The thing with pundits that style themselves economists like Noah Smith is that in some instances they will lean hard on their economist card and be like ‘sure it maybe politically popular but it’s economically inefficient’ and other times they’ll be like ‘look I’m a pundit, maybe if you’re a moral philosopher (or an economist) it maybe better utilitarian wise but it’s electorally bad’, and I’m curious what’s the hidden paradigm that makes them choose one or the other
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Dems are such entrenched institutionalist everyone is convinced they lost due to some measurable strategic choice. It’s such utter delusion and a total lack of introspection. Dems lost because the American system is rotten. The institutions are failing all Americas. MAGA understands this and dems have no chance or real power until they do too.
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This is not really new news though is it? (this rant is not directed at you). All this waxing philosophical people are doing about minorities not voting the “right” way (lol, the racism always comes pouring out when the chips are down and the mask comes off), the ecoooooonomy stupid, etc.
Let’s take this from the POV of kamala campaign. Her central issue was bodily autonomy. Voters that cared about bodily autonomy somehow voted trump because “he said he wouldn’t sign abortion legislation.”
That’s it. You ran on a campaign where as a literal woman people believed a campaign promise of donald fucking trump, the biggest pants on fire liar rapist mysoginist to ever live. if you run on that platform and that happens you should get slaughtered. It’s not mystical.
Yglesias tweeting like a madman. He was born for this “we need to moderate” moment.
https://x.com/PatrickRuffini/status/1855058919954973169
I know Republicans have a fetish for retirement being tied to your pay, but if social security privatization accounts do so well, why not just have a sovereign wealth fund? No need to only limit the benefits of the market to individual retirement accounts.
Most voters also have no clue how anything like this works, they think that Joe was The Boss Of The Country when the Supreme Court took away abortion rights, so that’s the Dems fault.
People that post stuff like this do not have a good sense of how big Social Security actually is. The entire S&P market cap is like $45 trillion, Social Security collects a little over a trillion in contributions each year. If SS contributions had been poured into the S&P over the last 20 year then the entire composition of global capital markets would be different (to say nothing of the political shitshow of what would have happened in 2008 and 2020 if Social Security was dependent on the stock market).
I am not even saying that a transformation of SS into a massive source of capital investment would necessarily be bad, but it wouldn’t look anything like “we all would have got the same returns as the index the past 20 years”. That kind of change would have made the entire global economy different. Also, if SS is actually turned into a private accounts type set up, then it is not going to look like index investing on a massive scale, it is going to be private sector fee harvesting on a massive scale.
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Imagine what the suicide rates would have looked like if we put everyone’s SS money in the market right before the subprime mortgage crisis.
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SS retirement age will be continued to be moved up and the goalposts shifted for people around the age I am and there is tremendous rage about it brewing for a long time. Why the left hasn’t targeted this rage is beyond me. There’s healthy appetite for SS reform
Do you mean the Dems? They don’t want to increase taxes.
There has been a bit of chatter about a US Sovereign Wealth Fund in center-right economic circles for a while. I think it would actually be pretty easy to convince Trump to do it by:
A) Telling him all the cool kids like Saudia Arabia already have one.
B) Designing it in a way that would let him over leverage over certain economic sectors or companies. Imagine telling Trump that he could play around with a few billion dollars of taxpayer money and put it into crypto or Truth Social or whatever.
They’ve also consistently voted for these things in the past. it’s been part of my rant for a long time about the whole WHY DONT MILLENNIALS VOTE FOR US narrative that’s been persistent and false in the boomer left media for most of my life.
No. Not even the ppl who make it onto the Good Liars think this
He’d be more interested in channeling the “investments” to the companies of him and his loyal followers. They’d just grift the whole thing while people cheer him on for Running The Country Like A Busiess".
A lot of people have no idea how anything works.
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Real world anecdote time…
I walk into my gym in a Latino majority neighborhood this morning. Two young men are working the front desk, engaged in a conversation with two young female gym-goers. I doubt any of them are over 25.
I couldn’t eavesdrop in a way that wouldn’t be creepy, but the one thing I hear before moving on is one of the guys saying, “look at Biden… they threw him out like a dog”. Don’t hear much more, so I can’t assume who he voted for, I guess, but clearly right wing framing had sunk in.
After a quick warm-up, I passed by the desk again about 5 minutes later, and they are all still engaged in a conversation. Guy number two at the front desk says something like “yeah, but you live in New York, so if you need to…” Pretty sure he was telling them they can get abortions still, so it’s all ok.
Girl is getting frustrated responds that it’s a really fucked up position to basically say “well I’m ok, so I don’t give a fuck about everyone else”
Wish I had been able to hear more but those dribs and drabs were an interesting lens into the Latino men situation.
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I mean biden is partially to blame