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Notes -
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):
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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