I find increíble how complacent Americans are with the Non concession of the previous election.
Either the election was stolen (and the US President is an usurper) or it was not, and Trump is an aspiring usurper. Discussions on policy are incredibly complacent when the election is about legitimacy.
This seems like a reasonable case to not vote for Trump, and has a pretty minimal effect on whether to vote for a GOP Congress or a Dem Congress on long-term growth and individual liberty.
The main problem of right populism is personality cult. Many of the problems and liberal overextension they point out are real. But as long as autocracy is the tool, who cares about the objective? Institutions and legitimacy are above policy.
It's helpful to pay attention to the legislature if we want to preserve it. Republicans in Congress refused to all vote to fund Trump's wall during his first two years, which was his most famous campaign slogan during the 2016 campaign. If we lived in a country where splitting one's ticket was impossible, there would be no debate downstream of the presidential ticket. But we don't, so there very much is one.
I think Pence's refusal to do what Trump wanted is a strong proof that what Trump wanted was illegal, and that is a kinda strong proof it was not stolen, because then he would have tried something legal.
The one-two punch of Hanania's essay and this is so mentally stimulating — a perfect example of what the "caucus of reality" can give to the world. Thanks for putting time into such a strong rejoinder!
Thank you for making the case against Hanania. I like Hanania's contrarian thinking, but on this he seems to have missed the harm that scuttling our nation's institutions will do. Trump may not be able to enact a coherent plan to do that himself, but his appointees would be more than capable. Also, libertarians should be very wary of great saviors who promise that upsetting the apple cart will make things great again. Once they are in power, the system is unable to get rid of them. See: Maduro...
The case that Trump is worse on "the economy" is much stronger if you don't assume, as you seem to in this article, that "the economy" is roughly synonymous with "economic growth". For instance, Harris is more likely to pass redistributive policies and protect various welfare programs. Will this increase or harm economic growth on net? It depends on the program but in general I'm sort of unsure. Will it economically benefit the average person in other ways? Certainly.
>While Trump might sometimes have good policies, he’s a loose cannon—a crazy person. He is, by my estimation, far more likely to crazily start a nuclear war than Harris because he’s erratic.<
This is the worst sort of obnoxious TDS. I had to do a double take to make sure you really wrote this. Anyways, taking this claim seriously for two seconds: One, Blumpft was already President once, and did he do anything crazy like this? No, he didn't. Two, if he gave the order to fire nukes, do you think that order would be obeyed? No, it wouldn't be, the regime would constrain him, just like it did when he complained about losing in 2020, as Hanania covered in his article. The only way nukes might fly is if the regime more broadly actually wants them to (extremely unlikely, thank goodness, but Trump doesn't get to do it either way).
>Second, Trump is worse on existential risks. While Hanania describes the badness of locking down schools, I’d trust a Harris administration much more than a Trump administration in the event of a pandemic. Global pandemics and AI are the biggest threats to the world, seriously risking ending advanced civilization.<
Dude we literally just had a pandemic and the left were the ones that screwed it up with insanely harmful lockdowns. The Trump administration accomplished the only intervention that you could reasonably argue was positive, Operation Warp Speed to get a vaccine out quickly. And you're citing pandemics as a reason to vote against Trump and for leftists now? What even. The AI risk thing is just silly. This is a science fiction concept. I might as well argue that we need to vote for Trump because he'd be better at negotiating with aliens in the event that they contact us in the next four years.
Then you cite veganism as another reason to vote left. This makes sense if you're a vegan, but if you're going to write an article for a general audience seeking to influence their vote like this, you should account for the fact that most people don't share this sort of niche worldview. This would be like me saying that everyone needs to vote for Trump because I'm pro-life and IMO millions of children are murdered each year via abortion. It's a big deal if you're me but the point of an article like this is presumably to try and convince people who *aren't* me, which means appealing to shared premises. If I'm going to bring up abortion, now I need to demonstrate why people must agree with me on abortion, which is a different article all on its own.
I have more criticisms but this is long enough. I don't like to be overly harsh but this was bad.
Yes, I think on foreign policy Trump was just flat-out superior to several presidencies in my lifetime. On domestic policy, it's often good on net, and you're right to bring up Operation Warp Speed as a great thing to focus on instead of the usual Democratic party wishlist (he had to sign some of it of course to get a bill through a Dem House in 2020.)
But on domestic *governing*, there is really high variance. The bad gets quite bad. There are two big problems that come to mind.
The first is that Trump did not have the trust of the military due to his impulsive and erratic behavior as an entertainer and brand-maker with little interest in being a statesman. As a result, civilian control over the military regularly weakened during his presidency and there's little evidence he can make it better during a second term.
It isn't entirely his fault because a lot of educated people in government do fundamentally distrust him in a way he can't fix, but he made it worse in both statements and governing as he regularly called to pull out troops from Syria but didn't actually look into the details. That is partly on him, as commander in chief, because of the decisions he made and didn't follow through on. By the time the 2020 riots were occurring, Trump's relationship with military control was so strained that it's plausible he couldn't deploy troops the way HW did to LA if he wanted to. He had to resort to various DHS and exec departments for men on the ground. That's a huge problem in a second Trump term that he has no way to solve if we expect mass protests and accompanying riots in his second term, especially if he tried deporting 1 million people quickly using DHS authority and repurposed funds. Not hard to see how that gets to a crisis of executive authority, even granting Democrats have perpetuated trend towards it with their asylum policy up until a few months ago.
The second problem is that he played with fire on the 2020 election to the point of a fan riot in the legislature despite not having a legal case to make successfully in court. It's fine that he thinks the Democratic NGOs pushing for last-minute changes to state elections was under-handed. Plenty of Democrats in state elections run by Republicans have said as much with changes to voter rolls or requiring IDs. The problem is occupying the same place Obama was in after November 2016 and straight up refusing to take the L like Obama did. Many Republicans cannot argue convincingly that this is due to someone else in the White House; everyone knows it's Trump. So you can vote GOP for Congress and easily bypass both of these problems I've staked out. Do Harris, or a write-in, but get many of the superior governing traits in the legislature coupled with investigations guaranteed into the executive branch of a Democrat.
But on voting for Trump the man, it's hard to say the lower bound of *governing* (separate from policy planks you correctly note) isn't very low in a way we haven't often seen with recent presidents. Your proposed solution is a strengthened deep state to just repeatedly disobey direct orders from the commander in chief, but what is even the point of arguing to elect a certain person president in a popular election at the end of that? Why even have elections? It's bad enough Democrats have come to this conclusion with an inner circle lying about Biden's basic capability to go to foreign leader meetings without nappy time. How does "just take away more credible authority from the president" solve this crisis? It doesn't. It "solves" TDS by simply saying we will no longer have a head of government. Even with the incredible cynicism among high-ranking Democrats and Biden's situation, you can notice they feel shame giving bad policy planks and avoid interviews for Harris altogether because they don't actually believe this. Who should?
I'm not "proposing" a "strengthened deep state," I'm describing the status quo. I don't think Kamala Harris is particularly likely to order offensive use of nuclear weapons either, but if she did, it's more likely that order would be obeyed than if it were Trump giving it (although, again, I find it much more likely than not that Kamala's order wouldn't be obeyed either). You said it yourself--if the military distrusted Trump so much that they wouldn't even deploy to stop the George Floyd riots, they're not going to let him fire nukes and blow everyone up.
If we're going to pretend that this "but what if he decides to shoot nukes?!" idea is a serious talking point, that's pretty relevant. If the blob ever actually does decide to do something this crazy, you could argue they're less likely to try it while Blumpft is in office as compared to a person who is on the same page as them and who they find more trustworthy/predictable.
Again, your point is we shouldn't worry about Trump making outrageous statements because his call will be overridden by serious adults in the room when necessary. How do we determine when this happens? Who says when it's necessary?
I never said Trump is going to shoot nukes, because I agree with you that this particular interpretation is clearly wrong and Trump's foreign policy record was in fact significantly safer than Biden's (why that is, might be more contentious to debate.) I said Trump's executive role isn't taken seriously by himself and that's a problem if we want democratically elected executives. My hypothetical given was an attempt at mass internal deportations never seen since Bush being met with numerous protests and accompanying riots, not nuclear war. In that scenario of serious disorder and disagreement, who is going to be the executive and call the shots?
Trump couldn't correctly call the shots in late 2020 like Obama did in late 2016. As a result, the transfer of power occurred but with more chaos than people wanted for the country. One of his biggest fans committed suicide by cop. There's no reason she had to die, but that's tragically how the process of changing power ended. Feel free to dodge this situation a second time in the reply. But it's important to address if you want to argue Trump is going to be an effective executive and should be voted for on the merits of the job.
I'm responding to the specific points that the author raised in his article--the author decided to make the argument that we can't vote for Trump because he might fire off nukes and blow everyone up. The idea that Trump is going to plunge the country into chaos by ordering mass deportations is, while more grounded than the nuclear holocaust scenario, still quite fantastical. Again, he was already president once and nothing like this happened, despite him constantly saying stupid stuff on Twitter. Again, if there is any kind of mass disorder and unrest, it will be because of left-wing action that goes forward with tacit approval from the ruling class, not because of anything Donald Trump does.
I'm not going to vote for Trump personally although my reasons are very different from this author's. But to repeat, my comment is pointing out why I think the author's case is bad. This is different from engaging in a more general debate of Trump vs Harris. If you want to hammer on about Jan 6, I have plenty of angles by which to dismiss that, but the easiest one is to simply point out that the harm done by COVID insanity and George Floyd riots in 2020 make the Jan 6 incident look completely harmless by comparison. If we're going to engage in hand-wringing over the one Trump supporter that died on January 6, that's opening up a whole can of worms to start pointing fingers at various parties' misbehavior and how many people died as a result of it.
Very nice, agree with all these points. Also, the odds of a US vs Iran war happening soon are much higher with Trump (and they're already disturbingly high).
It's high now because Iran and Israel have been making aggressive moves on each other's territory, most recently when Israel assassinated that Hamas guy in Iran. And the US has responded to this by sending naval forces into the Gulf and shooting down Iranian missiles, the implication seems to be that we'd fight in some capacity if a shooting war starts.
Trump was super aggressive against Iran in his term, tearing up the nuclear deal (JCPOA) even though Iran was in compliance and later assassinating one of their top generals.
So the risks were low under Trump, who did actually govern, and have gotten consistently higher under Biden, so you think they will be higher under Trump?
Trump getting elected and breaking the JCPOA convinced the Iranians that there's no point in negotiating with non-crazy US presidents, because any agreement you sign will get torn up next time a crazy person like Trump gets elected.
Trump killed an important arms control agreement, Biden tried to reinstate it but the Iranians demanded too much in return for it to be politically possible, and relations have degenerated ever since. But the relationship would be better, and there wouldn't be an Iranian bomb almost completed, if Trump had never been elected. Iran would still be mortal enemies with Israel of course, but not with the US.
It's possible that the Iranian attitude is "we won't mess with a crazy person like Trump." I doubt it--after the Soleimani killing they launched an attack that wounded over 100 US soldiers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Martyr_Soleimani). Trump then down-played it in the media so he could de-escalate the situation. I think he made the right call in de-escalating of course, but the assassination was a huge mistake.
But even if Trump's madman factor would deter the Iranians, that just means that re-electing Trump will mean that a war with Iran will likely happen after he leaves office. Whereas if Trump is never re-elected the current situation will probably resolve into a ceasefire eventually and there probably won't be a war with Iran any time soon.
Good points, but I guess my view is that Iran was covertly, but barely, at war with the US already and that killing Soleimani was a very valid step. Iran's "response" was itself a de-escalation (we killed one of their best leaders and they... wounded a bunch of soldiers?).
I think that a lot of the escalation since was not due to the Iranians thinking that they had nothing to lose but to them thinking that they again had a free rein on their proxies, which they clearly did not under Trump who demonstrated his willingness to ignore the "polite" fiction and kill the Iranian bosses directly.
Recent developments suggest that they no longer feel quite so confident, so perhaps Biden has managed to claw back some ground. Or perhaps they are preparing for a Trump presidency 😄
The general competence test is, in my opinion, extremely important. I’d include in the definition of “incompetence” in the context of the presidency being prone to making decisions based off of ideology and mythology.
Sadly, the effectiveness of this argument has been degraded by the fact that this has been the Democrats’ messaging since Trump’s escalator ride in 2015. The persistent name-calling of “incompetent”, “crazy”, “unpredictable”, etc. by many in the media and other political circles without a logical and comprehensive explanation of the mechanisms by which those tendencies actually have a tangible negative effect on the country have turned many voters off to that argument (maybe the lack of effect on swing independents is smaller in magnitude to the effect that argument had on solidifying Trump’s populist base, due to the elitist undertones).
When dems make the argument they have to lay out a detailed scenario to provide a vivid picture of how incompetence actually damages the country. I’ve always conceived of it as: Consider two leaders deciding between action A and action B on their desk. Leader 1 attempts to analyze pure costs and benefits 50% of the time, and considers ideology and optics for the other 50%. Leader 2 attempts to analyze pure costs and benefits 90% of the time. Play this out across an entire term and you have a clear choice for which leader would maximize benefits and minimize costs on net.
Unfortunately, the argument is rarely ever played out and instead becomes lost in the drone of political name-calling.
I think you're (1) underestimating the costs of the pandemic restrictions. Saying people were "just" putting masks on their face is like saying they're "just" putting paper bags over their heads with holes in them to see and talk. The latter is worse, but it's not *that* much worse when it comes to experiencing life. I wasn't convinced that COVID restrictions were a bad idea until I read this article by Bryan Caplan that completely changed my perspective (as is normal for reading Caplan) https://www.econlib.org/life-years-lost-the-quantity-and-the-quality/
COVID restrictions were a *significant* totalitarian restriction on human freedom and had a massive effect on human quality of life. People were worried about the norms that Trump trying to overturn the election were creating, but this type of restrictive norm violation is horrible too. Francis Collins, head of the NIH and founder of Biologos, admitted that they screwed up and practically placed infinite value on a life when they shouldn't have in an interview you can find online (Evolution News has an article that links the video). The terrible incentive structures that government's face will likely lead to similar mistakes again. This analysis hasn't included the significant economic costs .
(2) Further, governments everywhere absolutely bungled the COVID response regardless of how you look at it. Fauci and co. told so many "noble lies" about masking, the certainty of COVID origins, how dangerous COVID really was, what they knew about it, etc. that people who aren't politically aligned with epidemiologists and bureaucrats aren't gonna trust them about anything, and that includes vaccines. So if anything, a Democrat's willingness to cooperate with incompetent international bureaucrats is a bad thing. Thanks to them, people might not actually get vaccinated for a hypothetical Ebola-covid. Luckily, self-interest could actually lead to people getting vaccinated anyway, but there will be a group of people who don't trust it who might have vaccinated otherwise had the government been honest. They should have just trusted the power of private self-interest.
(3) Politicians lie, make false promises, and flip-flop for political gain all of the time. I wouldn't put much stock in Walz saying he would leave people alone - the heuristic "politicians will do what they say before an election" is one of the worst heuristics out there.
(4) Trump's presidency didn't have the drastic effects on GDP that you say that right wing populist leaders have. With the exception of the attempted coup, he governed like many generic Republicans would have.
(5) Energy policy is really important. The effects of climate change are likely mixed overall (see David Friedman for a quick look and then Alex Epstein for a more in-depth look at the likely effects), but the standard consensus worldwide is that we have to go net zero in carbon emissions to prevent catastrophe. Millions of people live in energy poverty, and solar, wind, and even nuclear (in the short term) won't be able to meet their needs because of certain inherent disadvantages that make them unreliable for energy production (solar and wind frequently need fossil fuels for backup and batteries are extremely expensive). Restrictions and taxes that limit fossil fuels will likely cause significant amounts of suffering for millions worldwide, and that's not counting the problems caused to rich westerners from a less reliable power grid. There are also some industrial level things that are literally impossible to do without fossil fuels and they will become more expensive.
I don't have much else to say other than it's ridiculously hard to measure the costs and benefits of voting for politicians, and that's why most people shouldn't vote even when they could statistically make a difference in expected value. The mere fact that you can't trust their word beforehand makes it makes it nearly impossible to judge their effects as politicians.
If you're a single-issue factory farming voter, you're certainly right to vote for her. But otherwise, I disagree. First, I'll run through the issues you list. Then, I'll get to other concerns.
First, you gesture at general competence. You provide no evidence that Harris is at all competent. Your evidence against Trump is that you dislike his tweeting style, that he mentioned the past possibility of war with Korea (but you think that an exaggeration). One and a half: institutions. Our government is not well run. One and two-thirds: chance of overturning the government. I will return to this.
Second: existential risks. I think you dramatically overestimate the effect of AI regulation. The biggest existential threat of AI comes from it being voluntarily put in the loop in the US military systems. There is no way that any proposed AI regulation touches this—this will be left wide open, and AI will be used by the military whenever it seems effective. Rather, post-lobbying, any regulation will have the net effect that regulations of this sort always have: protecting incumbents, and making it difficult for new players enter the field. Regarding pandemics, in your quote, the second paragraph is literally talking about ways that he did not worsen things, and of the first paragraph, only the first sentence would have had any chance of seriously reducing the harm of the pandemic—once it was out of china, there was no stopping it. He handled COVID fairly competently—recall, Operation Warp Speed was a thing—and not in a manner servile to his base. Additionally, you fear about bio-terrorists. But, no such groups exist, to my knowledge. The most active terrorists tend to be devoted muslims, and they have no intention of wiping out humanity. And Ord's solution will not happen—no way does, e.g. China give the sort of authority he wants; this is a nonstarter.
Third, I concede factory farming in full. Third and a half: regarding personal freedom. Your pro-democrat points are euthanasia, abortion, immigration, and Walz saying "mind your own damn business." Euthanasia is of little importance; suicide by firearm is not inaccessible. Abortion, well, I have nothing to convince you here, since utilitarianism, so I'll concede it (and you've granted that there is unlikely to be a major effect). Walz is only talking about abortions; he literally set up a hotline to report your neighbors for violating COVID guidelines, and has advocated for banning 'hate speech'. While I generally am sympathetic to immigration on economic and humanitarian grounds, I think the current Republican thought is that importing people, and giving them the vote even if they do not demonstrate an appreciation for American values, would be seriously destructive to America managing to maintain itself as, as you put it, "one of the best countries in world history." An American turn to socialism is a serious tail risk that you need to consider, given how important it is to the general world economy, and to effective altruism in particular. The US is an outlier among values in general; unless there is heavy selection, immigrants will not share those values. Okay, now for the arguments for the Republicans on personal freedom: the lockdowns were much more than simple mask mandates, but a substantial reduction in economic activity and personal liberties. Republicans are far better on speech, educational choice, and more generally on freedom to conduct economic activity. Democrat-aligned governments worldwide have shown willingness to act in a totalitarian manner over unapproved speech, as seen in the debanking of the Canadian truckers, and freeing violent criminals to jail social media posters in Britain. While I do not think democrats will do anything of the sort in the near future, I see no reason not to think that, should they gain a trifecta, they will attempt to limit 'hate speech' (read, saying anything negative towards politically favored groups) in the manner Walz has mentioned, given how much they dislike Musk owning twitter.
Economics:
First, economics matters immensely once you consider second-order effects. The general lifting up of the world from poverty is an immense good—the graph you cited shows as much, looking at the far left.
Second and third, conceded in entirety.
Fourth, do you have any reason to think Harris is competent? You've merely stated that. She's literally proposed banning "price gauging" on groceries. That's a recipe for food shortages. Biden-Harris have proposed large taxes on unrealized gains; it should be obvious that that's bad. Yes, both parties are currently far too economically populist. One is obviously far more so than the other.
But just look at the rhetoric. Trump is pro-wealth. Democrats are anti-wealth (they hate the wealthy). If you wanted to increase wealth, especially in a non-zero-sum way, one of those looks a lot better than the other.
Trump is worse than Romney, but we are not getting Romney again in the near future (sadly). Things will get worse; I'm pretty sure boomers are better on average about economics (communism being around when they grew up helps with that). Currently the only figure at all talking about the better economic vision is Ramaswamy, and he would be helped by the Trump wing of the party, maybe? Really not sure.
Have you actually calculated pharmaceutical price controls? If Trump rolls those back, it would be huge. You're arguing for a relative effect size; that requires you to actually have rough sizes in mind. You seem to pose this as something that would be different if it were another Republican, but that really just doesn't match most of your points—most of these arguments would still hold if Desantis had won the primary.
Okay, what are the big things you didn't mention.
Foreign policy. Frankly, I have no way to evaluate this; I'm not at all knowledgeable enough. Trump had a more peaceful term, which is likely due in part to foreign powers being more wary of him, but I don't know how the tail risks compare.
Maintaining our constitutional order. Hey, I said I'd be back to Jan. 6th. I'm think that Trump genuinely believed that he was cheated out of the election. I still think it was terrible, but that makes it unlikely he tries unconstitutionally to hold onto power.
One thing that no one is talking about that the democrats will do is supreme court 'reforms'. These would be passed merely by statute, not constitutional amendment (so, merely requiring a trifecta, which prediction markets put at a 50% chance or so, conditional on Kamala winning). There are two sorts proposed so far: term limits, which prediction markets put at a 65% chance of happening, conditional on a trifecta (this market does not seem to be liquid or have many traders), and the No Kings Act, which strips jurisdiction on matters of immunity from SCOTUS, and instructs federal courts to rule otherwise, which has had most of the democratic senators sign on. These are both extremely bad. The former is bad, because a willingness to mess with the court by a bare majority will lead to retaliation, destabilizing the whole court system. The latter does so as well, but by an even greater extent—it sets the precedent of circumventing, at will, any disliked court decisions or constitutional provisions—by precisely the same logic, they could instruct courts to ignore the bill of rights, or creatively interpret it in line with whoever takes power! This is an end-run around the constitution. The net effect of these is the destruction of the independence of the federal judiciary. This is extremely bad, because the federal judiciary is the main entity that seems to at all care about constitutional bounds, instead of merely pretending so when electorally convenient. This is not out-there. The media has been spreading lies about the supreme court; the democrat proposals enjoy broad support; given the opportunity, one of these will probably be passed. It takes effort to think of a legislative precedent more destructive to our constitutional order than the No Kings Act. And destruction of the independence of the federal judiciary will make tyranny far, far, easier.
“I think economic growth, while important, has a much less significant effect on quality of life than the other sorts of issues I’ve dissed.” Economic growth *this year* has only a small effect, but *in the long run* economic growth is overwhelmingly important.
Yes, that was amazing. If you are an EA economic growth should be nearly everything because it is the _only_ thing that reliaby improvs quality of life at scale and at multiple margins, with as yet no hard constraint identified.
"The one exception to this is pharmaceutical price controls."
I read your piece on this but your analysis is missing the decrease in life expectancy from people who can't take medication / ration medication due to overly high drug prices + fails to acknowledge the possibility that pharma companies can recoup at least some (if not most) of their losses from raising prices in other countries. There's no reason America should be subsidizing the cost of drug innovation for the rest of the world.
Also, Trump's policies are likely going to be bad for the economy. Tax cuts and tariffs are both inflationary. Going back to the previous antitrust regime under the FTC and rolling back the IRA will also be very bad.
I didn't see any of the studies address that costs would likely go up in other countries to partially offset the decrease in prices in the US, but I'd be happy to take a look if you have a link. For the decrease in life expectancy due to people being unable to afford / rationing drugs, I didn't see Scott address that in his article.
I would also disagree that less innovation = more medical spending. It certainly means life expectancy goes up, but that just means people live longer to develop other diseases which increases medical spending overall (e.g. you live long enough to get cancer which costs much more than someone dying from a stroke). Of course, it's a good thing that people live longer, so that's a tradeoff I'm happy to make, but generally more innovation in medicine leads to more spending.
Yeah, less innovation = more spending doesn’t make sense to me. Historically, like the last 100 years, there has been innovation and medical spending must be higher now than in 1924.
Seems like the pharmaceutical price controls aren’t that bad. They only include a few drugs, and don’t bring down prices as much as some people thought they would. Overall effect on pharmaceutical profits, though not great for future innovation, isn’t devastating either.
I believe I've heard we're already seeing large decreases in investment in future drugs. The US used to subsidize drug development for the entire world with their high prices. Drastically reducing drug innovation for all this is extremely bad.
I may have missed it, but a real benefit of Harris is she’s so good on housing.
If I held, I think I would vote for Harris and then vote all the Republicans down ballot. that would avoid benefiting Trump the attempted coup, but also stop a lot of legislation and cause various committees to have Republicans.
Hard to feel like he isnt motivated by DEI a lot here also
On the economy I would add the following comparison.
The deficit was $440B in 2016 before Trump took office. From 2017-2019, the “incremental deficits” above that base rate averaged $340B a year.
I will give 2020 a pass because both parties voted for the stimulus bills in that year. And I will set the Democrats incremental baseline to the $980 deficit in 2019.
But from 2021 onwards, all new spending legislation was passed on party line votes by the Democrats.
The incremental deficit of 2021-2024 is $950B. Nearly 3x the Trump years.
Economists at the time, such as Larry Summers, called the bills the Democrats passed “the worst economic policy he had seen in 40 years” and warned it would cause a spike in inflation, but they plowed through with it anyway.
I see little to reason that their policy will be different going forward. There isn’t a category of spending democrats want to cut. They have proposed some potentially terrible taxes on “the rich” (unrealized capital gains!), but it’s not going to close the gap. They also support some really terrible tax policies like the SALT deduction because it butters the bread of state employees and blue state professionals.
Overall, the last four years are a terrible track record on the economy and we shouldn’t trust them going forward.
I find increíble how complacent Americans are with the Non concession of the previous election.
Either the election was stolen (and the US President is an usurper) or it was not, and Trump is an aspiring usurper. Discussions on policy are incredibly complacent when the election is about legitimacy.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ekM9jQqXq8D8qa2fP/united-states-2024-presidential-election-so-help-you-god
This seems like a reasonable case to not vote for Trump, and has a pretty minimal effect on whether to vote for a GOP Congress or a Dem Congress on long-term growth and individual liberty.
The main problem of right populism is personality cult. Many of the problems and liberal overextension they point out are real. But as long as autocracy is the tool, who cares about the objective? Institutions and legitimacy are above policy.
It's helpful to pay attention to the legislature if we want to preserve it. Republicans in Congress refused to all vote to fund Trump's wall during his first two years, which was his most famous campaign slogan during the 2016 campaign. If we lived in a country where splitting one's ticket was impossible, there would be no debate downstream of the presidential ticket. But we don't, so there very much is one.
I think Pence's refusal to do what Trump wanted is a strong proof that what Trump wanted was illegal, and that is a kinda strong proof it was not stolen, because then he would have tried something legal.
Illegal? Who cares? Some legal things are anti democratic and treasonous even if legal!
The one-two punch of Hanania's essay and this is so mentally stimulating — a perfect example of what the "caucus of reality" can give to the world. Thanks for putting time into such a strong rejoinder!
Thank you!
Thank you for making the case against Hanania. I like Hanania's contrarian thinking, but on this he seems to have missed the harm that scuttling our nation's institutions will do. Trump may not be able to enact a coherent plan to do that himself, but his appointees would be more than capable. Also, libertarians should be very wary of great saviors who promise that upsetting the apple cart will make things great again. Once they are in power, the system is unable to get rid of them. See: Maduro...
The democrats plan to scuttle the federal judiciary (and no one is talking about it, for some reason!). See: the No Kings Act.
The case that Trump is worse on "the economy" is much stronger if you don't assume, as you seem to in this article, that "the economy" is roughly synonymous with "economic growth". For instance, Harris is more likely to pass redistributive policies and protect various welfare programs. Will this increase or harm economic growth on net? It depends on the program but in general I'm sort of unsure. Will it economically benefit the average person in other ways? Certainly.
Redistributive policies are usually bad economically. That's bad for average people.
I have to admit, this is a terrible article IMO.
>While Trump might sometimes have good policies, he’s a loose cannon—a crazy person. He is, by my estimation, far more likely to crazily start a nuclear war than Harris because he’s erratic.<
This is the worst sort of obnoxious TDS. I had to do a double take to make sure you really wrote this. Anyways, taking this claim seriously for two seconds: One, Blumpft was already President once, and did he do anything crazy like this? No, he didn't. Two, if he gave the order to fire nukes, do you think that order would be obeyed? No, it wouldn't be, the regime would constrain him, just like it did when he complained about losing in 2020, as Hanania covered in his article. The only way nukes might fly is if the regime more broadly actually wants them to (extremely unlikely, thank goodness, but Trump doesn't get to do it either way).
>Second, Trump is worse on existential risks. While Hanania describes the badness of locking down schools, I’d trust a Harris administration much more than a Trump administration in the event of a pandemic. Global pandemics and AI are the biggest threats to the world, seriously risking ending advanced civilization.<
Dude we literally just had a pandemic and the left were the ones that screwed it up with insanely harmful lockdowns. The Trump administration accomplished the only intervention that you could reasonably argue was positive, Operation Warp Speed to get a vaccine out quickly. And you're citing pandemics as a reason to vote against Trump and for leftists now? What even. The AI risk thing is just silly. This is a science fiction concept. I might as well argue that we need to vote for Trump because he'd be better at negotiating with aliens in the event that they contact us in the next four years.
Then you cite veganism as another reason to vote left. This makes sense if you're a vegan, but if you're going to write an article for a general audience seeking to influence their vote like this, you should account for the fact that most people don't share this sort of niche worldview. This would be like me saying that everyone needs to vote for Trump because I'm pro-life and IMO millions of children are murdered each year via abortion. It's a big deal if you're me but the point of an article like this is presumably to try and convince people who *aren't* me, which means appealing to shared premises. If I'm going to bring up abortion, now I need to demonstrate why people must agree with me on abortion, which is a different article all on its own.
I have more criticisms but this is long enough. I don't like to be overly harsh but this was bad.
Yes, I think on foreign policy Trump was just flat-out superior to several presidencies in my lifetime. On domestic policy, it's often good on net, and you're right to bring up Operation Warp Speed as a great thing to focus on instead of the usual Democratic party wishlist (he had to sign some of it of course to get a bill through a Dem House in 2020.)
But on domestic *governing*, there is really high variance. The bad gets quite bad. There are two big problems that come to mind.
The first is that Trump did not have the trust of the military due to his impulsive and erratic behavior as an entertainer and brand-maker with little interest in being a statesman. As a result, civilian control over the military regularly weakened during his presidency and there's little evidence he can make it better during a second term.
It isn't entirely his fault because a lot of educated people in government do fundamentally distrust him in a way he can't fix, but he made it worse in both statements and governing as he regularly called to pull out troops from Syria but didn't actually look into the details. That is partly on him, as commander in chief, because of the decisions he made and didn't follow through on. By the time the 2020 riots were occurring, Trump's relationship with military control was so strained that it's plausible he couldn't deploy troops the way HW did to LA if he wanted to. He had to resort to various DHS and exec departments for men on the ground. That's a huge problem in a second Trump term that he has no way to solve if we expect mass protests and accompanying riots in his second term, especially if he tried deporting 1 million people quickly using DHS authority and repurposed funds. Not hard to see how that gets to a crisis of executive authority, even granting Democrats have perpetuated trend towards it with their asylum policy up until a few months ago.
The second problem is that he played with fire on the 2020 election to the point of a fan riot in the legislature despite not having a legal case to make successfully in court. It's fine that he thinks the Democratic NGOs pushing for last-minute changes to state elections was under-handed. Plenty of Democrats in state elections run by Republicans have said as much with changes to voter rolls or requiring IDs. The problem is occupying the same place Obama was in after November 2016 and straight up refusing to take the L like Obama did. Many Republicans cannot argue convincingly that this is due to someone else in the White House; everyone knows it's Trump. So you can vote GOP for Congress and easily bypass both of these problems I've staked out. Do Harris, or a write-in, but get many of the superior governing traits in the legislature coupled with investigations guaranteed into the executive branch of a Democrat.
But on voting for Trump the man, it's hard to say the lower bound of *governing* (separate from policy planks you correctly note) isn't very low in a way we haven't often seen with recent presidents. Your proposed solution is a strengthened deep state to just repeatedly disobey direct orders from the commander in chief, but what is even the point of arguing to elect a certain person president in a popular election at the end of that? Why even have elections? It's bad enough Democrats have come to this conclusion with an inner circle lying about Biden's basic capability to go to foreign leader meetings without nappy time. How does "just take away more credible authority from the president" solve this crisis? It doesn't. It "solves" TDS by simply saying we will no longer have a head of government. Even with the incredible cynicism among high-ranking Democrats and Biden's situation, you can notice they feel shame giving bad policy planks and avoid interviews for Harris altogether because they don't actually believe this. Who should?
I'm not "proposing" a "strengthened deep state," I'm describing the status quo. I don't think Kamala Harris is particularly likely to order offensive use of nuclear weapons either, but if she did, it's more likely that order would be obeyed than if it were Trump giving it (although, again, I find it much more likely than not that Kamala's order wouldn't be obeyed either). You said it yourself--if the military distrusted Trump so much that they wouldn't even deploy to stop the George Floyd riots, they're not going to let him fire nukes and blow everyone up.
If we're going to pretend that this "but what if he decides to shoot nukes?!" idea is a serious talking point, that's pretty relevant. If the blob ever actually does decide to do something this crazy, you could argue they're less likely to try it while Blumpft is in office as compared to a person who is on the same page as them and who they find more trustworthy/predictable.
Again, your point is we shouldn't worry about Trump making outrageous statements because his call will be overridden by serious adults in the room when necessary. How do we determine when this happens? Who says when it's necessary?
I never said Trump is going to shoot nukes, because I agree with you that this particular interpretation is clearly wrong and Trump's foreign policy record was in fact significantly safer than Biden's (why that is, might be more contentious to debate.) I said Trump's executive role isn't taken seriously by himself and that's a problem if we want democratically elected executives. My hypothetical given was an attempt at mass internal deportations never seen since Bush being met with numerous protests and accompanying riots, not nuclear war. In that scenario of serious disorder and disagreement, who is going to be the executive and call the shots?
Trump couldn't correctly call the shots in late 2020 like Obama did in late 2016. As a result, the transfer of power occurred but with more chaos than people wanted for the country. One of his biggest fans committed suicide by cop. There's no reason she had to die, but that's tragically how the process of changing power ended. Feel free to dodge this situation a second time in the reply. But it's important to address if you want to argue Trump is going to be an effective executive and should be voted for on the merits of the job.
I'm responding to the specific points that the author raised in his article--the author decided to make the argument that we can't vote for Trump because he might fire off nukes and blow everyone up. The idea that Trump is going to plunge the country into chaos by ordering mass deportations is, while more grounded than the nuclear holocaust scenario, still quite fantastical. Again, he was already president once and nothing like this happened, despite him constantly saying stupid stuff on Twitter. Again, if there is any kind of mass disorder and unrest, it will be because of left-wing action that goes forward with tacit approval from the ruling class, not because of anything Donald Trump does.
I'm not going to vote for Trump personally although my reasons are very different from this author's. But to repeat, my comment is pointing out why I think the author's case is bad. This is different from engaging in a more general debate of Trump vs Harris. If you want to hammer on about Jan 6, I have plenty of angles by which to dismiss that, but the easiest one is to simply point out that the harm done by COVID insanity and George Floyd riots in 2020 make the Jan 6 incident look completely harmless by comparison. If we're going to engage in hand-wringing over the one Trump supporter that died on January 6, that's opening up a whole can of worms to start pointing fingers at various parties' misbehavior and how many people died as a result of it.
Very nice, agree with all these points. Also, the odds of a US vs Iran war happening soon are much higher with Trump (and they're already disturbingly high).
Why think it’s high now? And why would trump raise it (haven’t looked much into his Iran policy).
It's high now because Iran and Israel have been making aggressive moves on each other's territory, most recently when Israel assassinated that Hamas guy in Iran. And the US has responded to this by sending naval forces into the Gulf and shooting down Iranian missiles, the implication seems to be that we'd fight in some capacity if a shooting war starts.
Trump was super aggressive against Iran in his term, tearing up the nuclear deal (JCPOA) even though Iran was in compliance and later assassinating one of their top generals.
So the risks were low under Trump, who did actually govern, and have gotten consistently higher under Biden, so you think they will be higher under Trump?
Can you perhaps spell out the mechanism here?
Trump getting elected and breaking the JCPOA convinced the Iranians that there's no point in negotiating with non-crazy US presidents, because any agreement you sign will get torn up next time a crazy person like Trump gets elected.
Trump killed an important arms control agreement, Biden tried to reinstate it but the Iranians demanded too much in return for it to be politically possible, and relations have degenerated ever since. But the relationship would be better, and there wouldn't be an Iranian bomb almost completed, if Trump had never been elected. Iran would still be mortal enemies with Israel of course, but not with the US.
It's possible that the Iranian attitude is "we won't mess with a crazy person like Trump." I doubt it--after the Soleimani killing they launched an attack that wounded over 100 US soldiers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Martyr_Soleimani). Trump then down-played it in the media so he could de-escalate the situation. I think he made the right call in de-escalating of course, but the assassination was a huge mistake.
But even if Trump's madman factor would deter the Iranians, that just means that re-electing Trump will mean that a war with Iran will likely happen after he leaves office. Whereas if Trump is never re-elected the current situation will probably resolve into a ceasefire eventually and there probably won't be a war with Iran any time soon.
Good points, but I guess my view is that Iran was covertly, but barely, at war with the US already and that killing Soleimani was a very valid step. Iran's "response" was itself a de-escalation (we killed one of their best leaders and they... wounded a bunch of soldiers?).
I think that a lot of the escalation since was not due to the Iranians thinking that they had nothing to lose but to them thinking that they again had a free rein on their proxies, which they clearly did not under Trump who demonstrated his willingness to ignore the "polite" fiction and kill the Iranian bosses directly.
Recent developments suggest that they no longer feel quite so confident, so perhaps Biden has managed to claw back some ground. Or perhaps they are preparing for a Trump presidency 😄
Ha I didn’t expect to see Wayne quoted on Substack.
The general competence test is, in my opinion, extremely important. I’d include in the definition of “incompetence” in the context of the presidency being prone to making decisions based off of ideology and mythology.
Sadly, the effectiveness of this argument has been degraded by the fact that this has been the Democrats’ messaging since Trump’s escalator ride in 2015. The persistent name-calling of “incompetent”, “crazy”, “unpredictable”, etc. by many in the media and other political circles without a logical and comprehensive explanation of the mechanisms by which those tendencies actually have a tangible negative effect on the country have turned many voters off to that argument (maybe the lack of effect on swing independents is smaller in magnitude to the effect that argument had on solidifying Trump’s populist base, due to the elitist undertones).
When dems make the argument they have to lay out a detailed scenario to provide a vivid picture of how incompetence actually damages the country. I’ve always conceived of it as: Consider two leaders deciding between action A and action B on their desk. Leader 1 attempts to analyze pure costs and benefits 50% of the time, and considers ideology and optics for the other 50%. Leader 2 attempts to analyze pure costs and benefits 90% of the time. Play this out across an entire term and you have a clear choice for which leader would maximize benefits and minimize costs on net.
Unfortunately, the argument is rarely ever played out and instead becomes lost in the drone of political name-calling.
I think you're (1) underestimating the costs of the pandemic restrictions. Saying people were "just" putting masks on their face is like saying they're "just" putting paper bags over their heads with holes in them to see and talk. The latter is worse, but it's not *that* much worse when it comes to experiencing life. I wasn't convinced that COVID restrictions were a bad idea until I read this article by Bryan Caplan that completely changed my perspective (as is normal for reading Caplan) https://www.econlib.org/life-years-lost-the-quantity-and-the-quality/
COVID restrictions were a *significant* totalitarian restriction on human freedom and had a massive effect on human quality of life. People were worried about the norms that Trump trying to overturn the election were creating, but this type of restrictive norm violation is horrible too. Francis Collins, head of the NIH and founder of Biologos, admitted that they screwed up and practically placed infinite value on a life when they shouldn't have in an interview you can find online (Evolution News has an article that links the video). The terrible incentive structures that government's face will likely lead to similar mistakes again. This analysis hasn't included the significant economic costs .
(2) Further, governments everywhere absolutely bungled the COVID response regardless of how you look at it. Fauci and co. told so many "noble lies" about masking, the certainty of COVID origins, how dangerous COVID really was, what they knew about it, etc. that people who aren't politically aligned with epidemiologists and bureaucrats aren't gonna trust them about anything, and that includes vaccines. So if anything, a Democrat's willingness to cooperate with incompetent international bureaucrats is a bad thing. Thanks to them, people might not actually get vaccinated for a hypothetical Ebola-covid. Luckily, self-interest could actually lead to people getting vaccinated anyway, but there will be a group of people who don't trust it who might have vaccinated otherwise had the government been honest. They should have just trusted the power of private self-interest.
(3) Politicians lie, make false promises, and flip-flop for political gain all of the time. I wouldn't put much stock in Walz saying he would leave people alone - the heuristic "politicians will do what they say before an election" is one of the worst heuristics out there.
(4) Trump's presidency didn't have the drastic effects on GDP that you say that right wing populist leaders have. With the exception of the attempted coup, he governed like many generic Republicans would have.
(5) Energy policy is really important. The effects of climate change are likely mixed overall (see David Friedman for a quick look and then Alex Epstein for a more in-depth look at the likely effects), but the standard consensus worldwide is that we have to go net zero in carbon emissions to prevent catastrophe. Millions of people live in energy poverty, and solar, wind, and even nuclear (in the short term) won't be able to meet their needs because of certain inherent disadvantages that make them unreliable for energy production (solar and wind frequently need fossil fuels for backup and batteries are extremely expensive). Restrictions and taxes that limit fossil fuels will likely cause significant amounts of suffering for millions worldwide, and that's not counting the problems caused to rich westerners from a less reliable power grid. There are also some industrial level things that are literally impossible to do without fossil fuels and they will become more expensive.
I don't have much else to say other than it's ridiculously hard to measure the costs and benefits of voting for politicians, and that's why most people shouldn't vote even when they could statistically make a difference in expected value. The mere fact that you can't trust their word beforehand makes it makes it nearly impossible to judge their effects as politicians.
If you're a single-issue factory farming voter, you're certainly right to vote for her. But otherwise, I disagree. First, I'll run through the issues you list. Then, I'll get to other concerns.
First, you gesture at general competence. You provide no evidence that Harris is at all competent. Your evidence against Trump is that you dislike his tweeting style, that he mentioned the past possibility of war with Korea (but you think that an exaggeration). One and a half: institutions. Our government is not well run. One and two-thirds: chance of overturning the government. I will return to this.
Second: existential risks. I think you dramatically overestimate the effect of AI regulation. The biggest existential threat of AI comes from it being voluntarily put in the loop in the US military systems. There is no way that any proposed AI regulation touches this—this will be left wide open, and AI will be used by the military whenever it seems effective. Rather, post-lobbying, any regulation will have the net effect that regulations of this sort always have: protecting incumbents, and making it difficult for new players enter the field. Regarding pandemics, in your quote, the second paragraph is literally talking about ways that he did not worsen things, and of the first paragraph, only the first sentence would have had any chance of seriously reducing the harm of the pandemic—once it was out of china, there was no stopping it. He handled COVID fairly competently—recall, Operation Warp Speed was a thing—and not in a manner servile to his base. Additionally, you fear about bio-terrorists. But, no such groups exist, to my knowledge. The most active terrorists tend to be devoted muslims, and they have no intention of wiping out humanity. And Ord's solution will not happen—no way does, e.g. China give the sort of authority he wants; this is a nonstarter.
Third, I concede factory farming in full. Third and a half: regarding personal freedom. Your pro-democrat points are euthanasia, abortion, immigration, and Walz saying "mind your own damn business." Euthanasia is of little importance; suicide by firearm is not inaccessible. Abortion, well, I have nothing to convince you here, since utilitarianism, so I'll concede it (and you've granted that there is unlikely to be a major effect). Walz is only talking about abortions; he literally set up a hotline to report your neighbors for violating COVID guidelines, and has advocated for banning 'hate speech'. While I generally am sympathetic to immigration on economic and humanitarian grounds, I think the current Republican thought is that importing people, and giving them the vote even if they do not demonstrate an appreciation for American values, would be seriously destructive to America managing to maintain itself as, as you put it, "one of the best countries in world history." An American turn to socialism is a serious tail risk that you need to consider, given how important it is to the general world economy, and to effective altruism in particular. The US is an outlier among values in general; unless there is heavy selection, immigrants will not share those values. Okay, now for the arguments for the Republicans on personal freedom: the lockdowns were much more than simple mask mandates, but a substantial reduction in economic activity and personal liberties. Republicans are far better on speech, educational choice, and more generally on freedom to conduct economic activity. Democrat-aligned governments worldwide have shown willingness to act in a totalitarian manner over unapproved speech, as seen in the debanking of the Canadian truckers, and freeing violent criminals to jail social media posters in Britain. While I do not think democrats will do anything of the sort in the near future, I see no reason not to think that, should they gain a trifecta, they will attempt to limit 'hate speech' (read, saying anything negative towards politically favored groups) in the manner Walz has mentioned, given how much they dislike Musk owning twitter.
Economics:
First, economics matters immensely once you consider second-order effects. The general lifting up of the world from poverty is an immense good—the graph you cited shows as much, looking at the far left.
Second and third, conceded in entirety.
Fourth, do you have any reason to think Harris is competent? You've merely stated that. She's literally proposed banning "price gauging" on groceries. That's a recipe for food shortages. Biden-Harris have proposed large taxes on unrealized gains; it should be obvious that that's bad. Yes, both parties are currently far too economically populist. One is obviously far more so than the other.
But just look at the rhetoric. Trump is pro-wealth. Democrats are anti-wealth (they hate the wealthy). If you wanted to increase wealth, especially in a non-zero-sum way, one of those looks a lot better than the other.
Trump is worse than Romney, but we are not getting Romney again in the near future (sadly). Things will get worse; I'm pretty sure boomers are better on average about economics (communism being around when they grew up helps with that). Currently the only figure at all talking about the better economic vision is Ramaswamy, and he would be helped by the Trump wing of the party, maybe? Really not sure.
Have you actually calculated pharmaceutical price controls? If Trump rolls those back, it would be huge. You're arguing for a relative effect size; that requires you to actually have rough sizes in mind. You seem to pose this as something that would be different if it were another Republican, but that really just doesn't match most of your points—most of these arguments would still hold if Desantis had won the primary.
Okay, what are the big things you didn't mention.
Foreign policy. Frankly, I have no way to evaluate this; I'm not at all knowledgeable enough. Trump had a more peaceful term, which is likely due in part to foreign powers being more wary of him, but I don't know how the tail risks compare.
Maintaining our constitutional order. Hey, I said I'd be back to Jan. 6th. I'm think that Trump genuinely believed that he was cheated out of the election. I still think it was terrible, but that makes it unlikely he tries unconstitutionally to hold onto power.
One thing that no one is talking about that the democrats will do is supreme court 'reforms'. These would be passed merely by statute, not constitutional amendment (so, merely requiring a trifecta, which prediction markets put at a 50% chance or so, conditional on Kamala winning). There are two sorts proposed so far: term limits, which prediction markets put at a 65% chance of happening, conditional on a trifecta (this market does not seem to be liquid or have many traders), and the No Kings Act, which strips jurisdiction on matters of immunity from SCOTUS, and instructs federal courts to rule otherwise, which has had most of the democratic senators sign on. These are both extremely bad. The former is bad, because a willingness to mess with the court by a bare majority will lead to retaliation, destabilizing the whole court system. The latter does so as well, but by an even greater extent—it sets the precedent of circumventing, at will, any disliked court decisions or constitutional provisions—by precisely the same logic, they could instruct courts to ignore the bill of rights, or creatively interpret it in line with whoever takes power! This is an end-run around the constitution. The net effect of these is the destruction of the independence of the federal judiciary. This is extremely bad, because the federal judiciary is the main entity that seems to at all care about constitutional bounds, instead of merely pretending so when electorally convenient. This is not out-there. The media has been spreading lies about the supreme court; the democrat proposals enjoy broad support; given the opportunity, one of these will probably be passed. It takes effort to think of a legislative precedent more destructive to our constitutional order than the No Kings Act. And destruction of the independence of the federal judiciary will make tyranny far, far, easier.
“I think economic growth, while important, has a much less significant effect on quality of life than the other sorts of issues I’ve dissed.” Economic growth *this year* has only a small effect, but *in the long run* economic growth is overwhelmingly important.
Yes, that was amazing. If you are an EA economic growth should be nearly everything because it is the _only_ thing that reliaby improvs quality of life at scale and at multiple margins, with as yet no hard constraint identified.
"The one exception to this is pharmaceutical price controls."
I read your piece on this but your analysis is missing the decrease in life expectancy from people who can't take medication / ration medication due to overly high drug prices + fails to acknowledge the possibility that pharma companies can recoup at least some (if not most) of their losses from raising prices in other countries. There's no reason America should be subsidizing the cost of drug innovation for the rest of the world.
Also, Trump's policies are likely going to be bad for the economy. Tax cuts and tariffs are both inflationary. Going back to the previous antitrust regime under the FTC and rolling back the IRA will also be very bad.
The studies take those into account. And besides, less innovation means more medical spending
I didn't see any of the studies address that costs would likely go up in other countries to partially offset the decrease in prices in the US, but I'd be happy to take a look if you have a link. For the decrease in life expectancy due to people being unable to afford / rationing drugs, I didn't see Scott address that in his article.
I would also disagree that less innovation = more medical spending. It certainly means life expectancy goes up, but that just means people live longer to develop other diseases which increases medical spending overall (e.g. you live long enough to get cancer which costs much more than someone dying from a stroke). Of course, it's a good thing that people live longer, so that's a tradeoff I'm happy to make, but generally more innovation in medicine leads to more spending.
Yeah, less innovation = more spending doesn’t make sense to me. Historically, like the last 100 years, there has been innovation and medical spending must be higher now than in 1924.
Seems like the pharmaceutical price controls aren’t that bad. They only include a few drugs, and don’t bring down prices as much as some people thought they would. Overall effect on pharmaceutical profits, though not great for future innovation, isn’t devastating either.
Well more major future ones could affect more drugs.
I believe I've heard we're already seeing large decreases in investment in future drugs. The US used to subsidize drug development for the entire world with their high prices. Drastically reducing drug innovation for all this is extremely bad.
I may have missed it, but a real benefit of Harris is she’s so good on housing.
If I held, I think I would vote for Harris and then vote all the Republicans down ballot. that would avoid benefiting Trump the attempted coup, but also stop a lot of legislation and cause various committees to have Republicans.
Hard to feel like he isnt motivated by DEI a lot here also
You can meme yourself into thinking Harris is a good choice, but it’s not convincing
On the economy I would add the following comparison.
The deficit was $440B in 2016 before Trump took office. From 2017-2019, the “incremental deficits” above that base rate averaged $340B a year.
I will give 2020 a pass because both parties voted for the stimulus bills in that year. And I will set the Democrats incremental baseline to the $980 deficit in 2019.
But from 2021 onwards, all new spending legislation was passed on party line votes by the Democrats.
The incremental deficit of 2021-2024 is $950B. Nearly 3x the Trump years.
Economists at the time, such as Larry Summers, called the bills the Democrats passed “the worst economic policy he had seen in 40 years” and warned it would cause a spike in inflation, but they plowed through with it anyway.
I see little to reason that their policy will be different going forward. There isn’t a category of spending democrats want to cut. They have proposed some potentially terrible taxes on “the rich” (unrealized capital gains!), but it’s not going to close the gap. They also support some really terrible tax policies like the SALT deduction because it butters the bread of state employees and blue state professionals.
Overall, the last four years are a terrible track record on the economy and we shouldn’t trust them going forward.