we don't because we subsidized the infrastructure a long time ago (first as telephone, then as cable TV). Likewise, if we subsidize rooftop solar now, we add capacity to the grid such that, in a future where most buildings have solar panels, we collectively pay for upkeep through monthly electricity bills the same way we currently pay for power companies to maintain centralized generation infrastructure.
Installing solar on your home isn't that cheap. (Just installed it.*) Is industrial-sized solar mature enough not to need any more subsidies? Maybe, but I'm not sure. So I'd prefer to be conservative and keep the subsidies in place until we have a lot more confidence that it will survive and flourish without them.
*I like my solar panels but to tell you the truth, if my grid is becoming more based on renewables (like here in California), I'm not sure it's the best investment for most people.
This is strikes me as the key point: you can argue about changes to policy, perhaps utility grade should get more subsidies or maybe the subsidies should be more about your income and less about the size your system, there are a million ways to change things. But BBB doesn't do that, it's basically just an attempt to throttle the entire world of renewable energy which is bad because renewable energy is a lot better than the alternatives.
I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion that Trump and the Republicans are not in favor of good policy that can help make America stronger and the world a better place.
Without net metering there would not BE (nor should there be) and long term savings. Putting solar panels on rooftops is an inefficient way to reduce CO2 emissions. Ergo: stop subsidizing it in _any_ way.
I honestly think the best solution for rooftop solar is to just get rid of all of the China tariffs. It would have the same effect on making solar more affordable as subsidies, but without large sums of taxpayer money.
Yes, domestic companies that make solar panels wouldn't like it, but it's not like they have a strong business anyway, and the domestic business of solar panel installation, if Chinese imports were allowed, would boom.
Thanks for the tip, I haven’t checked out eggs at Target.
Fun tidbit: shortly after the inauguration, a jar of instant coffee at Target was $7. Last month the same identical brand and size was $13. And I’m talking regular instant coffee, not some fancy schmancy artisanal single-origin rainforest-friendly fair trade coffee!
TRUMP PROMISED LOWER PRICES WHERE IS MY AFFORDABLE COFFEE GODDAMMIT
Yes! It's valuable to let people who are watching at home on TV that people who are motivated to protest can care about these things too, not just Palestine!
Over the years environmentalists could have been sold as a way to reduce electricity bills and make the cost of living more manageable. But they didn’t because they get hard making people do without. And now the chickens have come home to roost.
I agree here, the ascetic streak in the environmental movement is insanely counterproductive.
Frankly, it shows up a lot of places on the right and left, and has it EVER paid off? It seems like a tent shrinking mechanic to find the true believers
Seems like it probably paid off for the abolitionists in some respects. You don't want to make your case that "slavery is bad" contingent on "if and only if it's a less efficient form of surplus creation for capital owners than voluntary employment" if it turns out that the contingent fact is untrue. Sure, it's enormously helpful instrumentally in the event that it *is* true, but it's also basically just saying "what terminal values lol. No terminal values, only capitalism."
In honesty, reducing the harm of CO2 emissions is NOT costless. It is not anywhere near as costly as most environmentalists and all anti-environmentalists imply, but not zero. Trying to make it appear costless may be a necessary tactic at any given disjuncture, but it is a fatal strategy.
IMO, the real fatal strategy was focusing too much on climate change and CO2 and deemphasizing costs of pollution from fossil fuel emissions. For reasons I can't get my head around, they intentionally chose to make it almost all about climate change and carbon and mostly ignore all the other bad stuff in ff combustion emissions.
A quick half-assed ChatGPT session puts the 20 yr NPV of non-climate related costs of ff combustion at around $4 trillion. That's a lot lower than the estimated climate cost NPV of $14 trillion, but imo it's both less controversial (hardly any PM 2.5 deniers out there) and way less hypothetical/theoretical versus cost of carbon calculations.
And also, don't forget about noise. For the most part, engines that run off fossil fuels are noisy and obnoxious. Leaf blowers, pressure washers, chainsaws...all of this stuff, but bulk of the noise comes not from the actual work, but from fossil-fueled machinery powering the equipment. All of these pieces of equipment have electric alternatives, but the electric alternatives are seldom used, mostly due to inertia.
Another pet peeve of mine is generators used to power stuff like food trucks or event lighting with large crowds of people nearby, often within a couple hundred feet of an electrical outlet they could have easily plugged into. Even though it has negligible climate change impact, large crowds of people should not be breathing generator exhaust when there's such easy alternatives.
I agree, and one place this line of thinking can have real impact on policy is which energy measures to spend money on.
In general, I think the focus on the government should be measures that both reduce carbon emissions *and* have real potential to lower energy costs for consumers, when deployed at scale. Heat pumps, solar+wind generation, next gen battery development, and EVs all meet the bar of "real potential to lower costs". (Geothermal also does, but in a way that is more speculative).
Examples of what doesn't have any realistic potential to lower costs include green hydrogen, "sustainable" aviation fuel, and machines to scrub carbon dioxide from the air. This is the kind of stuff that, at best, provides a small reduction in net CO2 emissions, in exchange for a huge, never-ending cost to the taxpayer and, at worst, doesn't even reduce net CO2 emissions because of people forgetting to factor in stuff like emissions from fossil fuels powering the carbon capture machines.
Bone to pick with you from the Politix podcast. You have banged the drum continuously that Democrats need to focus more on the Medicaid cuts than immigration protests. That there needs to be more protests around the Medicaid cuts so "normies" know bad it is. But lastly, immigration is a winning issue for Trump and so any focus whatsoever on immigration will benefit Trump and therefore it will absolutely help GOP in midterms and 2028.
You really need to update your priors on this. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/11/trump-quinnipiac-poll-immigration-00400784. I am more sympathetic to you regarding your "popularism" stance than a lot of your left wing critics. I don't disagree at all that there should be more focus on the extremism of the Medicaid cuts; the fact that it doesn't come close to being on the home page of the New York Times is honestly shocking. But part of "popularism" has to come with understanding that the public's opinion on a variety of issues is a) often not stable generally b) is subject to changes from subtle changes to poll wording c) will and often does change in response to events.
Also, I gotta go kind of doomer. Matt, this is it. Forget the threat of authoritarian takeover in 2028 it's being threatened now. President Stephen Miller is clearly aching to find reason to invoke the Insurrection Act and at that point honest to god, what the are the chances we have an actual free and fair election? You're not going to reach any member of the public about Medicaid cuts if you're in a jail cell for not dancing heartily enough at Trump's "I didn't get enough hugs from daddy so I need to wildly overcompensate for my emotional shortcomings" military parade.
Matt's been rightly banging on about stakeholders being silent in the face of this ruinous bill. I wonder how much the President's authoritarian turn has affected their willingness to speak out.
I feel like it's wildly underreported how often GOP politicians will apparently say off the record in private that a big reason they don't speak out more on Trump's obviously idiotic statements/policies/general behavior is actual fear for their physical safety.
I suspect some of this is overreaction and/or a crutch. Politicians since beginning of time have had unhinged opponents who threaten harm. Also, citing safety of one's family is an easy to justify (even just to yourself) why you didn't do more to some bad thing from happening.
But it's been a consistent enough refrain that I think there is a bit of "where there's smoke there is fire" aspect to why there isn't more criticism from people or entities you would think would be more vocal in opposition.
Also, as to why House members voted for a bill that so clearly would harm them in a midterm election (especially ones in "swing" districts), it seems likely party of the story is a shocking number of them clearly didn't know the details of all the provisions in the bill. But I think we also need to give credence to a) Trump is the GOP and all money basically flows to him so he has ability to direct primary campaigns against incumbents b) There is going to be some true "thumb on the scale stuff" with elections going forward.
Again, in the annals of stuff that don't get talked about enough; please see all the GOP hagiography of Viktor Orban. They had CPAC in Hungary for godsakes. Like there is subtlety to here. Quote directly from G Elliott Morris "If Trump gets away with this, he will absolutely do the same thing during the 2026 & 2028 elections. He will manufacture unrest just like in LA and send federal troops to every major city as a way to intimidate voters and decrease turnout. Functional end to fair elex."
Maybe tax write offs for unreimbursed care are worth similar amounts to what Medicaid reimburses. Only administrators would know what true cost sinks are, and I doubt anyone is making much money off Medicaid patients at all.
All the more reason to have avoided protests over the the immigration issue; it was just too likely to generate exactly the kind of Trump -friendly video that it did.
"Bone to pick with you from the Politix podcast. You have banged the drum continuously that Democrats need to focus more on the Medicaid cuts than immigration protests. That there needs to be more protests around the Medicaid cuts so "normies" know bad it is. But lastly, immigration is a winning issue for Trump and so any focus whatsoever on immigration will benefit Trump and therefore it will absolutely help GOP in midterms and 2028."
Yeah, I don't even know how successful it will be, the people getting Medicaid cuts will be the ones who need to protest at the ballot box. Does J Random swing voter who has a health plan even care?
And then you read all those stories about Medicaid recipients who don't even know they're on Medicaid because the states have branded it in their own name, like TennCare or whatever. They're unconcerned because they don't understand the situation.
People who have or would support Trump don't care if there are theoretical Medicaid cuts, because they either are not on Medicaid and feel they have no reason to care, or they don't think that they would be affected by the cuts.
It is going to suck when they pass this bill, but even as Trump supporters are kicked off of Medicaid or find that their local rural hospitals are closed will still mostly blame Democrats.
Oo, a little bit of polite shade from Paul Krugman this morning.
"If you’re a pundit who thinks that this is over the top, you’re part of the problem (and you have been wrong every step of the way.) If you’re a Democrat who wants to ignore the ongoing assault on democracy so we can talk about Medicaid — important as it is — you’re hiding your head in the sand."
Honestly wrecking the green investment incentives is trivial to its tax on foreign investment into USA.
That goes through, you have a proper US financial crisis and dollar crisis.
the level of Bad and Stupid Trump packed into this steaming mess is at some level impressive
(meanwhile Trump caved to China, the Financial Times comment by Beattie (How China beat Trump before the trade battle even started) is at once amusing and accurate https://on.ft.com/3TiYeen - and one doesn't often see Princesss Bride worked into trade negotiations commentary. But Trump is so incompetent....
No, it shouldn't, but Matt can also choose not to antagonize his co-partisans and waste time on petty intra-party squabbles.
2017-2018 saw widespread and concurrent coverage of the ACA repeal, the administration's cruelty towards immigrants, and the Mueller stuff. These issues all hit with different audiences. This stuff isn't mutually exclusive. Matt has rightly complained about hospitals being pretty mum about this extremely harmful bill. Anti-ICE protests aren't preventing them from speaking up.
I don't think it's accurate to say that the bill will boost GDP growth in the short term. The economy is not depressed - stimulus would only cause the economy to overheat. Either borrowing costs will increase, or inflation will. Either way, it will be a drag on the economy.
Additionally, given that much of the tax cuts benefit the rich, who have a lower propensity to spend their additional after-tax income, and that the benefit cuts target the poor, it may actually have a negative impact on GDP in the short term also.
I can understand wanting more money/power even when you have a lot. It's just hard to see how theoretically smart people are behind this then when the most likely result is that they end up worse off.
“What’s more, coal is dramatically worse than natural gas for air quality, so this is really bad for people with asthma or heart disease.”
And for the additional people who will contract those diseases along with those who will suffer other impacts tied to particulate pollution (neurological conditions, cancer, premature deaths, adverse birth outcomes, etc.)
To give some concrete examples from an outsider's perspective for Matt's argument: I'm a German energy journalist, and for years the open secret among German companies was that the US is actually way behind when it comes to clean energy. That's partly because US fossil fuels are so cheap, partly because of legislative gridlock, and partly because Republicans hate clean energy for culture war reasons and would rather placate their rich donors from the fossil fuels industry.
For that reason, the US has always been an exciting market for the German energy and greentech industry. There is a small company from southern Germany, for example, that provides digital grid upgrades for utilities in Utah, thus bringing down energy prices. It's a great success that noone really knows about! But the German-led projects that were in the pipeline before Trump came along were way bigger than that. Among them
A giant offshore windpark on the East coast by German energy company RWE
A wind turbine plant in Iowa
An electrolyzer plant for green hydrogen in Houston
Solar plants in Illinois and North Carolina
A high-speed rail project by Siemens connecting LA to Las Vegas
A plant for recycling batteries in Ohio
A plant for electric trucks by Daimler
The IRA greatly encouraged German companies to pursue those projects, obviously because there were subsidies to grab, but also because it served as a signal that the United States were finally ready to reach their potential. But then came Trump, and a lot of those projects, if not most of them, are in limbo now. Trump straight-up forbid offshore wind projects on the East coast, for example, which RWE now says makes them wary about any US-based projects in the future, since they had already lined up the permits.
That's why I fear the damage from Trump's corruption and culture war brainrot will be even bigger than Matthew describes here. Not only will electricity prices go up, not only will jobs be lost, not only will global warming be accelerated, not only will more people die because of air pollution - the US will also lose a lot of trust from exactly those foreign companies that it desperately needs to get back into the game. Solar, grids and batteries in particular will be decisive in the future, and right now the US is behind in all three.
I also want to offer an outsider's perspective, because when I see the words "Germany" and "energy" together I feel severe anxiety about my parents' bank account (I now live in the US but my parents still live in the EU).
First, offshore wind in particular faced many challenges even before Trump. Examples:
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/27/1221639019/offshore-wind-in-the-u-s-hit-headwinds-in-2023-heres-what-you-need-to-know
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/global-offshore-wind-industry-poised-miss-big-targets-obstacles-mount-2024-11-18/
If you are talking about the Community Offshore Wind project specifically, here is another article from 2024 (before the election):
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/new-york-says-it-is-not-moving-forward-with-three-offshore-wind-farms-2024-04-19/
Second, at some point I had compared my electricity bill here in the US with the electricity bill of a good friend back home (who also happens to be an engineer specialized in power systems). My friend's cost per kWh was about 3x mine at that time, even though salaries in the EU are lower than salaries in the US. Americans have much higher electricity consumption (I have been to Phoenix and Miami and Atlanta and Houston and Los Angeles in spring/summer, and AC is really necessary!), and having lived here for a while now I find it unlikely that they would go towards German electricity costs without a fight.
Third, the US state that installs the most renewable generation annually for the past few years is, I think, Texas. Republicans are fighting a stupid culture war (I wholeheartedly agree on this!), but in Secret Congress and red states have shown willingness to invest in renewables provided that the economics make sense.
I don't want to be too negative on my continent of birth. There are things that Europe does better than the US (like healthcare!). But energy is not one of them.
PS: None of this is an endorsement of Trump's policies. Every serious analyst that I have seen as well as even Republican Members of Congress do sound the alarm about these policies, and I think this is happening for a reason.
edit: Just to clarify my intentions a bit more, I live in the US on a visa. You don't need to pay close attention to US news to understand that it's ...ummm... unlikely that I am blindly supporting MAGA.
I struggle to understand what your response has to do with my post. Of course offshore wind has faced headwinds before, of course the German energy system is far from perfect. I've never claimed otherwise. German electricity is indeed much more expensive than in the US, 1) because we put a lot of taxes on energy and 2) because our energy system has been fossil-based for decades, and fossil-based energy is more expensive in Europe than the US - vastly more so since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The increasing share of renewables is bringing the prices down, but that's a long process, especially considering renewables necessitate a one-time investment in the form of grid expansion.
But that's exactly my point: Since fossil fuels are so much cheaper in the US, the incentives to switch to a carbon-neutral energy system are much weaker. But those incentives still exist, even in the US! And that's where foreign investment and project management come into play.
Texas is actually an interesting case. They're about to surpass California in renewable generation, but Texas Republicans are trying their darndest to kneecap the industry for ideological reasons: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12062025/texas-anti-renewable-energy-bills-die-in-legislature/
The fact that they (narrowly) failed is cause for optimism, however. I don't think even Trump could stop solar expansion, because the business case for that is way too obvious.
My two main points were that: a) I doubt that German (or European in general, really) perspectives can be really helpful when it comes to the US energy sector, and b) that a lot of the issues here aren’t Trump-specific but would have existed even under a Harris administration. I used to have a smug attitude towards my American friends here about how we enlightened Europeans protect the environment that they destroy, but not anymore. I now have huge doubts about the viability of the European clean energy sector. Sorry if I didn’t explain it very well before. Does this make a bit more sense?
PS: Texas Republicans aren’t trying to kneecap the industry. Just look at their abortion laws to see that all sorts of crazy ideas can become law there for ideological reasons. Instead, when it comes to solar, they are permitting new installations at record numbers (and the bill failed unlike the crazy abortion bills).
Technocratic neoliberals have a tendency to look at any policy regime and think "Ahh, the technological advances that have come from this policy regime are good so the policy regime must be good."
They do it regarding Germany, Japan, South Korea, China...
But the reality is that Germany's Energiewende has both A) produced impressive (if still immature) technology stacks) and B) been cripplingly horrible for consumers and many industries outside those which develop and sell those specific technologies.
China's industrial policy has A) led to huge advances in Chinese productive capabilities, B) required massive transfers from the ordinary citizenry, and C) diverted state capacity and financing from any effort to improve QoL, public services, and soft infrastructure like medical or old-age provision, thus D) causing immense structural tensions with its trading partners.
There's every reason to believe that Germany would be better off had it just built a dozen new nuclear power plants at a quarter the explicit cost of the Energiewende and a tenth of its opportunity costs, if not less, and that China would be better off if it were not "investing" 10% of GDP into manufacturing subsidy but instead plowing it into social services and social security provision.
When you consider only ends, and neither means nor counterfactuals, then of course these policy regimes look great. They aren't.
Always love to get lectured with grossly wrong figures about points I wasn't even making from people who read like two articles about Germany in the WSJ opinion section
Look man, all I was trying to offer was a perspective from someone who talks to those companies on the daily on how their confidence in the US market has waned thanks to Trump's policies and what the consequences of that will be for America. If that makes you want to go on some weird tangent about Germany's energy policy, fine. But please do that somewhere else and don't waste my time
You are welcome to articulate which figures are "grossly wrong" there.
Actually, I'll do it for you... there is a single "figure," which is that a dozen nuclear power plants would have cost a fourth as much as the entire Energiewende's direct costs. Said costs are estimated at 500-700B Euros, call it US$650B at the midrange.
Based on the various fuck-ups that western countries have had with greenfield nuclear power plants in the last few decades, it's safe to assume that the first two units of a 12-unit building program will cost around US$15-20B, and that the last two could easily get to 50% above South Korean costs, closer to US$7.5B, due to the learning curve. If we take the US$20B figure, that brings the total program cost to around US$165B for a dozen reactors, almost exactly a quarter of the direct cost of the Energiewende (under rather unfavorable assumptions to boot)!
That you could then, you know, keep building them for cheap is just icing on the cake. In fact, it's the very icing promised by the Energiewende in the first place, indeed by all industrial policy: the government subsidizes a sector to develop technology, acquire know-how, and reach scale, then that sector is profitable both privately and in terms of tax receipts and employment!
It's just that the Energiewende has carried even more daunting indirect costs that have made the whole endeavor a net negative for German industry, her citizenry, and the public purse.
Almost any counterfactual program of public investment would have been better, whether it was nuclear power, rebuilding your passenger rail network, or almost anything else.
Okay, but then wouldn't it be great if the US could benefit from that impressive technology stack without the downsides? These German companies weren't proposing to write energy policy in the US, they were going to build wind turbines and solar panels.
Great comment(s) but please don't fall into this trap of saying Texas is "about to surpass California in renewable generation." (Noah Smith is terrible on this.) It's superficially true but highly misleading. Texas consumes more than twice as much electricity as California (and even more per capita) because it is really hot and has some really high-demand industries, like petrochemicals. As a percentage of total demand, California continues to easily surpass Texas. One reason California isn't building more renewable generation (or contracting for more, because unlike Texas, it is connected to other states' grids) is that there's really not much more demand to satisfy via renewables. In the middle of the day, it's not unusual for fossil fuels to account for less than 5% of California's demand. (In Texas yesterday it was over 60%).
The big growth area for California remains battery storage for evening demand peaks. And the use of batteries has been skyrocketing in California. Within the past four years, it's gone from basically nothing to covering as much as 30% of evening demand (when renewables are quiescent). And it keeps growing.
So good for Texas, but they're still behind us here in California. Sorry for the diatribe but I see this highly misleading claim being put forward all the time.
"I have this facility that demands a lot of electricity, and I'll put it in Texas which produces more from renewables." sounds like a win for Texas, no?
My main thought here is that Europe is pushing its factories to China and then celebrates the reductions in European emissions, and that doesn't sound like a net gain for the planet...
People aren't locating factories in Texas rather than California because there's not enough electricity in California.
EV demand is higher in CA than TX, just for example. I have no doubt that as demand grows in California, more renewable supply will be brought on line. What makes you think otherwise?
Probably the CEC environmental reviews under CEQA which are more rigorous than NEPA and also local use restrictions for new site permitting requirements. Within CA it's easier / faster to increase output within an existing site (i.e., nat gas) than build a net new clean energy site.
EDIT: These site permitting challenges are one of the reasons they import so much energy (84GWh or 30% of total consumption).
You're still wrong about this, and Noah is still right, because California is not an autarky. Until California ceases consuming electricity and products made with electricity from other states, simply not building power and claiming the mix is higher is irrelevant.
Your claim that % of power is more important amount of power is easily disproven by claiming that because I put some solar powered lights in my front yard, I am doing more for green power generation than California (there is no gas turbine in my back yard).
Joshua, I've tried really hard to parse your answer as a response to my argument and I guess I'm not smart enough because I just failed to make much sense of it. Are you suggesting that California build everything it needs? And if your lights are solar powered and don't draw from a dirty grid, isn't that exactly what carbon reduction is all about?
What I’m saying is that as long as California participates in the national and global economy, simply not building power and buying products produced by power from elsewhere means that the fraction of their power that is green is not a meaningful comparison. Much like how my house might have 100% green power generation on premises but buys goods delivered by Amazon and runs its refrigerator on power delivered from elsewhere, a large amount of California’s GDP and consumption involve power generation elsewhere. Money that Apple makes in Cupertino relies on datacenters in Texas and iPhone assembly powered by coal in China.
My front yard is lit by cheapo solar-powered lights. But the proper denominator is not “power produced on my property,” which would give a misleading 100% renewable ratio, it is “power that contributes to my production and consumption.”
I agree with Noah Smith on this. California and Texas share the same Earth. The absolute amount of CO2 emitting energy that is replaced with zero-emmissions energy is important, not the per capita numbers.
What Texas has done so far is great; I hope its government doesn't screw it up.
But what California has done so far is more effective because it's getting rid of almost all of the carbon emitting under its control. Texas still has a ways to go there. (More batteries, Texas!)
That's a very good point, thanks! My use of "about to surpass" was arguably a little too liberal
Germany screwed the pooch by importing gas from Russia instead of going all-in on nuclear reactors like France. It's a huge shame.
Grrr. This talking point just won't die, but imo it's mostly wrong.
In 2022 1/2 of France's nuclear fleet went offline unexpectedly for most of the year and France was a net electricity importer at a time when Europe needed their nuclear output the most. Who's to say that Germany's even older fleet wouldn't have had its own reliability challenges?
But lets assume the fleet runs fine and consider the counterfactual. How much would per kwh rates in Germany have changed if they kept the plants open instead of closing them? Perhaps surprisingly, ChatGPT thinks keeping the plants open would have resulted in a 1.3 euro cents per kWh INCREASE in rates, even factoring in the price spikes from the Russian gas shutoff.
Here's the actual ChatGPT session for this:
Consider the counterfactual of germany not shuttering plants after fukushima. What impact would that have made on the cost of electricity in 2022-2025? Consider the likely generation mix in the counterfactual as well as the cost of substitutes for nuclear like coal that filled the gap.
ChatGPT said:
If Germany had not shut down its nuclear plants after Fukushima, and those reactors continued operating through 2022–2024:
💶 Estimated Economic Impact
Total electricity cost savings (2022–2024):
€30 billion across the 3-year period
Per-kWh cost difference (2022 levels):
About €0.02/kWh less (i.e., 2 euro cents/kWh cheaper electricity)
📊 Assumptions Behind This Estimate:
~100 TWh/year of generation lost from early nuclear shutdowns
Replaced mainly by coal and gas, which had very high prices during the energy crisis (~€150/MWh vs. ~€50/MWh for nuclear)
German annual electricity consumption: ~500 TWh/year
What This Means Practically:
The average pre-tax retail electricity price in Germany was ~€0.32–€0.36/kWh in 2022. If nuclear stayed online, prices could have been ~€0.02 lower per kWh, or roughly 5–6% cheaper.
You said:
does this include the costs of keeping these plants running including one-time maintainance/refurbs that many of these plants needed? If not, please amortize those costs into the rate calculations
ChatGPT said:
Once we account for refurbishment and ongoing maintenance costs of keeping Germany’s nuclear reactors online:
🛠️ Adjusted Economic Impact
Refurbishment cost: €10 billion over 3 years (~€1B/reactor × 10 reactors)
Amortized cost per kWh: €0.033/kWh
Adjusted cost impact (2022–2024):
Instead of saving €0.02/kWh, this scenario would now result in a net cost increase of €0.013/kWh (1.3 euro cents per kWh higher)
Total adjusted net cost (not savings):
€20 billion more expensive over 3 years, after maintenance costs are included
📌 Conclusion
Had Germany kept its nuclear plants running without major modernization, it could have saved money. But if significant maintenance and refurbishments were needed (as widely expected for many reactors), the result would likely have been higher total electricity costs overall, not lower
A ~1.3¢/kWh increase in effective rates vs. current policy, purely from amortized upgrade costs
In Texas the new capacity can just interconnect wherever snd transmission will come, which is much different than any other ISO. This works particularly well in west Texas, but I don’t see this to be an example that every state can follow, including every state in a multi-state market due to cost allocation. And anyway, ERCOT still has a lot of problems.
From the outside it looks as if almost every aspect of the Energiewende has been a near-unmitigated disaster, so forgive me if I just flat out refuse to accept the outsider's perspective on this at all.
I don't disagree with all of it; Trump's policies are uniformly quite bad and this will be no exception, but... I don't care to be lectured at regarding energy or consumer welfare by Germans, of all people, ROFL.
I tend to think it's possible to look specifically at the merits of individual aspects of the German system and pass judgment on each of them separately based on the facts and evidence, rather than dismissing everything the guy says because he's German.
That's a good comment, and I think it may help me further clarify my disagreement with Florian. I think that the merits of the German energy sector can't translate well to an American environment.
One non-energy example: I find the amount of metal detectors in the US ridiculous. If I pointed out how much easier it is to enter event venues in Europe, most of you would (correctly) point out that the availability of guns is much lower there, so that's not really a sector where the US can easily copy the EU.
One non-energy example that is closer to the energy sector: Last summer I spent some time chatting with a PhD student at a leading German university. German privacy laws restrict the amount of information that a utility can directly access for each individual customer, and he was working on techniques to extract information useful to the system operator from limited data. This guy was trying to estimate with a lot of coding and a lot of data analytics something that (my understanding is) utilities can directly measure in the US.
It's things like that (and what I've already said in previous comments) that make me pretty skeptical about the merits of copying even parts of what Germans are doing. It's a totally different environment.
That was rather the point, I think for these points to be taken as "good," one has to ignore the reality of exactly how badly German energy policy has failed.
The fact that individual German firms have technological capabilities that American ones do not is almost irrelevant to this argument.
an expert is someone who has made all the mistakes in a narrow field. arguably, germany has done that and learned the relevant lessons.
I love the definition, I am... less confident... that Germany is through making mistakes and has actually learned the relevant lessons.
We're talking about a country which, over the last two years, has preferred to re-activate coal-fired power plants instead of extant, mothballed, well-preserved nuclear plants.
Lectured? It seemed like an interesting observation to me.
Any lecture that make any good points from anyone is good to exactly that extent.
An Italian company was going to build a $300 million dollar electric cable factory with 150 permanent manufacturing jobs on the site of a closed, half-torn down coal plant that is currently used as a scrap yard in the distressed city of Fall River, MA. The factory alone would’ve increased Fall River’s property taxes by 30%!
The factory was meant to provide cables for the Northeast offshore wind industry. In MA alone 2.4 GW is being built and another 3.2 GW was planned.
But along comes Trump and the company cancels their factory. Ironically Fall River narrowly voted for Trump-the first GOP win in over a century. Just absolute self-sabotage.
And on the flip side, US greentech companies have been forced to pursue the German market as growth in the US market hits a ceiling.
I think there's a lot of nuance in those examples you list that don't really have anything to do with Trump. Some are just bad investments that Americans shouldn't waste money on (offshore wind, green hydrogen, electric trucks). Solar will be fine where it makes sense without IRA. But Siemens HSR has incredible upside - Brightline West is a big deal that could very likely spark a boom in other routes and isn't partisan at all. If successful, it's the type of industrial investment Trump would even loan to (esp with reputable partners like Fortress and Siemens). The point is, much of the IRA-dependent green stuff will fail, and deservedly so, but overall, German heavyweights like Siemens/VW/Mercedes will more than offset that. And they'll be heavily concentrated in red states with more fossil fuels.
Reading this post sort of makes me think there was section missing. Matt sort of comes to the edge of saying “you can’t explain kneecapping the energy provisions without talking about the super reactionary culture turn Trumpists have taken”. And then doesn’t. I almost feel like if Matt conceded that Trumpists social issues agenda is also hideously unpopular would undermine his message to Democrats to moderate on social issues.
So I’ll do it. I’ve come around a lot in the last 10 years (God has it been that long) to the idea that whatever you think the motivations or thinking is behind what Trump does or what his sycophants say, the real answer is way stupider than you think.
And if there is one overarching sentiment that guides Trumpism it this; Manly man man man, grrr, big dick, manly man man man.
That’s it. Honest to god I truly don’t think the motivations for what undergirds what Trump says, what Trumpism is goes beyond that in way too many cases or situations.
To the post at hand. All of this unnecessary gutting of clean energy provisions seems secondarily driven by rewarding fossil fuel interests, but honestly more to do with green energy is associated with being weak and feminine. And coal, gas and oil are manly. The workers who work in the latter industries are largely male. And it’s considered “tough”, “dirty” “real man” work. Solar panels and wind are “girly girl” weak.
It’s idiotic, it’s retrograde, it’s cartoonishly oafish. And yet honestly think this is what stripping out these clean energy provisions are all about.
I've said this before, but hoisting a turbine blade the size of a city block into place in the middle of the rolling ocean is manly man work. So is climbing a ladder onto someone's roof to bolt in solar panels in the blistering heat.
The girly girl work is when the local HOA starts a catfight and sues to stop a project. Make that go away instead.
Also everyone in the coal industry is just pressing buttons on an electric dashboard watching the work get done by some machine through a video feed. The pickaxes are long gone (thank goodness).
(Disclaimer: I would prefer to live in an ungendered society, but I'm also a male who owns the box set of Modern Marvels. Also Atticus Finch is my male role model and I don't mean to impugn lawyers.)
It's funny that railing against offshore wind was part of RFK Jr.'s crank turn. For all of their bluster, being afraid of vaccines (or no! an itty bitty needle!), seed oils, and wind turbines obstructing your oceanfront view aren't exactly the most masculine qualities.
Oh I totally agree conceptually.
I think about all of this in relation to my continuous point that the other basic explanation for so so much of everything is the "everything was better in the good ole days" mindset.
And of course part of the problem is too many of the people who recognize this are themselves part of the problem or have "solutions" that are worse than the problem.
I'm thinking specifically about Ross Douthat. Something has gone wrong in our culture where we can't seemingly think of new ideas for movies (everything is superhero or reboots), concerts are dominated by older acts and there is a general lack of forward momentum culturally. So of course the reason is because we have deviated from the path of super reactionary Catholicism and we need everyone to go back to that. So what we need is actually even more "back in the good ole days" culture and policy.
I know this isn't strictly the thesis of his last book or writings. He's too smart to put anything like that in writing. But honest to God, I really think I've summed his thinking and writing last few years pretty well.
An additional thought about Douthat, a co-religionist who's ideas aggravate me to the point I need to consider penance in response: his super reactionary Catholicism would have been considered extreme even at the height of Catholic observance in this country. He reminds me of the way over the top practitioners in my town/parish who even my uncle, a priest, described as religious fanatics.
The good old days he missed but longs for weren't anything like he imagines.
It's worth pointing out he's a convert. His understanding of being Catholic seems to be more an intellectual/political project than it is for people who grew up in Irish, Italian, Polish, or Latin Catholic families, where it's part of the family background and wider cultural context. It's not the Catholicism of the kids I grew up with complaining about having to go to CCD after school.
As always -
Lifelong Catholic: Abortion is bad, but we need to let in refugees
Convert: The Pope in 1153 said the blood of your enemies is actually...
He also has (I am not a Catholic, not an expert, so take that with a grain of salt) a very inaccurate view of Catholic doctrine and beliefs. There was a very funny letter to the New Yorker by the former President of Georgetown pointing this out a while back. Just kinda bizarre that this is his whole thing and there isn't a lot of intellectual backing, I suspect that it's because people aren't used to arguing about it.
Why do you consider his Catholicism super reactionary and extreme? My very limited understanding was that among the observers who care there's a liberal faction and conservative faction and that he's well within the mainstream of the conservative faction, not trending into Catholic weirdo territory with the Latin mass, etc, like MBD or even further like Matthew Walther.
“and there is a general lack of forward momentum culturally.”
I was in London last week and in the Tube there are many advertisements for…Back to the Future: the Musical.
I don’t know why, but that was my moment where I was like “yup, our culture is hopelessly stagnant and decadent.”
At the stage production my wife and I most recently went to ("Life of Pi"), I entertained myself during the intermission by counting up how many of the shows listed for next season were (i) adaptations of a work from another medium (mostly film) or (ii) sequels to/revivals of earlier stage productions, and came up with 14 of 18 shows fitting one of those criteria. (Also, I have to acknowledge I've seen "Back to the Future: The Musical," which my wife got tickets to for our whole family, and, while it was serviceable, I did spend the entire time feeling like the Ryan Reynolds "But why?" GIF was playing in my head.)
When I walked out of Sinners in the movie theater (a great original movie) I saw posters for a new Naked Gun, Final Destination, and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
[Emperor Palpatine voice] Goood… goooood! Buy tickets to the next Disney live action CGI remake, and the journey to the fall of Western pop culture will be complete!
It seems like even when we get an original movie, it's still basically a super hero movie without a pre-existing IP (Novocain, etc.).
Everything Everywhere All at Once was a good example of that. I was definitely thinking of that movie when I watched Sinners, even though it doesn’t really fit that description.
Captain Novolin?
We just got Back to the Future scratch tickets in Minnesota!
I really want to hear Douthat’s take on Sinners, after seeing him talk about left art and right art and the ways one can appreciate good original art with a different political point of view from one’s own.
Sinners seems like ground zero for appreciating multiple points of view even with respect to itself. The vampires made an incredibly compelling pitch!
I agree!
My read is that in the main part of the movie we have four separate moral centers - the characters in the juke joint (representing traditional musical culture), the vampires (representing the capitalist music industry), the church (which sees music as a danger), and the KKK (which sees black people as a danger). The end scene seems to show the main character living somewhere between the first two.
I think the vampires are homogenizing but I'm not sure they're capitalist -- the "shared pain / shared knowledge" aspect is so intrinsically communitarian that my read of them was in the vein of cultural appropriation more generally, with the movie cultivating a deliberately ambiguous take on whether segregating traditions to allow allopatric speciation to flourish (exemplified by the super-white Irish and bluegrass music as contrasted with the basically purely African American blues tradition) was necessarily better than syncretism by dint of making the vampires' pitch so compelling. Conversely, if anyone is capitalist it seems like Smoke, who's in the position of explicitly trying to determine the solvency of the juke joint.) Also Rammick's stated motivation for converting Sammie is his desire to use Sammie's abilities to recommune with his deceased relatives -- a fairly concrete / instrumental and clearly sympathetic (but not particularly homogenizing) desire. Although I hadn't considered the specific music industry read heretofore - I'll have to chew on it more!
My view of the church was that that was a kind of token edgy-atheism / "Christianity is a conqueror's / white man's religion" insert (and not great writing for that reason). Sammie's father isn't developed much past a strawman (except I guess inasmuch as his forewarning about music was kinda right, but c'mon, no viewer is going to side with the hellfire and brimstone preacher *against* the blues) and the spiritual center of the movie is Annie, who very much represents a non-Christian-inflected spirituality. The anti-Christian take seemed particularly driven home with respect to Rammick reciting the Lord's Prayer and ironically "baptizing" Sammie while noting that while it was a comfort it had been uttered by the men who took his (Rammick's) father's land -- the implication is that religion is just empty words rather than treating Christian piety as anathema to vampires in the way that the Western canon traditionally does (e.g. crosses as among the vampire-repellents). Here, instead we have juju bags.
If Douthat was a liberal, a centrist, or a leftist, he would have been likely been forgotten as an intellectual over a decade ago.
Nope, there's a reason why he's widely acknowledged to be the best columnist in America.
By whom? Certainly not by the NYT readers, judging by the number of comments that say "Why is this hack still on the NYT payroll" and "he makes me want to cancel my subscription" and such.
Ideology aside, there are many columnists in America who are more interesting intellectually, better prose stylists, or both.
Heck, I'll take David French or David Brooks over Ross Douthat any day of the week.
I, for one, would not take Brooks over Douthat (at least pre-latter-days Douthat). Douthat writes actual takes from his sort of 'would-be-center-rightist-except-also-super-tradCath' idiosyncratic perspective. Which, as Walter would say, is at least an ethos. The fault with him as a token conservative stand-in is that he doesn't really represent any kind of meaningful political constituency.
I find Brooks' output to much better approximate the center-rightist version of GPT-3 AI slop and (back when I read him semi-regularly) would pretty often find myself finishing a column and immediately regretting it, thinking "I am dumber for having read this."
By Andrew Sullivan, Scott Sumner, possibly Steve Bannon (IIRC lol). Really anyone with a modicum of intellectual discernment would realize it...it's not exactly a high bar (best columnist that is). You can also tell by the deference he's given by his colleagues on podcasts and often times by the guests.
The problem I have with Douthat is that most of his columns don't pass the basic test of "could this be written to more clearly exposit the point he is trying to make?" The columns, if written more clearly, would be less attractive and pleasurable to read, but they fail as columns. The purpose of column-writing prose is to deliver the underlying point as clearly and unequivocally as possible; writing a column should force the columnist to clarify exactly what their point is in order to do so.
Douthat writes well, he's a fine prose stylist. But that's the thing that is wrong with his columns. Columns should be boring in a literary sense; the prose should be "transparent" (to steal a term from literary criticism) because the purpose of the column is not prose.
But Trump and the people like this don't know these things, because they're not interested in the details of what modern labor is like. They're just thinking of old videos showing men at work and saying "yeah, that's cool and manly, let's go back to that" without really realizing that we don't send burly men with pickaxes down to the coal seams anymore. It's skin-deep, all vibes, retirees and lawyers musing about how other people should work.
This is why I like MattY's "sock factory" shtick. It gets the point across to people who aren't interested in the details.
I basically agree with this. I think if you want a fancier wrapping for it you could say that Trumpism is - and always has been - an explicitly *nostalgic* political project, to a much greater extent than even normal Republican politics.
The bit about coal miners being 'manly' is clearly correct, he has given more than one speech where he's made that subtext into very literal text.
Also conservatives like doing the opposite of whatever liberals want, because they don't like liberals and therefore do like it when liberals are angry, sad, or otherwise upset.
Yeah this is the better explanation. Nuclear power and digging extremely deep holes are pretty manly, but liberals think they're good so Republicans don't.
It's just both things? Nuclear power and geothermal energy are 'forward-looking' coded, and coal mines are 'it was better when I were a lad' coded.
All gendered explanations are reductive, but isn't it also the case that prizing 'feminine' values of proceduralism, consensus, and equity is, to some extent, how we got here? Arguably the EV charging and other investments would have benefited from some he-man, just-get-it-done energy that would have given dems something tangible to take to the voters. You could say, at its best the abundance agenda is pretty manly and resolute - maybe that's why the groups (overwhelmingly run by women) are fighting it so hard. We can either embrace Ezra's version of masculinity or Trump's - but the dem's old order that saw David Hogg ejected because he messed up the numerically correct gender allocation of leadership posts at the dnc needs to go.
Good point, at least more of that machoism than we'd like to think (also explains the behavior around Covid--vaccines are feminine, letting immune systems tough it out is manly).
The weird thing is that the anti-vaccine movement grew out of crunchy mom culture in the UK. It used to be most prominent among the hippies with MFAs. Being scared of needles isn't manly!
Used to be that Ann Arbor and Boulder had the lowest vaccination rates in the country (whatever that means, I have no idea how that stat is constructed). Doubt that’s true anymore
You say "being scared of needles", they'd say "boldly refusing to submit to being microchipped".
+eleventy thousand gigazillion on this entire comment
Thank you for putting it so clearly
Do you happen to live in SoCal, by chance, and if so, would you like to attend our next SoCal SB meetup?
Sending my affection and good vibes! Wife and I are moving so we can’t make it.
Sorry the renovations and subsequent cleanup/getting the house to a presentable state have taken way longer than I thought!
You and your wife are still invited, I'll send you the details just in case you happen to be in the vicinity.
Aww, thanks! I’ll be there in spirit. I’m actually moving her to NYC on a road trip (one last hurrah before 3 years long-distance/before the national parks degrade).
Complete opposite actually; live in NYC metro. Otherwise, I would be interested.
This predates Trumpism, though. He's just tapping in to what was already there and amplifying it.
It's funny to see rich people who think working class people also want their kids to be working class. My grandpa drove a truck and my dad was an electrician - they sure as shit didn't want me doing either job.
Their perspective is that men are men when they do "dirty jobs" like mining coal and drilling oil, and there's nothing dirty about installing a wind turbine.
Because this is a family site, I will not refer to the psychological implications of seeing the oil first shoot out of the well when the drill first hits paydirt.
“Because this is a family site…”
Someone needs to tell Joseph and David M-With-Too-Many-Syllables 😊
I assure anyone that welding a beautiful seam with flux core is dirty so unless they're riveting the bloody things together it's getting gross when you put them together.
I appreciate that the most famous riveter is a woman (Rosie), but riveting is generally regarded as a pretty manly working-class job.
Yes, but welding is far superior! It just takes slightly longer.
I had a meeting with my local DTC communications committee on Tuesday and naturally immigration came up. An honor roll, soccer star, graduating at the age of 16 years old kid was picked up by ICE along with his father after a routine courthouse check-in and they were overnighted to Texas where they are being held. It sucks. It's fucking awful.
What I had to keep reminding my co committee members was that the zeitgeist right now is not in our favor on this topic. The argument should lead with concerns about due process, bad faith treatment of those cooperating with the process already (the absolutely ghoulish ICE practice of camping outside courthouses and whisking people away after routine hearings), and maybe some Dreamer-adjacent rhetoric and some super sympathetic local cases (ie a beloved member of the community who has been here forever and runs a populat business). What you can't do is lead with concepts related to legal status not mattering, insisting those here illegally have a right to stay, etc. Another thing I am pushing is for them (all of us where nice white libs) to actually talk to the working class Hispanics in our town about what's going on. One member said that the "local Hispanic community must be terrified of going out right now" which was news to me because at the Catholic church bazaar I went to on Wednesday the tamales and birria tacos were on point and the place was slammed.
Anyways. How to link this to today's post. I feel a bit like this post and the Politix podcast are pissing up a rope. I think Beutler has a point about *making* something an issue rather than passively waiting for the right issue to come around. To your point this legislation is going to have huge impact in the near and mid term of the country. I think the synthesis here is you both need to put in an effort to make something an issue, but something about the zeitgeist determines what issues can ever gain traction. And the problem right now is despite tremendous amounts of Fucking Around there has been shockingly little Finding Out while Trump has been in office. I am starting to appreciate your point about how it might have been better to have lost in 2020 - the Finding Out would have been clearly a Trump issue. Until the Finding Out can be clearly tied to Trump's Fucking Around, stuff like Congressional legislation is too abstract, not visceral enough for the low info voters watching tiktok all day or infinite scrolling their For You slop on X. What they see is anarchists burning Waymos and flying Mexican flags.
Dems had the Juice in 2004-2006 because Bush was clearly starting to Find Out. I've said it before, but I still believe that this phase of Fucking Around is going to have a potentially catastrophic Finding Out. But until Finding Out hits we need to think hard about how we can best shift the frame in the way it can be shifted.
Sorry for the ramble
Yea, my conversations with the more sane conservatives in my life have consisted of laying groundwork that I’ll be able to reference later if and as things break because of actions taken now.
“Why does curtailing China’s market distortions require tariffs on Canada?”
“Why is the House proposing to significantly increase the deficit?”
“What’s up with pulling funding for nuclear?”
Brief conversation in which they admit this makes no sense, then I let it lay fallow.
Let’s see what seed gets sown in those fields.
The weird thing about most of the conservatives I know is that they are just rich to insanely rich highly educated guys who are sort of temperamentally pro immigration.
My blue collar Irish relations who have switched to Trump, well, they’re not people who are interested in policy, they have completely incoherent views (to the extent they have them), and so these discussions are worse than pointless. They do, however, have a roughly anti immigrant stance- none of the ones they know, let’s be clear, all those guys are hard working honest people. That being said, it’s pretty clear from the group chat that kidnapping kids from elementary schools is absolutely turning these guys off. We all have elementary school age kids and grandkids
> kidnapping kids from elementary schools
Did that actually happen? I know it was discussed. I agree though that there's ground to be gained where the administration oversteps.
I know of reporting that says ICEshowed up at an elementary school saying they had parental permission to pick up kids. I also know my uncle went straight to “ICE is kidnapping kids”
My personal belief is there’s no way they’d be dumb enough to do that, but Stephen miller was dumb enough to leave his wife alone with Musk so who knows
I searched around a bit and found what I think you're referring to: https://archive.is/hM1JG (LA Times story from April 9)
It seems if the administration had any notions of doing it initially, they backed off for now. Like you say, it would be incredibly dumb.
also: on Miller's wife with Elon... 😂
Oh, I would've expected you to get these answers, these seem easy:
"It's a negotiating tactic, try to keep up"
"It's not much of an increase if you take extending the 2017 tax cuts as a baseline"
"Why are we giving taxpayer money to *any* companies?"
As I said, "more sane." My dad is a gun nut but otherwise not too invested in justifying every horrible thing Trump says or does, and so he doesn't bother.
What do they say to video of people taking small kids away? If we even get one video of ICE in an elementary school I think thinks turn FAST
"Blame the parents for putting their kids in that situation"
I am hoping that these seeds will bloom, but they require pain and suffering that Americans can readily understand as being the fault of Trump for us to benefit.
As much as I hate to say it, I am kind of with Matt on being an immigration doomer right now. We have lost the argument. Deportations are popular. Protesting ICE raids only help the admin. It's a completely cooked situation and I hate it.
Agreed.
In my experience, the most honest intellectually honest conservatives will admit these things but then still find a reason to vote for Trump.
As is typical for Republican presidents though, I worry that the "finding out" will be too delayed to be political useful to an organized opposition
Deciphering cause and effect can be difficult and swing voters are not known for their critical thinking skills.
I'm totally fine with ICE waiting outside court houses.
I'm also fine with immigration raids against businesses that hire illegals.
And probably 99% of those that got let in on asylum claims all need to be deported because those asylum claims were all bogus
They need to hire a ton more immigration judges, build more detention centers, stop catch and release. Oh and implement e-verify
THEN AFTER WE HAVE A SECURE BORDER
we can start talking about what to do with the dreamers etc
This is where the majority of the public is on the issue. The more time I spend in the comment section here, the more I realize that a large portion of the SB readers appear to be far left activists. Oh well, if they want JD Vance for president in 2028 they should continue with this this nonsense. Here is the hoping the next democratic candidate is a centrist.
Outsourcing your principles to majority opinion is unbelievably cucked. I used to be a Republican and would switch back just as easily if Democrats became the party of craven populism. I hate populism more than I hate losing elections.
My principle is that if you are here illegally you should be deported
My principle is that I've yet to hear an even halfway convincing ethical argument against expanding immigration on humanitarian grounds. It seems pretty clear that the opposition is hiding behind layman's "wisdom" to rationalize/excuse their moral laziness
"Voters don't like moralizing."
If you abandon morals the second they're unpopular, then you don't really have any morals. And if that's the new political reality, you're wasting your time on anything that isn't self-serving hedonism.
In general I'm not for immigration on humanitarian grounds,
I'm for high skilled immigration so we can suck up all the best and brightest to compete against China.
Moreover, I think the level of immigration needs to be slow enough to allow for assimilation.
I’m not a republican. I’m a centrist disgusted with the democrats and mostly disagree with SB takes because they are stupid
I think ICE camping outside courthouses and arresting those complying with a legal process are operating in bad faith and in ways that will ultimately be counterproductive if illegal immigrants go back to 90s style hiding vs some degree of monitoring.
they shouldn't be here in the first place. And usually they are at the courthouse because they were arrested already
They were in the country illegally though. What was the routine courthouse checkin and why did the go?
Because "in the country illegally" is not a thing. The INA lays out the specifics of who is authorized to enter and stay in the US under what conditions. And one does not imply the other. You can enter the US legally on a visa and then overstay it or violate its terms. You can also enter illegally and then be granted legal status. All that happens at a court, in front of a judge. These are not criminal trials because they are not criminal offenses.
Quite often, ICE is detaining lawful residents obeying lawful court orders and then putting them in (privately run) detention centers while they work to strip them of said lawful status so they can deport them. Of course, skipping those court appearances is often grounds for deportation so people---who may have been here for years, working, paying taxes and be married to US citizens and have US citizen children---are given the choice of going to court and risking being stuffed into a van by a militarized federal immigration force or risking their legal status by skipping it.
Being in the country illegally is absolutely a thing. That doesnt mean ICE is not also detaining people illegally.
I would say the point is that people showing up to a routine court house appointment have some reason to believe they might be allowed to be here. The ones that don't aren't getting scheduled hearings.
Last week, ICE showed up at the immigration court in Downtown Miami and arrested a few people when they showed up for their regular check-in with authorities. The follow-up stories about the reason for those arrests didn’t get nearly as much attention as the initial story: ICE wasn’t grabbing everyone who showed up for their appointment, but only the ones who had committed crimes since being granted temporary status.
There is nothing wrong with this.
Thank you for the context.
That is why I asked the question in the original comment.
I think you have it backwards. ICE is not detaining people illegally until a judge says so. Up until then, they are just abusing their authority. They could stuff me in a van right now and claim my ID is fake or that facial recognition matched me for a person with a deportation order.
If you enter the country without a visa, you are not in the country illegally until a judge says so. You might be able to apply for asylum, parole, deferred action, etc. Same goes if you violate the terms of a visa. I suppose once you receive a deportation order you could be considered "in the country illegally" but then those aren't really the people showing up for a court appearance.
“If you enter the country without a visa, you are not in the country illegally until a judge says so”
Dunno if you’re just badly misinformed or engaging in sophistry, but:
“8 U.S. Code § 1325 - Improper entry by alien
Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.“
I suppose one could also say you can murder someone and it’s not technically illegal until you’ve been convicted. But that’s silly.
Thank you for referencing this - I was just going to look for it .
They're arguing in bad faith. A perfect example of why dems keep losing elections.
Sure, but other parts of the INA can supersede § 1325 --- or whatever the word is, I'm not a lawyer. Like § 209 which allows you to enter an asylum claim which, if deemed (presumably by a judge) credible, prohibits DHS from removing you.
And no, you cannot murder someone legally because that is the definition of the word murder. You can, however, kill someone legally. You can even "murder" someone in the colloquial sense legally and "get away with murder".
I don't feel like I'm making a weird abstract argument here. Laws amend and supersede other laws and things may be illegal or against the law, but until a judge rules on which part of what law applies, you have not actually broken the law in any meaningful or consequential sense.
Yes, being here illegally is real. I don't deny it. I think the camping outside of courthouses is bad faith on behalf of the government for changing the terms of their interactions, and ultimately counterproductive for ICE. In reality they don't have the resources (as of today) to chase all undocumented immigrants down if those immigrants stop cooperating to any degree and basically go back into 90s style hiding.
The checkin could have been related to asylum claim processing, some kind of TPS, or some kind of monitoring before a hearing that can lead to deportation. We don't know the specifics of the case that my DTC discussed.
Assuming 10M people crossed the border during Biden's presidency (this may be high) - What do you realistically thinks should happen to them ?
If they have made asylum claims the law states they are due some degree of hearing and a decision. If the Trump admin juiced up the processing capacity and deported all of those with illegitimate asylum claims them that'd be fine. If they are here out and out illegally they can be deported.
That’s a reasonable response
It's really something to see Trump's approval ratings bounce back to an almost normal level as Liberation Day fades into the background.
Basically, people are fine with Trump, and will continue to be fine with him only if and until his actions hit their pocketbooks directly. You'd think people would have *some* pride in being Americans and all of what that means and would be at least somewhat horrified by his bull in a china shop/horse loose in a hospital administration, but nope.
So, sure, protest and all that. Maybe his numbers will dip a point or so. But until his incompetence, malfeasance and ugliness hits home for them personally, it's all good, man.
"Around, stuff like Congressional legislation is too abstract, not visceral enough for the low info voters watching tiktok all day or infinite scrolling their For You slop on X. What they see is anarchists burning Waymos and flying Mexican flags."
I've said this before but I live in Florida and this describes probably 85% of my friends, almost all of whom are college graduates, many of which are lawyers and all of which are well off. In my circle, most people are seeing these protests as a bunch of lawless antagonizers with no respect for the rule of law - they don't see that these protests/riots are based on a draconian immigration policy. Fair or not, the images coming from these incidents are not good for Dems, although I'm not sure what Dems can do about it.
I'm so sick of this attitude where, whenever a protest is for left-wing causes, the entire Democratic party is personally responsible for each and every person who crosses the line - even when the Republican president is intentionally escalating the situation, trying to goad somebody into going too far. While, whenever a protest is for right-wing causes, it's just people gathering peacefully, even when they do get violent or destroy property (e.g. 1/6). The complete and total double-standard regarding protests is disgusting. It's essentially a world where the first amendment applies only to conservatives.
I also just think it's a little too early to get the bill into the popular consciousness. No matter how many rallies you hold, it isn't going to grab the interest of normal people who aren't political junkies until the final vote is maybe a couple weeks away.
The public is solidly against the bill. Quinnipiac has it has 27/53 approve/disapprove. Do you think that will stop the Republicans? I don't.
The only protests that *might* matter would be those involving diehard Trump supporters in rural areas. Whatever one might think about that, that's certainly out of our control or influence.
In the end, Republicans are going to Republican, and we'll see just how bad it is. If it's bad enough, then they'll be punished at the polls at some point.
how many weeks away do you think the final vote is? (not a rhetorical question, i just can't tell by looking at the coverage... i got the impression they want to get it done by july 4th at the latest, but what is stopping it from happening sooner?)
It seems like the general mood of the nation now is just "nothing matters lol"
Covid broke something, Biden couldn't put it back together, so everyone's in a "I'm not gonna be a sucker, I got mine" mode.
Covid is a red herring. It's social media.
i find the divergence between how matt and ezra are taking this moment in quite curious. i would argue that ezra's approach is ``everything matters lol''.
Despite Trump's desire for a July 4 bill, the likely path is a vote just before the August recess. But a Senate mark-up is probably coming next week.
I don't know, the ACA repeal and TCJA had lots of consciousness throughout the drafting and negotiation processes. I don't think is too early.
“I do want to flag that progressives are allowed to organize protests against looming Medicaid cuts, not just immigration enforcement.”
Are centrists also allowed to organise protests? Why don’t you, or anyone else perturbed by the current state of affairs, try to organise one against this bill?
Take matters into your hands!
We have day jobs
Speak for yourself. My WFH employer has no idea how I spend my time.
Lol I think that must be true for so many of these accounts who seem to be able to throw 20+ comments on every SB article within half an hour of its publication 😂
I’m up at 5 before my kids get up. I’m on my second cup of coffee when this drops. Some days I’m up at 4 doing Murph with my neighbor.
Matt generally drops the article in my lunch break, so you get 30-40 minutes of my comments then and then I come back three hours later after I finish work. (I'm in europe)
No no my friend, that's having a four year old, not being unemployed haha we've already been up for hours and are fully caffeinated by the time MattY drops the daily fix
Seems like the more efficient way to do it would be to persuade people attending the ICE protests to hold up signs saying "Also The Medicaid Cuts Are Bad."
I might do that!
If Matt is concerned about optics, he might want to consider the intraparty optics of progressives being out on the streets opposing Trump while the moderates are doing PowerPoint presentations at WelcomeFest complaining about BlueSky posters.
the bill has lots of ice funding in it (just sayin)
Moderates routinely get outhustled by radicals and then complain said radicals have disproportionate influence in politics. I would say they're too invested in proceduralism over taking action but that might be too on the nose.
I am sad no one is using my “Big Bloated Boondoggle” to point out how bad this GOP bill is.
They strip healthcare from millions and make energy prices higher for what? Higher interest rates for everyone.
Trump gives my many, many, many friends in oil and gas extraction an ulcer. They do not want what he thinks they want (there aren’t meaningful external constraints on production). They cannot give him what he wants (unlimited supply- they’ll go out of business in a pretty tight space already).
Theres some heterogeneity based on where peoples’ wells are but the economics of fracking just dont work the way Trump thinks it does.
Trump demands mutual economically exclusive outcomes. Large increases in production and lower prices. And all he is doing is driving down global economic activity and thus prices.
It's almost like he's deeply ignorant and incurious or something.
I do wonder- I know a lot of people in the industry- but it seems like they have really really big problems with how complex financing is for extraction right now, and despite having people at energy who know this and come from the industry there’s nothing anyone is even willing to try to unfuck that industry.
This mess is gonna collapse private equity, if anything does.
We need to make direct bank loans to companies easier so they don’t have to float bonds for capital.
If you really want to lower costs for the oil and gas industry, getting rid of the tariffs on their equipment would be a good place to start. And, according to a podcast I listened so, unblocking solar and wind development so they can power their drilling equipment with cheaper renewable energy would also help. Giving away more federal land does almost nothing, as the oil industry already has pretty much all the land they want, and they're not even using most of it because it's not economical.
I have some genuine questions about the "change the topic" messaging strategy suggested here and in some other articles.
1. Does changing the topic work? I usually agree with Matt when he says Democrats can't distract everyone from their cultural views by just going full tilt on socialism. But this seems like the same strategy -- he wants to distract everyone from the thing on the news by getting everyone to yell about Medicaid instead.
I understand healthcare is Trump's weakest issue, but I'm not sure what to make of this. Imagine World War III were taking place, and a political party has an unpopular approach to World War III but a popular approach to an issue that's less pressing in voters' minds (say, regulation of insurance companies). Would screaming about insurance regulation every day help that party or make it look stupid?
2. Even if we grant that changing the topic works, do people typically respond to these types of economic forecasts? They didn't really seem to respond to, e.g., this bill will bring down inflation! We even called it the Inflation Reduction Act!
I think maybe for this type of messaging to be effective, you have to wait until the economic consequences are apparent. If this bill doesn't have a big effect on the pocketbooks of likely voters (not necessarily Medicaid recipients...), then it won't work. Furthermore, if it does have such a detrimental effect, people will actually be angry, so Democrats won't have to rely on changing the topic.
The Trump administration really makes following politics kind of a bummer. Just a constant stream of dumb things and lies for like, no particular reason.
After four years of basically no press from Biden I forgot how exhausting it all is.
Perhaps you think that is unintended?
I used to listen to policy and politics podcast at the gym up until 2015. Then it just got depressing.
I used to listen to policy and politics podcasts all the time until Ezra and Sarah Kliff left the Weeds :(
To put it in the context of rooftop solar right now if BBB is passed into law we'd be looking at the market shrinking from the current world where tons of people go solar for the economic reasons (and through various incentives and leasing models many moderate to low income people can go solar as well), to one where people who go solar are largely like Matt: well to do homeowners who can write a big check because they believe in taking action on the climate issue and can afford to make a big payment now for long term savings.
Suffice to say the market for the former is much larger than the market for the later and so you'll see a major contraction in the whole industry.
Does rooftop solar really warrant subsidy of this sort?
I think the answer is very clearly no.
Now if you ask this about heat pumps, which have in response to the subsidy and research incentives improved hugely on both performance and price in just a few years, then yes. Battery cell production, virtual peaker installation, and R&D? Yes. EV charging infrastructure? Yes.
But solar power is a largely mature technology with gradually improving performance and scale, and its manufacture and utility-scale installation are profitable without subsidy.
Why we should subsidize the *least efficient* mode of installing and connecting solar power is beyond me.
Well, subsidy all else being equal is a no. Subsidy to survive being driven out of business by dumping, I think is more defensible.
Sure, though my preference would be to sit down with our allies and agree on a common framework to confront the main actor behind that dumping. But I am open to some industrial policy framework in support of highly automated manufacturing here.
I am just questioning the specifics of why we'd subsidize *rooftop solar* of all things.
I just put in solar panels and a lot of battery capacity. And I tend to agree with you. I'm happy to get my tax credit, but putting in my 17 panels on my roof is *way* more expensive than adding 17 more panels to some huge solar farm out in the desert. As long as the grid becomes more renewables/battery-based (like here in CA), rooftop solar isn't that critical. Ultimately, I did it for reasons of vanity, virtue signaling and (big one) keeping the power on after the Big One.
I don’t know, especially at least for me “home battery that really durably replaces an emergency generator” would be worth WAY more than solar (I have a very, very low energy bill for some reason, solar gets me next to nothing without storage)
I think we agree with one another?
Yeah maybe I’m not being clear, I think we agree.
There is room for subsidies, there’s probably not room for an interesting paper on the political economy of “why solar?” But it does interest me that there are subsidies for that and less for other things
I read somewhere that rooftop solar is more efficient than it seems because it doesn't require new transmission capacity - the energy is generated right there where most of it is being used. Utility solar may be cheap as far as panel installation goes, but the transmission lines required to connect all that capacity to the grid are not only expensive, but tend to get mired in years and years of endless red tape (because nobody wants new, ugly, high-voltage transmission lines in their backyard).
I'm fine with ending the subsidies as long as we also end the massive direct and indirect subsidies for gas, oil, and coal.
"Why we should subsidize the *least efficient* mode of installing and connecting solar power is beyond me."
In an ideal world where we could build large-scale solar projects quickly and easily, you might have a point.
In the real world, where my choices are "get some solar panels installed on my roof, which I own and which local rules allow me to do" or "wait and hope that the proposed local solar installation will manage to run the gauntlet of environmental impact review/a hundred concerned NIMBYs making noise about how the solar installation is bad and will ruin their community," the former sometimes looks more attractive than the latter, but it is only an option for people who can shell out $30k out of pocket, and that is, needless to say, a small minority of people.
Again, solar installations are capacity constrained. Every cell that isn’t installed on a roof will get installed elsewhere at present and for the foreseeable future, so this is flat out untrue.
"(and through various incentives and leasing models many moderate to low income people can go solar as well), to one where people who go solar are largely like Matt: well to do homeowners who can write a big check because they believe in taking action on the climate issue and can afford to make a big payment now for long term savings."
If solar is so cheap and easy now, why does it need incentives and market distortions to be installed?
Because most people can't afford to write a big check up front to savings that are realized over a 5-20 year timeline. It's like telling a low income renter "Just buy a house with cash up front and stop throwing away money on rent or a mortgage, what's so hard about that?" (Which by the way is why home ownership is heavily subsidized by the federal government, if it wasn't far fewer people could afford to own their own home)
People buy cars they can't afford to write a big check for all the time. If the deal is win win and the homeowner is going to save all this money with solar, the solar is being installed on the collateral the bank needs to underwrite a loan, why wouldn't the solar company just lend the money to the homeowner if it's such a good deal? Car companies all have finance arms.
There are a bunch of lending programs. I haven’t really thought about the optimal financing structure but there are various ways to get your solar panels “paid for.”
As for car companies and captive financing… industry practices have whipsawed back and forth since the collapse of GMAC (which became Ally). But that’s tangential.
Also, I'm not sure "this industry should act more like car dealerships" is where we want our economy to go towards anyway.
Solar panels aren't a status symbol like big trucks or sports cars are.
How heavily is homeownership actually subsidized by the federal government? The median homeowner, and probably the 75th percentile one, do not use the mortgage interest deduction, which is the main focus of these conversations.
I’ve been completely unable to find an accounting of what direct or opportunity costs are associated with federal market-making activities for long-term fixed-interest rate mortgages, which are the main finger on the scale in this sector.
It's massively indirectly subsidized via a variety of mechanisms, the whole idea of a 20 year mortgage was invented as a government backed policy after World War 2, before then you had a "market" system where mortgages where only for a few years and were largely for the rich.
I am aware of the history, I am trying to understand the magnitude of the subsidies or the opportunity cost and I have never been able to find *anything*.
Beyond the fact that everyone refers to it as "massive."
Here's the classic https://www.amazon.com/Crabgrass-Frontier-Suburbanization-United-States/dp/0195049837
For a more recent and critical take see here https://www.amazon.com/When-Affirmative-Action-White-Twentieth-Century/dp/0393328511
Because you are paying for the infrastructure. Internet would be unaffordable if every house had to pay to run wires from the ISP to their house. But we don't because we subsidized the infrastructure a long time ago (first as telephone, then as cable TV). Likewise, if we subsidize rooftop solar now, we add capacity to the grid such that, in a future where most buildings have solar panels, we collectively pay for upkeep through monthly electricity bills the same way we currently pay for power companies to maintain centralized generation infrastructure.
Can the utilities use the capacity?
"we add capacity"
But does that capacity reduce CO2 emissions enough to be worth the subsidy?
Installing solar on your home isn't that cheap. (Just installed it.*) Is industrial-sized solar mature enough not to need any more subsidies? Maybe, but I'm not sure. So I'd prefer to be conservative and keep the subsidies in place until we have a lot more confidence that it will survive and flourish without them.
*I like my solar panels but to tell you the truth, if my grid is becoming more based on renewables (like here in California), I'm not sure it's the best investment for most people.
This is strikes me as the key point: you can argue about changes to policy, perhaps utility grade should get more subsidies or maybe the subsidies should be more about your income and less about the size your system, there are a million ways to change things. But BBB doesn't do that, it's basically just an attempt to throttle the entire world of renewable energy which is bad because renewable energy is a lot better than the alternatives.
I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion that Trump and the Republicans are not in favor of good policy that can help make America stronger and the world a better place.
Without net metering there would not BE (nor should there be) and long term savings. Putting solar panels on rooftops is an inefficient way to reduce CO2 emissions. Ergo: stop subsidizing it in _any_ way.
I honestly think the best solution for rooftop solar is to just get rid of all of the China tariffs. It would have the same effect on making solar more affordable as subsidies, but without large sums of taxpayer money.
Yes, domestic companies that make solar panels wouldn't like it, but it's not like they have a strong business anyway, and the domestic business of solar panel installation, if Chinese imports were allowed, would boom.
I assume some number of people here are going to No Kings protests this Saturday. Let’s use this thread to brainstorm some useful protest signs.
Stop Trump from Killing Solar and Nuclear
Save Medicaid!
Let Me Have My Vaccines!
Cancer Research is Good, Actually
Eggs Are Up to $5
Average Social Security Hold Time Since DOGE: 90+ Minutes
"Eggs Are Up to $5"
/laughs-cries in California, where Albertsons sells eggs for $8/dozen on a good day
Aldi's and Trader Joe's are the only way to go. Eggs were $11.99 at Ralph's last week!
Target is $4.49 for me. Sprouts also runs cheaper. Have you tried those? Safeway is $8 still somehow. Huge variance
Thanks for the tip, I haven’t checked out eggs at Target.
Fun tidbit: shortly after the inauguration, a jar of instant coffee at Target was $7. Last month the same identical brand and size was $13. And I’m talking regular instant coffee, not some fancy schmancy artisanal single-origin rainforest-friendly fair trade coffee!
TRUMP PROMISED LOWER PRICES WHERE IS MY AFFORDABLE COFFEE GODDAMMIT
Evan Bear's suggestion of "Also the Medicaid Cuts Are Bad" mixes the message with a bit of humor.
This sounds like the centrist version of a leftist showing up to every protest with a palestinian flag
Yes! It's valuable to let people who are watching at home on TV that people who are motivated to protest can care about these things too, not just Palestine!
...
If I ran a business I would never let a moderate near my marketing department.
Over the years environmentalists could have been sold as a way to reduce electricity bills and make the cost of living more manageable. But they didn’t because they get hard making people do without. And now the chickens have come home to roost.
I agree here, the ascetic streak in the environmental movement is insanely counterproductive.
Frankly, it shows up a lot of places on the right and left, and has it EVER paid off? It seems like a tent shrinking mechanic to find the true believers
Seems like it probably paid off for the abolitionists in some respects. You don't want to make your case that "slavery is bad" contingent on "if and only if it's a less efficient form of surplus creation for capital owners than voluntary employment" if it turns out that the contingent fact is untrue. Sure, it's enormously helpful instrumentally in the event that it *is* true, but it's also basically just saying "what terminal values lol. No terminal values, only capitalism."
In honesty, reducing the harm of CO2 emissions is NOT costless. It is not anywhere near as costly as most environmentalists and all anti-environmentalists imply, but not zero. Trying to make it appear costless may be a necessary tactic at any given disjuncture, but it is a fatal strategy.
IMO, the real fatal strategy was focusing too much on climate change and CO2 and deemphasizing costs of pollution from fossil fuel emissions. For reasons I can't get my head around, they intentionally chose to make it almost all about climate change and carbon and mostly ignore all the other bad stuff in ff combustion emissions.
A quick half-assed ChatGPT session puts the 20 yr NPV of non-climate related costs of ff combustion at around $4 trillion. That's a lot lower than the estimated climate cost NPV of $14 trillion, but imo it's both less controversial (hardly any PM 2.5 deniers out there) and way less hypothetical/theoretical versus cost of carbon calculations.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Final Summary: All Fossil Fuel Pollution (Excl. Climate)
🧬 ~50,000 premature deaths/year, equivalent to ~500,000 QALYs/year
💵 Total monetized benefit of elimination:
– $275 billion/year
– $4.1 trillion NPV over 20 years (3% discount)
This includes:
Avoided mortality (QALYs)
Avoided hospitalizations and health costs
Increased worker productivity
Reduced infrastructure and ecosystem damage
------------------------------------------------------
U.S. fossil CO₂ emissions: ~5.0–5.2 billion metric tons/year
The SCC is the estimated economic damage from emitting one ton of CO₂, accounting for:
Agricultural loss
Sea level rise
Extreme weather damage
Health effects (indirect)
Ecosystem disruption
Estimates of SCC (per metric ton of CO₂):
Source 2023 Value
EPA (2023 proposed update) $190/ton (central case, 2% discount)
Some academic models $250–300/ton (with global equity weighting)
Annual Climate Damage (5B tons CO₂)
$100/ton $500 billion/year
$190/ton $950 billion/year
$250/ton $1.25 trillion/year
And also, don't forget about noise. For the most part, engines that run off fossil fuels are noisy and obnoxious. Leaf blowers, pressure washers, chainsaws...all of this stuff, but bulk of the noise comes not from the actual work, but from fossil-fueled machinery powering the equipment. All of these pieces of equipment have electric alternatives, but the electric alternatives are seldom used, mostly due to inertia.
Another pet peeve of mine is generators used to power stuff like food trucks or event lighting with large crowds of people nearby, often within a couple hundred feet of an electrical outlet they could have easily plugged into. Even though it has negligible climate change impact, large crowds of people should not be breathing generator exhaust when there's such easy alternatives.
I agree, and one place this line of thinking can have real impact on policy is which energy measures to spend money on.
In general, I think the focus on the government should be measures that both reduce carbon emissions *and* have real potential to lower energy costs for consumers, when deployed at scale. Heat pumps, solar+wind generation, next gen battery development, and EVs all meet the bar of "real potential to lower costs". (Geothermal also does, but in a way that is more speculative).
Examples of what doesn't have any realistic potential to lower costs include green hydrogen, "sustainable" aviation fuel, and machines to scrub carbon dioxide from the air. This is the kind of stuff that, at best, provides a small reduction in net CO2 emissions, in exchange for a huge, never-ending cost to the taxpayer and, at worst, doesn't even reduce net CO2 emissions because of people forgetting to factor in stuff like emissions from fossil fuels powering the carbon capture machines.
Particulate and CO2 reductions are not alternatives, but we should have different instruments for different externalities.
Bone to pick with you from the Politix podcast. You have banged the drum continuously that Democrats need to focus more on the Medicaid cuts than immigration protests. That there needs to be more protests around the Medicaid cuts so "normies" know bad it is. But lastly, immigration is a winning issue for Trump and so any focus whatsoever on immigration will benefit Trump and therefore it will absolutely help GOP in midterms and 2028.
You really need to update your priors on this. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/11/trump-quinnipiac-poll-immigration-00400784. I am more sympathetic to you regarding your "popularism" stance than a lot of your left wing critics. I don't disagree at all that there should be more focus on the extremism of the Medicaid cuts; the fact that it doesn't come close to being on the home page of the New York Times is honestly shocking. But part of "popularism" has to come with understanding that the public's opinion on a variety of issues is a) often not stable generally b) is subject to changes from subtle changes to poll wording c) will and often does change in response to events.
Also, I gotta go kind of doomer. Matt, this is it. Forget the threat of authoritarian takeover in 2028 it's being threatened now. President Stephen Miller is clearly aching to find reason to invoke the Insurrection Act and at that point honest to god, what the are the chances we have an actual free and fair election? You're not going to reach any member of the public about Medicaid cuts if you're in a jail cell for not dancing heartily enough at Trump's "I didn't get enough hugs from daddy so I need to wildly overcompensate for my emotional shortcomings" military parade.
Matt's been rightly banging on about stakeholders being silent in the face of this ruinous bill. I wonder how much the President's authoritarian turn has affected their willingness to speak out.
I feel like it's wildly underreported how often GOP politicians will apparently say off the record in private that a big reason they don't speak out more on Trump's obviously idiotic statements/policies/general behavior is actual fear for their physical safety.
I suspect some of this is overreaction and/or a crutch. Politicians since beginning of time have had unhinged opponents who threaten harm. Also, citing safety of one's family is an easy to justify (even just to yourself) why you didn't do more to some bad thing from happening.
But it's been a consistent enough refrain that I think there is a bit of "where there's smoke there is fire" aspect to why there isn't more criticism from people or entities you would think would be more vocal in opposition.
Also, as to why House members voted for a bill that so clearly would harm them in a midterm election (especially ones in "swing" districts), it seems likely party of the story is a shocking number of them clearly didn't know the details of all the provisions in the bill. But I think we also need to give credence to a) Trump is the GOP and all money basically flows to him so he has ability to direct primary campaigns against incumbents b) There is going to be some true "thumb on the scale stuff" with elections going forward.
Again, in the annals of stuff that don't get talked about enough; please see all the GOP hagiography of Viktor Orban. They had CPAC in Hungary for godsakes. Like there is subtlety to here. Quote directly from G Elliott Morris "If Trump gets away with this, he will absolutely do the same thing during the 2026 & 2028 elections. He will manufacture unrest just like in LA and send federal troops to every major city as a way to intimidate voters and decrease turnout. Functional end to fair elex."
Maybe tax write offs for unreimbursed care are worth similar amounts to what Medicaid reimburses. Only administrators would know what true cost sinks are, and I doubt anyone is making much money off Medicaid patients at all.
All the more reason to have avoided protests over the the immigration issue; it was just too likely to generate exactly the kind of Trump -friendly video that it did.
The postcards I should be writing
https://www.activateamerica.vote/postcards
instead of sparring with you guys :) are about tax cuts and Medicaid.
"Bone to pick with you from the Politix podcast. You have banged the drum continuously that Democrats need to focus more on the Medicaid cuts than immigration protests. That there needs to be more protests around the Medicaid cuts so "normies" know bad it is. But lastly, immigration is a winning issue for Trump and so any focus whatsoever on immigration will benefit Trump and therefore it will absolutely help GOP in midterms and 2028."
Yeah, I don't even know how successful it will be, the people getting Medicaid cuts will be the ones who need to protest at the ballot box. Does J Random swing voter who has a health plan even care?
And then you read all those stories about Medicaid recipients who don't even know they're on Medicaid because the states have branded it in their own name, like TennCare or whatever. They're unconcerned because they don't understand the situation.
I am once again asking states to stop camouflaging their Medicaid programs by giving them cutesy names.
“I like ACA but hate Obamacare! F**k Obama!”
Facepalm 🤦
California's is...MediCal. A nightmare to google.
People who have or would support Trump don't care if there are theoretical Medicaid cuts, because they either are not on Medicaid and feel they have no reason to care, or they don't think that they would be affected by the cuts.
It is going to suck when they pass this bill, but even as Trump supporters are kicked off of Medicaid or find that their local rural hospitals are closed will still mostly blame Democrats.
Random swing voter may care if their mom gets kicked out of her Medicaid-subsidized nursing home or something.
Oo, a little bit of polite shade from Paul Krugman this morning.
"If you’re a pundit who thinks that this is over the top, you’re part of the problem (and you have been wrong every step of the way.) If you’re a Democrat who wants to ignore the ongoing assault on democracy so we can talk about Medicaid — important as it is — you’re hiding your head in the sand."
Honestly wrecking the green investment incentives is trivial to its tax on foreign investment into USA.
That goes through, you have a proper US financial crisis and dollar crisis.
the level of Bad and Stupid Trump packed into this steaming mess is at some level impressive
(meanwhile Trump caved to China, the Financial Times comment by Beattie (How China beat Trump before the trade battle even started) is at once amusing and accurate https://on.ft.com/3TiYeen - and one doesn't often see Princesss Bride worked into trade negotiations commentary. But Trump is so incompetent....
So, um, Matt, you missed a, uh, spirited conversation about your priorities in the Wednesday thread.
(I agree that immigration should not totally overshadow everything else! [ducks])
No, it shouldn't, but Matt can also choose not to antagonize his co-partisans and waste time on petty intra-party squabbles.
2017-2018 saw widespread and concurrent coverage of the ACA repeal, the administration's cruelty towards immigrants, and the Mueller stuff. These issues all hit with different audiences. This stuff isn't mutually exclusive. Matt has rightly complained about hospitals being pretty mum about this extremely harmful bill. Anti-ICE protests aren't preventing them from speaking up.
The anti-ICE protests are harmful to Dems. Any video of cars burning s bad. You combine that with idiots waving the Mexican flag and its WAY worse.
My immediate response is rough them up a bit as you kick them out
I don't think it's accurate to say that the bill will boost GDP growth in the short term. The economy is not depressed - stimulus would only cause the economy to overheat. Either borrowing costs will increase, or inflation will. Either way, it will be a drag on the economy.
Additionally, given that much of the tax cuts benefit the rich, who have a lower propensity to spend their additional after-tax income, and that the benefit cuts target the poor, it may actually have a negative impact on GDP in the short term also.
Why do any rich people even actually want this bill?
Greed?
I can understand wanting more money/power even when you have a lot. It's just hard to see how theoretically smart people are behind this then when the most likely result is that they end up worse off.
Plus aren't most of the "tax cuts" just keeping the current TCJA rates that were set to expire?
That's such bullshit though, the TCJA would've scored as increasing the deficit more if the rates weren't set to expire.
“What’s more, coal is dramatically worse than natural gas for air quality, so this is really bad for people with asthma or heart disease.”
And for the additional people who will contract those diseases along with those who will suffer other impacts tied to particulate pollution (neurological conditions, cancer, premature deaths, adverse birth outcomes, etc.)
excuse me i believe these are all due to vacines