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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9644 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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A mistake in government? It can literally kill, it can have dangerous long term ramifications on both the lives of the citizens and the future of the country as a whole.

This is true, but also we have had government for some time. As a calibration measure, can you give some examples of what are, in your opinion, the top five or ten worst mistakes in US government since, say, the year 2000?

Focussing only on unambiguous mistakes - i.e. avoiding decisions which one side thinks are bad for partisan reasons:

If we are restricting ourselves to the Federal government, then the worst mistake is invading Iraq with no clear political goal or plan in place for the post-war occupation. If Scott Sumner and Kevin Erdmann are correct (and their models are based on sound theory and have a record of making correct predictions) then the second worst mistake was misreading a housing market borked by fundamentals (YIMBY supply restrictions driving mass migration out of Blue cities in general and SoCal in particular) for a speculative bubble, causing an avoidable Great Recession. With one exception (failing to approve rapid antigen tests for COVID-19 fast enough or to approve sufficiently many competing manufacturers to make them cheap), all the other serious, unambiguous mistakes seem to be downstream of those two. The botched rollout of healtcare.gov was the most embarrassing mistake, but it turned out to be orders of magnitude less expensive than Iraq or housing.

If we include Federal, State and local government failure then my list looks like (order is a guess):

  1. NIMBYism and the attempts to obfuscate the damage it is doing.
  2. Reversing the Bratton/Giuliani era reforms to policing that had successfully reduced both crime and incarceration.
  3. Iraq
  4. The US's worst-in-class COVID response, getting both more deaths and more practical damage from restrictions that any other rich country. Most of the mistakes were not federal, which is why it is lower down the previous list. Apart from the lack of rapid antigen tests, key severe, unambiguous mistakes are keeping elementary schools closed after it became clear Zoom school wasn't working and elementary school age children weren't spreading the virus, retaining outdoor restrictions after it became clear the virus mostly spread indoors, and retaining any restrictions at all after the most vulnerable groups were vaccinated.
  5. Bush Jr's FEMA, Gov Landrieu, and Mayor Nagin collectively botching the response to Hurricane Katrina.

with the Bozo the Clown award for the most hilariously stupid, most total, most humiliating failure that doesn't make the list because the cost wasn't high enough going to CAHSR.

There is one I would add to the list, but I think most people would see it as a partisan issue rather than a clear mistake - Merrick Garland slow-walking the prosecution of Donald Trump for the events leading up to January 6. If the indictment drops a year earlier - critically, before Trump was the presumptive Republican nominee - then the ridiculous New York false accounting case never happens, nor does the Section 3 disqualification litigation, both sides (and SCOTUS) have an incentive to get through the immunity litigation faster (because Trump can't delay the trial beyond election day) so either Trump is ruled immune or the case goes to trial before the first primaries, the partisan temperature around the case is generally lower, and if Trump is convicted then the Republican Party has an open primary to find a non-felonious nominee. I think all three possible outcomes (Trump convicted, Trump acquitted, Trump conclusively ruled immune by SCOTUS) are better for the health of American democracy than what we got.

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