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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3998 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024

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.

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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).

This is a good point. Breaking things is often bad. Making things is harder than breaking them.

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.)

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.

Yeah, the "everyone gets insurance someone 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?

pandemic

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.

This is the point in reading your reply that I'm pretty convinced I'm just being trolled, but I'll respond with charity.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think enough Republicans in Congress are not very pro-life, or are sufficiently moderately that I don't think it would happen.

And Biden wants to raise cap on the payroll tax that is causing this problem.

Fair point. But we also need to touch spending, which there's no chance he does.

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.

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.

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