I agree with everything in this article. I also want to throw some cold water in before our heads get too big. The Republican party is stuck in such a place where it is so committed to tax cuts for the ultra wealthy but also reliant on marginal rural working class that it can't make sound policy. The loss of PEPFAR is a tragedy. The loss of state capacity and investment in cutting edge research is beyond stupid and counterproductive.
However, it seems to me that we (being Democrats and the broader left of center) are also in a place where we both can't raise taxes on households making less than $400k per year due to increasing reliance on educated upper middle class voters and also refuse to draw the line on spending anywhere short of the most ineffectual civil servant, or the most inane silly program at a marginal agency like USAID.
My question is at what point does something give? I don't see a single national level politician that seems to take long term fiscal trajectory seriously and am not sure there has been one since Obama.
Color me massively skeptical that's what driving things. Are people in 2025 so much more ignorant or selfish or cynical or spiteful than the people of 1975? It's a hard case to make. Education levels have risen a lot since then, and the polling generally shows Americans have grown more reasonable on things like racism, sexism, homophobia, religious differences and so on.
Maybe what people tell pollsters is all BS, and the actual government we get is an example of revealed preference. But I continue to believe the central problem is that the critical guardrail of a "reasonably virtuous class of political elites" is just broken. I reckon lots of voters fifty years ago would vote for the kinds of charlatans and cranks we regularly send to office these days if they had the opportunity. But they *didn't* have the opportunity to do so, because both parties weeded them out. Now only one party does that, and because the other wins about half the time, we're screwed.
I like this comment, and as an agnostic who spent much of the early 2000s railing against the religious right I am nevertheless tempted to wonder if a lot of this isn't downstream of the significant reduction of religion in American society.
When the Rove/Bush GOP started to heavily politicize religion at that time, I remember a lot of people predicting that this would end up killing religious communities because the coalition logic meant that leaders were forced to take increasingly vocal stands on the wrong side of extremely popular social developments (gay marriage, marijuana legalization) that would ultimately delegitimize the whole enterprise.
Godless city slickers like me said at the time that this was basically fine, and that people can live morally upright lives without formal religious attendance, and I still think that's true. But I nevertheless do think that there is a palpable change between then and today about the expectations that we seem to have about the moral lives of ourselves and others, with a greater prioritization of self-interest over the common good. That makes me wonder more about the social function that a religion provides, and what might have been lost as that particular institution went by the wayside.
Or maybe I'm just approaching middle age and everybody starts to think the kids are punks when they hit 40.
Thanks for sharing that- it's an interesting tick-tock of how Jerry Falwell saw a market opportunity in the evangelical community and exploited it. The quotes provided make it seem clear that he was primarily interested in exploiting the churchgoing community for personal gain, which I believe.
The more interesting part to me is about the current ministers, however, who the author suggests basically believe that it is the parishoners who insist on nonstop culture war opprobium. Notably, all of them appear to agree with the underlying premise that the church is best understood as a market where it is the job of the clergy is to cater to the revealed preference of their flock for fear of losing influence and market share. Missing from the gloss that the author provides is the discussion about what the church leaders believe that their more abstract responsibilities are in the face of QAnon and pizzagate conspiracies popping up among the faithful.
A skeptic might say that religion is pretty specifically inoculated from market dynamics in the US by statute via the First Ammendment and tax preferences, and question the idea that church leaders should be particularly beholden to internet-type engagement metrics. After all, one of the key reasons that people go to church is that they want to become better people than they are, so the fact that people are interested in internet conspiracy theories could be thought of asa diagnosis rather than a mandate. I'm sure that the church leaders have thought about this, and it would be nice to hear what they think they should do.
I don't see what the First Amendment tax exemptions have to do with isolating churches from market dynamics. Churches live on tithes from attendees, those with more attendance prosper more. There's your customer base and revenue stream right there. In a time where non-religion is more popular than ever, especially among the young, the pressure to secure more members is higher.
The ideal purpose of a religious institution is to improve the character of its congregation, but that's not necessarily why people show up at any given church. People want a sense of belonging and purpose, and without a developed intellectual foundation they'll take those things from whoever demands the least in return. On the left you get people saying burning down walmarts is better than protest and not doing either, on the right you get conspiracy theorists gathering at the most friendly church. Obviously pastors shouldn't bend to these dynamics, but that doesn't mean they won't.
Civic virtue or moral rectitude do not require god. For a long time liberalism relied to a large extent on personal moral standards. America has long had an especially liberalist religious tradition which eventually morphed into the Transcendentalists and similar groups. After WWII we pretty much broke the bonds of virtue and governance. We certainly need to recover those bonds and maybe that's underway but it seems we have to slog through lots of sewage to get there.
Has gerrymandering gotten worse over the past 50 years? I would have assumed it had gotten better, given how bad things were before the court cases of the 1950s and 1960s, but maybe the 1970s were a brief period of particularly good districting?
Gerrymandering isn’t just about the divide between Dems and the GOP. When districts get gerrymandered to become safer they have a greater likelihood of attracting cranks, because said cranks only need to win a primary.
I half agree with you, but FoxNews and the National Review did try to get Republican primary voters to reject Trump early on. They would have been happier with Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. His base refused to do so however and so here we are.
I think it’s just more efficient information flow. Cranks can find an audience, and people aren’t confined to newspapers for information. Information not subject to elite taste is vastly more accessible
The media environment is WILDLY different than 1975. It's not that people are less-educated, it's that they're getting their info from social media without any of the guardrails of traditional media.
It's not the people that are different - it's that they're voting in a world where traditional institutions have been dissolved, and their replacements are the very large but thin social networking sites (including Tiktok).
I am with you here, I am finding it hard to stay angry with politicians for behavior that amounts to following clear incentives. And the incentives are crystal clear at this point. Instead I'm just increasingly demoralized about the voting public.
Spare a moment for a local complaint. I'm in Fairfax county in the DC suburbs. It is both one of the best educated parts of the country and maybe the single place with the highest concentration of direct personal experience with government operations.
And the county is having a budget crisis. Why? Because, essentially, 1) people want to cut spending in the abstract but generally favor increasing spending on any particular budget item, and 2) people hate taxes and will throw a fit if their taxes go up. So, the exact same willful refusal to believe in tradeoffs that is sabotaging our national governance. If we can't do any better here, of all places, what hope is there at the national level?
The politicians hear those priorities loud and clear, of course. And the rational response is a mixture of pretending, outright lying, cutting anything not directly public facing, no matter how important, and exploding deficits where allowed (not in sub-national govs). It won't get better until our electorate figures out how to send a better incentive signal than "I demand something for nothing."
Or it's emotionally easy and cathartic to blame voters instead of facing the reality that your favorite politicians are often out-of-touch and simply support bad, dumb things for bad, dumb reasons.
Both major parties are historically unpopular, but there aren't really any alternatives, especially when many people feel they have no choice but to vote for one party because the party is really really bad.
We don't live in Westeros where we are stuck with the Lannisters. We're a democracy where we have the ability to vote people out if we want. The incentives voters give politicians don't just determine who on the ballot wins, but also who decides to run in the first place.
Sure, and elected officials are allowed to implement good policies, even if some pollster from some interest group shows them a poll that says that the policy might be unpopular.
You can look at things like Manhattan's congestion pricing or the Nippon Steel deal where politicians took opposed these things for very little reason even though all indications are that voters support them.
That's ignoring the effect of time lags for policy effectiveness, tradeoffs among different groups of voters, and non-political effects of changes in culture. It's pretty well established in poli sci literature that there has become a disconnect between economic growth rates and voters' views of the economy in the US, even if they think their own local economy is good or their own circumstances are good. Sometimes policies have diffuse beneficial effects for the country overall, but concentrated harms.
I would take your critique more seriously if you were talking about something like the Congress Party in India, where elite party members almost all inherit their positions, than a country where primary elections determine pretty much every level of government.
I'm not ignoring any of those things. Almost every elected officials has at least 2 years in between elections and most have about 4. There are plenty of tangible things any politician at any level to earn public support within that time frame, such as the examples mentioned above. There occasionally might be competing views among different constituencies, but there are many things that the public broadly wants, like lower cost of living and improved public safety. Lastly, nothing is stopping politicians from adapting to changes in culture.
I don't expect you to take my critique seriously. It seems you've decided "the voters" are the nameless, faceless entity to blame for the country's problems. Ironically, I assume you are a voter yourself but probably view yourself as one of the "good ones" that makes smart, reasonable decisions, like voting for Joe Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary.
To me it seems easy and cathartic to blame politicians instead of facing the reality that voters strongly encourage them to pander on partisan red meat rather than addressing difficult questions with difficult measures.
The problem here is that both of those numbers are irrelevant. If we want large government spending of social programs we have to be talking about tax increases in the 5 digit incomes. Every nation you can point to that has programs like free Healthcare, college, expansive child payments, maternity leave etc has very high taxes at the very bottom of the income chart. They also pair that with regressive taxes like VAT, gas taxes, car registrations etc, that are typically more than double what we pay in the US.
All the arguments about fairness, loopholes etc are irrelevant as long as we are unwilling to acknowledge this. There just isn't enough money to extract from "the people richer than me" to pay for these things, as evidenced by the fact that the places where it does exist don't pay for it like that.
This is exactly right. I am not an anti-debt fanatic but it is hard to not notice that we are not paying for the state we have, much less the state we theoretically want.
I’m wondering if part of the problem with the idea of a national VAT is that it would be on top of state sales tax? We deal with state and federal income tax through the SALT deduction, though that only applies to people who itemize as far as I know.
Personally, I think the single biggest obstacle to the adoption of a VAT in the US is the existence of midterm elections. Voters generally loathe tax increases, but you can take the gamble if you've got enough time (say, 4-5 years) before the next election to show the electorate that your program as a whole yielded good results.
US lawmakers don't even get two years, they get 22 months from the time they take office until the next election. Indeed, throw primaries into the mix and the interval is barely a year and a half.
This arrangement renders members of Congress responsive to voter concerns, but also timid AF.
That might effect the mechanics of implementation but isn't relevant to the tax rate magnitude. We could have a 10% national VAT on top of state sales tax, or just have states increase thier rates to 20+% with 10% going to social programs etc. The point here being that if you want large social programs then everyone has to pay.
Somewhat over half of total income goes to people making $100k+ (I think? This is surprisingly hard to look up). So you could get a substantially more generous welfare state just by raising marginal taxes above that threshold.
This depends on what you mean by substantial i guess but you are focused on trying to twist the spreadsheet to find a way to sell a bad idea. The Nordic tax systems function because the entire populace is united in the belief that paying taxes into collective systems is a benefit for everyone. The wealthy pay a higher rate but everyone pays at least a high rate. You are trying to build a system where one half of society takes from the other half which is a fundamentally flawed way to structure a society.
You will never get the votes to have the near zero taxes <100k while also having Nordic level taxes over 100k. Which is why the Democrats have to lie and say the taxes are just for the >400k cohort. They haven't succeeded in getting consensus that everyone should buy in so they pretend like you can vote yourself other people's money.
A lot of people who vote for democrats are just making it at 300k in high COL places. The MEDIAN white HHI in DC was 160k. I bet it’s close to that in New York. I am not sure those people would suddenly become republicans but I think dems would hear about it
Educational polarization is a threat to the republic. It’d be good to chase some high earners out of the Democratic party if we can pick up lower earning voters in trade.
Of course, higher taxes in themselves aren’t a selling point to low earners, even higher taxes on someone else. So we’ll need a different, complementary, positive agenda as well.
Honestly speaking for myself, I’m friends with a lot of GOP staffers and lobbyists who are frankly on a desert island crafting a sand idol to mitt Romney. It’s us and the Manhattan Institute. But “good governance” republicans would be that group and they are way out in the cold right now.
For some reason, I love the mental image of Tom Hanks as a moderate Republican stuck on a desert island, yet still somehow out in the cold, spending his time building Wilson a sand idol to Mitt Romney.
Agree. The idea that people are barely making it on 300k has some truth to it due to the high cost of housing and medical care, but to many non highly partisan voters, that idea sounds ridiculous and completely out of touch to how they live their lives.
As a PMC-type in a high COL location, I agree. I'm not hurting (I bought a house almost a decade ago and I don't have kids) but a lot of people adjacent me live on the knife's edge. If the Republican Party could return to Romney sanity, it could peel off some of these voters.
I know it's mentioned a lot here, but YIMBY reforms would be huge for this group.
We could have a Federal Construction Commission (have to find a different acronym), to which construction companies have to prove that they don't have significant market power.
It wouldn't take care of zoning, but it's an idea. Not a good idea, but an idea nonetheless.
Or, what about a Herfindahl-Hirschman index of household incomes? Take each household's percentage of their city's income and square it. Your sum will probably be pretty small because there are a lot of households in a city, but you could use this "HHI of HHIs" as a pointlessly confusing way of measuring both the smallness and income inequality of a city.
On the other side is the claim "it's easy to fix Social Security, *just* get rid of the income cap" which would be the biggest tax increase in history on working professionals.
It's nuts that I'm excluded from the group that needs to pay more taxes, but hitting people with a 12 point increase in their marginal rates is also crazy.
I think the whole framing is ill-advised. Better to not get overly specific. Say, broadly, "We want to make government work for the many, not the few, and we also want to make sure the rich pay their fair share" or some such.
You'd have to pass specific policies, probably including tax increases -- you can't *govern* vaguely. But maybe you can campaign vaguely.
If the candidate has to do interviews and they get asked about specifics, what should they do? Maybe insist that they share certain principles, but that the details have to be worked out as cases arise, on the basis of these principles?
Yes, you do at some point have to give specifics. But you can avoid doing so until you absolutely must. When Democrats gain power they seem to jump all over themselves to >preemptively< boast about how their tax proposals affect *so few people*. This seems dumb to me—a very poor effort at building the needed narrative, because it does so using a framework established by Republicans (taxes are bad! government doesn't have to be paid for! etc).
Again, focus on the fact that the Other Party doesn't want the rich to pay their fair share. And go from there.
Right, Democrats are willfully boxing themselves into a corner here. The longer they do this, the more painful it will be to get out, but as InMD says, somethings got to give.
It’s a two way street for Dems: you’d need to raise taxes on those making under 400k AND you’d need to meaningfully reduce social security and healthcare spending (there’s ways to do this without screwing over the poor but those are unpopular).
You wouldn't *need* to "meaningfully reduce" entitlements, no. You personally may feel it would be unwise to exempt such spending (and stabilize our fiscal trajectory solely through tax hikes). But it's certainly not infeasible to do that. We need deficit reduction to the toon of 3% of GDP. That's a lot of money, but ours is a gigantic economy.
(For the record, if it were up to me we would look at entitlements. I'd personally bump up the retirement age. Yes, I'd go there. I'm simply pointing out that we could, uh, just raise taxes and keep spending as is. We're very lightly taxed as a country!)
All those GOP congressmen in purple districts in blue states pushing to raise the SALT deduction know that their bread is buttered by moderate voters that care more about their taxes than progressive policies
The left I think would happily take a European style package that paired a regressive VAT tax with universal health care. Not even Bernie Sanders himself would say no to that.
Moreover, I think even center left moderates at this point would take that package--IF they thought there was ANY CHANCE WHATSOEVER that the government had the state capacity to set something like that up. But trust in the government to do anything right or at reasonable cost has all but vanished across the political spectrum, and for good reason.
The ultimate problem, then, is state capacity. The path to fiscally sound leftist politics is therefore:
- execute really well on pragmatic government functions
- increase credibility of Dems and the government generally
- make a "grand bargain" Euro style welfare policy that funds universal programs with VAT
None of this is novel; it used to be called "Sewer Socialism" and I think could still work.
I think there's a path dependency issue that precludes that kind of deal. Maybe it would have been plausible 60 or 70 years ago but now too many people live too well too far down the income ladder* to make it palatable. The best case scenario is saving something resembling what exists today but more efficient. The other cold reality is that we are getting to a place where even Europe can no longer afford Europe. Outside a few of the smaller countries their model is looking less like a forward vision and more a momentary blip of generosity possible only by virtue of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
*Edit to add, this is a good thing! It just alters the politics.
>The best case scenario is saving something resembling what exists today but more efficient.
I mean, to me this is pretty much what Medicare for All *is*. Maybe we have a disagreement on that--don't have to litigate it here though!
>The other cold reality is that we are getting to a place where even Europe can no longer afford Europe
I don't think the thing holding Europe back is universal healthcare, especially since every European country spends less per capita on healthcare than the US and gets better outcomes. That's one economic area where they are actually consistently beating us.
The problem with Europe I think has more to do with overregulation and hostility to business, especially venture capital. Most economic growth over the last two decades has come from tech and any would-be entrepreneur with a choice is going to choose the US, where you can easily raise money and also--and this is no small thing--quickly and easily fire employees who aren't performing well.
(An aside: I've always considered myself a leftist but after having experience with European workers I've had to reconsider certain things, for example excessive worker protections--1 year parental leave! Multiple paid months off due to "burnout"!--that make it impossible to create a well-functioning organization)
In any case, the point is, I think "you can't have universal healthcare / other universal programs AND economic dynamism" is a false narrative!
I'm not so sure you can disentangle the over regulation and hostility to business from the government programs. Europeans are much more supportive of government than business generally, while in the US is mostly the opposite. Culturally I think that really matters with regards to politics and the ability of the government to gain public support for raising taxes and spending money on programs.
I think we can have universal healthcare, loosely defined, and are already closer to it due to the ACA than is fully appreciated in the Discourse.
What I think is highly questionable is that you can have generous universal benefits, all of the accommodations and benefits that European workers enjoy, and a dynamic economy, and crucially the ability to defend yourself militarily.
The dirty secret about the US healthcare system is that for most people most of the time it isn't nearly bad enough to generate political will even a Medicare for all type reform might entail, and thats to say nothing of the defensiveness the average American will have about what is by global and even Western standards a lifestyle of lavish consumption. Big picture point of my comment is that the subject may well be besides the point for the situation we're looking at. Which isn't to say I disagree with your broader sentiments (I don't) but I see no way to get there from here.
Yes you caught me in a sweeping generalization; of course there are well-functioning organizations in Europe. Perhaps the best way to put it is: achieving a well-functioning organization in America requires less luck than in Europe.
I've been inspired by comments like this to actually work out (mostly with ChatGPT and a handful of links) a rough estimate of the Federal Government's tax revenues. I'm curious where people here think revenue could be raised.
Here are the major categories. Note the effective tax rates include payroll taxes on labor, and all of this is a very rough estimate.
EffectiveTaxRate TrillionsAnnualRevenue Category
13% 3.3 Labor (0-50k)
20% 4.4 Labor (50k-160k)
22% 2.2 Labor (160k-500k
27% 2.0 Labor (500k-5M)
31% 0.5 Labor (5M+)
15% 1.8 Capital Gains
15% 1.1 Dividends
18% 3.0 Business Income
0% 2.0 Taxable Consumption (Taxed at State Level)
0% 17.0 Untaxed Consumption
My naive thoughts are Dividends and Capital Gains would be one of the easier places to go for more revenue? I also wonder whether 17 trillion in untaxed consumption could be taxed somehow.
There are about 10-12 million households in the 160k-500k bracket (compared to about 1.5 million households in the 500k+ brackets). That is where the money is.
There's more money in the 50k-160k bracket. I know my chart isn't the easiest to read, but it's supposed to display that the 160k-500k bucket has 2.2 Trillion and the bucket one rung down has 4.4T.
Personally, I was struck by how gigantic the untaxed consumption bucket is. I'm sure there's good reasons most of it is untaxed, but but it's bigger than all the labor incomes put together, and currently at 0%.
And the states that tax only consumption and not income seem to make out pretty well from it. Makes one wonder if the Feds should follow their example, as the comment suggests.
None. And that's what people fundamentally don't understand when it comes to taxation in the US. It really is a lot lower not just on the wealthy but on the actual middle and a bit below (and far enough down you don't pay any income taxes at all). There's of course also the confounding factor that if you are living in a deep blue coastal metropolitan state what you pay in federal taxes doesn't tell the story of how much you are being taxed on net, which can be closer to the norm for a developed country. It just doesn't register at the federal level.
Now, there is not a world where I am going to support the Republicans but if they were going to make these kinds of draconian cuts and BS pretextual work requirements etc., on Medicaid but also let the 2017 tax cuts expire and not pass any additional cuts I'd respect it. Their priorities would be different than mine but at least it would be a concession to reality.
Haha fair. Same on my end, as I intended that comment to end with a question mark.
In my defense, the 1-year old is on a kick where he wakes up for *four fucking hours* in the middle of 5 nights in every 7, for like three months running now.
Every time we think we've turned a corner he goes right back to this.
Let's not forget the emblematic story of Mitt Romney's $100M IRA, completely untaxed. Or his refusal to release his tax returns. One key point here is that a lot of income and wealth is escaping taxation entirely.
There are very good reasons that dividends and capital gains are taxed less.
1. That money has already been taxed.
2. That's the money that drives investment thus GDP growth.
If you want to grow the economy you want taxes that don't effect reduce economic growth too much. Property taxes and consumption taxes are preferable for that.
There’s very little evidence that investors care about the capital gains tax rate more than market returns. If someone was shown a graph from a random period from the stock market without any annotations, most people would not be able to guess the tax rate from that. My response to this kind of argument is to propose that we make the corporate tax rate as low as possible (10%) and tax capital gains like regular income.
All money has already been taxed, lol. It's like... fundamental to how money and taxation work.
I kinda sorta don't disagree with the second point, but really if we were designing a system from scratch we'd want all income, earned and unearned (inflation adjusted), taxed at a lower level but in a highly progressive fashion, paired with a fairly large VAT and a shitpot of Pigouvian taxes.
In our system I'm opposed to the VAT because I see no reason to expect it would also be paired with reforms to income/payroll/capital gains taxes, but would love to try to close existing holes with more Pigovian taxes and fewer income tax rate increases.
I believe capital gains were taxed at the same rate as ordinary income under the Reagan tax reform of 1986, but that act also set the top marginal rate at 28% and created deficits that led Congress to go back to the table and increase margin rates for top income earners, and they also went back to lower rates for capital gains. Something about markets being affected or something, but taxing capital gains at ordinary income rates is harder than you think.
I believe that capital gains rates discourage efficient capital allocation (and, in particular, accurate pricing) because the act of moving money around itself creates taxable events even if you’re not “cashing out” of the market but just reallocating a portfolio. 401(k)s handle this more gracefully.
From what I understood from an investment advisor we were kind of paying capital gains taxes on mutual funds that we weren't actually withdrawing anything from because maybe when _other_ people withdrew money that caused the fund to have to register gains on the sales they made.
I have no problem paying gains(even at regular income tax rates!) on money I'm actually taking out but I really dislike paying it when I'm leaving my money in the market, especially when I'm not even pulling it out of a fund.
Consuming is just what you do with already-taxed income. It’s not conceptually distinct from just raising income taxes except that it’s easier to forgo consumption on a short term basis (would be indefinitely excpet that death is somewhat perversely treated as a form of consumption.)
"My question is at what point does something give?"
There's probably not a person in "media" I like less than David Sacks - he sucks - but he said it best. Our politicians will only take the debt levels seriously when the market forces them to.
He published an entire book on the plan but here's the exec. summary:
“A “beautiful deleveraging” happens when the four levers are moved in a balanced way so as to reduce intolerable shocks and produce positive growth with falling debt burdens and acceptable inflation. More specifically, deleveragings become beautiful when there is enough stimulation (i.e., through “printing of money” / debt monetization and currency devaluation) to offset the deflationary deleveraging forces (austerity / defaults) and bring the nominal growth rate above the nominal interest rate—but not so much stimulation that inflation is accelerated, the currency is devaluated, and a new debt bubble arises.”
Fiscal repression typically acts in the same direction as currency devaluation when one is a net exporter, and should partially offset when you're a net importer, so it strikes me as plausible. Book title?
>and also refuse to draw the line on spending anywhere short of the most ineffectual civil servant<
I question the implication of this wording. The United States maintains one of the smallest public sectors of any high income country. This fact in isolation doesn't mean the federal government gets good value for it dollars, sure. Maybe given the results we get, the federal budget should indeed be a lot smaller. Perhaps! But I don't see much evidence of systemic or chronic waste. Nothing's ever perfect of course, and you can find individual examples of unnecessary spending, like Medicare Advantage (and Medicare fraud). But on the whole the country's national government seems to have done a decent job in recent years (at least until 2025). Look at how the US has lept ahead of most of the rich world in per capita output and overall economic strength. And there's the country's share of Nobel prizes. And there's the plunging crime rate. There's the continual improvement in air travel safety. Our cities are growing again. Obesity is declining. A higher percentage of people have health insurance coverage than ever before. The country continues to operate the world's strongest military. And it remains at the forefront of space exploration. And it wasn't the Chinese who gave the world MRNA vaccines, nor the Europeans who figured out large language models.
In other words, based on both the size of the government compared to other rich countries *and* the national conditions that money buys us, we don't have a spending problem. We have a revenue problem. Full stop.
If you want to argue in libertarian fashion that government should be a lot smaller and spend a lot less of GDP, you can try. Plenty of people agree with you. But the country would look a lot different if you succeed, and it's doubtful for the better. If you want to argue Washington borrows too much, you'll have my support. But again, this really isn't caused by too much spending—not, as I noted above, by any reasonable standard or metric. We just don't raise enough revenue.
I understand your argument in the abstract. However applied to practical politics it is a combination of rejection of democracy and plain old giving up the game.
It has not yet been 8 months since the first blip of serious inflation and accordant cost of living increases in 2 generations (and in living memory of many voters) prompted the country to elect Donald Trump a second time. I think everyone needs to adapt their thinking to that reality.
I agree entirely! That's just the point—very large numbers of voters don't possess detailed knowledge of policy. So yeah, in an election with conditions favoring the Republicans, many will vote for the Republican.
Which again, is why we need a Republican party that provides the electorate with decent political leaders.
> nor the Europeans who figured out large language models.
Do you count that labor in terms of its consumption, to "figure out LLMs", or its production, educating professionals? Because the Europeans and the Chinese contributed quite a lot on that production end to AI research.
Very much agreed. To avoid fiscal collapse we will need some combination of higher taxes and lower spending (with most of it coming from lower spending). That means it will need to be bipartisan because neither party will do this on their own because it would be political suicide.
In particular this will mean cuts to entitlements.
My preference
raise the payroll tax
raise the retirement age and index it to life expectancy
end heroic end of life care (on tax payer dime).
tax sugar and other high calorie sugar substitutes and use it to offset the costs of obesity. Including providing GLP-1 drugs
Greatly increase anti-aging research spending in the hope that we can get a medical miracle in the next 10 years or so (this is actually possible)
For the love of god, stop raising the payroll tax burden on prime-age workers to transfer money to old people.
Seriously, I want to see Social Security on sustainable footing but absent massive transfers to child-rearing young people that will never happen. Any further payroll taxes need to be limited to funding huge child tax credits and nothing else.
The only payroll tax reform we should be considering for SSI is to uncap it and leave the current benefits caps in place.
I don't want to kill it. I want to make it fiscally sustainable. And while I'm willing to tolerate small tax increases for a bipartisan fiscal solution, I'm not willing to tolerate big ones. EVEN if they don't effect me personally.
I am affected personally, albeit not by much, stand to be more affected in the future, and am nonetheless completely committed to avoiding huge cuts to SSI *and* not burdening middle-income prime-age adults anymore.
While I have two kids, any move to subsidize the fuck out of them would require me to cough up more in income taxes than I’d get back, and I’m committed to that too.
raise the payroll tax --> disincentivize hiring/incentivize hiring & paying cash under the table for things like "upper middle class family hiring a nanny" = seems not great
raise the retirement age --> oddly, this is popular among conservatives but it punishes the very people conservatives claim to love, i.e., blue-collar Americans who use their bodies to work instead of sitting in front of a laptop in a climate-controlled office. Is a construction worker going to be thrilled about either having his retirement age go up or having to retrain for an office job at the age of 60?
end heroic end of life care --> I would support that!
tax sugar and shitty ultra-processed food --> I'm in favor of that, and it would benefit me personally, as I eat too much sugar and I'm overweight
greatly increase anti-aging research --> naturally, I would support that
Now look at those last three points where we agree and ask yourself, how likely are they to pass? If you ran for office on those policy proposals, what would the Median Swing Voter say? "Boo, mathew wants to kill your great-grandma, make your delicious doughnuts and soda more expensive, and give money to elitist pointy-headed scientists who study aging worms and flies and shit! Down with mathew!!!"
I actually wonder whether a sugar/processed food tax would be unpopular with the right. For all of their insanity, RFK Jr. and plenty of visible right-wing types do mostly agree that sugar and ultra processed foods are bad. I think this is a zone of agreement the Dems should lean in to.
Color me very, very skeptical. The average MAGA supporter loves RFK Jr. for making teh libz cry, but they'll turn on him with the fury of a million suns if he tries to raise the prices of their beloved soda and chips and candy. Just because they listen to Joe Rogan extol the virtues of paleo or whatever, doesn't mean they *actually* want to apply it in their own life.
We've seen this story a hundred times by now: "Haha, Trump's people do something to stick it to the libz, yay Trump!/Booo, the Trump administration does something that affects ME negatively, f**k you! How dare you!"
It's amazing how quickly the bond market turned on her. I would have thought a PM would have to have announced the immediate start of communism to have the market react that badly that quickly.
What I don't understand is how Republicans are beholden on tax cuts for the wealthy? Most wealthy are doing fine and don't need tax cuts. Pretty much full stop. More, unless you define wealthy in an odd way, the vast majority of the voting block is not wealthy. So why and how do they clinch so much of the vote?
Because they believe their non-rich supporters are there for the cultural red meat and the resentment of others and don't care about policy issues like tax cuts for the wealthy.
That addresses the view from the Republicans in power. My question, I think, is more why does the base support this situation? It is legit baffling when I have family on medicare that support these style cuts. Or how they can get upset about how much I paid in taxes. Like, why?
For the last 20 years, neither party has been willing to inflict economic hardship. So Republicans haven't really cut spending enough to impact the low income voters much, while Democrats haven't raised taxes enough to really impact higher income voters. They just took on more debt. The question is open for what happens when they can't do more debt.
Amusingly, I think there's very good reason to believe that the single largest consequence of America being unable to sustain current deficits will be the rapid implosion of the PRC.
The US is so fabulously wealthy relative to the rest of the globe that even fucking things up quite badly will still see us very wealthy and attractive to immigration.
Agree on the latter point. On the former point, I'm dubious that the PRC will face a rapid implosion. I could be wrong, but betting that things muddle along even if they get worse and worse seems more likely. As in, 60% chance the current semi autocracy continues, 30% it gets much worse with a full dictatorship, and 10% something else happens.
Probably because these voters don't believe the Republicans will actually inflict economic costs on them and if poor people are hurt, they'll be the undeserving poor (i.e., not themselves).
With the changing shape of the Republican coalition and the apparent Republican desire to inflict costs on at least some of their new supporters, we may be seeing an interesting test. I think Josh Hawley is a canary in the coal mine on this regarding Medicaid cuts. (I also think in the final vote, Hawley will fold and vote for massive Medicaid cuts.)
> Probably because these voters don't believe the Republicans will actually inflict economic costs on them and if poor people are hurt, they'll be the undeserving poor (i.e., not themselves).
You hit the nail on the head... When they talk about increasing the retirement age, they think it'll be only for libs in offices, not hardworking Americans like themselves, when they talk about cutting Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, they think it'll be for people that don't deserve it, never people like them. So much of the conservative / MAGA movement simply believes that some Americans deserve more than others, and they are in the in group vs the out group. They simply don't get it until they are affected... Similar to how they only ever think the only moral tax break or moral abortion is the one they get.
Has anyone ever proposed making federal tax brackets vary with the local cost of living?
In the way that the SALT cap was the Republicans’ way of going “fuck YOUR rich guys but not OUR rich guys,” this is how you do the opposite: make the car dealership owner in Biloxi pay more than the Cravath associate in Brooklyn Heights.
Democrats, unlike Republicans, take budgeting at least somewhat seriously. If, once back in power, they discover that passing some new spending program will explode the deficit, they'll cut back on their ambitions (see: Clinton for example). Republicans just don't give a crap. Tax cuts will explode the deficit? Yawn.
If the more liberal members of the Republican Congress stop their own BBB, just like elements of the Democratic party killed their BBB, then let's talk.
In the meantime, let's do the apples to apples comparison and look at what the parties actually pass.
Not only that - Republicans will vociferously remind dems about debt as they magically pivot to deficit scolds the second it's not about unfunded tax cuts.
We have to make the honest case that tax increases are good for growth of real incomes of people making a lot less than $400,000. Republicans can always out "zero sum" us. That's the normal naïve human default presumption. Lower deficits, more trade and more immigration are good for ordinary people, are truly "populist" but they have to be argued.
A good start could be to do away with all tax deductions. And then ask if the marginal $ is allocated to a program or "spent" as a tax deduction or cut. Another option, anchor tax deductions to interest payments. Yet another option, would be to take Mike Lee at face blur and reset what SS truly is with the people i.e. transfer from currently working to currently retired. It's not a drawdown on what you contributed to like 401K is. And with it, take a formulaic approach to SS payments based on variance of reality from expectations. People live longer -> less payments, ratio of younger people to older people drops -> less payments. At least let the mechanism be transparent and let voters decide if even more labor income should be diverted from the earner's 401K towards making SS payments that were based on inaccurate estimates.
While politicians have been lying about SS since its inception, the lie is unfortunately what keeps SS popular. People believe they are getting their money back (and importantly, not getting money from their 30-year-old neighbor).
The money I deposit in the bank is not sitting in a safe with my name put on top of the stack of bills. Every withdrawal is a legally-blessed transfer from somewhere and someone else to me.
At this point some kind of default/deleveraging is imminent within the next few years. Neither side is fixing the federal debt because they know they can't slap a $350,000 invoice on every working taxpayer. No wonder MMT was embraced, keep the party going and kick the can to the next admin. The Democrats have been obsessing over catastrophic climate themes, gender, and handing out unneeded stimulus, while if they truly cared about the majority of the citizens they would be yelling and screaming about getting Social Security and Medicare funded (and frankly IMO making a broad push for Medicare for All). The Republican's faults are well pointed out in this article. I believe the country is due for a reset, the Democrats would be well advised to return to a more practical, pragmatic party while the Republicans self-destruct.
“ they can't slap a $350,000 invoice on every working taxpayer”
That numbers not correct and you should stop using it to lie. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you heard the number somewhere and are repeating it without giving it a few minutes of thought.
36 trillion debt divided by 163 million working adults = $220,858.
That's not $350,000 but it's close enough I assume that's the number we're talking about. It's kind of an invoice in that we're expected to pay it, but it's NOT like we're making everyone suddenly pony that up (and also we were ALREADY expected to pay it...)
The more relevant number is the deficit - $11,226 / taxpayer. If we had the deficit under control we'd slowly be working away the debt.
Or, the deficit is about 1/3 of our tax revenue. So a 33% tax increase (relative to current taxes, not a topline rate increase of 33%) would cover it. That's not small, but that would be, for instance 20% -> 27%.
And why shouldn't be kids be counted? The debt won't be repaid before they enter the workforce.
In any case, one can scare people with big numbers about each individual's share of the debt. More important is the cost we're paying, put in terms of absolute interest payments, and as % of GDP, and how that ongoing cost could be affected by changing interest rates. Those are clearly too high now and very likely to go higher.
The reason kids shouldn't be counted is that yes, they'll be on the hook in the future, but also older people are dying naturally and their debt doesn't magically vanish when they die, so it's best to just look at people who can currently contribute to taxes, since that's the number that will tend to matter for our ability to repay.
Nobody in mainstream politics is going to push for a form of M4A that would save the taxpayer money by downsizing the administrative cadre of the healthcare sector.
Killing millions aside it really is insane that the main impact of DOGE seems to be simply degrading state capacity. The IRS has been a huge victim of DOGE, to the point where 20,000 people are taking the resignation offer or are potentially being laid off. It’s become very difficult to get in touch with the IRS for no reason other than DOGE coming in and slashing jobs, similar to the SSA. This saves ultimately a trivial amount of money (and in fact may cost billions in lost collections due to decreased compliance), but just makes life worse for Americans. Connecting these new inconveniences to DOGE, Republicans and Trump will be important for Democratic messaging going forward.
This is particularly true given the statue of limitations for recovering taxes and how difficult it is to prove intent in white collar cases now (for the record, I'm not a lawyer and have a weak at best understanding of the law, but I've seen enough people that I respect state this that I am pretty confident that it is true).
This is the sneaky one. Shuttering USAID gets a lot of headlines (rightly so) but the slow trickle of smart tenured people out of other agencies just because they're sick of this shit is also scary. Or, for that matter, all of the smart people that would want to work in government but don't want to work for stupid Trump people.
Not to mention that you won’t get a lot of these people back under the next sane administration, because they suspect there will be another insane administration four years later that just does this all again.
There's probably going to be a shift of smart young people away from studying policy, economics, medicine, etc. since the incentives to dedicate your lives to medical research or diplomacy are just bad. That's going to lead to weaker academic programs due to insufficient demand, which will make ramping back up state capacity harder later.
How big of a risk is this really? The IRS cuts are infuriating but only because I have radical views on tax cheats and would love to fill the jails with them and their accountants to close the tax-gap. 98% of federal employees are US citizens. They're not leaving the country. We're still at 4.2% unemployment. They'll all find amazing jobs. When I worked at one of the DoE particle physics labs there were four Nobel Prize winners also working there at the same time. By definition the smartest of smart type of people working in government. It's *brilliant* work but neutrino research is esoteric and even the super conducting magnet technology would have been developed by the private sector. IDK. Self-selecting of the smartest people returning to the private sector is probably a net good outcome.
My favorite example of this is the forced reassignments of senior executives to random places to get them to quit. Just utterly pointless. Most of CDC's senior career leadership, for example, was forced to take random reassignments to IHS facilities in places like Alaska.
Honestly, that's the type of thought process someone comes up with when their understanding of government has been based on watching too many spy movies.
To be more pedantic, "contributing to millions of deaths that would likely have been prevented if DOGE had not cancelled PEPFAR, USAID, and various programs bringing medical and developmental aid to some of the poorest people in the world. Only in some cases is it clear that a given person would have lived with aid and died without it, but on the scale of the population, the increased morbidity and mortality from losing public health measures is obvious."
DOGE / the Trump administration intervened in ways that predictably resulted / will result in these people's deaths, so I consider it reasonable to blame them for it.
I think it's pretty obvious there's a moral difference between "should have created a program to help people but didn't" and "proactively and abruptly kill an existing program that was helping people, including things like halting medical care for patients who were midway through their treatment"
Ken, you have some good things to say sometimes, but this kind of mockery when real people are dying is just shitty and unbecoming of SB. Have a nice life.
I mean yes, we should. It’s extremely cost effective. Even better, we should work on putting together an international coalition to do this so that it’s more robust and can take advantage of different global expertises and share the cost.
If you want to slash spending without feeling like a dickhead, you need to believe there’s massive fraud and waste. Plenty of people sincerely hate taxes and sincerely don't want to feel like dickheads. The myth of massive fraud is so convenient and comforting that it will not die.
Plenty of Republicans are fine looking like dickheads as long as they're being dickheads to their outgroup or fargroup. Many of the most vocal have basically celebrated the deportations and aid cuts killing people as "not my problem lol".
You are talking about the loudest 30%, many of whom are low status. How many Republican Congressmen tell their constituents they want to be dickheads? They do what JD Vance did talking about bank teller jobs, they lie.
I have many thoughts, as someone who experienced DOGE’s meddling at an independent agency.
But I think there’s been insufficient attention paid to the separation of powers aspect of this. Congress appropriates funds, the President either spends those funds or complies with the Impoundment Control Act. Musk should not be given credit for any savings that are not officially recouped through rescission.
If the President can actually ignore the requirements of the ICA, we have a big problem. The activities of the federal government are largely the product of horse trading by the two parties, particularly in the Senate. Military spending in exchange for domestic non-defense spending. Farm aid in exchange for food stamps. And so on. If the Executive Branch can take those compromises and renege on the appropriations that the opposing congressional faction bargained for, there is no reason for the minority party to play ball.
I think this probably blows over without major incident, with SCOTUS selectively crafting a solution that advantages conservative presidents without upending the entire constitutional order. Maybe they uphold the ICA but require an appropriation to include specific, directive language before there can be a finding that it has been unspent in violation of the ICA (conveniently giving Trump a pass while setting new rules going forward). But this is an underrated way in which Trump is jeopardizing the rule of law and destabilizing the federal government. PBS and Malagasy bug powder are just the canaries in the coal mine.
Vought really doesn’t seem to care that the other team is gonna get to have the ball, unless he thinks the other team isn’t going to get the ball again and then we have a whole other set of problems.
No one has really pinned him on what he’s going to do if the Dems win again. He seems to know what he’s doing is broadly unpopular and threatens downballot Republicans but seems to view it as necessary medicine. Ok fine. But if you get impoundment through the next dem is going to be doing gay abortions on every street corner in Waco.
Unfortunately (for Dems) this is mostly a one-way ratchet. I don’t think there’s much federal spending that Dems actively want to withhold. Impounding large amounts of military spending would serve the interests of isolationists, many of whom are on the right these days.
And ultimately this game of appropriations chicken is one that Democrats can’t win, because a small federal government that spends money on fewer things is inherently a GOP win.
I may be wrong, but my recollection is that a lot of the deficit reduction under Obama came from "sequestration" of defense spending as part of the debt ceiling deal he cut with Republicans. Basically, both sides agreed to politically painful cuts in the future with the hope that they'd win enough power before then to change the formula. Neither side did so the cuts went through.
The sequester featured caps on both defense and non-defense discretionary spending, yes. While it forced some fiscal tightening, both parties agreed to relax the caps as part of various budget deals from 2013-2017. Still, that was all legislation, not unilateral action by the executive.
I don’t think that’s true. The government is a eyewatering proportion of ag spending and rural subsidies. They can make the southeast and Midwest really squeal if they want. Maybe they don’t want to, I dunno. But even the ag cuts and loan holds now are causing problems.
Right, it’s fine and good to cut agricultural subsidies (many of which flow to those that viscerally hate the Dems and don’t matter electorally), but that’s not that’s really driving spending.
In theory yes, but practical politics suggests that this won't happen even if Dems have a trifecta in 2028.
As Matt has noted a number of times, there are more self described conservatives than liberals which is part of the reason why GOP has more runway space to take more extreme positions.
Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, the senate wildly overrepresents this interest of rural voters (a huge part of the story of why the Deep South wielded disproportionate power pre 1965). As Matt has noted a number of times, if Dems want to retake the senate, they're going to need to win states with a large number of rural voters.
Just noting that I can see Dems impounding Congressionally approved funds, but I have a hard time believing their target will be funds that disproportionately benefit rural voters.
Most of these guys in the administration and their loud, online supporters seem to sincerely believe that Democrats have been doing horrible stuff like this for a long time, and what they are doing now is payback and revenge.
It’s one thing for politicians and people in the administration to think/say this, they have to for PR and legislative pressure reasons, it’s another for experienced bureaucrats to loudly signal this stuff.
This is basically what the big RIF lawsuit is about, and I think we're on a path to the Supreme Court saying there are basically no constraints on how the president can reorganize the executive branch. If the president can unilaterally "reorganize" 100% of a congressionally-funded program out of existence, then it's functionally the same as impoundment (if not worse).
I am not a lawyer, but it seems clear to me that the president does not have unilateral authority to reorganize the executive branch however they see fit. If they did, why have previous presidents requested specific authority, and why has Congress passed statutes granting the president to propose reorgs to Congress for review and approval? The current admin's take on reorg power incoherent, and yet here we are.
I'll assume from your handle that you are familiar with North Carolina which, like a lot of sun belt states, has a lot to lose if the current budget is passed by the senate. Let's say their senators successfully fight to keep some of the energy subsidies from being repealed and then Trump just decides not to fund them anyway. Energy rates skyrocket (especially with all the data centers opening in the South), planned battery manufacturing plants are scrapped, etc. --- bad for a bunch of states with Republican senators.
Maybe then some GOP senators will rediscover the value of the separation of powers? Or maybe a Democratic president decides to raise taxes unilaterally (the way Trump does with tariffs) or withhold spending for some right-wing sacred cow. With a lot of the lawlessness of MAGA it seems people have to experience the negative consequences themselves before they realize why we have laws in the first place, you know?
"It seems like he actually ended up cutting between $60 billion and $160 billion. Clearly, part of the game here is to get me to write that sentence down so that right-wingers can dunk on me and say, “How out of touch do you have to be to think that $60 billion is a small number?” Well, fair enough."
No, it's not "fair enough" - the money that was saved was saved by just indiscriminately firing and tearing down. It's not as if even that $60 billion is $60 billion in fraud - it's $60 billion in literal lives (USAID) and livelihoods.
I've saved hundreds of dollars by not contributing anything to my retirement. I mean my financial advisor called this "insane", but what does that so-called expert know?
There's a whole "this food is terrible. And in such small portions" problem to DOGE. Simultaneously, the cuts were often to actually useful programs that very online bros didn't understand, while the amount cut is miniscule compared to the federal budget. It's like someone bragging that they scored multiple goals in the NHL, but it turns out those were all own-goals and they only scored twice.
DOGE proved only that the ADHD version of government reform doesn’t work. There's little waste a 100-day ketamine-fueled whirlwind can uncover. Real efficiencies come from emulating systems already proven by our peer countries. Tunnel boring is a great example: Iceland’s 5.8 km Hvalfjörður Tunnel cost about $12M/km, Norway’s record-setting 24.5 km Lærdal Tunnel just $5M/km. Even the remote Faroe Islands delivered a 10.8 km tunnel at around $12M/km—compared to Boston’s Big Dig, which ballooned to $1 billion/km.
Even the best boring companies cut costs slowly. Unless you hire the right people, firing alone won’t deliver. Healthcare offers even bigger savings, since Europe spends 40% less per capita than we do for equal or better results. Here too, real reform means studying complex systems—not quickly finding villains and breaking things.
The waste versus inefficiencies framing is important, but depressingly intractable in face of public opinion. A huge percentage of governance failures in the US are rooted in insufficient expertise in the government, but I cannot imagine a near-term world where the public is willing to allow the government to raise wages and hire more staff to internalize roles that are either done by contractors/consultants or not at all.
Public opinion will not change on the government until the face of government customer service is a nice white man in their 30s/40s.
I think right now too many peoples’ mental model of the modal government worker is a black woman who hates them, doesn’t deserve their job, and won’t do their job. regardless of the truth of that statement.
Also what I said is falsifiable, stunned government doesn’t do more survey work leading to impression management on this for their own sake.
This is somewhat tangential, but I found "The Politics of Resentment" by Katherine J. Cramer to have a pretty compelling explanation of why many people think government employees are overcompensated and underworked. The book claims that visible public sector workers (particularly in rural areas) are typically frontline employees of organizations like the Post Office who actually do receive better pay and benefits than comparable private sector employees. The people whose counterfactual career involves making twice as much with comparable or better conditions are typically in an office invisible to the public and are often based somewhere in the DC area.
I knew about government economists, who trade academic freedom or truly eyewatering amounts of money in litigation consulting or elsewhere for the stability of a public job that generally pays well enough to live in the DMV. I did not realize how many people at the various agencies (my experience is mostly with financial regulators) left director or EVP jobs in tech to work in government. The guy who designed Windows’ GUI and left to work at SDS is a type. People don’t get a lot of exposure to them.
Anyway, government should spend money on PR so that the mental model of a government worker is either mayor Pete or a forest ranger.
And the economists already gave up an even more renumerative counterfactual career on Wall Street (or big tech if they're younger) by going to graduate school.
I had a few friends that worked for the Philadelphia City Solicitor's office after law school. 35 hours a week looks pretty good when the new grads who went to law firms were working triple the hours for less than double the pay.
How in the fuck do rural voters come to resent their mail carrier?
Now that my neighborhood finally has a long-term one assigned instead of a rotating cast of temps, I love the dude. Shit works well, he recognizes names on mis-addressed mail, packages come first thing in the morning before mail pieces later on… and he does this mostly on foot and for like $18/hr.
More broadly, how the fuck do rural voters think that they're the ones being screwed and neglected by the federal government?
I found the book to have the best explanation that I've seen, but I personally have a lot of resentment towards rural voters for fucking up the United States out of anger for a system that has showered them with benefits and money while neglecting the cities that fund the country.
Never read the book but my core thesis is that rural resentment is driven less by economic opportunity and more by demographic change. There're plenty of prosperous rural farms, some decent-paying manufacturing/resource extraction/agricultural supply chain work, etc... but there's less and less services work as rural populations age and fall.
Automation in agricultural work occurred long ago, but the reliability and automation of all the secondary sector operations (logistics, capital maintenance, capital formation, agricultural processing, etc) that support it has gotten so good that the old secondary-sector clusters in county seats and rural towns are basically gone, with the tertiary sectors following quickly, and demographics following at a lag.
There's just no economic impetus for many of these places, and the reality of "rural revitalization" is that it's basically picturesque locations turning into remote worker hubs and retirement communities, or exurbs expanding into rural areas around big and mid-sized cities. Most rural areas are still emptying out at a good clip, mitigated almost solely by Social Security and Medicare allowing older residents to age in place instead of following their children and grandchildren to suburbs and cities.
My experience is that there are a few things going on.
-Many rural voters have a very romantic vision of themselves as "real Americans" and rugged individualists who don't need anything from the government. I think this is just embedded in American culture.
-There seems to be a genuine ignorance of taxing and spending. I don't know if people have any interest in becoming better informed or would believe information on this subject, but I think that the federal government and state governments should do a better job of pushing out information on spending versus tax revenue at the county level.
-Tied to the previous, I think a lot of people have no idea how much it costs to provide mail service, broadband, roads, schools, and so on in rural areas.
A lot of people hate government workers for a lot of different reasons but I’d be surprised if rural folk make up the majority of the sizable group that wants to privatize mail. Rural mail can’t survive without massive subsidies and I’m sure every farmer knows it.
"Once, I got charged a late fee because I never got the water bill. The mailman probably didn't even deliver it. All he does is sit in that mail truck and drive around, and regular folk pay for it. Have you seen the price of stamps?"
Its funny, when I have to deal with almost any department in Philly in person I’m almost always hoping to find a slightly-past-middle-aged black woman who’s been working there since 1990 when nothing worked well, and therefore knows everything and everyone and is willing to just talk you through everything like you’re new but not stupid.
Our first construction inspector for our project was such a person, albeit younger. “You guys screwed up this, this, that, and this. Do it and document X, Y, and Z via photos and W via video before your insulation people come and I’ll pass all this stuff at the drywall inspection.”
I’ve also dealt with the archetype being discussed here, but it’s almost never among the middle-class skilled bureaucrats. Its the parking enforcement “cop” at the airport, etc.
The parking enfocement dudes at PHL arrival terminals D-F are some of the meanest and most miserable people on the planet. My dad once got a ticket for not moving from the pick-up lane during the 30 seconds it took my mom to walk to the car.
I have been fortunate never to encounter this at PHL, but I remember well an incident while I was in college elsewhere... I was literally pointing at the younger brother of a friend 50 yards away coming out of ORD, having pulled up less than a minute prior. I was told, "I'll have you arrested if you don't move" by some morbidly obese woman who would have struggled to keep up had I moved the car up slowly to meet him.
Had to do another loop and arrive back at the exact same spot, taking up three times as much curb time and wasting 15 minutes of everyone's time.
The commonality in my experience has never been the race of the folks involved, it's been that they're drawn from the local underclass and have a massive chip on their shoulder.
One of the police stuck with airport traffic duty last year yelled at my dad for following the orders he just gave him. It was the first time in at least 20 years I've seen someone yell at him in public. What a miserable human being.
It's funny that the type of government worker that drives the most resentment - people at the DMV - are specifically working for local governments, which feeds backlash to the federal government in favor of politicians who want more local control.
I'm not sure? My experience in DC was fine, but in Virginia it literally changes from town to town. The state government also changed a law a little while ago that you have to go to the DMV to get a copy of an accident report (instead of just being able to ask the police like before), which has been a nightmare in practice.
I’ve had positive experiences with the MI SOS (DMV equivalent). The website tells you what to bring and allows you to schedule an appointment. Arrive prepared and you’ll likely be out in 10 minutes.
You are on the right track, but I don’t agree with your framing. The problem with the federal government is not insufficient expertise, it is the much larger problem of an inability to adjust for altered conditions, learn from mistakes, and enforce rules in a clear and fair manner. DOGE’s failure to tackle these problems made me smell a rat.
I don't disagree with those problems also existing, but my prior is that:
- all three problems, particularly "enforce rules in a clear and fair manner", are primarily downstream of the actual laws passed by Congress and decisions made by the legal system rather than failures of the federal bureaucracy itself.
- the "inability to adjust for altered conditions" is often due to rigid contracts with the organizations that actually do a large portion of what the government does (and that flexibility often involves either expensive change orders or being grossly overcharged in anticiption of unreasonably large changes to the originally procured work).
- "learn[ing] from mistakes" is hard with siloed organizations constrained by extensive rules outside of their control that are ran by political appointees that change direction every four to eight years.
Just buttressing point one, who do you think is arguing for all the small business carveouts for some middle of nowhere town in South Dakota? Not a government employee…
Last time I checked, Boston didn’t have any 300-meter deep fjords. Even if you adjust for the number of lanes, the difference per lane kilometer would still be massive, Boston was 100x as expensive.
And Boston is built on swamp and infill with several rivers nearby. I dunno, the process seemed really inept and corrupt at the time, but I think there were genuine challenges.
Broadly speaking: Paris, Madrid, and the like are centuries-old cities with extensive underground infrastructure, and yet they still build subways at much lower cost than NYC. The Big Dig may have been a more complex project but I think it is similarly flawed to argue that the complications were what drove such a disproportionate expense.
This is a pretty funny theory. Trump thinks the Government is wantonly corrupt because its all he knows lol. Its not that he is an effective altruist bemoaning the Zero Sum nature of the world. he thinks its the only path dependency available
You can apply this type of logic to many of the Trump/Republican admin actions and it seems to explain a lot. "This is how I would personally act in this situation. Therefore, those other people must be acting how I would act." Repeat ad nauseum.
I get that this is an article about Medicaid cuts, and that's genuinely the most important thing at the moment because maybe we can stop them. But in terms of the long term impact of DOGE, I think Matt has consistently underestimated it by taking position 1.
Changing Medicaid formulas is something that can be reversed in 4 years, and its impact is mostly bounded to the time it's in place. The destruction of American state capacity is going to be much much harder to fix. Matt and Brian talked about the IRS and the amount of focus needed to fix that on Politix, but that's one of the easiest to fix. The destruction of American science and universities, or of weather forecasting, or volcano monitoring, or long term studies of education, or the US foreign service, are all going to take decades to fix, and that's only if bipartisan agreement to fix them returns.
This is a dramatic underestimation of the impact of these Medicaid cuts. For one, the impact on people losing their coverage is not reversible- if you're an elderly person now who receives personal care aide services in the amount of 8 hours a day, losing those benefits means that what could be the final years of your life are significantly immiserated. Not to mention that the hospitals that close because of the loss of revenue won't just magically reappear on January 21, 2029. The long term impacts of these cuts will be truly and deeply harmful to millions of Americans, and rebuilding the damage done will take a lot longer and involve a lot more than just updating the FMAP in 4 years.
We can be upset about both things (Medicaid cuts and loss of state capacity) without downplaying either to highlight how bad the other is.
I agree that the human suffering caused by the medicaid cuts will be much greater in the near term. And there are always long term consequences. But the structure of medical care in the country is unlikely to change, and thus it's much easier to return to a better place. The same is true for lots of things where the government primarily does funding and they cut a small share of it, like road construction or schools. In contrast, cutting huge swaths of agencies and programs, or devastating funding where the government is the primary funder (eg science research or public transit) is much much harder to restore after a few years.
I think it's fairer to say that these are two different types of harms.
The Medicaid cuts are going to kill people. Those people won't come back to life when the cuts are undone.
But ten years after the cuts are undone, the world will look pretty similar to how it would have looked without the cuts.
The science cuts will dismantle infrastructure in the US and it's not simple to just reopen a lab that was closed. The scientists will have moved on, and that also means that the people training the next generation of scientists won't be there. Lots of people will have moved abroad, and it may be that the US dominance of top-level research just doesn't recover, or takes decades to do so.
"But ten years after the cuts are undone, the world will look pretty similar to how it would have looked without the cuts."
Potentially (maybe even probably) true. But the certainty with which people are acting like you can just roll back the clock if Dems regain the Presidency in 2028 seems overconfident to me. Expanding health care opportunities was a huge political lift that was tremendously difficult. Restoring the situation to the status of the Medicaid programs from last year will not be easy (we're talking about potentially needing to restore roughly a trillion dollars of funding that will be stripped by the BBB), which doesn't even include an evaluation of the opportunity costs of 4 years of declining and deteriorating health care infrastructure.
I think your first point is incredibly accurate- the difference in harms between the Medicaid cuts and the loss of state capacity are so different that I don't see much value in trying to compare them. There's just far too many moving parts to assume "this can probably snap back into place with a change in administrations, whereas this other stuff can't".
It's much better to address each issue individually rather than comparing and conflating the two.
Yes, I think this is exactly right. I mostly commented because I think Matt is consistently underrating the second kind of harm in his writing about DOGE.
Even further, the best and brightest students simply won't make the commitment of 10+ years to become a scientist now that it's abundantly clear that funding will get blown away by any electoral winds. The federal research funding system has been revealed as fundamentally untrustworthy and you can't put that back in the bottle. The only way to restore confidence is massive reform to guarantee independence from politics, but Congress will not do that (they couldn't agree on it even if they wanted to, which they don't).
The timelines have shifted throughout the negotiation process, so it's hard to make definitive statements about what the final cuts will look like and when they will go into effect. Some provisions included delayed implementation dates, some did not.
I agree, they dramatically underestimate the challenge of hiring qualified people and building expertise among a group employees, which is kind of unsurprising given their background tbh. The government already struggles to do this to begin with, and now it's much worse.
The DOGE harms have been quite real. Aside from my own misery of having to be in the office 5 days a week for the first time since ~2013, they're cancelling contracts left and right with no warning and that is seriously hampering our ability to do our jobs. And that's before the Hell of RIFs/Vera/VSIP and generally treating the civil service like shit. The civil service morale can't get much lower. Musk enabled a lot of misery while he "played" at governing. It's infuriating he'll never be held accountable for the misery and real harm his inflicted on millions worldwide because his understanding of policy issues is on the "Limbaugh" level, at best.
"ignorant" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.
The agency I work for had been fairly aggressive about embracing telework, and the policy going back a decade+ was suddenly changed on us with minimal warning, despite the written CBA guaranteed our telework arrangement. The staff's decisions about where to work and live were made on the basis of good faith, long standing, agreements with the government that the government reneged on. So while you may not have had sympathy for government workers "having to go to work", you probably would if you had any idea what was going on.
It is the lack of honoring contracts and agreements all around in this administration that had me fearful because of the precedent it is setting. There are so many cases, even in my small city, of contracts and grants being cut halfway through a project. Maybe the projects were bad (I don't happen to think so), but the reasonable approach would be to adjust the program in the future, not halfway through promised funds. Who is going to trust the government to keep any signed on the dotted line agreements in the future?
I personally know people who made financial decisions like buying a home away from their agency offices, because they believed that the government wouldn't arbitrarily change their word. That's pretty tough to just reverse. Actually one CDC employee I know said that the CDC no longer even had the office space in Atlanta to accommodate all of the now-returning workers. So it was 'you're required to sell your house and return to Atlanta, except that we don't have enough room for you in Atlanta'
No one said it was oppression. But you seemed to be very insistent on telling people to their face how much you don’t care about them. And you made it sound like it was impossible to work from home, such that return to office is just doing the bare minimum for doing your job.
Rules matter. Norms matter. Violating terms of an agreement in a manner that increases costs and lowers quality of work for no tangible or explained benefit is asinine.
Did your boss ever randomly decide to keep the job you've had for 5 years you had to either drive 3hr a day or move across the country... With no guarantee you wouldn't be immediately fired anyway?
And whenever it does I think we can all understand why it would be frustrating and messed up for the company to force the employee to do that. If you had a friend that had this happen to them in the private sector would your response be "ehh, so what? No big deal. Just uproot your whole life or quit your job and enter into a very different future then the one you had been promised 24 hours ago. What are you complaining about?"? I would certainly hope not.
I get the instinct to say that this isn't the worst thing in the world and isn't on par with people dying in Africa or something. But I don't get the instinct to respond with a shoulder shrug and telling someone that because it CAN happen that it's therefore not something that they should be upset or frustrated about.
To me there's a big difference between, "I took the job knowing that my life could be uprooted and I could be forced to move across the country, and now I'm faced with moving," and "I took this job and bought this house with the written understanding that I would be able to work remotely, and now my boss is reneging on our contract." If you're a minor league athlete and you get traded, you have to move, but you knew that was a risk. If your boss promised you could work remotely and now you can't, that's a different story,
You’re correct, sympathy is appropriate when people’s lives are being disrupted.
I shouldn’t have been so flippant in my original reply.
On the other hand, I don’t want Democrats to be the party that worries more about civil servants than it does about taxpayers and service recipients. I think that’s a tendency we have that’s bad on the merits and that it hurts us politically.
Sympathy is good as a matter of personal behavior, but I don’t want it to be driving our policy on these kinds of issues.
Agreed. I think there's a distinction to be drawn between return-to-work policies for flexibilities that were granted due to the PHE and telework arrangements that were deemed appropriate long before telework became mandated. So as a policy matter, I'm fine with saying "the PHE is over, so those of you who had PHE related flexibilities are losing those flexibilities because the underlying reason has disappeared." That's a fine policy, and I think you nailed it on the head when you said "Sympathy is good as a matter of personal behavior, but I don’t want it to be driving our policy on these kinds of issues."
Brian fell into the latter camp though- he had flexibilities going back to about 2013 according to his original comment. So stripping that away strikes me as equally bad policy. The decision to force him back to the office had nothing to do with good policy or rational HR decision making- it was just punitive and lumping him in more broadly. So I can certainly understand why he's especially bothered by the decision.
If you care about state capacity, then you have to care about the ability of the civil service to some extent, even if you think there need to be changes to things like hiring and firing. The ability of the state to execute is related to its ability to hire and retain competent employees. If you make this even harder to do, I don't see how state capacity magically gets better.
Sort of. Once I moved halfway across the country for a job in New York, then a couple weeks later the entire office closed and almost everyone was laid off. I had the option to keep my job but would have to move back where I came from. Things happen and we're all just cogs at the end of the day.
There's a big difference between "this is a relatively common occurrence" and "I don't have any sympathy for you for dealing with it." Kind of shocked to have to point that out. I would hope you wouldn't approach other experiences with that mindset.
"Oh you have a bad cold? Boohoo, those are incredibly common."
"Your girlfriend broke up with you? Happens all the time, no big deal."
I mean, c'mon man, the guy you were talking to is another human being on the other end of the screen. Telling him you don't care about his situation is fairly (and unnecessarily) callous.
“lack of sympathy for government workers who complain about having to go to work” seems to suggest you view those working from home weren’t doing work. It is reasonable to assume from context and framing.
I don't think that's at all reasonable as there's a difference between working and going to work. If you're going to argue please stick to things I actually said.
Why do you care if they go to work? You phrased it in a way that was very much intending for people to interpret it as though they weren’t doing anything at home and now are being required to do their job.
Layoffs suck, but I don’t see why you’re complaining about being offered voluntary early retirement on reasonable terms. This offer also weakens the case that we were wronged with the back to office push (which I agree with on the merits).
Not sure why you think Musk won’t be held accountable. Both of his major companies (electric cars and space) are extremely sensitive to federal policy. If he doesn’t wriggle his way back into the Dem’s good graces before we’re back in power, I think the goodwill he’s burned will absolutely impact his bottom line.
It's unfortunate that the way you think he will be held accountable will be personal retribution from a future Democratic administration, which essentially amounts to a similar kind of corruption as what we see from the Trump administration. If Space X and Tesla are worthy of government contracts and funding that would promote the best interests of the American people then I would hope that a Dem President wouldn't instruct his/her administration to withhold such funding just to negatively impact Elon Musk.
I don't see much evidence that Dem presidents in the past were engaging in these kinds of actions, so I'm not sure why you're assuming a future administration will.
It’s very hard to tell from that. So far, most clean vehicle subsidy policies have specifically limited the number of subsidies per company for precisely the stated reason - to facilitate more entry into the field. This has been how they were structured for many years, so that Toyota stopped getting subsidies for Priuses before any other company did, and Tesla stopped getting the EV subsidies. It would be surprising if new subsidies didn’t have that feature.
This article plays it up as though this is targeting Tesla because both the reporter and the governor want people to think that. But making sure Tesla was included would actually be the bigger policy change.
In addition to Kenny's comments, it was difficult to find the actual proposal put forth by Newsome. It seems like Newsome just proposed a market cap limit in the event that the Trump admin (which wasn't in office in November 2024 and hadn't actually done anything yet) removed certain federal subsidies. But the specific proposal and its implementation are pretty nebulous and unclear.
I took your original comment to be saying something slightly different (you claimed the Dems would withhold funding, which is different than changing subsidies to consumers in ways that will filter through to Tesla more indirectly), but I do take your point that at least some Dem politicians do seem to be thinking about actions that would hit Musk's bottom line. But I think it's less clear than your claiming that this is being driven by some sort of Musk animosity and/or decision making will be done specifically to harm him even though doing so is not in America's best interest.
First, most people aren't complaining about early retirement, they're complaining about forced layoffs. Second, at least some people are only taking early retirement so that they can avoid those layoffs. Third, I'm not sure that the early retirement is so generous that people can afford to actually retire, and that's assuming the administration follows through on its promises.
Musk at Doge was a guy on Ketmaine trying to get Twitter outrage by posting about government projects that kind of sounded bad when summarised and he surrounded himself with men under 25, all of this is odd.
If you were trying to do genuine cuts you would have accountants and Heritage staffers around the table, you would be sober and you wouldn't be so reliant on keyword searches.
Elon had a huge amount of power and used it to get popularity on his own site, rather than being corrupt, punishing enemies or fulfilling ideological ends. I guess it is the reflection of one man's psychology and/or his addiction.
"an attempt to rehabilitate Tesla’s reputation in a world where Republicans still don’t want to buy electric cars"
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 🤣🤣🤣
I know Elon Musk is extremely unlikely to read Matt Y's Substack, but just in case he does, here's my message to him:
Buddy, you're supposed to be an ultra-brilliant genius, a demigod among mere men, so this should be easy for you to understand: You are NOT going to rehabilitate Tesla's reputation. You did not just kill Tesla's reputation with the eco-friendly PMC set and piss on the corpse; you *transmogrified* it in an unholy dark rite.
What now, Mr. Space Genius? What do you expect to happen? The Truck Nutz crowd loves you for shitposting on Xitter but the vast majority of them will never buy a pricey Tesla, and the nice PMC liberals who used to love and admire you (myself and Husband included) are all like "I wouldn't be caught dead driving a Deplorean/Swastikar/Incel Camino/insert your favorite derogatory nickname that hints at your turn to the Dark Side." Enjoy selling your cars to the Curtis Yarvin-curious wealthy tech bros who still want them, i.e., <20% of your original intended market.
[Pitch Meeting Guy voice] Oh, whoops! Whoopsie!
And don't expect me to feel sorry for you. You said empathy is a weakness of the Western world, did you not? I don't want to be weak.
This is good, but I don't think it really goes far enough. Musk trashed Tesla's reputation as Hyundai/Kia and Ford have come into the EV market with a vengeance. BYD is a massive stormcloud on the horizon.
I think it's important to note that DOGE isn't done. The broad point here, about DOGE's failure, is well taken. But DOGE still exists, and it's still firing people. My wife's division is facing two rounds of RIFs, and the leadership team is having to spend time they don't really have meeting with DOGE officials to try and convince them that their job is important. The big headlines are gone, so I think people believe that DOGE has stopped getting rid of government workers, but they are still cutting state capacity to the bone.
I think even the $60B in DOGE cuts is a generous estimate. Judd Legum's Musk Watch has a DOGE tracker, and they've only been able to verify $16.3B of the DOGE cuts - around $50 per American. All this chaos and lives lost for cuts that are an immaterial percentage of the federal budget
"Lots of rank-and-file Republican Party voters sincerely believe that it’s possible to dramatically cut taxes and balance the budget without painful cuts to retirement and health care programs that they support."
I guess "believe" is doing some funny work. This is a sort of metaphysical "belief" that signals allegiance to a cause without any empirical content: Obama was born in Kenya, the Assumption, fossil fuel firms cause climate change.
DOGE's failure will not affect this "belief."
Nor was it trying to bring the Federal Work force "to heal." It was just a way (one among others) to do harm to perceived enemies like USAID, public media, universities. At that it was quite successful.
This is true for Republican partisans, but I think that a lot of recent Republican voters genuinely believe that "it’s possible to dramatically cut taxes and balance the budget without painful cuts to retirement and health care programs that they support". People are generally innumerate and have a weak at best sense of what the government does and how much it spends on various things, and I have a strong prior that the persuadable voters Trump picked up in 2016 and 2024 are significantly less informed and innumerate than the average American. I know people with graduate degrees who work in government and seem to genuinely believe you can fund universal healthcare by taxing billionaires and cutting defense spending. If well-educated, politically active Americans do not understand how much of the budget goes to defense or social programs (primarily healthcare and social security), I highly doubt that "undecided voters" have anything resembling a clue.
“"it’s possible to dramatically cut taxes and balance the budget without painful cuts to retirement and health care programs that they support”
Similarly a great many democratic partisans claim you can create a European welfare state with defense cuts, higher income tax on the rich and some wealth taxes.
I agree--acceptance of innumeracy is baffingly common across the world. I've never been anywhere where illiteracy among elites would be accepted, but most places seem to tolerate people who are the numeracy equivalent of not being able to read "A Cat in the Hat" making important decisions. Most universities in the US push "broad education" to some degree, but I've never seen it go both ways. STEM people are required to learn to write essays and do some basic humanities work, but humanities people are allowed to take joke versions of STEM classes if they're required to at all. At my alma mater, they loosened the requirements so much that someone could fulfill their math and science requirements with a logic course (taught by the Philosophy department via readings without doing any rigorous logic) and a social psychology methods course (that didn't really teach empirical methods at all besides falsely claiming that p-value < 0.05 = truth).
I don’t know the situation at your university, so I don’t know which logic class fills the requirement there. I’ve taught that logic class at several universities and it’s always full of students with math anxiety. I’m not sure what you mean by “rigorous logic”, but in the classes I’ve taught they at least have to learn to calculate truth tables, and either do some formal proofs, or apply Bayes theorem. There are some number of students who actually manage to overcome their math anxiety, because the material of this class is sufficiently different from the calculus-focused classes they have taken their entire life that they can reset their mental expectations of what they are able to do. I think logic and probability are in fact more relevant to basic numeracy than calculus is.
(There’s often a “baby logic” class as well where people learn to identify fallacies - I don’t think that one fills the quantitative reasoning requirement but it might.)
You did a much better job of explaining it than I did. By rigorous logic, I was thinking of non-trivial truth tables, proofs, Bayes theorem, or really anything "mathy". It may have changed since then, but the class that I was thinking of matched your "baby logic" description and came across as more of a debate course. I don't care if undergraduate students take a calculus or formal statistics class or not, but I was really frustrated by the humanities departments managing to shelter their students from half of the college's departments while complaining about how other majors lacked academic breadth.
I generally agree that logic and probability are more relevant to practical numeracy than calculus. At my current university I TA a course on causal inference and statistical modelling for public policy students that tries to hide the underlying math and statistical methods and emphasizes being able to read empirical papers and understand what assumptions they're making. I fully support teaching in a way that makes people feel more confident thinking empircally and avoids triggering math anxiety, but I do think it's reasonable to expect every student to learn a little about thinking in an empirical or quantitative way.
As a science major I complained about this literally all the time. There were very limited options where I didn't have to read 500 pages a week but for humanities people they could basically do Middle School level science to get credit
Let me advertise the philosophy department to students from all sides - in our classes that fill humanities requirements, you probably only have to read about 20-30 pages a week, rather than the large amounts you have to read in English and History classes (though you have to read it closely to figure out where the person is actually making arguments, and you have to think about which premises are reasonable or questionable, and how they disagree with the other things we've been reading); and in our classes that fill math requirements (i.e. logic), you don't have to do any calculus (though you do have to learn to follow the precise rules of setting up truth tables, and following the rules of inference for each logical symbol in creating formal proofs - or Bayes' theorem, if you take the probability and inductive logic class).
I feel like most schools will have a Hermeneutics of Marvel Movies or something course, no?
Maybe there’s an asymmetric information thing. You don’t know if a class like that is going to be taught by a true believer who makes you read 400 pages of Marvel Theory a day. Whereas in STEM it’s pretty clear which classes are Physics for Poets.
Still, I don’t think all humanities courses are that intense or high level.
My university was actually willing to fail people (I withdrew from a class and started over after practing the prerequisites more because there was a decent chance I would fail it) and my anecdata is also from Germany, Brazil, and the UK, which all seem to be willing to fail people than the average US institution. There seems to be a near global acceptance of smart people making important decisions having weaker symbolic manipulation and numeracy skills than a mathematically-inclined 10 year old.
Yeah my experience of other systems- Canada, the UK, Germany- is that they are much more willing to fail people.
Canada and Germany too, they let a ton of people in and fail a huge proportion.
At schools I have worked at in the states, it was kind of hard to fail people administratively unless they just didn’t show up. Like you would have to do paperwork to give an F for my quantitative methods class
I would be happy to give hairdressers a pass, but I would expect lawyers, senior government officials, and corporate executives to have some sense of the difference between a mean and a median or intuition about how big a trillion is compared to a million outside of their area of expertise.
Lawyers are lawyers because they hate math, or what they think math is. A lot of judges are, to put it bluntly, anti empirical. That is, they’re looking for a reason to just throw out all the complicated litigation math and decide on a legal philosophical ground in most cases. You still need the numbers, but a depressing number of judges just assume two sets of numbers cancel each other out. A lot of lawyers know this!
I once tried doing the Physics section of the french hairdressing exam and I struggled despite a degree in physics. They really want to have high standards.
Based on the people they hired, they probably achieved that. It just takes a long time and a lot of humility to learn enough about complex systems to be useful. A lot of the claims they made (eg weird records in a database == fraud) was reminiscent of the kind of dumb, arrogant stuff I did as a 17 year old working at a software consultancy.
Yes, but aren't a lot of those DOGE people still there? Particularly after all the firings and forced resignations. Moreover, I personally am quite excited for the contract work they're figuring out w/ Palantir. That firm has a ton of experience in working w/ legacy IT infrastructure in government and corps. Eg, they certainly know how to mass migrate off of 60’s era hardware and software to massively decrease capex and opex expenses, while creating more intuitive, modern UIs and dashboards to simplify analytics and revisions to programs that implement business or government policy.
Specifically, I’m quite confident that in 6 to 12 months time they will be able to quantify issues with potential SSN fraud, be it on the illegal employment side or fraudulent benefits. They should even be able to use historical transaction logs to identify any likely perpetrators. Moreover, they can make their assumptions of fraud legible enough for outsiders to challenge and critique these considerations.
I doubt this will save much money, but we’ll at least have quantitative insights to disprove the myth around massive savings. Could also be useful in implementing some limited amount of deportations for employment and wire fraud. Not to mention empowering future, more sophisticated logic to implement more complicated policy. Eg, Republicans have long claimed that there is massive SSI fraud, so let them actually craft a bill and associated computer program logic to eliminate what they define as fraud.
They could also make real progress into healthcare provider fraud, or at least up charging, as has been plaguing the healthcare industry for decades. See private practices being reclassified as hospitals to increase reimbursed funding. [1] They might even be tempted to require retiree relocations from urban cores like SF to lower costs of living areas in order to both decrease expected provider costs as well as pay for the associated SALT cap rollbacks for those same metros. Maybe Palantir and staff will even modernize and automate IRS filing and fining to reduce subjective pain points.
Regardless, I think all of us with something of a technocratic bent should be excited for these possibilities, even if most of the pro-social gains are realized under a future Democratic administration that utilizes the upgraded digital infrastructure for more pro-social policies.
I hope this is true, but Elon Musk's leadership got DOGE off to an awful start. I worry that the various organizations that need modernization will do some combination of resisting and avoiding DOGE staffers out of fear for their jobs and ending up as Twitter main character despite not having a Twitter account. On top of that, the deep unseriousness of the first few months of DOGE is unlikely to inspire people to try to proactively work with them.
From my experience working with legacy federal systems, a lot of stuff is not written down in a clear place and many critical design choices predate decent version control systems. It's less hunting through git commits and more knowing who and what to ask to find the systems analyst IV that has a bunch of emails from 1999 that explain why the unique identifier field documented in the PDF codebooks that haven't been updated in fifteen years is not actually unique and how to work around it.
>Eg, they certainly know how to mass migrate off of 60’s era hardware and software to massively decrease capex and opex expenses, while creating more intuitive, modern UIs and dashboards to simplify analytics and revisions to programs that implement business or government policy.
All this is fine and good, but you know as well as I do that such migrations and upgrades require a lot of upfront cost, a steady + competent hand at the tiller and willingness to overcome growing pains. Has this administration shown that is willing to approach such issues in a measured way? The experience of DOGE suggests more of a “slash and burn, rip out the copper for cash” versus “methodically conduct process audits to identify outdated processes, ineffective personnel and obsolete hardware/software, present a plan to upgrade said hardware ($$), remove/hire personnel and improve processes, get buy in (by carrot or stick) and implement while continually monitoring KPIs”.
If they had wanted to actually fix things they would have hired Karp and people in that orbit sooner. Palantir and others are willing to compete for contracts (great!) but it’s worrying that they won’t touch the admin with a ten foot pole.
Do you genuinely think those people aren’t in government already? Who do you think works at census, at the NIH, NSF, or heck the SDS? It’s not like you fail comps then immediately get a government job
The problem is that Silicon Valley is really insular and only appreciates code compared to other sectors. There have already been smart numerate quant people working on fiscal issues for years inside and outside of government, but they weren't consulted.
We are talking about a guy who left tech to transform the world of rocketry, electric cars and solar panels all industries completed different from coding and he did this by hiring industry experts.
But the guys he hired didn't understand those sectors or any others. They were usually the least experienced person in any room they were in. One of them spent her time trying to be a fashion TikTok influencer instead of learning about the agency she was gutting. And Musk himself has become insular as he's descended into a ketamine-induced Twitter hole.
They also think 20% of the population is Muslim and 40% are gay and 40% are black and 40% are Asian and 50% are Hispanic. (And that most of these numbers should be reduced, but that anyone who actually suggests reducing any of these is a Nazi.)
A lot of voters run their own households without a clear idea that they are debt spending. But the buying on credit scam has been going on for decades, so lots of people are unclear about the real choices needed to live within their means. So rather than talk about the deficit, it's now all about lowering taxes.
Don't most Democrats, British voters, French voters, Chinese non-voters etc all believe you can spend more/tax less without impacting benefits for the elderly, it is just a universal flaw in how the public think.
Yes, a great many democratic partisans claim you can create a European welfare state with defense cuts, higher income tax on the rich and some wealth taxes.
I mostly agree with this. Homer Simpson once said, "Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand." In the case of the typical rank-and-file Republican Party voter, it's more like, "Just because I don't understand doesn't mean I would care if I did." Knowledgeable conservatives do understand that people are going to get hurt, but they see that as good.
On the other hand, you don't need a large number of Republican Party voters to get disillusioned to see a big political impact. If just a few of them are peeled off, then combine that with what's likely also happening with swing voters and it adds up to real political damage.
IMO, they aren't really getting deceived much at all. It's almost always willful ignorance.
They think they're in on the scam, so it's ok that there's some massaging the facts in service of the cause.
The elevation and acceptance of deception and outright lying is a sight to behold, especially considering that so many on the right call themselves Christians.
Watch Democrats talk about gender roles or masculinity and you’ll see much the same dynamic. Women who would only date high status men say lots of egalitarian things.
What does “high status” mean here? People in the US still tend to marry others with similar levels of education, but women in the US are now more likely than men to marry someone with less education than them, whereas that used to be the other way around. Men still tend to be the higher earner in a given pairing on average, but that still seems to be mostly accounted for by men earning more than women with similar levels of education, and related biases in career choice (the causes of which are complex and multifactorial). What we have is high levels of assortative mating by both genders. “High status” women on average marry and expect to marry “high status” men and vice versa, which seems pretty egalitarian. If I had to guess, that’s probably even more likely in the democratic circles you’re talking about.
My point is, plenty of women say things like “money doesn’t matter” or “we are all morally equal” or “i just want someone who likes me” and then act very differently. Egalitarian pretensions founder upon the realities of dating. Any sort of “equality” which means nothing in the dating market is little more than a subsistence guarantee.
They're perfectly willing to date or marry people of any social class, as long as they share household style preferences, some hobbies, and interests about things to talk about - never mind that these requirements for shared things rule out nearly everyone who isn't of the same social class. People don't understand disparate impact.
What breakdown are you pointing to re: fossil fuels and climate change?
Clearly, GHG emissions from burning fossil fuels contributes to AGW. There are many instances at which we can curtail the degree of GHG emissions, as they’re mostly not burned while the fuels are being extracted, but it’s not ludicrous to link the firms extracting the fossil fuels from the ultimate impact those fuels have on the climate once they’re burned. They’re clearly being extracted precisely so that we can burn them.
I don’t think I get how linking fossil fuel firms to climate change is supposed to be analogous to a belief in a balanced budget without cuts to programmes.
Thomas knows how climate change works, he’s posted about it before. I read his meaning as: lefty activists are wrong to believe that “fossil fuel companies cause climate change for the evilz” rather than “we, wealthy (by world standards) consumers, collectively cause climate change with everyday activities like driving, and fossil fuel companies just meet the demand we create.”
I would love to point out all the high fossil fuel consumption degrowthers do, but they would just get smug and yell "no, but we're doing it for the good cause of the planet!!!!"
I'm kind of convinced it was a "friend-enemy" power flex (that had long term intentions) on bureaucracy wrapped up in kayfabe of "waste fraud and abuse".
Understand why matt would think it's more useful to try and disabuse conservatives of the waste fraud and abuse rhetoric (you can find some but it quickly turns into actual governing priorities that probably do matter to you and the populous, if you talk about deficits or debt sizes)
DOGE may have failed from Russ Vought's point of view, but not from Musk's. He managed to cripple state capacity, hand a lot of contacts to himself and this friends, and kill a lot of African children. I think he probably regards this a a good day's work and I haven't heard anyone who isn't a known liar say otherwise.
I agree with everything in this article. I also want to throw some cold water in before our heads get too big. The Republican party is stuck in such a place where it is so committed to tax cuts for the ultra wealthy but also reliant on marginal rural working class that it can't make sound policy. The loss of PEPFAR is a tragedy. The loss of state capacity and investment in cutting edge research is beyond stupid and counterproductive.
However, it seems to me that we (being Democrats and the broader left of center) are also in a place where we both can't raise taxes on households making less than $400k per year due to increasing reliance on educated upper middle class voters and also refuse to draw the line on spending anywhere short of the most ineffectual civil servant, or the most inane silly program at a marginal agency like USAID.
My question is at what point does something give? I don't see a single national level politician that seems to take long term fiscal trajectory seriously and am not sure there has been one since Obama.
I guess until the debt becomes an actual political problem, rather than an abstract one?
in 2032 there will be cuts to SS of about 20%, I bet it will get really REAL then.
Of course that assumes we don't have a debt crisis before then
Let's see exactly how the reconciliation package plays out and how the Treasuries market reacts.
Voters have become really bad at setting incentives for American politicians.
That is the understatement of the century.
It's a dumb statement that just excuses lazy, bad politicians
Color me massively skeptical that's what driving things. Are people in 2025 so much more ignorant or selfish or cynical or spiteful than the people of 1975? It's a hard case to make. Education levels have risen a lot since then, and the polling generally shows Americans have grown more reasonable on things like racism, sexism, homophobia, religious differences and so on.
Maybe what people tell pollsters is all BS, and the actual government we get is an example of revealed preference. But I continue to believe the central problem is that the critical guardrail of a "reasonably virtuous class of political elites" is just broken. I reckon lots of voters fifty years ago would vote for the kinds of charlatans and cranks we regularly send to office these days if they had the opportunity. But they *didn't* have the opportunity to do so, because both parties weeded them out. Now only one party does that, and because the other wins about half the time, we're screwed.
I like this comment, and as an agnostic who spent much of the early 2000s railing against the religious right I am nevertheless tempted to wonder if a lot of this isn't downstream of the significant reduction of religion in American society.
When the Rove/Bush GOP started to heavily politicize religion at that time, I remember a lot of people predicting that this would end up killing religious communities because the coalition logic meant that leaders were forced to take increasingly vocal stands on the wrong side of extremely popular social developments (gay marriage, marijuana legalization) that would ultimately delegitimize the whole enterprise.
Godless city slickers like me said at the time that this was basically fine, and that people can live morally upright lives without formal religious attendance, and I still think that's true. But I nevertheless do think that there is a palpable change between then and today about the expectations that we seem to have about the moral lives of ourselves and others, with a greater prioritization of self-interest over the common good. That makes me wonder more about the social function that a religion provides, and what might have been lost as that particular institution went by the wayside.
Or maybe I'm just approaching middle age and everybody starts to think the kids are punks when they hit 40.
You might like this article: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/book-review-the-kingdom-the-power
Thanks for sharing that- it's an interesting tick-tock of how Jerry Falwell saw a market opportunity in the evangelical community and exploited it. The quotes provided make it seem clear that he was primarily interested in exploiting the churchgoing community for personal gain, which I believe.
The more interesting part to me is about the current ministers, however, who the author suggests basically believe that it is the parishoners who insist on nonstop culture war opprobium. Notably, all of them appear to agree with the underlying premise that the church is best understood as a market where it is the job of the clergy is to cater to the revealed preference of their flock for fear of losing influence and market share. Missing from the gloss that the author provides is the discussion about what the church leaders believe that their more abstract responsibilities are in the face of QAnon and pizzagate conspiracies popping up among the faithful.
A skeptic might say that religion is pretty specifically inoculated from market dynamics in the US by statute via the First Ammendment and tax preferences, and question the idea that church leaders should be particularly beholden to internet-type engagement metrics. After all, one of the key reasons that people go to church is that they want to become better people than they are, so the fact that people are interested in internet conspiracy theories could be thought of asa diagnosis rather than a mandate. I'm sure that the church leaders have thought about this, and it would be nice to hear what they think they should do.
I don't see what the First Amendment tax exemptions have to do with isolating churches from market dynamics. Churches live on tithes from attendees, those with more attendance prosper more. There's your customer base and revenue stream right there. In a time where non-religion is more popular than ever, especially among the young, the pressure to secure more members is higher.
The ideal purpose of a religious institution is to improve the character of its congregation, but that's not necessarily why people show up at any given church. People want a sense of belonging and purpose, and without a developed intellectual foundation they'll take those things from whoever demands the least in return. On the left you get people saying burning down walmarts is better than protest and not doing either, on the right you get conspiracy theorists gathering at the most friendly church. Obviously pastors shouldn't bend to these dynamics, but that doesn't mean they won't.
Civic virtue or moral rectitude do not require god. For a long time liberalism relied to a large extent on personal moral standards. America has long had an especially liberalist religious tradition which eventually morphed into the Transcendentalists and similar groups. After WWII we pretty much broke the bonds of virtue and governance. We certainly need to recover those bonds and maybe that's underway but it seems we have to slog through lots of sewage to get there.
Gerrymandering / redistricting is a huge part of the story over that 50 year gap.
Plus the Big Sort where people moved into more gerrymandered places. This is going in reverse in the 2020s but it takes time.
Has gerrymandering gotten worse over the past 50 years? I would have assumed it had gotten better, given how bad things were before the court cases of the 1950s and 1960s, but maybe the 1970s were a brief period of particularly good districting?
Democrats are over represented in the house than their house popular vote
Gerrymandering isn’t just about the divide between Dems and the GOP. When districts get gerrymandered to become safer they have a greater likelihood of attracting cranks, because said cranks only need to win a primary.
I half agree with you, but FoxNews and the National Review did try to get Republican primary voters to reject Trump early on. They would have been happier with Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. His base refused to do so however and so here we are.
I think it’s just more efficient information flow. Cranks can find an audience, and people aren’t confined to newspapers for information. Information not subject to elite taste is vastly more accessible
The media environment is WILDLY different than 1975. It's not that people are less-educated, it's that they're getting their info from social media without any of the guardrails of traditional media.
It's not the people that are different - it's that they're voting in a world where traditional institutions have been dissolved, and their replacements are the very large but thin social networking sites (including Tiktok).
I am with you here, I am finding it hard to stay angry with politicians for behavior that amounts to following clear incentives. And the incentives are crystal clear at this point. Instead I'm just increasingly demoralized about the voting public.
Spare a moment for a local complaint. I'm in Fairfax county in the DC suburbs. It is both one of the best educated parts of the country and maybe the single place with the highest concentration of direct personal experience with government operations.
And the county is having a budget crisis. Why? Because, essentially, 1) people want to cut spending in the abstract but generally favor increasing spending on any particular budget item, and 2) people hate taxes and will throw a fit if their taxes go up. So, the exact same willful refusal to believe in tradeoffs that is sabotaging our national governance. If we can't do any better here, of all places, what hope is there at the national level?
The politicians hear those priorities loud and clear, of course. And the rational response is a mixture of pretending, outright lying, cutting anything not directly public facing, no matter how important, and exploding deficits where allowed (not in sub-national govs). It won't get better until our electorate figures out how to send a better incentive signal than "I demand something for nothing."
This all sounds like an excuse to defend bad politicians.
Or it's emotionally easy and cathartic to blame voters instead of facing the reality that your favorite politicians are often out-of-touch and simply support bad, dumb things for bad, dumb reasons.
Both major parties are historically unpopular, but there aren't really any alternatives, especially when many people feel they have no choice but to vote for one party because the party is really really bad.
We don't live in Westeros where we are stuck with the Lannisters. We're a democracy where we have the ability to vote people out if we want. The incentives voters give politicians don't just determine who on the ballot wins, but also who decides to run in the first place.
Sure, and elected officials are allowed to implement good policies, even if some pollster from some interest group shows them a poll that says that the policy might be unpopular.
You can look at things like Manhattan's congestion pricing or the Nippon Steel deal where politicians took opposed these things for very little reason even though all indications are that voters support them.
That's ignoring the effect of time lags for policy effectiveness, tradeoffs among different groups of voters, and non-political effects of changes in culture. It's pretty well established in poli sci literature that there has become a disconnect between economic growth rates and voters' views of the economy in the US, even if they think their own local economy is good or their own circumstances are good. Sometimes policies have diffuse beneficial effects for the country overall, but concentrated harms.
I would take your critique more seriously if you were talking about something like the Congress Party in India, where elite party members almost all inherit their positions, than a country where primary elections determine pretty much every level of government.
I'm not ignoring any of those things. Almost every elected officials has at least 2 years in between elections and most have about 4. There are plenty of tangible things any politician at any level to earn public support within that time frame, such as the examples mentioned above. There occasionally might be competing views among different constituencies, but there are many things that the public broadly wants, like lower cost of living and improved public safety. Lastly, nothing is stopping politicians from adapting to changes in culture.
I don't expect you to take my critique seriously. It seems you've decided "the voters" are the nameless, faceless entity to blame for the country's problems. Ironically, I assume you are a voter yourself but probably view yourself as one of the "good ones" that makes smart, reasonable decisions, like voting for Joe Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary.
To me it seems easy and cathartic to blame politicians instead of facing the reality that voters strongly encourage them to pander on partisan red meat rather than addressing difficult questions with difficult measures.
> where we both can't raise taxes on households making less than $400k per year due to increasing reliance on educated upper middle class voters
Of course we can. Democratic voters aren't single issue voters on their tax levels, and you won't find any statistic or survey suggesting they are.
Do wonder if the 400k pledge is really a barrier in the sense could it have been 200k and been fine electorally.
The problem here is that both of those numbers are irrelevant. If we want large government spending of social programs we have to be talking about tax increases in the 5 digit incomes. Every nation you can point to that has programs like free Healthcare, college, expansive child payments, maternity leave etc has very high taxes at the very bottom of the income chart. They also pair that with regressive taxes like VAT, gas taxes, car registrations etc, that are typically more than double what we pay in the US.
All the arguments about fairness, loopholes etc are irrelevant as long as we are unwilling to acknowledge this. There just isn't enough money to extract from "the people richer than me" to pay for these things, as evidenced by the fact that the places where it does exist don't pay for it like that.
This is exactly right. I am not an anti-debt fanatic but it is hard to not notice that we are not paying for the state we have, much less the state we theoretically want.
We'll pay somehow, with inflation being the ultimate guarantee of it if it comes to that.
This kind of my point. That "somehow" will be higher taxes on the 5 digit salaries or societally collapsing levels of debt.
I’m wondering if part of the problem with the idea of a national VAT is that it would be on top of state sales tax? We deal with state and federal income tax through the SALT deduction, though that only applies to people who itemize as far as I know.
Personally, I think the single biggest obstacle to the adoption of a VAT in the US is the existence of midterm elections. Voters generally loathe tax increases, but you can take the gamble if you've got enough time (say, 4-5 years) before the next election to show the electorate that your program as a whole yielded good results.
US lawmakers don't even get two years, they get 22 months from the time they take office until the next election. Indeed, throw primaries into the mix and the interval is barely a year and a half.
This arrangement renders members of Congress responsive to voter concerns, but also timid AF.
And notably, it's the House of Representatives that has the power of the purse, not the Senate where they have six-year terms.
That might effect the mechanics of implementation but isn't relevant to the tax rate magnitude. We could have a 10% national VAT on top of state sales tax, or just have states increase thier rates to 20+% with 10% going to social programs etc. The point here being that if you want large social programs then everyone has to pay.
Somewhat over half of total income goes to people making $100k+ (I think? This is surprisingly hard to look up). So you could get a substantially more generous welfare state just by raising marginal taxes above that threshold.
This depends on what you mean by substantial i guess but you are focused on trying to twist the spreadsheet to find a way to sell a bad idea. The Nordic tax systems function because the entire populace is united in the belief that paying taxes into collective systems is a benefit for everyone. The wealthy pay a higher rate but everyone pays at least a high rate. You are trying to build a system where one half of society takes from the other half which is a fundamentally flawed way to structure a society.
You will never get the votes to have the near zero taxes <100k while also having Nordic level taxes over 100k. Which is why the Democrats have to lie and say the taxes are just for the >400k cohort. They haven't succeeded in getting consensus that everyone should buy in so they pretend like you can vote yourself other people's money.
A lot of people who vote for democrats are just making it at 300k in high COL places. The MEDIAN white HHI in DC was 160k. I bet it’s close to that in New York. I am not sure those people would suddenly become republicans but I think dems would hear about it
Educational polarization is a threat to the republic. It’d be good to chase some high earners out of the Democratic party if we can pick up lower earning voters in trade.
Of course, higher taxes in themselves aren’t a selling point to low earners, even higher taxes on someone else. So we’ll need a different, complementary, positive agenda as well.
Honestly speaking for myself, I’m friends with a lot of GOP staffers and lobbyists who are frankly on a desert island crafting a sand idol to mitt Romney. It’s us and the Manhattan Institute. But “good governance” republicans would be that group and they are way out in the cold right now.
For some reason, I love the mental image of Tom Hanks as a moderate Republican stuck on a desert island, yet still somehow out in the cold, spending his time building Wilson a sand idol to Mitt Romney.
Agree. The idea that people are barely making it on 300k has some truth to it due to the high cost of housing and medical care, but to many non highly partisan voters, that idea sounds ridiculous and completely out of touch to how they live their lives.
As a PMC-type in a high COL location, I agree. I'm not hurting (I bought a house almost a decade ago and I don't have kids) but a lot of people adjacent me live on the knife's edge. If the Republican Party could return to Romney sanity, it could peel off some of these voters.
I know it's mentioned a lot here, but YIMBY reforms would be huge for this group.
As a PMC-type, I would vote for much higher taxes and much higher housing construction as a package deal, easy peasy.
You just reminded me of Herfindahl–Hirschman indices.
We could have a Federal Construction Commission (have to find a different acronym), to which construction companies have to prove that they don't have significant market power.
It wouldn't take care of zoning, but it's an idea. Not a good idea, but an idea nonetheless.
Or, what about a Herfindahl-Hirschman index of household incomes? Take each household's percentage of their city's income and square it. Your sum will probably be pretty small because there are a lot of households in a city, but you could use this "HHI of HHIs" as a pointlessly confusing way of measuring both the smallness and income inequality of a city.
On the other side is the claim "it's easy to fix Social Security, *just* get rid of the income cap" which would be the biggest tax increase in history on working professionals.
It's nuts that I'm excluded from the group that needs to pay more taxes, but hitting people with a 12 point increase in their marginal rates is also crazy.
The better solution of course is to raise the rate for everyone by 1 or 2% points.
SS is supposed to be an entitlement where you pay in, NOT a welfare program
(note I earn below the cap)
Phase it in with two percentage points every two years for twelve years. Or lift the cap in pieces. I think people can adjust and accept that.
I think the whole framing is ill-advised. Better to not get overly specific. Say, broadly, "We want to make government work for the many, not the few, and we also want to make sure the rich pay their fair share" or some such.
You'd have to pass specific policies, probably including tax increases -- you can't *govern* vaguely. But maybe you can campaign vaguely.
If the candidate has to do interviews and they get asked about specifics, what should they do? Maybe insist that they share certain principles, but that the details have to be worked out as cases arise, on the basis of these principles?
Yes, you do at some point have to give specifics. But you can avoid doing so until you absolutely must. When Democrats gain power they seem to jump all over themselves to >preemptively< boast about how their tax proposals affect *so few people*. This seems dumb to me—a very poor effort at building the needed narrative, because it does so using a framework established by Republicans (taxes are bad! government doesn't have to be paid for! etc).
Again, focus on the fact that the Other Party doesn't want the rich to pay their fair share. And go from there.
Right, Democrats are willfully boxing themselves into a corner here. The longer they do this, the more painful it will be to get out, but as InMD says, somethings got to give.
It’s a two way street for Dems: you’d need to raise taxes on those making under 400k AND you’d need to meaningfully reduce social security and healthcare spending (there’s ways to do this without screwing over the poor but those are unpopular).
You wouldn't *need* to "meaningfully reduce" entitlements, no. You personally may feel it would be unwise to exempt such spending (and stabilize our fiscal trajectory solely through tax hikes). But it's certainly not infeasible to do that. We need deficit reduction to the toon of 3% of GDP. That's a lot of money, but ours is a gigantic economy.
(For the record, if it were up to me we would look at entitlements. I'd personally bump up the retirement age. Yes, I'd go there. I'm simply pointing out that we could, uh, just raise taxes and keep spending as is. We're very lightly taxed as a country!)
All those GOP congressmen in purple districts in blue states pushing to raise the SALT deduction know that their bread is buttered by moderate voters that care more about their taxes than progressive policies
The left I think would happily take a European style package that paired a regressive VAT tax with universal health care. Not even Bernie Sanders himself would say no to that.
Moreover, I think even center left moderates at this point would take that package--IF they thought there was ANY CHANCE WHATSOEVER that the government had the state capacity to set something like that up. But trust in the government to do anything right or at reasonable cost has all but vanished across the political spectrum, and for good reason.
The ultimate problem, then, is state capacity. The path to fiscally sound leftist politics is therefore:
- execute really well on pragmatic government functions
- increase credibility of Dems and the government generally
- make a "grand bargain" Euro style welfare policy that funds universal programs with VAT
None of this is novel; it used to be called "Sewer Socialism" and I think could still work.
I think there's a path dependency issue that precludes that kind of deal. Maybe it would have been plausible 60 or 70 years ago but now too many people live too well too far down the income ladder* to make it palatable. The best case scenario is saving something resembling what exists today but more efficient. The other cold reality is that we are getting to a place where even Europe can no longer afford Europe. Outside a few of the smaller countries their model is looking less like a forward vision and more a momentary blip of generosity possible only by virtue of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
*Edit to add, this is a good thing! It just alters the politics.
>The best case scenario is saving something resembling what exists today but more efficient.
I mean, to me this is pretty much what Medicare for All *is*. Maybe we have a disagreement on that--don't have to litigate it here though!
>The other cold reality is that we are getting to a place where even Europe can no longer afford Europe
I don't think the thing holding Europe back is universal healthcare, especially since every European country spends less per capita on healthcare than the US and gets better outcomes. That's one economic area where they are actually consistently beating us.
The problem with Europe I think has more to do with overregulation and hostility to business, especially venture capital. Most economic growth over the last two decades has come from tech and any would-be entrepreneur with a choice is going to choose the US, where you can easily raise money and also--and this is no small thing--quickly and easily fire employees who aren't performing well.
(An aside: I've always considered myself a leftist but after having experience with European workers I've had to reconsider certain things, for example excessive worker protections--1 year parental leave! Multiple paid months off due to "burnout"!--that make it impossible to create a well-functioning organization)
In any case, the point is, I think "you can't have universal healthcare / other universal programs AND economic dynamism" is a false narrative!
I'm not so sure you can disentangle the over regulation and hostility to business from the government programs. Europeans are much more supportive of government than business generally, while in the US is mostly the opposite. Culturally I think that really matters with regards to politics and the ability of the government to gain public support for raising taxes and spending money on programs.
This visual is insane: https://geekway.substack.com/p/a-visualization-of-europes-non-bubbly
Europe has no idea what they're doing in the start-up space. It's shocking incompetence.
I think we can have universal healthcare, loosely defined, and are already closer to it due to the ACA than is fully appreciated in the Discourse.
What I think is highly questionable is that you can have generous universal benefits, all of the accommodations and benefits that European workers enjoy, and a dynamic economy, and crucially the ability to defend yourself militarily.
The dirty secret about the US healthcare system is that for most people most of the time it isn't nearly bad enough to generate political will even a Medicare for all type reform might entail, and thats to say nothing of the defensiveness the average American will have about what is by global and even Western standards a lifestyle of lavish consumption. Big picture point of my comment is that the subject may well be besides the point for the situation we're looking at. Which isn't to say I disagree with your broader sentiments (I don't) but I see no way to get there from here.
I know lots of Europeans who work in well-functioning organizations, so I don't think it's *impossible*.
Yes you caught me in a sweeping generalization; of course there are well-functioning organizations in Europe. Perhaps the best way to put it is: achieving a well-functioning organization in America requires less luck than in Europe.
I've been inspired by comments like this to actually work out (mostly with ChatGPT and a handful of links) a rough estimate of the Federal Government's tax revenues. I'm curious where people here think revenue could be raised.
Here are the major categories. Note the effective tax rates include payroll taxes on labor, and all of this is a very rough estimate.
EffectiveTaxRate TrillionsAnnualRevenue Category
13% 3.3 Labor (0-50k)
20% 4.4 Labor (50k-160k)
22% 2.2 Labor (160k-500k
27% 2.0 Labor (500k-5M)
31% 0.5 Labor (5M+)
15% 1.8 Capital Gains
15% 1.1 Dividends
18% 3.0 Business Income
0% 2.0 Taxable Consumption (Taxed at State Level)
0% 17.0 Untaxed Consumption
My naive thoughts are Dividends and Capital Gains would be one of the easier places to go for more revenue? I also wonder whether 17 trillion in untaxed consumption could be taxed somehow.
There are about 10-12 million households in the 160k-500k bracket (compared to about 1.5 million households in the 500k+ brackets). That is where the money is.
[X] I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
There's more money in the 50k-160k bracket. I know my chart isn't the easiest to read, but it's supposed to display that the 160k-500k bucket has 2.2 Trillion and the bucket one rung down has 4.4T.
Personally, I was struck by how gigantic the untaxed consumption bucket is. I'm sure there's good reasons most of it is untaxed, but but it's bigger than all the labor incomes put together, and currently at 0%.
“…there's good reasons most of it is untaxed…”
It is taxed by the states.
And the states that tax only consumption and not income seem to make out pretty well from it. Makes one wonder if the Feds should follow their example, as the comment suggests.
Those states don’t overspend.
Taxing something generally means there is less of it. Taxing consumption reduces consumption. Taxing income reduces production.
But even then, the states only tax about 2T of total 19T of consumption.
Yeah, I know: You’re talking about a VAT.
Maybe once we finally default on the national debt we’ll do that.
"I was struck by how gigantic the untaxed consumption bucket is."
I've seen people speculate that if we ever do have a deficit crisis emergency, congress will, after much hand wringing, implement a VAT.
What political will is there to raise taxes on the 50k-160k bracket?
None. And that's what people fundamentally don't understand when it comes to taxation in the US. It really is a lot lower not just on the wealthy but on the actual middle and a bit below (and far enough down you don't pay any income taxes at all). There's of course also the confounding factor that if you are living in a deep blue coastal metropolitan state what you pay in federal taxes doesn't tell the story of how much you are being taxed on net, which can be closer to the norm for a developed country. It just doesn't register at the federal level.
Now, there is not a world where I am going to support the Republicans but if they were going to make these kinds of draconian cuts and BS pretextual work requirements etc., on Medicaid but also let the 2017 tax cuts expire and not pass any additional cuts I'd respect it. Their priorities would be different than mine but at least it would be a concession to reality.
So that column is not tax revenues, it’s total earned income for members of that bracket.
Yeah "revenue" was a terrible choice of word. I can only plead the usual early morning excuses, ie in a hurry, pre-coffee, etc..
Haha fair. Same on my end, as I intended that comment to end with a question mark.
In my defense, the 1-year old is on a kick where he wakes up for *four fucking hours* in the middle of 5 nights in every 7, for like three months running now.
Every time we think we've turned a corner he goes right back to this.
Wouldn't a European style VAT be a consumption tax on that bucket?
Let's not forget the emblematic story of Mitt Romney's $100M IRA, completely untaxed. Or his refusal to release his tax returns. One key point here is that a lot of income and wealth is escaping taxation entirely.
There are very good reasons that dividends and capital gains are taxed less.
1. That money has already been taxed.
2. That's the money that drives investment thus GDP growth.
If you want to grow the economy you want taxes that don't effect reduce economic growth too much. Property taxes and consumption taxes are preferable for that.
There’s very little evidence that investors care about the capital gains tax rate more than market returns. If someone was shown a graph from a random period from the stock market without any annotations, most people would not be able to guess the tax rate from that. My response to this kind of argument is to propose that we make the corporate tax rate as low as possible (10%) and tax capital gains like regular income.
All money has already been taxed, lol. It's like... fundamental to how money and taxation work.
I kinda sorta don't disagree with the second point, but really if we were designing a system from scratch we'd want all income, earned and unearned (inflation adjusted), taxed at a lower level but in a highly progressive fashion, paired with a fairly large VAT and a shitpot of Pigouvian taxes.
In our system I'm opposed to the VAT because I see no reason to expect it would also be paired with reforms to income/payroll/capital gains taxes, but would love to try to close existing holes with more Pigovian taxes and fewer income tax rate increases.
I believe capital gains were taxed at the same rate as ordinary income under the Reagan tax reform of 1986, but that act also set the top marginal rate at 28% and created deficits that led Congress to go back to the table and increase margin rates for top income earners, and they also went back to lower rates for capital gains. Something about markets being affected or something, but taxing capital gains at ordinary income rates is harder than you think.
I believe that capital gains rates discourage efficient capital allocation (and, in particular, accurate pricing) because the act of moving money around itself creates taxable events even if you’re not “cashing out” of the market but just reallocating a portfolio. 401(k)s handle this more gracefully.
From what I understood from an investment advisor we were kind of paying capital gains taxes on mutual funds that we weren't actually withdrawing anything from because maybe when _other_ people withdrew money that caused the fund to have to register gains on the sales they made.
I have no problem paying gains(even at regular income tax rates!) on money I'm actually taking out but I really dislike paying it when I'm leaving my money in the market, especially when I'm not even pulling it out of a fund.
Federal land-value tax :-p?
Consuming is just what you do with already-taxed income. It’s not conceptually distinct from just raising income taxes except that it’s easier to forgo consumption on a short term basis (would be indefinitely excpet that death is somewhat perversely treated as a form of consumption.)
15/20/24/28/32 for the labor tiers...nice round numbers!
Because I rounded them! They are just rough estimates anyway.
"My question is at what point does something give?"
There's probably not a person in "media" I like less than David Sacks - he sucks - but he said it best. Our politicians will only take the debt levels seriously when the market forces them to.
It might be happening sooner than we think: https://www.axios.com/2025/05/19/bond-market-us-debt
I respect the hell out of Ray Dalio, I think his "beautiful deleveraging" plan is probably our best option and that seems to be getting more traction.
What is said plan?
He published an entire book on the plan but here's the exec. summary:
“A “beautiful deleveraging” happens when the four levers are moved in a balanced way so as to reduce intolerable shocks and produce positive growth with falling debt burdens and acceptable inflation. More specifically, deleveragings become beautiful when there is enough stimulation (i.e., through “printing of money” / debt monetization and currency devaluation) to offset the deflationary deleveraging forces (austerity / defaults) and bring the nominal growth rate above the nominal interest rate—but not so much stimulation that inflation is accelerated, the currency is devaluated, and a new debt bubble arises.”
Fiscal repression typically acts in the same direction as currency devaluation when one is a net exporter, and should partially offset when you're a net importer, so it strikes me as plausible. Book title?
>and also refuse to draw the line on spending anywhere short of the most ineffectual civil servant<
I question the implication of this wording. The United States maintains one of the smallest public sectors of any high income country. This fact in isolation doesn't mean the federal government gets good value for it dollars, sure. Maybe given the results we get, the federal budget should indeed be a lot smaller. Perhaps! But I don't see much evidence of systemic or chronic waste. Nothing's ever perfect of course, and you can find individual examples of unnecessary spending, like Medicare Advantage (and Medicare fraud). But on the whole the country's national government seems to have done a decent job in recent years (at least until 2025). Look at how the US has lept ahead of most of the rich world in per capita output and overall economic strength. And there's the country's share of Nobel prizes. And there's the plunging crime rate. There's the continual improvement in air travel safety. Our cities are growing again. Obesity is declining. A higher percentage of people have health insurance coverage than ever before. The country continues to operate the world's strongest military. And it remains at the forefront of space exploration. And it wasn't the Chinese who gave the world MRNA vaccines, nor the Europeans who figured out large language models.
In other words, based on both the size of the government compared to other rich countries *and* the national conditions that money buys us, we don't have a spending problem. We have a revenue problem. Full stop.
If you want to argue in libertarian fashion that government should be a lot smaller and spend a lot less of GDP, you can try. Plenty of people agree with you. But the country would look a lot different if you succeed, and it's doubtful for the better. If you want to argue Washington borrows too much, you'll have my support. But again, this really isn't caused by too much spending—not, as I noted above, by any reasonable standard or metric. We just don't raise enough revenue.
I understand your argument in the abstract. However applied to practical politics it is a combination of rejection of democracy and plain old giving up the game.
It has not yet been 8 months since the first blip of serious inflation and accordant cost of living increases in 2 generations (and in living memory of many voters) prompted the country to elect Donald Trump a second time. I think everyone needs to adapt their thinking to that reality.
I agree entirely! That's just the point—very large numbers of voters don't possess detailed knowledge of policy. So yeah, in an election with conditions favoring the Republicans, many will vote for the Republican.
Which again, is why we need a Republican party that provides the electorate with decent political leaders.
> nor the Europeans who figured out large language models.
Do you count that labor in terms of its consumption, to "figure out LLMs", or its production, educating professionals? Because the Europeans and the Chinese contributed quite a lot on that production end to AI research.
Very much agreed. To avoid fiscal collapse we will need some combination of higher taxes and lower spending (with most of it coming from lower spending). That means it will need to be bipartisan because neither party will do this on their own because it would be political suicide.
In particular this will mean cuts to entitlements.
My preference
raise the payroll tax
raise the retirement age and index it to life expectancy
end heroic end of life care (on tax payer dime).
tax sugar and other high calorie sugar substitutes and use it to offset the costs of obesity. Including providing GLP-1 drugs
Greatly increase anti-aging research spending in the hope that we can get a medical miracle in the next 10 years or so (this is actually possible)
For the love of god, stop raising the payroll tax burden on prime-age workers to transfer money to old people.
Seriously, I want to see Social Security on sustainable footing but absent massive transfers to child-rearing young people that will never happen. Any further payroll taxes need to be limited to funding huge child tax credits and nothing else.
The only payroll tax reform we should be considering for SSI is to uncap it and leave the current benefits caps in place.
Uncapping it doesn't fix the problem.
Nor do I see why we should turn SS into a bigger welfare program than it already is.
SS tax rates should match SS benefit payments as much as possible. We have a cap on benefits we should have a cap on taxes.
Or we can just allow the 20% cut to benefits to occur in 2032
Yes, I am aware of your stance and do not share your deep commitment to killing the transfer state.
I don't want to kill it. I want to make it fiscally sustainable. And while I'm willing to tolerate small tax increases for a bipartisan fiscal solution, I'm not willing to tolerate big ones. EVEN if they don't effect me personally.
I am affected personally, albeit not by much, stand to be more affected in the future, and am nonetheless completely committed to avoiding huge cuts to SSI *and* not burdening middle-income prime-age adults anymore.
While I have two kids, any move to subsidize the fuck out of them would require me to cough up more in income taxes than I’d get back, and I’m committed to that too.
> The only payroll tax reform we should be considering for SSI is to uncap it and leave the current benefits caps in place.
Which, as Bernie once pointed out, would instantly render it solvent.
Pretty close, and over timelines beyond which "projections" are kind of BS anyway.
At minimum it buys us time to *subsidize the ever-loving fuck* out of child-rearing and reach a durable settlement on immigration.
That' factually incorrect.
Not to mention a absolutely huge tax increase.
My not-well-thought-out, off-the-cuff reactions:
raise the payroll tax --> disincentivize hiring/incentivize hiring & paying cash under the table for things like "upper middle class family hiring a nanny" = seems not great
raise the retirement age --> oddly, this is popular among conservatives but it punishes the very people conservatives claim to love, i.e., blue-collar Americans who use their bodies to work instead of sitting in front of a laptop in a climate-controlled office. Is a construction worker going to be thrilled about either having his retirement age go up or having to retrain for an office job at the age of 60?
end heroic end of life care --> I would support that!
tax sugar and shitty ultra-processed food --> I'm in favor of that, and it would benefit me personally, as I eat too much sugar and I'm overweight
greatly increase anti-aging research --> naturally, I would support that
Now look at those last three points where we agree and ask yourself, how likely are they to pass? If you ran for office on those policy proposals, what would the Median Swing Voter say? "Boo, mathew wants to kill your great-grandma, make your delicious doughnuts and soda more expensive, and give money to elitist pointy-headed scientists who study aging worms and flies and shit! Down with mathew!!!"
This is why it's a very hard problem.
I actually wonder whether a sugar/processed food tax would be unpopular with the right. For all of their insanity, RFK Jr. and plenty of visible right-wing types do mostly agree that sugar and ultra processed foods are bad. I think this is a zone of agreement the Dems should lean in to.
Color me very, very skeptical. The average MAGA supporter loves RFK Jr. for making teh libz cry, but they'll turn on him with the fury of a million suns if he tries to raise the prices of their beloved soda and chips and candy. Just because they listen to Joe Rogan extol the virtues of paleo or whatever, doesn't mean they *actually* want to apply it in their own life.
We've seen this story a hundred times by now: "Haha, Trump's people do something to stick it to the libz, yay Trump!/Booo, the Trump administration does something that affects ME negatively, f**k you! How dare you!"
>My question is at what point does something give?
Unfortunately, the answer now seems to be “when the bond market freaks out and turns someone into the American Liz Truss”
Heh didn't she have an oped in WaPo a few weeks ago in support of the big boner bill or whatever Trump is calling it?
Yup. Had some fun discussing here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/thursday-thread-cf2?utm_source=direct&r=ehsiz&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=119369439
It's amazing how quickly the bond market turned on her. I would have thought a PM would have to have announced the immediate start of communism to have the market react that badly that quickly.
What I don't understand is how Republicans are beholden on tax cuts for the wealthy? Most wealthy are doing fine and don't need tax cuts. Pretty much full stop. More, unless you define wealthy in an odd way, the vast majority of the voting block is not wealthy. So why and how do they clinch so much of the vote?
Because they believe their non-rich supporters are there for the cultural red meat and the resentment of others and don't care about policy issues like tax cuts for the wealthy.
That addresses the view from the Republicans in power. My question, I think, is more why does the base support this situation? It is legit baffling when I have family on medicare that support these style cuts. Or how they can get upset about how much I paid in taxes. Like, why?
For the last 20 years, neither party has been willing to inflict economic hardship. So Republicans haven't really cut spending enough to impact the low income voters much, while Democrats haven't raised taxes enough to really impact higher income voters. They just took on more debt. The question is open for what happens when they can't do more debt.
Amusingly, I think there's very good reason to believe that the single largest consequence of America being unable to sustain current deficits will be the rapid implosion of the PRC.
The US is so fabulously wealthy relative to the rest of the globe that even fucking things up quite badly will still see us very wealthy and attractive to immigration.
Agree on the latter point. On the former point, I'm dubious that the PRC will face a rapid implosion. I could be wrong, but betting that things muddle along even if they get worse and worse seems more likely. As in, 60% chance the current semi autocracy continues, 30% it gets much worse with a full dictatorship, and 10% something else happens.
Probably because these voters don't believe the Republicans will actually inflict economic costs on them and if poor people are hurt, they'll be the undeserving poor (i.e., not themselves).
With the changing shape of the Republican coalition and the apparent Republican desire to inflict costs on at least some of their new supporters, we may be seeing an interesting test. I think Josh Hawley is a canary in the coal mine on this regarding Medicaid cuts. (I also think in the final vote, Hawley will fold and vote for massive Medicaid cuts.)
> Probably because these voters don't believe the Republicans will actually inflict economic costs on them and if poor people are hurt, they'll be the undeserving poor (i.e., not themselves).
You hit the nail on the head... When they talk about increasing the retirement age, they think it'll be only for libs in offices, not hardworking Americans like themselves, when they talk about cutting Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, they think it'll be for people that don't deserve it, never people like them. So much of the conservative / MAGA movement simply believes that some Americans deserve more than others, and they are in the in group vs the out group. They simply don't get it until they are affected... Similar to how they only ever think the only moral tax break or moral abortion is the one they get.
Has anyone ever proposed making federal tax brackets vary with the local cost of living?
In the way that the SALT cap was the Republicans’ way of going “fuck YOUR rich guys but not OUR rich guys,” this is how you do the opposite: make the car dealership owner in Biloxi pay more than the Cravath associate in Brooklyn Heights.
Democrats, unlike Republicans, take budgeting at least somewhat seriously. If, once back in power, they discover that passing some new spending program will explode the deficit, they'll cut back on their ambitions (see: Clinton for example). Republicans just don't give a crap. Tax cuts will explode the deficit? Yawn.
"Democrats, unlike Republicans, take budgeting at least somewhat seriously."
I must have imagined the the attempts to pas a $6 trillion BBB then
If the more liberal members of the Republican Congress stop their own BBB, just like elements of the Democratic party killed their BBB, then let's talk.
In the meantime, let's do the apples to apples comparison and look at what the parties actually pass.
Best bet on that is that the freedom caucus can't stomach the spending and some senate republicans can't stomach the medicaid cuts.
They'll pass something because if they don't tax rates on rich people and corporations go up and that is the Black Death for Republicans.
So either the Freedom Caucus or the "moderates" cave. One guess as to which that will be.
Hard to bet against someone caving to Trump given the history, but fingers crossed.
Not only that - Republicans will vociferously remind dems about debt as they magically pivot to deficit scolds the second it's not about unfunded tax cuts.
We have to make the honest case that tax increases are good for growth of real incomes of people making a lot less than $400,000. Republicans can always out "zero sum" us. That's the normal naïve human default presumption. Lower deficits, more trade and more immigration are good for ordinary people, are truly "populist" but they have to be argued.
A good start could be to do away with all tax deductions. And then ask if the marginal $ is allocated to a program or "spent" as a tax deduction or cut. Another option, anchor tax deductions to interest payments. Yet another option, would be to take Mike Lee at face blur and reset what SS truly is with the people i.e. transfer from currently working to currently retired. It's not a drawdown on what you contributed to like 401K is. And with it, take a formulaic approach to SS payments based on variance of reality from expectations. People live longer -> less payments, ratio of younger people to older people drops -> less payments. At least let the mechanism be transparent and let voters decide if even more labor income should be diverted from the earner's 401K towards making SS payments that were based on inaccurate estimates.
While politicians have been lying about SS since its inception, the lie is unfortunately what keeps SS popular. People believe they are getting their money back (and importantly, not getting money from their 30-year-old neighbor).
The money I deposit in the bank is not sitting in a safe with my name put on top of the stack of bills. Every withdrawal is a legally-blessed transfer from somewhere and someone else to me.
The same most definitely applies to my 401k.
At this point some kind of default/deleveraging is imminent within the next few years. Neither side is fixing the federal debt because they know they can't slap a $350,000 invoice on every working taxpayer. No wonder MMT was embraced, keep the party going and kick the can to the next admin. The Democrats have been obsessing over catastrophic climate themes, gender, and handing out unneeded stimulus, while if they truly cared about the majority of the citizens they would be yelling and screaming about getting Social Security and Medicare funded (and frankly IMO making a broad push for Medicare for All). The Republican's faults are well pointed out in this article. I believe the country is due for a reset, the Democrats would be well advised to return to a more practical, pragmatic party while the Republicans self-destruct.
“ they can't slap a $350,000 invoice on every working taxpayer”
That numbers not correct and you should stop using it to lie. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you heard the number somewhere and are repeating it without giving it a few minutes of thought.
Partially agree with you.
36 trillion debt divided by 163 million working adults = $220,858.
That's not $350,000 but it's close enough I assume that's the number we're talking about. It's kind of an invoice in that we're expected to pay it, but it's NOT like we're making everyone suddenly pony that up (and also we were ALREADY expected to pay it...)
The more relevant number is the deficit - $11,226 / taxpayer. If we had the deficit under control we'd slowly be working away the debt.
Or, the deficit is about 1/3 of our tax revenue. So a 33% tax increase (relative to current taxes, not a topline rate increase of 33%) would cover it. That's not small, but that would be, for instance 20% -> 27%.
Why wouldn’t retirees, a majority of whom have incomes from sources other than SS not be counted?
And why shouldn't be kids be counted? The debt won't be repaid before they enter the workforce.
In any case, one can scare people with big numbers about each individual's share of the debt. More important is the cost we're paying, put in terms of absolute interest payments, and as % of GDP, and how that ongoing cost could be affected by changing interest rates. Those are clearly too high now and very likely to go higher.
The reason kids shouldn't be counted is that yes, they'll be on the hook in the future, but also older people are dying naturally and their debt doesn't magically vanish when they die, so it's best to just look at people who can currently contribute to taxes, since that's the number that will tend to matter for our ability to repay.
Most retirees have other income?
Good point, retirees should maybe be counted.
But in any case my second calculation, looking at tax revenue overall doesn't skip them.
Only 27% of retirees have SS as their only source of income.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/05/20/what-the-data-says-about-social-security/
There is no path to getting SS and Medicare fully funded. They will have to be cut
There's space between "pay it all back in full right now" and "do nothing."
Nobody in mainstream politics is going to push for a form of M4A that would save the taxpayer money by downsizing the administrative cadre of the healthcare sector.
It is the same as it ever was. To balance the budget, mostly taxes will have to go up.
Killing millions aside it really is insane that the main impact of DOGE seems to be simply degrading state capacity. The IRS has been a huge victim of DOGE, to the point where 20,000 people are taking the resignation offer or are potentially being laid off. It’s become very difficult to get in touch with the IRS for no reason other than DOGE coming in and slashing jobs, similar to the SSA. This saves ultimately a trivial amount of money (and in fact may cost billions in lost collections due to decreased compliance), but just makes life worse for Americans. Connecting these new inconveniences to DOGE, Republicans and Trump will be important for Democratic messaging going forward.
Lost tax collections are a feature, not a bug. For the beneficiary, evasion is almost as good as an actual tax cut.
This is particularly true given the statue of limitations for recovering taxes and how difficult it is to prove intent in white collar cases now (for the record, I'm not a lawyer and have a weak at best understanding of the law, but I've seen enough people that I respect state this that I am pretty confident that it is true).
Like a third of my agency just quit and we aren’t even political targets.
This is the sneaky one. Shuttering USAID gets a lot of headlines (rightly so) but the slow trickle of smart tenured people out of other agencies just because they're sick of this shit is also scary. Or, for that matter, all of the smart people that would want to work in government but don't want to work for stupid Trump people.
Not to mention that you won’t get a lot of these people back under the next sane administration, because they suspect there will be another insane administration four years later that just does this all again.
There's probably going to be a shift of smart young people away from studying policy, economics, medicine, etc. since the incentives to dedicate your lives to medical research or diplomacy are just bad. That's going to lead to weaker academic programs due to insufficient demand, which will make ramping back up state capacity harder later.
Biggest downside for us who chose to stay is that we aren’t going to be offered promotional opportunities. That and the pay freeze nonsense.
How big of a risk is this really? The IRS cuts are infuriating but only because I have radical views on tax cheats and would love to fill the jails with them and their accountants to close the tax-gap. 98% of federal employees are US citizens. They're not leaving the country. We're still at 4.2% unemployment. They'll all find amazing jobs. When I worked at one of the DoE particle physics labs there were four Nobel Prize winners also working there at the same time. By definition the smartest of smart type of people working in government. It's *brilliant* work but neutrino research is esoteric and even the super conducting magnet technology would have been developed by the private sector. IDK. Self-selecting of the smartest people returning to the private sector is probably a net good outcome.
I next day shipped my buddy’s work laptop across the country so he could take the buyout offer before it expired.
Government Efficiency ™️
1/3 is light compared to some research divisions! Especially if you count RA’s who won’t get backfilled
Most of the regional offices all up and resigned. As did some research groups on the floor below. They can make more in industry.
"liked" but OMG terrible
I get what you mean, but I gotta say, “Killing millions aside” is a hell of a way to start a sentence.
“Aside from *that*, Mrs. Lincoln thinks the play was distinctly subpar.”
My favorite example of this is the forced reassignments of senior executives to random places to get them to quit. Just utterly pointless. Most of CDC's senior career leadership, for example, was forced to take random reassignments to IHS facilities in places like Alaska.
Honestly, that's the type of thought process someone comes up with when their understanding of government has been based on watching too many spy movies.
Like Grover Norquist said, the conservative agenda was to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub.
There's nothing surprising about this. They were clear in their intentions.
“Killing millions…”
Did DOGE declare war on somebody? I hadn’t heard that.
To be more pedantic, "contributing to millions of deaths that would likely have been prevented if DOGE had not cancelled PEPFAR, USAID, and various programs bringing medical and developmental aid to some of the poorest people in the world. Only in some cases is it clear that a given person would have lived with aid and died without it, but on the scale of the population, the increased morbidity and mortality from losing public health measures is obvious."
DOGE / the Trump administration intervened in ways that predictably resulted / will result in these people's deaths, so I consider it reasonable to blame them for it.
Do you blame the Clinton Administration for all the pre-PEPFAR deaths? Because that would make as much sense as what you wrote.
Did they actively pursue denying it or was it just not something identified well (harder to identify impact of things that don't exist yet tbh)?
It’s clear more could have been done. More wasn’t done, so it’s Clinton’s fault. Obviously.
I think it's pretty obvious there's a moral difference between "should have created a program to help people but didn't" and "proactively and abruptly kill an existing program that was helping people, including things like halting medical care for patients who were midway through their treatment"
Yes, and this conclusively proves that Lincoln was a terrible President for not preventing millions of deaths in Africa and Asia.
In moral terms, taking something away is far worse than implementing the theoretical solution in the first place.
I think the general view is that starting charity is good and ending charity is bad. That’s simplistic and wrong.
It's a combination of circumstances, including having good AIDS drugs that can be made economically to treat a large population with AIDS.
Good idea, at the time. No question about that.
PEPFAR
Oh I see. No one in Africa died from AIDS last year.
Low Human Capital here on display
There should be a new federal program to address your problem.
Yikes. This is some ugly stuff here.
Under your logic, because people still die of cancer we should just end all funding for chemotherapy.
No, we should borrow yet more billions to expand PEPFAR. If you oppose that you are directly responsible for those deaths. You monster.
Ken, you have some good things to say sometimes, but this kind of mockery when real people are dying is just shitty and unbecoming of SB. Have a nice life.
I mean yes, we should. It’s extremely cost effective. Even better, we should work on putting together an international coalition to do this so that it’s more robust and can take advantage of different global expertises and share the cost.
PEPFAR helps the US buy a more stable world for pennies on the dollar.
If you want to slash spending without feeling like a dickhead, you need to believe there’s massive fraud and waste. Plenty of people sincerely hate taxes and sincerely don't want to feel like dickheads. The myth of massive fraud is so convenient and comforting that it will not die.
Correct
Plenty of Republicans are fine looking like dickheads as long as they're being dickheads to their outgroup or fargroup. Many of the most vocal have basically celebrated the deportations and aid cuts killing people as "not my problem lol".
You are talking about the loudest 30%, many of whom are low status. How many Republican Congressmen tell their constituents they want to be dickheads? They do what JD Vance did talking about bank teller jobs, they lie.
I have many thoughts, as someone who experienced DOGE’s meddling at an independent agency.
But I think there’s been insufficient attention paid to the separation of powers aspect of this. Congress appropriates funds, the President either spends those funds or complies with the Impoundment Control Act. Musk should not be given credit for any savings that are not officially recouped through rescission.
If the President can actually ignore the requirements of the ICA, we have a big problem. The activities of the federal government are largely the product of horse trading by the two parties, particularly in the Senate. Military spending in exchange for domestic non-defense spending. Farm aid in exchange for food stamps. And so on. If the Executive Branch can take those compromises and renege on the appropriations that the opposing congressional faction bargained for, there is no reason for the minority party to play ball.
I think this probably blows over without major incident, with SCOTUS selectively crafting a solution that advantages conservative presidents without upending the entire constitutional order. Maybe they uphold the ICA but require an appropriation to include specific, directive language before there can be a finding that it has been unspent in violation of the ICA (conveniently giving Trump a pass while setting new rules going forward). But this is an underrated way in which Trump is jeopardizing the rule of law and destabilizing the federal government. PBS and Malagasy bug powder are just the canaries in the coal mine.
Vought really doesn’t seem to care that the other team is gonna get to have the ball, unless he thinks the other team isn’t going to get the ball again and then we have a whole other set of problems.
No one has really pinned him on what he’s going to do if the Dems win again. He seems to know what he’s doing is broadly unpopular and threatens downballot Republicans but seems to view it as necessary medicine. Ok fine. But if you get impoundment through the next dem is going to be doing gay abortions on every street corner in Waco.
Unfortunately (for Dems) this is mostly a one-way ratchet. I don’t think there’s much federal spending that Dems actively want to withhold. Impounding large amounts of military spending would serve the interests of isolationists, many of whom are on the right these days.
And ultimately this game of appropriations chicken is one that Democrats can’t win, because a small federal government that spends money on fewer things is inherently a GOP win.
I may be wrong, but my recollection is that a lot of the deficit reduction under Obama came from "sequestration" of defense spending as part of the debt ceiling deal he cut with Republicans. Basically, both sides agreed to politically painful cuts in the future with the hope that they'd win enough power before then to change the formula. Neither side did so the cuts went through.
The sequester featured caps on both defense and non-defense discretionary spending, yes. While it forced some fiscal tightening, both parties agreed to relax the caps as part of various budget deals from 2013-2017. Still, that was all legislation, not unilateral action by the executive.
I don’t think that’s true. The government is a eyewatering proportion of ag spending and rural subsidies. They can make the southeast and Midwest really squeal if they want. Maybe they don’t want to, I dunno. But even the ag cuts and loan holds now are causing problems.
That’s fair, maybe. But I still don’t think it’s the kind of tit for tat that Democrats want to have or will benefit from having.
Yeah, "we throttled the Midwest and the South" is not a winning message for swing states.
Yes, the Republicans have a big advantage in the "act viciously and engage in wanton destructiveness" category.
Right, it’s fine and good to cut agricultural subsidies (many of which flow to those that viscerally hate the Dems and don’t matter electorally), but that’s not that’s really driving spending.
In theory yes, but practical politics suggests that this won't happen even if Dems have a trifecta in 2028.
As Matt has noted a number of times, there are more self described conservatives than liberals which is part of the reason why GOP has more runway space to take more extreme positions.
Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, the senate wildly overrepresents this interest of rural voters (a huge part of the story of why the Deep South wielded disproportionate power pre 1965). As Matt has noted a number of times, if Dems want to retake the senate, they're going to need to win states with a large number of rural voters.
Just noting that I can see Dems impounding Congressionally approved funds, but I have a hard time believing their target will be funds that disproportionately benefit rural voters.
I don't think curtailing the food supply is something that will go well for Democrats.
Most of these guys in the administration and their loud, online supporters seem to sincerely believe that Democrats have been doing horrible stuff like this for a long time, and what they are doing now is payback and revenge.
Just like a whole bunch of people thought there was *an Epstein file* that could just be released.
It’s one thing for politicians and people in the administration to think/say this, they have to for PR and legislative pressure reasons, it’s another for experienced bureaucrats to loudly signal this stuff.
This is basically what the big RIF lawsuit is about, and I think we're on a path to the Supreme Court saying there are basically no constraints on how the president can reorganize the executive branch. If the president can unilaterally "reorganize" 100% of a congressionally-funded program out of existence, then it's functionally the same as impoundment (if not worse).
I am not a lawyer, but it seems clear to me that the president does not have unilateral authority to reorganize the executive branch however they see fit. If they did, why have previous presidents requested specific authority, and why has Congress passed statutes granting the president to propose reorgs to Congress for review and approval? The current admin's take on reorg power incoherent, and yet here we are.
I'll assume from your handle that you are familiar with North Carolina which, like a lot of sun belt states, has a lot to lose if the current budget is passed by the senate. Let's say their senators successfully fight to keep some of the energy subsidies from being repealed and then Trump just decides not to fund them anyway. Energy rates skyrocket (especially with all the data centers opening in the South), planned battery manufacturing plants are scrapped, etc. --- bad for a bunch of states with Republican senators.
Maybe then some GOP senators will rediscover the value of the separation of powers? Or maybe a Democratic president decides to raise taxes unilaterally (the way Trump does with tariffs) or withhold spending for some right-wing sacred cow. With a lot of the lawlessness of MAGA it seems people have to experience the negative consequences themselves before they realize why we have laws in the first place, you know?
"It seems like he actually ended up cutting between $60 billion and $160 billion. Clearly, part of the game here is to get me to write that sentence down so that right-wingers can dunk on me and say, “How out of touch do you have to be to think that $60 billion is a small number?” Well, fair enough."
No, it's not "fair enough" - the money that was saved was saved by just indiscriminately firing and tearing down. It's not as if even that $60 billion is $60 billion in fraud - it's $60 billion in literal lives (USAID) and livelihoods.
I've saved hundreds of dollars by not contributing anything to my retirement. I mean my financial advisor called this "insane", but what does that so-called expert know?
You’ll show him by dying young!
“I lost weight.”
“Oh great - how?”
“I cut off my arm.”
It’s like Nissan saving 20 billion by gutting R&D when they need a new platform. Great job guys.
“I have saved so much money by turning off the furnace during winter - what do you mean, my pipes burst?”
There's a whole "this food is terrible. And in such small portions" problem to DOGE. Simultaneously, the cuts were often to actually useful programs that very online bros didn't understand, while the amount cut is miniscule compared to the federal budget. It's like someone bragging that they scored multiple goals in the NHL, but it turns out those were all own-goals and they only scored twice.
exactly. an asinine way to characterize these cuts.
Politically, that seems to be the smart move since people are not out on the streets, protesting cuts to USAID.
DOGE proved only that the ADHD version of government reform doesn’t work. There's little waste a 100-day ketamine-fueled whirlwind can uncover. Real efficiencies come from emulating systems already proven by our peer countries. Tunnel boring is a great example: Iceland’s 5.8 km Hvalfjörður Tunnel cost about $12M/km, Norway’s record-setting 24.5 km Lærdal Tunnel just $5M/km. Even the remote Faroe Islands delivered a 10.8 km tunnel at around $12M/km—compared to Boston’s Big Dig, which ballooned to $1 billion/km.
Even the best boring companies cut costs slowly. Unless you hire the right people, firing alone won’t deliver. Healthcare offers even bigger savings, since Europe spends 40% less per capita than we do for equal or better results. Here too, real reform means studying complex systems—not quickly finding villains and breaking things.
The waste versus inefficiencies framing is important, but depressingly intractable in face of public opinion. A huge percentage of governance failures in the US are rooted in insufficient expertise in the government, but I cannot imagine a near-term world where the public is willing to allow the government to raise wages and hire more staff to internalize roles that are either done by contractors/consultants or not at all.
Public opinion will not change on the government until the face of government customer service is a nice white man in their 30s/40s.
I think right now too many peoples’ mental model of the modal government worker is a black woman who hates them, doesn’t deserve their job, and won’t do their job. regardless of the truth of that statement.
Also what I said is falsifiable, stunned government doesn’t do more survey work leading to impression management on this for their own sake.
This is somewhat tangential, but I found "The Politics of Resentment" by Katherine J. Cramer to have a pretty compelling explanation of why many people think government employees are overcompensated and underworked. The book claims that visible public sector workers (particularly in rural areas) are typically frontline employees of organizations like the Post Office who actually do receive better pay and benefits than comparable private sector employees. The people whose counterfactual career involves making twice as much with comparable or better conditions are typically in an office invisible to the public and are often based somewhere in the DC area.
I knew about government economists, who trade academic freedom or truly eyewatering amounts of money in litigation consulting or elsewhere for the stability of a public job that generally pays well enough to live in the DMV. I did not realize how many people at the various agencies (my experience is mostly with financial regulators) left director or EVP jobs in tech to work in government. The guy who designed Windows’ GUI and left to work at SDS is a type. People don’t get a lot of exposure to them.
Anyway, government should spend money on PR so that the mental model of a government worker is either mayor Pete or a forest ranger.
And the economists already gave up an even more renumerative counterfactual career on Wall Street (or big tech if they're younger) by going to graduate school.
I had a few friends that worked for the Philadelphia City Solicitor's office after law school. 35 hours a week looks pretty good when the new grads who went to law firms were working triple the hours for less than double the pay.
How in the fuck do rural voters come to resent their mail carrier?
Now that my neighborhood finally has a long-term one assigned instead of a rotating cast of temps, I love the dude. Shit works well, he recognizes names on mis-addressed mail, packages come first thing in the morning before mail pieces later on… and he does this mostly on foot and for like $18/hr.
More broadly, how the fuck do rural voters think that they're the ones being screwed and neglected by the federal government?
I found the book to have the best explanation that I've seen, but I personally have a lot of resentment towards rural voters for fucking up the United States out of anger for a system that has showered them with benefits and money while neglecting the cities that fund the country.
Never read the book but my core thesis is that rural resentment is driven less by economic opportunity and more by demographic change. There're plenty of prosperous rural farms, some decent-paying manufacturing/resource extraction/agricultural supply chain work, etc... but there's less and less services work as rural populations age and fall.
Automation in agricultural work occurred long ago, but the reliability and automation of all the secondary sector operations (logistics, capital maintenance, capital formation, agricultural processing, etc) that support it has gotten so good that the old secondary-sector clusters in county seats and rural towns are basically gone, with the tertiary sectors following quickly, and demographics following at a lag.
There's just no economic impetus for many of these places, and the reality of "rural revitalization" is that it's basically picturesque locations turning into remote worker hubs and retirement communities, or exurbs expanding into rural areas around big and mid-sized cities. Most rural areas are still emptying out at a good clip, mitigated almost solely by Social Security and Medicare allowing older residents to age in place instead of following their children and grandchildren to suburbs and cities.
My experience is that there are a few things going on.
-Many rural voters have a very romantic vision of themselves as "real Americans" and rugged individualists who don't need anything from the government. I think this is just embedded in American culture.
-There seems to be a genuine ignorance of taxing and spending. I don't know if people have any interest in becoming better informed or would believe information on this subject, but I think that the federal government and state governments should do a better job of pushing out information on spending versus tax revenue at the county level.
-Tied to the previous, I think a lot of people have no idea how much it costs to provide mail service, broadband, roads, schools, and so on in rural areas.
A lot of people hate government workers for a lot of different reasons but I’d be surprised if rural folk make up the majority of the sizable group that wants to privatize mail. Rural mail can’t survive without massive subsidies and I’m sure every farmer knows it.
I highly doubt every farmer knows it (not that real farmers make up the majority of rural voters).
*puts on a rural voter hat*
"Once, I got charged a late fee because I never got the water bill. The mailman probably didn't even deliver it. All he does is sit in that mail truck and drive around, and regular folk pay for it. Have you seen the price of stamps?"
Its funny, when I have to deal with almost any department in Philly in person I’m almost always hoping to find a slightly-past-middle-aged black woman who’s been working there since 1990 when nothing worked well, and therefore knows everything and everyone and is willing to just talk you through everything like you’re new but not stupid.
Our first construction inspector for our project was such a person, albeit younger. “You guys screwed up this, this, that, and this. Do it and document X, Y, and Z via photos and W via video before your insulation people come and I’ll pass all this stuff at the drywall inspection.”
I’ve also dealt with the archetype being discussed here, but it’s almost never among the middle-class skilled bureaucrats. Its the parking enforcement “cop” at the airport, etc.
The parking enfocement dudes at PHL arrival terminals D-F are some of the meanest and most miserable people on the planet. My dad once got a ticket for not moving from the pick-up lane during the 30 seconds it took my mom to walk to the car.
I have been fortunate never to encounter this at PHL, but I remember well an incident while I was in college elsewhere... I was literally pointing at the younger brother of a friend 50 yards away coming out of ORD, having pulled up less than a minute prior. I was told, "I'll have you arrested if you don't move" by some morbidly obese woman who would have struggled to keep up had I moved the car up slowly to meet him.
Had to do another loop and arrive back at the exact same spot, taking up three times as much curb time and wasting 15 minutes of everyone's time.
The commonality in my experience has never been the race of the folks involved, it's been that they're drawn from the local underclass and have a massive chip on their shoulder.
One of the police stuck with airport traffic duty last year yelled at my dad for following the orders he just gave him. It was the first time in at least 20 years I've seen someone yell at him in public. What a miserable human being.
Same! In my dad's telling of the story it was also the first time he (a Pastor) called someone an a-hole lol
It's funny that the type of government worker that drives the most resentment - people at the DMV - are specifically working for local governments, which feeds backlash to the federal government in favor of politicians who want more local control.
Is the DMV really still hated? Most people seem to have a positive experience these days.
It helps a lot when people can do some of the stuff online instead of going to the DMV office in person.
I'm not sure? My experience in DC was fine, but in Virginia it literally changes from town to town. The state government also changed a law a little while ago that you have to go to the DMV to get a copy of an accident report (instead of just being able to ask the police like before), which has been a nightmare in practice.
I’ve had positive experiences with the MI SOS (DMV equivalent). The website tells you what to bring and allows you to schedule an appointment. Arrive prepared and you’ll likely be out in 10 minutes.
Waaaay back in the early 90s Pat Buchanan got a lot of traction by saying he was sick and tired of having to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish.
You are on the right track, but I don’t agree with your framing. The problem with the federal government is not insufficient expertise, it is the much larger problem of an inability to adjust for altered conditions, learn from mistakes, and enforce rules in a clear and fair manner. DOGE’s failure to tackle these problems made me smell a rat.
I don't disagree with those problems also existing, but my prior is that:
- all three problems, particularly "enforce rules in a clear and fair manner", are primarily downstream of the actual laws passed by Congress and decisions made by the legal system rather than failures of the federal bureaucracy itself.
- the "inability to adjust for altered conditions" is often due to rigid contracts with the organizations that actually do a large portion of what the government does (and that flexibility often involves either expensive change orders or being grossly overcharged in anticiption of unreasonably large changes to the originally procured work).
- "learn[ing] from mistakes" is hard with siloed organizations constrained by extensive rules outside of their control that are ran by political appointees that change direction every four to eight years.
Just buttressing point one, who do you think is arguing for all the small business carveouts for some middle of nowhere town in South Dakota? Not a government employee…
Improving government is hard, requires real expertise and takes time to achieve real changes.
Which is why you'll never see this Republican party improving government.
Boston is probably much more complicated to build a tunnel through.
Last time I checked, Boston didn’t have any 300-meter deep fjords. Even if you adjust for the number of lanes, the difference per lane kilometer would still be massive, Boston was 100x as expensive.
Geology aside, Boston has more lawyers per square inch than just about anywhere on earth.
The human geography is harder to bore through than nordic stone.
But think of all the buildings and roads you have to dig under, divert and connect to.
And Boston is built on swamp and infill with several rivers nearby. I dunno, the process seemed really inept and corrupt at the time, but I think there were genuine challenges.
Broadly speaking: Paris, Madrid, and the like are centuries-old cities with extensive underground infrastructure, and yet they still build subways at much lower cost than NYC. The Big Dig may have been a more complex project but I think it is similarly flawed to argue that the complications were what drove such a disproportionate expense.
If you want a deep dive on the Big Dig, GBH did a neat podcast series I think last year: https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig
to be fair there is less volcano risk
To be fair, if the federal government was run like the Trump Organization, I'm sure they would have found $1 Trillion in waste fraud and abuse.
This is a pretty funny theory. Trump thinks the Government is wantonly corrupt because its all he knows lol. Its not that he is an effective altruist bemoaning the Zero Sum nature of the world. he thinks its the only path dependency available
You can apply this type of logic to many of the Trump/Republican admin actions and it seems to explain a lot. "This is how I would personally act in this situation. Therefore, those other people must be acting how I would act." Repeat ad nauseum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_trigger
I get that this is an article about Medicaid cuts, and that's genuinely the most important thing at the moment because maybe we can stop them. But in terms of the long term impact of DOGE, I think Matt has consistently underestimated it by taking position 1.
Changing Medicaid formulas is something that can be reversed in 4 years, and its impact is mostly bounded to the time it's in place. The destruction of American state capacity is going to be much much harder to fix. Matt and Brian talked about the IRS and the amount of focus needed to fix that on Politix, but that's one of the easiest to fix. The destruction of American science and universities, or of weather forecasting, or volcano monitoring, or long term studies of education, or the US foreign service, are all going to take decades to fix, and that's only if bipartisan agreement to fix them returns.
This is a dramatic underestimation of the impact of these Medicaid cuts. For one, the impact on people losing their coverage is not reversible- if you're an elderly person now who receives personal care aide services in the amount of 8 hours a day, losing those benefits means that what could be the final years of your life are significantly immiserated. Not to mention that the hospitals that close because of the loss of revenue won't just magically reappear on January 21, 2029. The long term impacts of these cuts will be truly and deeply harmful to millions of Americans, and rebuilding the damage done will take a lot longer and involve a lot more than just updating the FMAP in 4 years.
We can be upset about both things (Medicaid cuts and loss of state capacity) without downplaying either to highlight how bad the other is.
I agree that the human suffering caused by the medicaid cuts will be much greater in the near term. And there are always long term consequences. But the structure of medical care in the country is unlikely to change, and thus it's much easier to return to a better place. The same is true for lots of things where the government primarily does funding and they cut a small share of it, like road construction or schools. In contrast, cutting huge swaths of agencies and programs, or devastating funding where the government is the primary funder (eg science research or public transit) is much much harder to restore after a few years.
I think it's fairer to say that these are two different types of harms.
The Medicaid cuts are going to kill people. Those people won't come back to life when the cuts are undone.
But ten years after the cuts are undone, the world will look pretty similar to how it would have looked without the cuts.
The science cuts will dismantle infrastructure in the US and it's not simple to just reopen a lab that was closed. The scientists will have moved on, and that also means that the people training the next generation of scientists won't be there. Lots of people will have moved abroad, and it may be that the US dominance of top-level research just doesn't recover, or takes decades to do so.
"But ten years after the cuts are undone, the world will look pretty similar to how it would have looked without the cuts."
Potentially (maybe even probably) true. But the certainty with which people are acting like you can just roll back the clock if Dems regain the Presidency in 2028 seems overconfident to me. Expanding health care opportunities was a huge political lift that was tremendously difficult. Restoring the situation to the status of the Medicaid programs from last year will not be easy (we're talking about potentially needing to restore roughly a trillion dollars of funding that will be stripped by the BBB), which doesn't even include an evaluation of the opportunity costs of 4 years of declining and deteriorating health care infrastructure.
I think your first point is incredibly accurate- the difference in harms between the Medicaid cuts and the loss of state capacity are so different that I don't see much value in trying to compare them. There's just far too many moving parts to assume "this can probably snap back into place with a change in administrations, whereas this other stuff can't".
It's much better to address each issue individually rather than comparing and conflating the two.
Yes, I think this is exactly right. I mostly commented because I think Matt is consistently underrating the second kind of harm in his writing about DOGE.
Even further, the best and brightest students simply won't make the commitment of 10+ years to become a scientist now that it's abundantly clear that funding will get blown away by any electoral winds. The federal research funding system has been revealed as fundamentally untrustworthy and you can't put that back in the bottle. The only way to restore confidence is massive reform to guarantee independence from politics, but Congress will not do that (they couldn't agree on it even if they wanted to, which they don't).
Didn't they time is to none of these changes happen until 2029?
The timelines have shifted throughout the negotiation process, so it's hard to make definitive statements about what the final cuts will look like and when they will go into effect. Some provisions included delayed implementation dates, some did not.
I agree, they dramatically underestimate the challenge of hiring qualified people and building expertise among a group employees, which is kind of unsurprising given their background tbh. The government already struggles to do this to begin with, and now it's much worse.
The DOGE harms have been quite real. Aside from my own misery of having to be in the office 5 days a week for the first time since ~2013, they're cancelling contracts left and right with no warning and that is seriously hampering our ability to do our jobs. And that's before the Hell of RIFs/Vera/VSIP and generally treating the civil service like shit. The civil service morale can't get much lower. Musk enabled a lot of misery while he "played" at governing. It's infuriating he'll never be held accountable for the misery and real harm his inflicted on millions worldwide because his understanding of policy issues is on the "Limbaugh" level, at best.
One thing I share with the ignorant American electorate is a lack of sympathy for government workers who complain about having to go to work.
"ignorant" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.
The agency I work for had been fairly aggressive about embracing telework, and the policy going back a decade+ was suddenly changed on us with minimal warning, despite the written CBA guaranteed our telework arrangement. The staff's decisions about where to work and live were made on the basis of good faith, long standing, agreements with the government that the government reneged on. So while you may not have had sympathy for government workers "having to go to work", you probably would if you had any idea what was going on.
It is the lack of honoring contracts and agreements all around in this administration that had me fearful because of the precedent it is setting. There are so many cases, even in my small city, of contracts and grants being cut halfway through a project. Maybe the projects were bad (I don't happen to think so), but the reasonable approach would be to adjust the program in the future, not halfway through promised funds. Who is going to trust the government to keep any signed on the dotted line agreements in the future?
Maybe but probably not. I have limited capacity for sympathy and there are a lot of issues in the world. You can always find another job.
If all you’re saying is that you’re too busy to care about someone, then why are you wasting your time telling them that?
Jesus some people took these comments super personally. Going to work in an office isn't oppression guys even if Gen-Z tells you it is
I personally know people who made financial decisions like buying a home away from their agency offices, because they believed that the government wouldn't arbitrarily change their word. That's pretty tough to just reverse. Actually one CDC employee I know said that the CDC no longer even had the office space in Atlanta to accommodate all of the now-returning workers. So it was 'you're required to sell your house and return to Atlanta, except that we don't have enough room for you in Atlanta'
No one said it was oppression. But you seemed to be very insistent on telling people to their face how much you don’t care about them. And you made it sound like it was impossible to work from home, such that return to office is just doing the bare minimum for doing your job.
Rules matter. Norms matter. Violating terms of an agreement in a manner that increases costs and lowers quality of work for no tangible or explained benefit is asinine.
ok, boomer
Good one
This is a bad incentive structure though if we want a generation of qualified people to go into government and policy.
Did your boss ever randomly decide to keep the job you've had for 5 years you had to either drive 3hr a day or move across the country... With no guarantee you wouldn't be immediately fired anyway?
This kind of thing happens in the private sector all the time…
EDIT: Which doesn’t change that it’s bad when it happens to you.
And whenever it does I think we can all understand why it would be frustrating and messed up for the company to force the employee to do that. If you had a friend that had this happen to them in the private sector would your response be "ehh, so what? No big deal. Just uproot your whole life or quit your job and enter into a very different future then the one you had been promised 24 hours ago. What are you complaining about?"? I would certainly hope not.
I get the instinct to say that this isn't the worst thing in the world and isn't on par with people dying in Africa or something. But I don't get the instinct to respond with a shoulder shrug and telling someone that because it CAN happen that it's therefore not something that they should be upset or frustrated about.
To me there's a big difference between, "I took the job knowing that my life could be uprooted and I could be forced to move across the country, and now I'm faced with moving," and "I took this job and bought this house with the written understanding that I would be able to work remotely, and now my boss is reneging on our contract." If you're a minor league athlete and you get traded, you have to move, but you knew that was a risk. If your boss promised you could work remotely and now you can't, that's a different story,
You’re correct, sympathy is appropriate when people’s lives are being disrupted.
I shouldn’t have been so flippant in my original reply.
On the other hand, I don’t want Democrats to be the party that worries more about civil servants than it does about taxpayers and service recipients. I think that’s a tendency we have that’s bad on the merits and that it hurts us politically.
Sympathy is good as a matter of personal behavior, but I don’t want it to be driving our policy on these kinds of issues.
Agreed. I think there's a distinction to be drawn between return-to-work policies for flexibilities that were granted due to the PHE and telework arrangements that were deemed appropriate long before telework became mandated. So as a policy matter, I'm fine with saying "the PHE is over, so those of you who had PHE related flexibilities are losing those flexibilities because the underlying reason has disappeared." That's a fine policy, and I think you nailed it on the head when you said "Sympathy is good as a matter of personal behavior, but I don’t want it to be driving our policy on these kinds of issues."
Brian fell into the latter camp though- he had flexibilities going back to about 2013 according to his original comment. So stripping that away strikes me as equally bad policy. The decision to force him back to the office had nothing to do with good policy or rational HR decision making- it was just punitive and lumping him in more broadly. So I can certainly understand why he's especially bothered by the decision.
If you care about state capacity, then you have to care about the ability of the civil service to some extent, even if you think there need to be changes to things like hiring and firing. The ability of the state to execute is related to its ability to hire and retain competent employees. If you make this even harder to do, I don't see how state capacity magically gets better.
Is that supposed to make it a good thing?
Sort of. Once I moved halfway across the country for a job in New York, then a couple weeks later the entire office closed and almost everyone was laid off. I had the option to keep my job but would have to move back where I came from. Things happen and we're all just cogs at the end of the day.
That sounds like a problem worth fixing, not a model to emulate.
Did you feel perfectly fine about all of that? Or were you frustrated?
It was definitely annoying but I do think things like this are a relatively common occurrence
There's a big difference between "this is a relatively common occurrence" and "I don't have any sympathy for you for dealing with it." Kind of shocked to have to point that out. I would hope you wouldn't approach other experiences with that mindset.
"Oh you have a bad cold? Boohoo, those are incredibly common."
"Your girlfriend broke up with you? Happens all the time, no big deal."
I mean, c'mon man, the guy you were talking to is another human being on the other end of the screen. Telling him you don't care about his situation is fairly (and unnecessarily) callous.
Do you think they weren't doing work at home? What evidence do you have for that claim?
Do you see the words "they weren't doing work at home" in my comment?
“lack of sympathy for government workers who complain about having to go to work” seems to suggest you view those working from home weren’t doing work. It is reasonable to assume from context and framing.
I don't think that's at all reasonable as there's a difference between working and going to work. If you're going to argue please stick to things I actually said.
Why do you care if they go to work? You phrased it in a way that was very much intending for people to interpret it as though they weren’t doing anything at home and now are being required to do their job.
Why, are those workers just not appreciating the hidden charms of sitting in traffic?
Layoffs suck, but I don’t see why you’re complaining about being offered voluntary early retirement on reasonable terms. This offer also weakens the case that we were wronged with the back to office push (which I agree with on the merits).
Not sure why you think Musk won’t be held accountable. Both of his major companies (electric cars and space) are extremely sensitive to federal policy. If he doesn’t wriggle his way back into the Dem’s good graces before we’re back in power, I think the goodwill he’s burned will absolutely impact his bottom line.
It's unfortunate that the way you think he will be held accountable will be personal retribution from a future Democratic administration, which essentially amounts to a similar kind of corruption as what we see from the Trump administration. If Space X and Tesla are worthy of government contracts and funding that would promote the best interests of the American people then I would hope that a Dem President wouldn't instruct his/her administration to withhold such funding just to negatively impact Elon Musk.
I don't see much evidence that Dem presidents in the past were engaging in these kinds of actions, so I'm not sure why you're assuming a future administration will.
I agree with you that it’s a bad thing, but I disagree with you about how Dems have behaved in the past.
It sure does look like CA Dems tried to fuck with Musk deliberately:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/california-governor-newsom-propose-clean-vehicle-rebate-if-trump-cuts-ev-tax-2024-11-25/
It’s very hard to tell from that. So far, most clean vehicle subsidy policies have specifically limited the number of subsidies per company for precisely the stated reason - to facilitate more entry into the field. This has been how they were structured for many years, so that Toyota stopped getting subsidies for Priuses before any other company did, and Tesla stopped getting the EV subsidies. It would be surprising if new subsidies didn’t have that feature.
This article plays it up as though this is targeting Tesla because both the reporter and the governor want people to think that. But making sure Tesla was included would actually be the bigger policy change.
In addition to Kenny's comments, it was difficult to find the actual proposal put forth by Newsome. It seems like Newsome just proposed a market cap limit in the event that the Trump admin (which wasn't in office in November 2024 and hadn't actually done anything yet) removed certain federal subsidies. But the specific proposal and its implementation are pretty nebulous and unclear.
I took your original comment to be saying something slightly different (you claimed the Dems would withhold funding, which is different than changing subsidies to consumers in ways that will filter through to Tesla more indirectly), but I do take your point that at least some Dem politicians do seem to be thinking about actions that would hit Musk's bottom line. But I think it's less clear than your claiming that this is being driven by some sort of Musk animosity and/or decision making will be done specifically to harm him even though doing so is not in America's best interest.
Good for Newsom.
When Elon Musk does vast damage to our national government, it is fitting and proper that there be consequences.
First, most people aren't complaining about early retirement, they're complaining about forced layoffs. Second, at least some people are only taking early retirement so that they can avoid those layoffs. Third, I'm not sure that the early retirement is so generous that people can afford to actually retire, and that's assuming the administration follows through on its promises.
Musk at Doge was a guy on Ketmaine trying to get Twitter outrage by posting about government projects that kind of sounded bad when summarised and he surrounded himself with men under 25, all of this is odd.
If you were trying to do genuine cuts you would have accountants and Heritage staffers around the table, you would be sober and you wouldn't be so reliant on keyword searches.
Elon had a huge amount of power and used it to get popularity on his own site, rather than being corrupt, punishing enemies or fulfilling ideological ends. I guess it is the reflection of one man's psychology and/or his addiction.
An unshakeable confidence in your intuitions, and that you are a Great Man of history, is a common effect of ketamine addiction.
https://alisoncrosthwait.substack.com/p/a-ketamine-addicts-perspective-on
The irony being that he is. The equivalent of being a paranoid schizophrenic in East Germany.
"an attempt to rehabilitate Tesla’s reputation in a world where Republicans still don’t want to buy electric cars"
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 🤣🤣🤣
I know Elon Musk is extremely unlikely to read Matt Y's Substack, but just in case he does, here's my message to him:
Buddy, you're supposed to be an ultra-brilliant genius, a demigod among mere men, so this should be easy for you to understand: You are NOT going to rehabilitate Tesla's reputation. You did not just kill Tesla's reputation with the eco-friendly PMC set and piss on the corpse; you *transmogrified* it in an unholy dark rite.
What now, Mr. Space Genius? What do you expect to happen? The Truck Nutz crowd loves you for shitposting on Xitter but the vast majority of them will never buy a pricey Tesla, and the nice PMC liberals who used to love and admire you (myself and Husband included) are all like "I wouldn't be caught dead driving a Deplorean/Swastikar/Incel Camino/insert your favorite derogatory nickname that hints at your turn to the Dark Side." Enjoy selling your cars to the Curtis Yarvin-curious wealthy tech bros who still want them, i.e., <20% of your original intended market.
[Pitch Meeting Guy voice] Oh, whoops! Whoopsie!
And don't expect me to feel sorry for you. You said empathy is a weakness of the Western world, did you not? I don't want to be weak.
[sad trombone outro]
This is good, but I don't think it really goes far enough. Musk trashed Tesla's reputation as Hyundai/Kia and Ford have come into the EV market with a vengeance. BYD is a massive stormcloud on the horizon.
The timing is awful.
I think it's important to note that DOGE isn't done. The broad point here, about DOGE's failure, is well taken. But DOGE still exists, and it's still firing people. My wife's division is facing two rounds of RIFs, and the leadership team is having to spend time they don't really have meeting with DOGE officials to try and convince them that their job is important. The big headlines are gone, so I think people believe that DOGE has stopped getting rid of government workers, but they are still cutting state capacity to the bone.
I think even the $60B in DOGE cuts is a generous estimate. Judd Legum's Musk Watch has a DOGE tracker, and they've only been able to verify $16.3B of the DOGE cuts - around $50 per American. All this chaos and lives lost for cuts that are an immaterial percentage of the federal budget
I thought you wrote $16.38 instead of $16.3B and I was prepared to believe it.
It might as well be $16.38
Really it's about tree fiddy.
I think that also doesn’t count all the money spent on operations or salaries for DOGE
It's more likely that DOGE will cost us more money in the long-run with the IRS cuts and all the other second-order effects from how badly it was done. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-cuts-cost-135-billion-analysis-elon-musk-department-of-government-efficiency/
The lost tax revenues from the IRS firings will more than eat up all the savings.
I've given away bottles of disappointing whiskey that cost me more than $50. These numbers are so pathetic in a multifaceted manner.
"Lots of rank-and-file Republican Party voters sincerely believe that it’s possible to dramatically cut taxes and balance the budget without painful cuts to retirement and health care programs that they support."
I guess "believe" is doing some funny work. This is a sort of metaphysical "belief" that signals allegiance to a cause without any empirical content: Obama was born in Kenya, the Assumption, fossil fuel firms cause climate change.
DOGE's failure will not affect this "belief."
Nor was it trying to bring the Federal Work force "to heal." It was just a way (one among others) to do harm to perceived enemies like USAID, public media, universities. At that it was quite successful.
This is true for Republican partisans, but I think that a lot of recent Republican voters genuinely believe that "it’s possible to dramatically cut taxes and balance the budget without painful cuts to retirement and health care programs that they support". People are generally innumerate and have a weak at best sense of what the government does and how much it spends on various things, and I have a strong prior that the persuadable voters Trump picked up in 2016 and 2024 are significantly less informed and innumerate than the average American. I know people with graduate degrees who work in government and seem to genuinely believe you can fund universal healthcare by taxing billionaires and cutting defense spending. If well-educated, politically active Americans do not understand how much of the budget goes to defense or social programs (primarily healthcare and social security), I highly doubt that "undecided voters" have anything resembling a clue.
I agree with this, most people just don’t know very much or think hard about it
“"it’s possible to dramatically cut taxes and balance the budget without painful cuts to retirement and health care programs that they support”
Similarly a great many democratic partisans claim you can create a European welfare state with defense cuts, higher income tax on the rich and some wealth taxes.
The "this B2 bomber is why we don't have healthcare" takes are plentiful.
I don't think innumeracy is limited to voters or Republicans or Americans.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/dec/06/mps-and-peers-do-worse-than-10-year-olds-in-math-and-english-sats
I agree--acceptance of innumeracy is baffingly common across the world. I've never been anywhere where illiteracy among elites would be accepted, but most places seem to tolerate people who are the numeracy equivalent of not being able to read "A Cat in the Hat" making important decisions. Most universities in the US push "broad education" to some degree, but I've never seen it go both ways. STEM people are required to learn to write essays and do some basic humanities work, but humanities people are allowed to take joke versions of STEM classes if they're required to at all. At my alma mater, they loosened the requirements so much that someone could fulfill their math and science requirements with a logic course (taught by the Philosophy department via readings without doing any rigorous logic) and a social psychology methods course (that didn't really teach empirical methods at all besides falsely claiming that p-value < 0.05 = truth).
I don’t know the situation at your university, so I don’t know which logic class fills the requirement there. I’ve taught that logic class at several universities and it’s always full of students with math anxiety. I’m not sure what you mean by “rigorous logic”, but in the classes I’ve taught they at least have to learn to calculate truth tables, and either do some formal proofs, or apply Bayes theorem. There are some number of students who actually manage to overcome their math anxiety, because the material of this class is sufficiently different from the calculus-focused classes they have taken their entire life that they can reset their mental expectations of what they are able to do. I think logic and probability are in fact more relevant to basic numeracy than calculus is.
(There’s often a “baby logic” class as well where people learn to identify fallacies - I don’t think that one fills the quantitative reasoning requirement but it might.)
You did a much better job of explaining it than I did. By rigorous logic, I was thinking of non-trivial truth tables, proofs, Bayes theorem, or really anything "mathy". It may have changed since then, but the class that I was thinking of matched your "baby logic" description and came across as more of a debate course. I don't care if undergraduate students take a calculus or formal statistics class or not, but I was really frustrated by the humanities departments managing to shelter their students from half of the college's departments while complaining about how other majors lacked academic breadth.
I generally agree that logic and probability are more relevant to practical numeracy than calculus. At my current university I TA a course on causal inference and statistical modelling for public policy students that tries to hide the underlying math and statistical methods and emphasizes being able to read empirical papers and understand what assumptions they're making. I fully support teaching in a way that makes people feel more confident thinking empircally and avoids triggering math anxiety, but I do think it's reasonable to expect every student to learn a little about thinking in an empirical or quantitative way.
As a science major I complained about this literally all the time. There were very limited options where I didn't have to read 500 pages a week but for humanities people they could basically do Middle School level science to get credit
And then the humanities students and faculty complain about how the STEM people lack academic breadth.
Let me advertise the philosophy department to students from all sides - in our classes that fill humanities requirements, you probably only have to read about 20-30 pages a week, rather than the large amounts you have to read in English and History classes (though you have to read it closely to figure out where the person is actually making arguments, and you have to think about which premises are reasonable or questionable, and how they disagree with the other things we've been reading); and in our classes that fill math requirements (i.e. logic), you don't have to do any calculus (though you do have to learn to follow the precise rules of setting up truth tables, and following the rules of inference for each logical symbol in creating formal proofs - or Bayes' theorem, if you take the probability and inductive logic class).
I feel like most schools will have a Hermeneutics of Marvel Movies or something course, no?
Maybe there’s an asymmetric information thing. You don’t know if a class like that is going to be taught by a true believer who makes you read 400 pages of Marvel Theory a day. Whereas in STEM it’s pretty clear which classes are Physics for Poets.
Still, I don’t think all humanities courses are that intense or high level.
US universities are deeply unwilling to fail people
My university was actually willing to fail people (I withdrew from a class and started over after practing the prerequisites more because there was a decent chance I would fail it) and my anecdata is also from Germany, Brazil, and the UK, which all seem to be willing to fail people than the average US institution. There seems to be a near global acceptance of smart people making important decisions having weaker symbolic manipulation and numeracy skills than a mathematically-inclined 10 year old.
Yeah my experience of other systems- Canada, the UK, Germany- is that they are much more willing to fail people.
Canada and Germany too, they let a ton of people in and fail a huge proportion.
At schools I have worked at in the states, it was kind of hard to fail people administratively unless they just didn’t show up. Like you would have to do paperwork to give an F for my quantitative methods class
"my anecdata is also from Germany, Brazil, and the UK, which all seem to be [more] willing to fail people than the average US institution."
In the UK, at least, this is not the case.
In France they don't let you become a hairdresser unless you pass a rigorous maths exam.
I thought you had to be trolling, but this appears to be real (https://eurydice.eacea.ec.europa.eu/eurypedia/france/assessment-vocational-upper-secondary-education).
I would be happy to give hairdressers a pass, but I would expect lawyers, senior government officials, and corporate executives to have some sense of the difference between a mean and a median or intuition about how big a trillion is compared to a million outside of their area of expertise.
Lawyers are lawyers because they hate math, or what they think math is. A lot of judges are, to put it bluntly, anti empirical. That is, they’re looking for a reason to just throw out all the complicated litigation math and decide on a legal philosophical ground in most cases. You still need the numbers, but a depressing number of judges just assume two sets of numbers cancel each other out. A lot of lawyers know this!
My friends who went to mid-level law school in the 1990s had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_(book) on their required reading and discussed it frequently in class.
I once tried doing the Physics section of the french hairdressing exam and I struggled despite a degree in physics. They really want to have high standards.
Do French people have really great hair or something?
>I've never been anywhere where illiteracy among elites would be accepted
You must have missed out on FrigidWind’s Bargain Basement All Expenses Included 2 week tour of rural Bihar.
I am always down for any all expenses tour, especially to a subcontinent that I have never visited.
The irony is that Doge was a genuine attempt to get smart people who are good at maths into government positions.
Based on the people they hired, they probably achieved that. It just takes a long time and a lot of humility to learn enough about complex systems to be useful. A lot of the claims they made (eg weird records in a database == fraud) was reminiscent of the kind of dumb, arrogant stuff I did as a 17 year old working at a software consultancy.
Yes, but aren't a lot of those DOGE people still there? Particularly after all the firings and forced resignations. Moreover, I personally am quite excited for the contract work they're figuring out w/ Palantir. That firm has a ton of experience in working w/ legacy IT infrastructure in government and corps. Eg, they certainly know how to mass migrate off of 60’s era hardware and software to massively decrease capex and opex expenses, while creating more intuitive, modern UIs and dashboards to simplify analytics and revisions to programs that implement business or government policy.
Specifically, I’m quite confident that in 6 to 12 months time they will be able to quantify issues with potential SSN fraud, be it on the illegal employment side or fraudulent benefits. They should even be able to use historical transaction logs to identify any likely perpetrators. Moreover, they can make their assumptions of fraud legible enough for outsiders to challenge and critique these considerations.
I doubt this will save much money, but we’ll at least have quantitative insights to disprove the myth around massive savings. Could also be useful in implementing some limited amount of deportations for employment and wire fraud. Not to mention empowering future, more sophisticated logic to implement more complicated policy. Eg, Republicans have long claimed that there is massive SSI fraud, so let them actually craft a bill and associated computer program logic to eliminate what they define as fraud.
They could also make real progress into healthcare provider fraud, or at least up charging, as has been plaguing the healthcare industry for decades. See private practices being reclassified as hospitals to increase reimbursed funding. [1] They might even be tempted to require retiree relocations from urban cores like SF to lower costs of living areas in order to both decrease expected provider costs as well as pay for the associated SALT cap rollbacks for those same metros. Maybe Palantir and staff will even modernize and automate IRS filing and fining to reduce subjective pain points.
Regardless, I think all of us with something of a technocratic bent should be excited for these possibilities, even if most of the pro-social gains are realized under a future Democratic administration that utilizes the upgraded digital infrastructure for more pro-social policies.
[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-press-releases/more-physicians-move-practices-owned-hospitals-private-equity
I hope this is true, but Elon Musk's leadership got DOGE off to an awful start. I worry that the various organizations that need modernization will do some combination of resisting and avoiding DOGE staffers out of fear for their jobs and ending up as Twitter main character despite not having a Twitter account. On top of that, the deep unseriousness of the first few months of DOGE is unlikely to inspire people to try to proactively work with them.
From my experience working with legacy federal systems, a lot of stuff is not written down in a clear place and many critical design choices predate decent version control systems. It's less hunting through git commits and more knowing who and what to ask to find the systems analyst IV that has a bunch of emails from 1999 that explain why the unique identifier field documented in the PDF codebooks that haven't been updated in fifteen years is not actually unique and how to work around it.
>Eg, they certainly know how to mass migrate off of 60’s era hardware and software to massively decrease capex and opex expenses, while creating more intuitive, modern UIs and dashboards to simplify analytics and revisions to programs that implement business or government policy.
All this is fine and good, but you know as well as I do that such migrations and upgrades require a lot of upfront cost, a steady + competent hand at the tiller and willingness to overcome growing pains. Has this administration shown that is willing to approach such issues in a measured way? The experience of DOGE suggests more of a “slash and burn, rip out the copper for cash” versus “methodically conduct process audits to identify outdated processes, ineffective personnel and obsolete hardware/software, present a plan to upgrade said hardware ($$), remove/hire personnel and improve processes, get buy in (by carrot or stick) and implement while continually monitoring KPIs”.
If they had wanted to actually fix things they would have hired Karp and people in that orbit sooner. Palantir and others are willing to compete for contracts (great!) but it’s worrying that they won’t touch the admin with a ten foot pole.
Do you genuinely think those people aren’t in government already? Who do you think works at census, at the NIH, NSF, or heck the SDS? It’s not like you fail comps then immediately get a government job
The problem is that Silicon Valley is really insular and only appreciates code compared to other sectors. There have already been smart numerate quant people working on fiscal issues for years inside and outside of government, but they weren't consulted.
We are talking about a guy who left tech to transform the world of rocketry, electric cars and solar panels all industries completed different from coding and he did this by hiring industry experts.
But the guys he hired didn't understand those sectors or any others. They were usually the least experienced person in any room they were in. One of them spent her time trying to be a fashion TikTok influencer instead of learning about the agency she was gutting. And Musk himself has become insular as he's descended into a ketamine-induced Twitter hole.
How much can foreign aid cost, Micheal? 10 dollars?
IIRC, surveys show that Americans think that the US government spends something like 25% of its budget on foreign aid and should reduce that to 10%.
They also think 20% of the population is Muslim and 40% are gay and 40% are black and 40% are Asian and 50% are Hispanic. (And that most of these numbers should be reduced, but that anyone who actually suggests reducing any of these is a Nazi.)
A lot of voters run their own households without a clear idea that they are debt spending. But the buying on credit scam has been going on for decades, so lots of people are unclear about the real choices needed to live within their means. So rather than talk about the deficit, it's now all about lowering taxes.
Don't most Democrats, British voters, French voters, Chinese non-voters etc all believe you can spend more/tax less without impacting benefits for the elderly, it is just a universal flaw in how the public think.
Yes, a great many democratic partisans claim you can create a European welfare state with defense cuts, higher income tax on the rich and some wealth taxes.
True, but not everyone has a deficit = 6% and the government proposing to increase it.
Of wealthy democracies only Norway, Denmark, Greece, Switzerland and Taiwan don't have budget deficits.
Zero budget defcits are not the ideal, its deficits that finance public investent.
Greece!!?!
Actually I was looking at data for April they are back in a budget deficit now
I mostly agree with this. Homer Simpson once said, "Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand." In the case of the typical rank-and-file Republican Party voter, it's more like, "Just because I don't understand doesn't mean I would care if I did." Knowledgeable conservatives do understand that people are going to get hurt, but they see that as good.
On the other hand, you don't need a large number of Republican Party voters to get disillusioned to see a big political impact. If just a few of them are peeled off, then combine that with what's likely also happening with swing voters and it adds up to real political damage.
IMO, they aren't really getting deceived much at all. It's almost always willful ignorance.
They think they're in on the scam, so it's ok that there's some massaging the facts in service of the cause.
The elevation and acceptance of deception and outright lying is a sight to behold, especially considering that so many on the right call themselves Christians.
Watch Democrats talk about gender roles or masculinity and you’ll see much the same dynamic. Women who would only date high status men say lots of egalitarian things.
What does “high status” mean here? People in the US still tend to marry others with similar levels of education, but women in the US are now more likely than men to marry someone with less education than them, whereas that used to be the other way around. Men still tend to be the higher earner in a given pairing on average, but that still seems to be mostly accounted for by men earning more than women with similar levels of education, and related biases in career choice (the causes of which are complex and multifactorial). What we have is high levels of assortative mating by both genders. “High status” women on average marry and expect to marry “high status” men and vice versa, which seems pretty egalitarian. If I had to guess, that’s probably even more likely in the democratic circles you’re talking about.
My point is, plenty of women say things like “money doesn’t matter” or “we are all morally equal” or “i just want someone who likes me” and then act very differently. Egalitarian pretensions founder upon the realities of dating. Any sort of “equality” which means nothing in the dating market is little more than a subsistence guarantee.
They're perfectly willing to date or marry people of any social class, as long as they share household style preferences, some hobbies, and interests about things to talk about - never mind that these requirements for shared things rule out nearly everyone who isn't of the same social class. People don't understand disparate impact.
What breakdown are you pointing to re: fossil fuels and climate change?
Clearly, GHG emissions from burning fossil fuels contributes to AGW. There are many instances at which we can curtail the degree of GHG emissions, as they’re mostly not burned while the fuels are being extracted, but it’s not ludicrous to link the firms extracting the fossil fuels from the ultimate impact those fuels have on the climate once they’re burned. They’re clearly being extracted precisely so that we can burn them.
I don’t think I get how linking fossil fuel firms to climate change is supposed to be analogous to a belief in a balanced budget without cuts to programmes.
Thomas knows how climate change works, he’s posted about it before. I read his meaning as: lefty activists are wrong to believe that “fossil fuel companies cause climate change for the evilz” rather than “we, wealthy (by world standards) consumers, collectively cause climate change with everyday activities like driving, and fossil fuel companies just meet the demand we create.”
Thanks. I probably would not has said it as well.
Ah cheers
I would love to point out all the high fossil fuel consumption degrowthers do, but they would just get smug and yell "no, but we're doing it for the good cause of the planet!!!!"
I'm kind of convinced it was a "friend-enemy" power flex (that had long term intentions) on bureaucracy wrapped up in kayfabe of "waste fraud and abuse".
Understand why matt would think it's more useful to try and disabuse conservatives of the waste fraud and abuse rhetoric (you can find some but it quickly turns into actual governing priorities that probably do matter to you and the populous, if you talk about deficits or debt sizes)
It's a real shame that Elon and the gang won't have to publicly admit DOGE was a big lie/failure.
DOGE may have failed from Russ Vought's point of view, but not from Musk's. He managed to cripple state capacity, hand a lot of contacts to himself and this friends, and kill a lot of African children. I think he probably regards this a a good day's work and I haven't heard anyone who isn't a known liar say otherwise.