Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The documents trial definitely seems like the most clear-cut case. And there's been drips of really bad-for-Trump-sounding headlines like yesterday "Special counsel probed Trump Mar-a-Lago trip that aides 'kept quiet' weeks before FBI search: Sources". The /r/politics commentariat is pretty convinced Trump and Kushner literally sold classified information to foreign adversaries, but I'd like to think if the government had anything resembling proof of a crime of that magnitude they'd actually indict them on it.
I'm not sure how much to read into it as really different from his first term, but it sounds like a more organized attempt to destroy the functioning of the federal government, so possibly even more effective at stopping a lot of important government functions. Not sure exactly how this interacts with the Chevron Deference case that presumably will get a Supreme Court opinion in the next day or two.
The above bleeds into the general policy issues that are more Republican Party related than Trump-specific: a Republican Party controlled federal government effectively means a 4-year pause on any chance to make improvements in anti-trust, climate/energy, environmental regulations, transportation, voting, public health, healthcare, USPS, IRS (e.g. Direct File), and I'm sure more areas that didn't come to mind writing this list. I don't expect to fully agree with Democratic Party policies, but I can generally expect them to not be actively trying to make things worse and there's a possibility of convincing them to do things better.
Trump's foreign policy in practice didn't seem to be majorly different, but he seems a lot more likely to do something stupid. And with the active wars in Ukraine and Palestine there's more opportunities for him to do real damage.
There's also some culture war-y issues that I'm likely shielded from living a Blue state, although could cause problems if I ever travel to/through a Red state. But a Republican Department of Education following Florida's lead could make it difficult for many of my friends to keep their jobs as people who are both teachers and queer. And many Red states making it difficult for people trying to have children to access healthcare and some national level politicians talking about want to make federal laws along the same lines make me worry about friends who want to get pregnant in the next few years. Also, more Republican appointments to the Supreme Court, among other problems, possibly results in Obergefell being overturned, although I'm not sure how that interacts with the Respect for Marriage Act.
It's good that someone is voting on national issues. I'd love to do so, but I think that would be naive of me.
The Democrats have made pleasant noises about high speed trains and carbon reduction, but in spite of the billions spent on CAHSR and Biden's electric charging stations, zero passengers have ridden CAHSR and only one charging station per billion dollars spent has been built. Millions of DEI hires have probably been made though.
Similarly, I'm sure pleasant noises will be made about anti-trust, but they will only go after political enemies, and big donors like Google will remain unscathed (if they don't actually get given a subsidy or tax break). "Health" funding will of course go to more DEI hiring. "Education" funding won't go to my kids, it will go to forgiving the student loans of AWFLs.
At this point the mask is off.
At this point, it's pretty obvious the Democrats will use the power of purse and prosecution to take from me and mine to benefit the PMC, so in spite of my agreement with their stated positions on so many things, I cannot vote for them.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, /r/politics is about the most biased pool you could think of.
I think it would be different from his first term, as he'll have way more buy-in. He's generally, through his generating a cult-following and way he handled that 2022 primaries, purged the party of people not willing to be pro-Trump. But I haven't looked at specific policies, to know whether they would be bad. What sorts of important government functions?
Now, my thoughts on your list:
Improvements on anti-trust: Probably a little more pro-corporation than under the democrats, but more hostile to them than Republicans ten years ago. I'm inclined to think people hate on corporations too much, so I don't know that I would be in favor of antagonism towards the largest and most successful companies.
Improvements on climate/energy: I'm really not sure how I feel about this. Our climate policy choices have not been ideal (like why are we not at least considering releasing aerosols into the stratosphere to reduce the greenhouse effect—it's way, way cheaper than reducing emissions). But it makes sense to be worry about contaminants.
Improvements on environmental regulations: I don't have a sense of how much the EPA is doing currently. I definitely appreciate keeping things clean, and the national parks and such. At the same time, I've heard that environmental regulations can be overly burdensome and make it considerably harder and more expensive to build things. Not sure how much of that is state vs. federal.
I don't have a good feel on either of the last two how much a president gets to set policy on those vs. it being mandated by Congress. I'm guessing the president can, with cooperative agencies, do a lot.
Improvements on transportation: Like, interstate highways? I have no sense as to whose administration spends more on them.
Improvements on voting: How exactly? I wouldn't mind requiring IDs. It'd be cool if we let children vote, and parents vote on their behalf, but no one serious would do that. Anyway, overall, how does the administration affect this?
Public health/healthcare: Yeah, our system isn't great. Not sure what's better. The most important thing, on this, though, is that we need to spend WAY less on this. Health care makes up almost a third of the entire federal budget. I'd prefer privatizing a lot more of that, in general, but we certainly shouldn't be spending that much when we're in as much debt as we are, and with as large of a deficit. But no one's going to touch this, because the old people will get mad. I trust Republicans better in a pandemic, given that there seems to be no course correction from the overreaction to 2020, and that Republicans would probably buy-in slightly more to Republican-given medical advice.
USPS: I don't see why you care about this much?
IRS: Is direct file a democrat thing? I hadn't realized it was polarized.
Foreign policy: I'm not sure. I agree that Trump is a little more likely to be unpredictable, but not terribly so. I think he's viewed as more competent, or at least as having more agency (which helps on some fronts), but is more hated by Europe (which hurts on those fronts). Biden doesn't always make good decisions, as seen in Afghanistan. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the ongoing foreign conflicts would have been less likely to take place if Trump were in the white house. At the same time, it wouldn't shock me if he just ceased support of Ukraine, which—I don't know that I'm a fan of, but I haven't thought about it sufficiently. He'd be more pro-Israel, I think. I don't know what even is a good resolution in Israel.
Oh, I'd love a Republican department of education. A significant reform in how universities are funded would be great. I have no interest in spending large amounts of federal money on a bunch of radicals. School choice probably is more a state thing, but that would be great too.
I don't expect any restrictions on IVF besides a few states. It's electoral suicide. Abortion restrictions are not nationally popular, and IVF restrictions less than that.
Supreme court is fair enough, though I wouldn't mind another conservative justice, except that that might make the democrats excessively mad and fuel polarization (but I'm not sure how much I should take that seriously, since they're already willing to slander the court as it stands currently). My sense was that Sotomayor's the only liberal who would have any real chance of dying? But she's not that old. Thomas and Alito are older, but they're the most conservative justices. I don't anticipate the court moving further right in the next few years, even if the law does, as a result of their actions. You're right that that could make a difference in overturning Obergefell, if they could convince Barrett they have standing and that stare decisis doesn't apply. Kavanaugh and Roberts don't like rocking the boat, and are enough of institutionalists that they wouldn't touch it, I imagine, but another conservative could make the difference. Not sure if that would happen, though, given Gorsuch's opinion in Bostock. But the marriage act you point to would suffice.
I'll note that the conservative justices, having looked a whole lot at them the past few weeks, seem considerably more principled than the liberal ones. At least, they're less likely to vote as a bloc, and they are more likely to care about what is correct law than whether it has things they view as good or bad.
So I guess that explains why you would prefer to vote blue, but doesn't really work to motivate me.
Here's my best pitch for you:
In general, we need to be spending way less. Social security will run out within ten years, on current trends. [The federal government] is struggling to find lenders to pay off the current spending. This will eventually turn into a sovereign debt crisis, crashing the U.S. economy with presumably negative effects on the world, both economically, and as a result of reduced American influence leading to a resurgence in nations trying to be expansionary. I fully expect this to happen within the next few decades. Let's try to have less of that, and Republicans have a better chance of doing that, even if way less than ten years ago, and even if it's not that high of a chance that they do that, instead of sleepwalking off an abyss. Yes, that would involve reducing welfare, but that'll happen anyway soon, as it runs out of funding.
I really wish we had Milei.
Anyway, regarding foreign policy, our shipbuilding capacity is far, far, far, worse than china's. I expect Republicans better to handle that, but not much. (There's so much inefficiency throughout the entire department of defense.) I expect Republicans to be more willing to deter bad action by nations. Republicans are evidently the only ones who might go after the Houthis, which is definitely needed, because shipping lanes are extremely important (Economics matters. People struggling in life is bad.).
I get that that's only two things, but I think those two matter by far the most, as the economy and foreign policy are the things with the largest effects.
Four years ago, I thought Biden would make the country more united. That didn't work, so you shouldn't expect that. Rather, what you see is institutions spending social capital on leftist causes, leading to further-declining trust.
Are there major wins from Biden over the last four years that you could point to that are better than the pre-COVID state of things? (E.g. reducing inflation, crime, a better economy: those don't count unless they're better than 2019.)
As I said, I'm here to understand, not to win arguments. Not that I won't respond, just that my goal here is not to convince you that I am right and you are wrong.
The short version is: of course there aren't any major wins. As long as the Democrats don't control Congress (and there's no realistic way of that happening in 2024; not sure what the 2026 Senate map looks like, but generally mid-terms aren't great for the president's party), they can't really pass any significant legislation outside of whatever they can squeeze into a budget reconciliation bill. The downside of a Republican presidency is much higher magnitude than the upside of a Democratic presidency because the Republicans have the goal of breaking things, which is a lot easier to do without legislation (the Republicans are also unlikely to get 60 votes in the Senate).
... do you think anti-trust is just lawfare against entities the government doesn't like? Monopolies result in high prices and bad service for all of us. The government doing something about them makes life better for everyone except the monopolists. Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy by Matt Stoller is a good book on the history of the politics around monopolies. The Biden administration is the first in a while to take monopolies at all seriously.
Somewhat related, Trump actively weakened the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has been actually doing things under Biden. I'd rather the financial system actually be restructured around smaller banks, but I don't see any political appetite for that.
Geo-engineering isn't a real solution to this problem. Even if we somehow knew how to do it and were confident we had all of the unintended consequences covered and well understood, the geo-political implications of fossil fuel dependence are still bad, as is the fact that fossil fuels getting increasing expensive to extract has been a drag on our economy for 50+ years and response for most of that time was to put our fingers over our ears and say "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU". The US government likes that they understand the geopolitical situation resulting from the importance of fossil fuels and the fact that the US has a lot, so they don't want to change, but that's playing with fire and it's stupid.
The only real headline here is the EPA press release "Biden-Harris Administration Announces $3 Billion for Lead Pipe Replacement". I don't have any other details here; mostly worried about a Republican president discouraging the EPA from enforcing existing regulations, but I assume there's always new things for the EPA to worry about.
The received wisdom on transit blogs is that a Republican administration probably kills, or at least significantly reduces, federal grants on bus/rail improvements. And probably kills any meaningful discussion on improving passenger rail in general. Inter-state rail seems more obviously the federal government's purview, but in practice a lot of projects that stay within a state are partially funded by federal grants.
If the Democrats could pass legislation, they could at least try to reinstate the Voting Rights Act. There's the For the People Act, although, of course, what politicians are willing to put in a bill they know will never pass may be different than what do would do once in power. I'd like to go further and uncap the House (perhaps with multi-member districts to have easier minority party representation), but I don't really see that happening, especially as it would likely be seen as a power grab by the Democrats since it would make winning the presidency without the popular vote basically impossible in practice.
Uh, single payer? Privatized medical billing is incredibly expensive and a complete waste of everyone's time. Everyone I know in health care complains that so much of their time is spent on billing instead of actually helping patients, and it's completely unnecessary except to employ a bunch of clerical workers doing nothing useful and funneling cash away from actually providing health care.
Don't get me wrong, Biden's handling of COVID (and H5N1 for that matter) has been awful. But his policy has been to do nothing while Trump's COVID policy was to actively sabotage everything except funding the vaccine development. Trump's pandemic plan is to disband the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (Biden's plan seems to be to shrug his shoulders and say testing cows for H5N1 is too hard, so not a lot better). A sensible COVID policy would have involved prioritizing research on transmission (after vaccines and treatments, of course, but it's not like the same scientists would be studying all of those) and what it's effected by and both communicating that information clearly (e.g. "gathering inside/inside with HEPA filters/outside is fine without masks is fine a X density, with N95s that are actually available at Y density") and providing the relevant equipment (HEPA filters, N95s, etc.). Instead we are watching another possible respiratory pandemic develop and no one's bothered to so much as put some HEPA filters in our
germ factoriesschools.I'm not sure where you got the idea that I care about this much. It's one of several items that get mentioned in news articles regularly. There's the obvious problem of it looking a lot like a plot to make mail-in voting work worse to reduce turnout and possibly swing elections. But also, it's an example of Republicans trying to destroy a cheap public sector solution so they can replace it with an expensive private sector one, costing everyone more money.
This is the point in reading your reply that I'm pretty convinced I'm just being trolled, but I'll respond with charity.
Yes, Republicans have proposed defunding Direct File. They didn't want it funded in the first place: the IRS creatively interpreted the funding bill letting them "study" the possibility to run a functional, albeit very limited, pilot program. Republicans are consistently against anything that makes filing taxes easier. They have openly stated their goal is to make the process of paying taxes painful to garner political support for reducing taxes. This makes them a political ally in Intuit and H&R Block who want paying taxes to be painful so they can sell you their products that should be unnecessary.
Also, the Republicans are consistently against funding for the IRS to actually be able to enforce tax law, which in practice results in rich people paying significantly less in tax than even what they are legally obligated to pay. Which is good evidence that they don't actually want to reduce the deficit because actually collecting taxes owed would help there.
Wait, what?! What possible evidence do you have that anyone thinks Trump is competent in foreign policy? The fact that his acting like an idiot didn't accidentally start any wars, so it must have been more calculated than it looked?
Really not sure how to respond to that. College has clearly gotten too expensive. The Democrats don't seem to really be trying to address the root causes and the Republicans just want to reduce the public funding to make it even more expensive.
School choice is a scam. Private schools that are better than public schools may exist, but they're the really expensive ones that school vouchers won't meaningfully cover, so they'd effectively be bleeding public school budgets to subsidize sending upper-middle-/upper-class children to private school. For the most part, private/charter schools are worse than public schools and the rare statistics showing otherwise are misleading because they're choosing their students. An important part of the scam is that school funding per student is not actually the marginal cost to educate a student in such a way that the funding for gen-ed students effectively subsidizes the much more expensive per-student special-ed programs. Charter schools don't accept special-ed students, so school voucher programs effectively defund special-ed through subtle accounting.
Not popular, and yet they happen anyway. Maybe the Republicans would keep their religious extremists from passing such policies if they ended up with a trifecta, but it's definitely something I worry about.
And Biden wants to raise cap on the payroll tax that is causing this problem.
The debt crisis is entirely artificial and it has been Republican policy to intensify it for decades because they want an excuse to kill welfare and other government spending. We could just not cut taxes and fund the IRS enough to collect the taxes that are officially owed.
This is a good point. Breaking things is often bad. Making things is harder than breaking them.
I actually do think that it it's often just lawfare. Or at least, not actually fixing problems. I get that monopolies are less efficient than competition, but that doesn't mean that it won't be weaponized or used in circumstances where breaking them up doesn't actually help.
Not infrequently, if there's a monopoly, it's a result of government regulation posing barriers to entry. That's certainly not always the case; monopolies can also naturally occur in industries with network effects, for example.
I don't think this is a good point. Maybe geo-engineering is risky, but it's so much cheaper that we should at least be seriously considering it. But your analysis of the negatives of fossil fuels is just bad. I'm certainly not arguing that we need to avoid sources of energy aside from fossil fuels. That would be silly. I'd prefer just to go with whatever the market prefers. So, if fossil fuels are expensive, we'd naturally cut back on them. I don't see precisely what your concerns are about geopolitics, but you do have to worry about the geopolitics of batteries, where, I believe, China is the big manufacturer.
Do people even use passenger rail in the united states? I guess I don't see why this is a big deal. Why is interstate rail needed when there are already flights and buses?
What deficiencies are there with the voting rights act? Like, what actual negatives are taking place currently? In principle I don't have a problem with an uncapped house, but in practice I'd oppose it for precisely the reason you suggest. (Same reason I'd prefer no Puerto Rico or DC statehood.)
Yeah, the "everyone gets
insurancesomeone else to pay for your medical bills, chosen by your work, not you" is not a good system. I think it'd be less of a problem if it weren't being done in the stupid way we do it. How would single-payer work, though? I'm not sure that I'd be a fan of globally set price controls. Would it still be possible to privately purchase additional care?I would appreciate if they drafted possible plans for different scenarios now, so that it wasn't an on-the-fly, "I guess we're doing this now" with no long-term plan. But that's just my preference, not anything I expect to be tied to either party. But fair point about stocking up for H5N1.
No, I wasn't trolling, and I'm sorry to come across that way. I legitimately hadn't realized that there was any political valence. I concur that filing taxes should be easier, so this is a good point.
I've seen people praise Trump for the Abraham Accords, and at least seen gestures at the idea that foreign countries were more reluctant under Trump than under Biden to do things like invade Ukraine, as a response would be a little more likely to be serious.
That said, I do not think isolationism would be a very good idea. But I'm not sure how isolationist he would be in practice.
Reducing public funding would definitely make it less expensive with regard to the total amount of money spent on colleges, aggregated. But I don't know how it would affect individual buyers. Make it more expensive.
But I don't know how bad this is. If we dropped federal student loans, it would still be possible to get private student loans (yes, at higher rates). It's definitely not hard to spend less on college, as state schools are cheap, so I don't really know how best to think about high college costs among prestige universities.
But we should try to reduce spending on colleges, especially because it is often mostly a positional good. We should also maybe be more cautious in doling out research spending, but I'm not as sure about that; it can genuinely be valuable.
You didn't mention it, but cancelling student debt is a terrible idea; it rewards those most who did not make fiscally responsible choices (like paying off their loans, or taking out less in the first place), and who are well-off enough to have gone to college (and so tend to have higher income), neither of which seems good.
Yeah, they're often subsidizing the wealthy, that's fair. But I don't know that I agree with your characterization of private/charter schools. At least in some states, charter schools can't choose students, though I would imagine many have a better pool. It looks like there exist school choice programs specifically for private schools. But people don't need to go to worse schools, if there are multiple schools in the same area; they can look at what they variously offer. I guess I've seen schools that are manifestly better than the local public schools, and so that's my instinct. At the very least, less dependence on teacher's unions and the ability to leave a school if there is a serious problem with it are good things. I heard that private and charter schools reopened earlier from the pandemic, which was good.
I think enough Republicans in Congress are not very pro-life, or are sufficiently moderately that I don't think it would happen.
Fair point. But we also need to touch spending, which there's no chance he does.
I agree that raising taxes to reduce the deficit is reasonable. Have Republicans really wanted to intensify the debt? I've mostly heard Republicans complaining about it. In any case, that doesn't change that the repercussions would genuinely be pretty terrible if the US defaults on its debt, or goes into full-on print-money-to-pay-for-everything mode to avoid it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link