Watch me debate Lee Bressler on substack live; Malcolm Kyeyune on the budget deficit; Lyman Stone vs. Greg Clark; Lorenzo Warby vs. economists on immigration; Charles C. Mann on progress
"DOGE is a gimmick" crowd is fast-becoming the worst kind of negative nancy. Everyone will complain about stifling bureaucracy, and wonder "if only there was someone with demonstrable singular expertise cultivating high performing organisations across a variety of complex domains....oh, if that person even existed, he'd be too busy running his companies to help." And system wide cuts is absolutely how to do it, and no, finding some redeeming anecdote about "the good ole deep state sprawl" is not remotely persuasive evidence that DOGE is off to a bad start. It's like nostalgia for communism, and it's pathetic. Whether it works or not, it's way too soon to tell, but if one is negative about the effort, it's either because of pure affiliation bias, or just terminal negativity about everything. Every classical liberal, state capacity libertarian, or "abundance" lefty should be cheering this effort with at least 3 foam fingers, or just admit that you like things to stay broken.
Amusingly every pundit or tweeter feels it as a requirement of the genre to adduce a singular or newest ridiculous example like “Irish musical” - for their “it’s trivial” mantra. Which is undermining their thesis, we fallible readers being what we are. They could write the same piece with a new example every single day for the rest of this administration.
In fact, they’d have to make massive, meaningful wholesale cuts to their anecdote-stirred readership to change this ;-).
I skimmed it and noticed within about the first three 'graphs he betrays absolutely zero understanding not only of the current form that most Federal discretionary government spending takes but also how recent the claim that the President must spend all money allocated by pretty breezily asserting the President has always had only a ministerial duty of signing checks. He does check all the talking point boxes about how dysfunctional Congress has been in budgeting and appropriations but doesn't seem to connect that to why DOGE is able to cancel spending, and also completely misses the point that a substantial part of DOGE's mission is affirming Presidential control over what are asserted to be "independent" agencies.
According to the article, Malcolm Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, a Swedish city north of Stockholm. Is that a Swedish last name? Anyway, I knew from listening to the Lotus Eaters podcast (a British content provider critical of mass immigration policies) that historically peaceful Sweden has been experiencing an upsurge in bombings (and rapes and sexual molestation of women) thanks to mass immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. I did a quick search and found a Politico article on the topic, dated October 2023, reporting an incident in which a 25-year old woman was killed in Uppsala by a bomb mistakenly placed outside the wrong house by gang members who have begun bombing the homes of each other's families, putting everyone else at risk (the article is titled "Sweden's New Normal: Bombs in the Suburbs on a Weeknight"). So as AK likes to say, have a nice day, Malcolm Kyeyune. And I think this also fits in with the Warby post on the effects of immigration, under the heading of what Warby calls the 'cultural transaction costs' of immigration.
Musk is no doubt great at GROWING companies. I'm not sure why you think he has any expertise at downsizing. Is there something more than Twitter? What expertise do you think he has displayed in the govt cuts? So far I haven't seen any.
My man, cuts, growing, who cares? Self-driving EVs, x.ai, Starlink, rockets, actual telepathy gadget, twitter...what more do you need? Anyone of those things would demonstrate management competence far in excess of anything the feds have ever pulled off. 6-7 of them, at once? This is manna from heaven, and you're like "ehhhh, could use some salt." It's absurd.
Sofa change and blind slash and burn. The list of idiotic cuts (some already reversed) is longer than the waste fraud and abuse that's been cut. I hope in the end you turn out to be right but I don't expect it.
Tell me, why would Trump be in favor of both the Keystone pipeline and a tariff on the oil that would flow through it? Just as stupid as the Dems.
Short answer, yes. But does one contradiction make the other any less?
Also, the housing issue has at least one more variable. The people most adamant we can have both typically think govt housing, govt subsidies, required low-income set aside, etc. can solve that issue. I'm not saying that's true but it's harder to prove it false and make everyone see the contradiction.
It doesn't make the contradiction any less. It's just an example that "not noticing" is bipartisan.
And of course, with the same sort of wishful thinking justification, Trump can say the combination of pro-drilling policies and the pipeline (both leading to increased supply) will keep prices down even with tariffs.
Lol, no. I sound like a person who can evaluate the reality of who is making decisions, their track record, and the nature of systemic solutions to systemic problems, without getting sidetracked by anecdotal clickbait.
The cultists are the people whose brains are so broken by politics they'll cry about a generational talent, undertaking a generational opportunity to fix an "unfixable" problem that everyone agreed (until 2 minutes ago) has been suffocating us to death bc he plays for the other team. The guy put together a computing cluster more quickly than anyone thought was possible to deliver the most powerful foundation model on the street, but people are focused on tweets they don't like? I don't care for George Soros's politics, but only a fool would doubt his genius.
Ezra Klein et al will furrow his eyebrows, and sternly admonish his tribe about how bad they are at governing, but all of a sudden it's "how dare you besmirch the honor of these loyal civil servants?! every card-carrying appendage of the bureaucracy is innocent until proven guilty! in this house we believe!"
The cultists have revealed themselves, but it's not me.
I think they could do a better job of documenting an unimpeachable list of top 10, though. If true, the 2B$ to Stacy Abram’s NGO based on nothing would be an excellent candidate, but things are moving so quickly it’s hard to know what will be real in the end. WSJ claimed recently that total savings are about 2B, which is hard to square. WSJ is usually a reasonable source.
He has publicly said that he believes a large amount of entitlement spending is waste fraud or abuse. The only evidence presented is the 25% rise over 4 years, which is indeed suspicious and monumental. I am curious how that will play out. Anyone who says DOGE is not serious conveniently leaves that out.
At a minimum the administration shouldn’t be cutting taxes. As difficult as it is absent cutting entitlements, taxes have to go up to make things sustainable. Doge going after the bureaucracy is fine, maybe it works long term, maybe not, I’m staying open to that part. In the meantime we’re still waiting for someone to take the fiscal situation seriously.
That's the first time I have read Kyeyune, and wow, he is awful.
The "we can't fix this bigger problem, so why are we trying to fix all these other problems?" is just another subspecies of the Nirvana Fallacy. I see this at work a lot, where people get nuts about stuff they can't fix, and cite that as a reason to not correct anything.
Worse, he gets the division of the constitutional powers laughably wrong. Sure Congress decides where money goes and the President sees that their legislation is enacted. Could anyone show where the legislated requirement for that 70k$ play was? No? Right, because Congress says "Spend money on this agency to do this vague sort of thing" and the agencies figure out what they want to do. There is no specific funding for nearly any of these programs; the government is not even certain how many there are or what they do.
Ideally Congress would write specific bills to spend X on Y for Z years, but in practice they have not done that for decades and instead of hand wave money at the executive branch to spend. Claiming it is not in the President's ambit to change how that money is spent by the agencies in pursuit of their legislated goals is absolute nonsense.
Agreed. Assortative mating on its own will do zero for *average* IQ either way (as long as one group does not "breed" consistently more than the other - I assume the "smart group" living in unhealthy towns did not "outbreed" the other groups). But it might enable more high-end IQs that may matter more for progress than the average or low-enders.
I have to disagree with the statement that the USAID will be unimportant. The money for a single grant is unimportant, but $40B to influence global culture, much of it flowing through domestic policy advocates, is not trivial. Combined with $15B of NIH overhead, that's already $55B of funding for one ideology, per year. Removing USAID is part of a sweeping anti-woke action that may end up being a footnote the way the counter-reformation is a footnote. However, it is a really big change in the way the government and international affairs will work. Much of the rest of what's going on is perhaps bound up in that - the question of how the elites bankroll their special religion and status and virtue - but these are pretty integral.
I read the Lyman Stone figure and unbidden, inwardly thought something snarky like, oh yeah, in one of the Canterbury Tales didn’t the Friar offer to take IQ tests for the others, in exchange for his board.
Of course it’s all very scientific comparisons of polygenic changes in the actual piece.
Persuasive - if you believe we understand: a) genetics; or b) the brain.
This: "economics ought to be a branch of what sociology ought to be. Sociology ought to be the study of human interdependence. Actually-existing sociology is not that. It is the interpretation of all human behavior as oppressors vs. oppressed. And economics is on the road to becoming actually-existing sociology."
No doubt oppressed/oppressor is a big part of sociology and maybe econ too but I can't agree it is all going to that. Plenty of less visible work not going down that path.
Malcom Kyeyune (what a fascinating wikipedia entry he has) is wholly correct. And for an extra-special nice day, his excellent article on the US military, “America’s National Security Wonderland” “https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/02/americas-national-security-wonderland/.” Reading the two together, I would suggest it might be possible to put the couch change into a larger context that begins to approach the degree of radical change that is necessary if the nation is make it through this decade. Here goes.
Isolationism: The Pragmatic Choice for a Broke-A** Nation
The reaction was of course entirely predictable. And alternatives from other countries are being aired. (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-spearheads-arab-scramble-alternative-trumps-gaza-plan-2025-02-14/ ). Intended or not, it certainly seems that the outlandish proposal has shifted the initiative (and financial burden) for handling the mess in Gaza to other countries. One might well doubt whether the President’s Budget for 2026 will even mention Gaza much less request any funding. If this is indeed the case, it might reflect a foreign policy strategy of “talk absurdly and let the other guys blow their money.” Such a strategy, as a new commitment to isolationism, is likely to be much more pragmatic and more likely to be successful in advancing the strategic interests of the United States than the old “buy influence at any cost” approach.
Tariffs, 40 Icebreakers, Canada as 51st State, and Red, White, and Blue Land
Of more immediate concern to the United States than Gaza is the situation in the Arctic in which China and Russia are apparently taking aggressive measures incompatible with US wellbeing. (https://www.defensenews.com/global/2024/12/07/china-russia-cooperation-poses-rising-threat-in-arctic-pentagon-warns/ ) Canada and Greenland are weak and essentially undefended based on the expectation that the United States will protect them. Will Trump’s absurd talk provoke Canada and Denmark into taking military responsibility for their territories?
The Panama Canal, The Gulf of America, and The South China Sea
Is Trump’s “Gulf of America” gambit a message to China about its South China Sea imperialism? Two can play that game? China is South America’s top export destination and source of foreign direct investment. Since 2017, China has persuaded three Central American countries—Panama, El Salvador, and Nicaragua—to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. China has invested in major infrastructure projects in Panama, including ports, bridges, railways, and power stations. The US essentially surrendered to China in the region decades ago and has only Argentina and El Salvador as potentially ideologically aligned allies at the present moment: every other country appears hell bent on emulating Venezuela. Clearly, the US has no more pragmatic interest in engaging with these countries that reject American values than it does with the EU nations that reject them as well. Will Trump’s absurdism force China and her Latinx minions to divert resources from development to wasteful military spending? Venezuela recently claimed it would liberate Puerto Rico using Brazilian troops. Might China one day grow to regret stepping into this mess? Will that day be hastened by Trump stirring the pot? And will stirring the pot save the US money? Already we see funds getting cut off to Honduras. A little couch change here, a little couch change there. Pretty soon you have enough to make to worthwhile to haul down to the machine at the grocery store.
Ukraine
At first it seemed to me that Trump’s absurd talk about mineral treaties seemed like just an excuse to abandon his campaign promise to achieve peace by giving the United States at least the intimation of an excuses for continuing to shovel treasure Ukraine’s way. Not sure what other reason there was for it other than at least trying to recover some of the billions (its very amusing all the cute different ways the experts come up with to achieve whatever figure they want to by including or excluding different types of transfers) already wasted. After witnessing the Foreign Policy, Inc. lobby fail miserably following dissolution of the Soviet Union, establish a noxious precedent with Kosovo, and in Georgia, and again in Crimea, use USAID funds to overturn the 2014 election in Ukraine, the US would have done much better for itself and for all concerned if it had simply shut up and engaged in ferocious neutrality and isolationism. Whenever the Foreign Policy, Inc. lobby gets involved, disaster is sure to follow :Ukraine could have signed an earlier peace treaty and would have retained much more of its territory than ever will now if Zelensky had only been permitted the initial peace treaty offered back at the start of the war. Now, Zelensky has offered Trump the perfect opportunity to wash his hands of the mess and Trump is a fool, and not acting in the strategic interests of the United States, if he fails to take full advantage.
Winning the Fight that Matters: Defeating the Forever Wars, Inc. Lobby
The counter-case for continued military engagement and spending around the world is made straightforwardly, honestly and nobly by defense industry funded 501(c)(3) lobbyists like CSIS: more profit for us. See:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-supporting-ukraine-revitalizing-us-defense-industrial-base One has to respect the Sell! Sell! Sell! Mentality. But the two trillion dollar debt is a reality. And getting rid of armaments just so you have to pay to replace them is not really doing much to strengthen the US militarily. The industry that has grown up over the Iraq and Afghanistan forever wars is not going to go quietly into the night. They need the stalemate that is the EU’s realistic and avowed goal for Ukraine to continue to forever to support their investment plans and continuing influence. To defeat them, more absurdist talk forcing the EU to create its own military system and to dissolve NATO, is definitely in order. Non-absurdly, Trump is talking about a new missile defense system for the United States. Perfect. Fund it with the savings from US military bases withdrawn from Europe. And to build a real industrial base in the United States, Musk and Trump need to shut down the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration whose de facto mission is to eliminate privately owned conveyances, and repeal all the ersatz safety regulations that make cars so expensive, and open the door to Toyota building and selling its $10,000 pickup truck here. Then we will have the makings of both an economy, personal income growth, and a sustainable defense industrial base.
Per immigration...and I apologize if I am so dense as to not know if it applies...but, what about all those jobs that Americans simply will not do, and if asked or required to do because it's the only job available, would riot?
Specifically, meat packing. Agricultural stoop labor. I know of more, but you get the idea. Even I can foresee when robots will handle these tasks, but meat packing robots are some not insubstantial number of years in the future. I've seen the developmental robot strawberry pickers and lettuce harvesters, but what about right now and the next couple years?
You've apparently never been in a meat packing plant nor done stoop labor. I've done both, in addition to a modest range of other backbreaking and soul annihilating agricultural work. Wages are abysmal, working conditions grotesque.
I suppose if hamburger was $50 a pound and a decent stake about $180 a pound, you might be right. Until it is, you are wrong.
"Wages are abysmal, working conditions grotesque."
That's precisely why the owners want to keep bringing in poor, unskilled immigrants -- so they don't have to raise wages and improve conditions. You're right that food prices would have to go up if that changed. How much, I don't know, but EVERYONE gets upset if food prices go up, so it doesn't seem real likely to change significantly.
Right. Make it something even mildly resembling equitable, and food price indices go straight up. The work is miserable. Honest, respectable, and miserable.
The only way out, near as I can tell, is robotics, which are making steady and amazing advances. Even strawberries, one of the hardest stoop labor tasks, is getting very close to workable and economically viable robotics.
Yeah. I grew up rural and was in those gigs. When I hear folks fantasizing that Americans will do those jobs, I can only do an eye roll. They pay squat, they're brutal, and you take abuse all day. I don't have an answer.
1) Americans won't do those jobs and they never will.
2) Americans won't do those jobs. Of course, if the jobs paid more and the working conditions were better, they would.
I go with 2). It sounds like you would too, but think that the change in wages and/or working conditions would have to be pretty big to get enough Americans to do them.
Given the cushiness of jobs in a sort of female-oriented economy, and the American habit of complaining - it would be a little strange if one group were to be totally left out of the equation, the obsession with “job” over private life, and how they’re treating you - just because they don’t work in air-conditioning, or with a keyboard.
Or not? What am I missing?
Because that is in fact the way things are. The noise emanates from those that least deserve attention.
The wages necessary to get Americans doing the jobs would blow a hole in food prices so large it would decimate people’s daily lives and become the Mother of all political footballs. History tells me it ain’t gonna happen. I’m not sure what it tells other people.
I read an unusually information-packed book about Cesar Chavez, a charismatic and sometimes nasty and mercurial, possibly eventually crazy, guy and also an enemy of the idea that working conditions should become such that only the desperate will accept them, and an opponent of illegal immigration.
Forgot name of book.
And another book by some enterprising young journalist gal who tried in the Barbara Ehrenreich vein, to get on as a picker so as to write about it.
Of course (as best I recall) she hadn’t the stamina to really carry on with it, but another takeaway, perhaps unintended, was the virtual impossibility of an American - even one whose ancestors did just this work a hundred years ago, so presumably not a physical impossibility - of “breaking in” to it due to the closed, ethnic barrier of it, now generations long. Unless you were “investigating” with that “Scout mindset. Any more than it would be very possible to join an all-Mexican, all illegal work crew.
You might sometimes have a “settler American” supervising those crews … but you see less of even that now.
Which has its own transaction cost, I can attest to that myself. It’s not easy being a female employer in that situation.
The jobs Americans won’t do are sometimes jobs that, in certain parts of the country, it would be hard for them to get. Regional variance suggests that Americans will still do those jobs.
I should add that later in life, CC - although he had surrounded himself with and made full use of do-gooding Protestants - came to reverence the idea of suffering, and moved away from practical or economic concerns, and into a sort of part Catholic/part Esalen -ish cult mindset, with himself as the center. Antimaterialist, but in a cool compound. This was actually my favorite CC.
Interesting point. When I was in the gig decades ago, I worked alongside Mexicans, all of course illegal and living in what we'd now call slave cabins, and it was not a problem being accepted. You do the work, and you're accepted. Nowadays, I can see how that's not likely.
Your last sentence, sure, in very small numbers on very small operations, orchards, blueberries (which is mostly mechanized nowadays). Big operations doing the ugly jobs, I don't see it, especially stoop labor...lettuce, cabbages, etc. Meat packing is another one. There's the odd white person amid a sea of ethnicity. Some of it is simple racism. I've had people tell me they'd never work with Mexicans. I hear Americans will do the jobs. Those with that opinion...I don't know how they get that opinion.
Folks offering opinions would be well advised to try the gig before imagining Americans would do those jobs. Even if they could find and take the job, they'd last about 1 pay period. I live in China nowadays. The work ethic here is so far beyond anything I've ever experienced in America, I just don't see Americans ramping up to do the ugly jobs. Maybe someday, but I doubt it.
However, our softness was not I feel, entirely of our own making.
It should thus not be referenced as a slam dunk, in re virtue. In my opinion.
And it’s worth noting, that time the illegals at the poultry plant asked for better gloves because they got such terrible staph infections in their hands …
One lady who led the effort, had been there 17 years. Same fake SS # the whole time.
Next day she was brought in and questioned about that number lol.
The whole lot fired - they’d been brought up in buses from Central America …
The plant owner got on a plane to Nepal, to find his new employees, who’d demand no gloves as these others finally had, or Sundays off as the Mennonites before *them* had.
It's hard to imagine how one could debate a contingent prediction. Either both share a model and the debate is about predicting the exogenous variables -- size of deficits, supply shocks, etc. or they do not and its not about interest rates at all.
Even if Warby is right -- society is set up in such a way that marginal improvement in efficiency go predominantly to the well off -- that still woud not be reason to oppose immigration, especially selective immigration. Why not spend anti-immigrant energy on fixing the societal system for distributing gains?
Sure, maybe. It’s easier to just exploit unfortunates. Folks trend toward easy and make up amazing excuses while doing so to make it appear they don’t know what their hands are doing.
"DOGE is a gimmick" crowd is fast-becoming the worst kind of negative nancy. Everyone will complain about stifling bureaucracy, and wonder "if only there was someone with demonstrable singular expertise cultivating high performing organisations across a variety of complex domains....oh, if that person even existed, he'd be too busy running his companies to help." And system wide cuts is absolutely how to do it, and no, finding some redeeming anecdote about "the good ole deep state sprawl" is not remotely persuasive evidence that DOGE is off to a bad start. It's like nostalgia for communism, and it's pathetic. Whether it works or not, it's way too soon to tell, but if one is negative about the effort, it's either because of pure affiliation bias, or just terminal negativity about everything. Every classical liberal, state capacity libertarian, or "abundance" lefty should be cheering this effort with at least 3 foam fingers, or just admit that you like things to stay broken.
Amusingly every pundit or tweeter feels it as a requirement of the genre to adduce a singular or newest ridiculous example like “Irish musical” - for their “it’s trivial” mantra. Which is undermining their thesis, we fallible readers being what we are. They could write the same piece with a new example every single day for the rest of this administration.
In fact, they’d have to make massive, meaningful wholesale cuts to their anecdote-stirred readership to change this ;-).
I skimmed it and noticed within about the first three 'graphs he betrays absolutely zero understanding not only of the current form that most Federal discretionary government spending takes but also how recent the claim that the President must spend all money allocated by pretty breezily asserting the President has always had only a ministerial duty of signing checks. He does check all the talking point boxes about how dysfunctional Congress has been in budgeting and appropriations but doesn't seem to connect that to why DOGE is able to cancel spending, and also completely misses the point that a substantial part of DOGE's mission is affirming Presidential control over what are asserted to be "independent" agencies.
According to the article, Malcolm Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, a Swedish city north of Stockholm. Is that a Swedish last name? Anyway, I knew from listening to the Lotus Eaters podcast (a British content provider critical of mass immigration policies) that historically peaceful Sweden has been experiencing an upsurge in bombings (and rapes and sexual molestation of women) thanks to mass immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. I did a quick search and found a Politico article on the topic, dated October 2023, reporting an incident in which a 25-year old woman was killed in Uppsala by a bomb mistakenly placed outside the wrong house by gang members who have begun bombing the homes of each other's families, putting everyone else at risk (the article is titled "Sweden's New Normal: Bombs in the Suburbs on a Weeknight"). So as AK likes to say, have a nice day, Malcolm Kyeyune. And I think this also fits in with the Warby post on the effects of immigration, under the heading of what Warby calls the 'cultural transaction costs' of immigration.
Musk is no doubt great at GROWING companies. I'm not sure why you think he has any expertise at downsizing. Is there something more than Twitter? What expertise do you think he has displayed in the govt cuts? So far I haven't seen any.
My man, cuts, growing, who cares? Self-driving EVs, x.ai, Starlink, rockets, actual telepathy gadget, twitter...what more do you need? Anyone of those things would demonstrate management competence far in excess of anything the feds have ever pulled off. 6-7 of them, at once? This is manna from heaven, and you're like "ehhhh, could use some salt." It's absurd.
You sound like a frickin cultist.
Sofa change and blind slash and burn. The list of idiotic cuts (some already reversed) is longer than the waste fraud and abuse that's been cut. I hope in the end you turn out to be right but I don't expect it.
Tell me, why would Trump be in favor of both the Keystone pipeline and a tariff on the oil that would flow through it? Just as stupid as the Dems.
For the same reason you can believe in affordable housing and strict zoning laws. They're both good ideas and good things go together, right?
Reality is a bitch.
Short answer, yes. But does one contradiction make the other any less?
Also, the housing issue has at least one more variable. The people most adamant we can have both typically think govt housing, govt subsidies, required low-income set aside, etc. can solve that issue. I'm not saying that's true but it's harder to prove it false and make everyone see the contradiction.
It doesn't make the contradiction any less. It's just an example that "not noticing" is bipartisan.
And of course, with the same sort of wishful thinking justification, Trump can say the combination of pro-drilling policies and the pipeline (both leading to increased supply) will keep prices down even with tariffs.
Lol, no. I sound like a person who can evaluate the reality of who is making decisions, their track record, and the nature of systemic solutions to systemic problems, without getting sidetracked by anecdotal clickbait.
The cultists are the people whose brains are so broken by politics they'll cry about a generational talent, undertaking a generational opportunity to fix an "unfixable" problem that everyone agreed (until 2 minutes ago) has been suffocating us to death bc he plays for the other team. The guy put together a computing cluster more quickly than anyone thought was possible to deliver the most powerful foundation model on the street, but people are focused on tweets they don't like? I don't care for George Soros's politics, but only a fool would doubt his genius.
Ezra Klein et al will furrow his eyebrows, and sternly admonish his tribe about how bad they are at governing, but all of a sudden it's "how dare you besmirch the honor of these loyal civil servants?! every card-carrying appendage of the bureaucracy is innocent until proven guilty! in this house we believe!"
The cultists have revealed themselves, but it's not me.
I didn’t expect Elon musk and doge to cut entitlements, which they have no authority to do.
I am pleasantly surprised that he has cut off a large flow of money to my enemies for the purpose of hurting me.
Agreed.
I think they could do a better job of documenting an unimpeachable list of top 10, though. If true, the 2B$ to Stacy Abram’s NGO based on nothing would be an excellent candidate, but things are moving so quickly it’s hard to know what will be real in the end. WSJ claimed recently that total savings are about 2B, which is hard to square. WSJ is usually a reasonable source.
He has publicly said that he believes a large amount of entitlement spending is waste fraud or abuse. The only evidence presented is the 25% rise over 4 years, which is indeed suspicious and monumental. I am curious how that will play out. Anyone who says DOGE is not serious conveniently leaves that out.
At a minimum the administration shouldn’t be cutting taxes. As difficult as it is absent cutting entitlements, taxes have to go up to make things sustainable. Doge going after the bureaucracy is fine, maybe it works long term, maybe not, I’m staying open to that part. In the meantime we’re still waiting for someone to take the fiscal situation seriously.
I don't have a problem with cutting taxes, but I'm not sure that extending the marginal tax rates from 2017 should be a priority.
I don't want to see the standard deduction, CTC, etc revert to 2016.
That's the first time I have read Kyeyune, and wow, he is awful.
The "we can't fix this bigger problem, so why are we trying to fix all these other problems?" is just another subspecies of the Nirvana Fallacy. I see this at work a lot, where people get nuts about stuff they can't fix, and cite that as a reason to not correct anything.
Worse, he gets the division of the constitutional powers laughably wrong. Sure Congress decides where money goes and the President sees that their legislation is enacted. Could anyone show where the legislated requirement for that 70k$ play was? No? Right, because Congress says "Spend money on this agency to do this vague sort of thing" and the agencies figure out what they want to do. There is no specific funding for nearly any of these programs; the government is not even certain how many there are or what they do.
Ideally Congress would write specific bills to spend X on Y for Z years, but in practice they have not done that for decades and instead of hand wave money at the executive branch to spend. Claiming it is not in the President's ambit to change how that money is spent by the agencies in pursuit of their legislated goals is absolute nonsense.
I knew it!
"Clark is patently wrong here."
I wouldn't expect assortative mating to raise IQ to any significant degree, at least not directly, but it should widen the distribution.
Agreed. Assortative mating on its own will do zero for *average* IQ either way (as long as one group does not "breed" consistently more than the other - I assume the "smart group" living in unhealthy towns did not "outbreed" the other groups). But it might enable more high-end IQs that may matter more for progress than the average or low-enders.
"They have radios, televisions, and many other goods that the wealthy Douglass never possessed."
Please don't forget modern dentistry, anti-fungal foot medications, and 24 hour access to 30 minutes or less pizza delivery.
Or a million other things.
Yup. So many other things. Life in China has shown me what it means to live in America. Abundance. Overwhelming abundance of good things.
I have to disagree with the statement that the USAID will be unimportant. The money for a single grant is unimportant, but $40B to influence global culture, much of it flowing through domestic policy advocates, is not trivial. Combined with $15B of NIH overhead, that's already $55B of funding for one ideology, per year. Removing USAID is part of a sweeping anti-woke action that may end up being a footnote the way the counter-reformation is a footnote. However, it is a really big change in the way the government and international affairs will work. Much of the rest of what's going on is perhaps bound up in that - the question of how the elites bankroll their special religion and status and virtue - but these are pretty integral.
I read the Lyman Stone figure and unbidden, inwardly thought something snarky like, oh yeah, in one of the Canterbury Tales didn’t the Friar offer to take IQ tests for the others, in exchange for his board.
Of course it’s all very scientific comparisons of polygenic changes in the actual piece.
Persuasive - if you believe we understand: a) genetics; or b) the brain.
This: "economics ought to be a branch of what sociology ought to be. Sociology ought to be the study of human interdependence. Actually-existing sociology is not that. It is the interpretation of all human behavior as oppressors vs. oppressed. And economics is on the road to becoming actually-existing sociology."
Perhaps all the assortative maters made better guns and bred better horses. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/06/medieval-horizons-why-the-middle-ages-matter.html
Re the Warby piece, this is the first time I've seen someone refer to the Baumol effect as a good thing!
No doubt oppressed/oppressor is a big part of sociology and maybe econ too but I can't agree it is all going to that. Plenty of less visible work not going down that path.
Malcom Kyeyune (what a fascinating wikipedia entry he has) is wholly correct. And for an extra-special nice day, his excellent article on the US military, “America’s National Security Wonderland” “https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/02/americas-national-security-wonderland/.” Reading the two together, I would suggest it might be possible to put the couch change into a larger context that begins to approach the degree of radical change that is necessary if the nation is make it through this decade. Here goes.
Isolationism: The Pragmatic Choice for a Broke-A** Nation
The Trump administration has made a number of outlandish foreign policy proposals. For example, the release of an AI generated video featuring a rebuilt Gaza replete with a gold statue of Trump himself. (https://www.euronews.com/2025/02/27/ai-generated-video-by-trump-shows-gaza-as-lavish-resort-drawing-criticism ). According to a White House public relations document, Trump has been talking with at least one foreign leader about “the President’s goal of ensuring that Gaza is rebuilt beautifully after the conflict ends, and providing options for the people of Gaza that allow them to live in security and dignity, and free of Hamas’s tyranny.” (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/02/readout-of-president-donald-j-trumps-meeting-with-king-abdullah-ii-of-jordan/ ).
The reaction was of course entirely predictable. And alternatives from other countries are being aired. (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-spearheads-arab-scramble-alternative-trumps-gaza-plan-2025-02-14/ ). Intended or not, it certainly seems that the outlandish proposal has shifted the initiative (and financial burden) for handling the mess in Gaza to other countries. One might well doubt whether the President’s Budget for 2026 will even mention Gaza much less request any funding. If this is indeed the case, it might reflect a foreign policy strategy of “talk absurdly and let the other guys blow their money.” Such a strategy, as a new commitment to isolationism, is likely to be much more pragmatic and more likely to be successful in advancing the strategic interests of the United States than the old “buy influence at any cost” approach.
Tariffs, 40 Icebreakers, Canada as 51st State, and Red, White, and Blue Land
Of more immediate concern to the United States than Gaza is the situation in the Arctic in which China and Russia are apparently taking aggressive measures incompatible with US wellbeing. (https://www.defensenews.com/global/2024/12/07/china-russia-cooperation-poses-rising-threat-in-arctic-pentagon-warns/ ) Canada and Greenland are weak and essentially undefended based on the expectation that the United States will protect them. Will Trump’s absurd talk provoke Canada and Denmark into taking military responsibility for their territories?
The Panama Canal, The Gulf of America, and The South China Sea
Is Trump’s “Gulf of America” gambit a message to China about its South China Sea imperialism? Two can play that game? China is South America’s top export destination and source of foreign direct investment. Since 2017, China has persuaded three Central American countries—Panama, El Salvador, and Nicaragua—to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. China has invested in major infrastructure projects in Panama, including ports, bridges, railways, and power stations. The US essentially surrendered to China in the region decades ago and has only Argentina and El Salvador as potentially ideologically aligned allies at the present moment: every other country appears hell bent on emulating Venezuela. Clearly, the US has no more pragmatic interest in engaging with these countries that reject American values than it does with the EU nations that reject them as well. Will Trump’s absurdism force China and her Latinx minions to divert resources from development to wasteful military spending? Venezuela recently claimed it would liberate Puerto Rico using Brazilian troops. Might China one day grow to regret stepping into this mess? Will that day be hastened by Trump stirring the pot? And will stirring the pot save the US money? Already we see funds getting cut off to Honduras. A little couch change here, a little couch change there. Pretty soon you have enough to make to worthwhile to haul down to the machine at the grocery store.
Ukraine
At first it seemed to me that Trump’s absurd talk about mineral treaties seemed like just an excuse to abandon his campaign promise to achieve peace by giving the United States at least the intimation of an excuses for continuing to shovel treasure Ukraine’s way. Not sure what other reason there was for it other than at least trying to recover some of the billions (its very amusing all the cute different ways the experts come up with to achieve whatever figure they want to by including or excluding different types of transfers) already wasted. After witnessing the Foreign Policy, Inc. lobby fail miserably following dissolution of the Soviet Union, establish a noxious precedent with Kosovo, and in Georgia, and again in Crimea, use USAID funds to overturn the 2014 election in Ukraine, the US would have done much better for itself and for all concerned if it had simply shut up and engaged in ferocious neutrality and isolationism. Whenever the Foreign Policy, Inc. lobby gets involved, disaster is sure to follow :Ukraine could have signed an earlier peace treaty and would have retained much more of its territory than ever will now if Zelensky had only been permitted the initial peace treaty offered back at the start of the war. Now, Zelensky has offered Trump the perfect opportunity to wash his hands of the mess and Trump is a fool, and not acting in the strategic interests of the United States, if he fails to take full advantage.
Winning the Fight that Matters: Defeating the Forever Wars, Inc. Lobby
The counter-case for continued military engagement and spending around the world is made straightforwardly, honestly and nobly by defense industry funded 501(c)(3) lobbyists like CSIS: more profit for us. See:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-supporting-ukraine-revitalizing-us-defense-industrial-base One has to respect the Sell! Sell! Sell! Mentality. But the two trillion dollar debt is a reality. And getting rid of armaments just so you have to pay to replace them is not really doing much to strengthen the US militarily. The industry that has grown up over the Iraq and Afghanistan forever wars is not going to go quietly into the night. They need the stalemate that is the EU’s realistic and avowed goal for Ukraine to continue to forever to support their investment plans and continuing influence. To defeat them, more absurdist talk forcing the EU to create its own military system and to dissolve NATO, is definitely in order. Non-absurdly, Trump is talking about a new missile defense system for the United States. Perfect. Fund it with the savings from US military bases withdrawn from Europe. And to build a real industrial base in the United States, Musk and Trump need to shut down the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration whose de facto mission is to eliminate privately owned conveyances, and repeal all the ersatz safety regulations that make cars so expensive, and open the door to Toyota building and selling its $10,000 pickup truck here. Then we will have the makings of both an economy, personal income growth, and a sustainable defense industrial base.
Per immigration...and I apologize if I am so dense as to not know if it applies...but, what about all those jobs that Americans simply will not do, and if asked or required to do because it's the only job available, would riot?
Specifically, meat packing. Agricultural stoop labor. I know of more, but you get the idea. Even I can foresee when robots will handle these tasks, but meat packing robots are some not insubstantial number of years in the future. I've seen the developmental robot strawberry pickers and lettuce harvesters, but what about right now and the next couple years?
IOW, who is going to do the dirty work?
Do not confuse jobs you and your friends wouldn't do with jobs that no Americans would do. It's amazing what high wages can accomplish.
You've apparently never been in a meat packing plant nor done stoop labor. I've done both, in addition to a modest range of other backbreaking and soul annihilating agricultural work. Wages are abysmal, working conditions grotesque.
I suppose if hamburger was $50 a pound and a decent stake about $180 a pound, you might be right. Until it is, you are wrong.
"Wages are abysmal, working conditions grotesque."
That's precisely why the owners want to keep bringing in poor, unskilled immigrants -- so they don't have to raise wages and improve conditions. You're right that food prices would have to go up if that changed. How much, I don't know, but EVERYONE gets upset if food prices go up, so it doesn't seem real likely to change significantly.
Right. Make it something even mildly resembling equitable, and food price indices go straight up. The work is miserable. Honest, respectable, and miserable.
The only way out, near as I can tell, is robotics, which are making steady and amazing advances. Even strawberries, one of the hardest stoop labor tasks, is getting very close to workable and economically viable robotics.
As long as Americans are only regarded as reaching their potential in the role of heavyset “consumers” I guess there’s no answer to this.
Yeah. I grew up rural and was in those gigs. When I hear folks fantasizing that Americans will do those jobs, I can only do an eye roll. They pay squat, they're brutal, and you take abuse all day. I don't have an answer.
There's a big difference between:
1) Americans won't do those jobs and they never will.
2) Americans won't do those jobs. Of course, if the jobs paid more and the working conditions were better, they would.
I go with 2). It sounds like you would too, but think that the change in wages and/or working conditions would have to be pretty big to get enough Americans to do them.
Given the cushiness of jobs in a sort of female-oriented economy, and the American habit of complaining - it would be a little strange if one group were to be totally left out of the equation, the obsession with “job” over private life, and how they’re treating you - just because they don’t work in air-conditioning, or with a keyboard.
Or not? What am I missing?
Because that is in fact the way things are. The noise emanates from those that least deserve attention.
The wages necessary to get Americans doing the jobs would blow a hole in food prices so large it would decimate people’s daily lives and become the Mother of all political footballs. History tells me it ain’t gonna happen. I’m not sure what it tells other people.
I read an unusually information-packed book about Cesar Chavez, a charismatic and sometimes nasty and mercurial, possibly eventually crazy, guy and also an enemy of the idea that working conditions should become such that only the desperate will accept them, and an opponent of illegal immigration.
Forgot name of book.
And another book by some enterprising young journalist gal who tried in the Barbara Ehrenreich vein, to get on as a picker so as to write about it.
Of course (as best I recall) she hadn’t the stamina to really carry on with it, but another takeaway, perhaps unintended, was the virtual impossibility of an American - even one whose ancestors did just this work a hundred years ago, so presumably not a physical impossibility - of “breaking in” to it due to the closed, ethnic barrier of it, now generations long. Unless you were “investigating” with that “Scout mindset. Any more than it would be very possible to join an all-Mexican, all illegal work crew.
You might sometimes have a “settler American” supervising those crews … but you see less of even that now.
Which has its own transaction cost, I can attest to that myself. It’s not easy being a female employer in that situation.
The jobs Americans won’t do are sometimes jobs that, in certain parts of the country, it would be hard for them to get. Regional variance suggests that Americans will still do those jobs.
I should add that later in life, CC - although he had surrounded himself with and made full use of do-gooding Protestants - came to reverence the idea of suffering, and moved away from practical or economic concerns, and into a sort of part Catholic/part Esalen -ish cult mindset, with himself as the center. Antimaterialist, but in a cool compound. This was actually my favorite CC.
Yes, it’s a pattern one can see in a few justice warriors.
Interesting point. When I was in the gig decades ago, I worked alongside Mexicans, all of course illegal and living in what we'd now call slave cabins, and it was not a problem being accepted. You do the work, and you're accepted. Nowadays, I can see how that's not likely.
Your last sentence, sure, in very small numbers on very small operations, orchards, blueberries (which is mostly mechanized nowadays). Big operations doing the ugly jobs, I don't see it, especially stoop labor...lettuce, cabbages, etc. Meat packing is another one. There's the odd white person amid a sea of ethnicity. Some of it is simple racism. I've had people tell me they'd never work with Mexicans. I hear Americans will do the jobs. Those with that opinion...I don't know how they get that opinion.
Folks offering opinions would be well advised to try the gig before imagining Americans would do those jobs. Even if they could find and take the job, they'd last about 1 pay period. I live in China nowadays. The work ethic here is so far beyond anything I've ever experienced in America, I just don't see Americans ramping up to do the ugly jobs. Maybe someday, but I doubt it.
I agree that Americans are soft.
I certainly wouldn’t dispute that. We are soft.
However, our softness was not I feel, entirely of our own making.
It should thus not be referenced as a slam dunk, in re virtue. In my opinion.
And it’s worth noting, that time the illegals at the poultry plant asked for better gloves because they got such terrible staph infections in their hands …
One lady who led the effort, had been there 17 years. Same fake SS # the whole time.
Next day she was brought in and questioned about that number lol.
The whole lot fired - they’d been brought up in buses from Central America …
The plant owner got on a plane to Nepal, to find his new employees, who’d demand no gloves as these others finally had, or Sundays off as the Mennonites before *them* had.
Maybe not a slam dunk but a sunk shot from 3 point range fits.
It's hard to imagine how one could debate a contingent prediction. Either both share a model and the debate is about predicting the exogenous variables -- size of deficits, supply shocks, etc. or they do not and its not about interest rates at all.
Even if Warby is right -- society is set up in such a way that marginal improvement in efficiency go predominantly to the well off -- that still woud not be reason to oppose immigration, especially selective immigration. Why not spend anti-immigrant energy on fixing the societal system for distributing gains?
Why spend time and energy insulating your house when you could build a fusion reactor and be warm no matter what the windows do?
"Why not spend anti-immigrant energy on fixing the societal system for distributing gains?"
Whaddaya got in mind? I suppose we could ask Elizabeth Warren and Bernie to design the system, but I'd rather not.
I mean Warby or anyone else who understands the pro-growth, argument but opposes immigration on distributional grounds.
Sure, maybe. It’s easier to just exploit unfortunates. Folks trend toward easy and make up amazing excuses while doing so to make it appear they don’t know what their hands are doing.