Torenberg is completely correct- we are increasingly producing nothing but bureaucrats at every level of our society. There will be a reckoning at some point.
I now think of this as an inevitable increase of middle managers trying to appear to do high-salary justifying work, meetings & reports, while actually doing very little.
Would be a smaller problem with more small firms. Republican (& Libber) support for most big mergers have contributed to this plethora of BS work.
What's the worst thing about Twitter as a company?
Musk tweeted "It seems there are 10 managers for each coder."
Lots of fat in all the "cash cow" quadrant companies, where so much tech has grown into.
"And one strongly suspects they would rather see public school reform, bigger retirement accounts, and lower property tax bills"
Sure, but are any of those possible? Seriously.
What do parents mean by "public school reform"? I think they mean that somehow the schools will teach something, something called education, and by so doing will cause their children to be prosperous after they leave school. But the schools can't. But the schools can't. At the most basic, nobody knows what makes someone prosperous, and a fortiori, how to teach that. Redoing how you teach Algebra Two or American History isn't going to do squat for making students prosperous. Both parties honestly believe they can "fix" the schools to do something like that. They are delusional, as the history of the past sixty years pretty strongly suggests.
In the long run, "bigger retirement accounts" come from economic growth. But in the short run, it's "animal spirits" and asset inflation, the latter often from policies that have long-term harm. Policies that promote long-term growth don't show results until the, um, long-term. Which doesn't help at the next election.
"Lower property tax bills" either mean the local government does less, or the state or federal government pays for more local expenses. Which eventually means higher sales and income taxes. Or the inflation of consistent deficits. As far as I can tell, there is very little constituency for "cut local spending", which means there is probably not much serious constituency for "lower property tax bills". When the local government says, "If we lower property taxes, we'll have to cut X, Y, and Z services", the people who called for lower property taxes will fold.
So De Santis, despite literally being the embodiment of "The New Right", isn't the New Right.
No True Scotsmen Indeed.
He flies illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard, but he's not a chauvinist.
He picks culture war fights against powerful institutions people like the author wouldn't touch with a ten foot poll, but he's not a culture warrior.
He's insanely pro growth, low tax, and low regulation...but the New Right is basically SOCIALISM.
All of these mixed use white collar neighborhoods are being built in Red States. When built anywhere else they are built in the reddest possible area within commuter distance. I live in one. I drive past them all the time. The statistic bear this out.
Zombie Reaganism lost California. It made the coasts non-competitive. It squandered all its victories.
These people should make up their minds. One minute De Santis is a mini-Trump just as bad as him and maybe even more dangerous. The next he's really been their guy all along.
The republic needs law & order and common sense leadership. This message won in Virginia and Florida and even pushed the needle in New York state. The foolish pundits can agitate about political labels. I don't care. If people vote for insanity then they deserve to get it. "Good and hard".
Harsanyi remains an elite globalist, but most GOP voters increasingly are not.
"My friends believe the Republican Party establishment is incompetent and cowardly. Maybe. Thankfully, we don’t have a binary choice. May both factions fail."
Democrats or Republicans will win - 99% binary choice. (Sanders independent? Ventura was Reform).
If the GOP wants 100% free and fair elections, the GOPe (Rep establishment) is incompetent - but if the GOPe wants to talk, like Dems, of "free and fair" but actually wants rigged elections with censorship against politically inconvenient news, they got what they really wanted. Dishonest, but not incompetent. Many, most?, GOPe would rather lose races with Trump supported candidates than have MAGA guys win and reform their club. (Shown objectively by spending in races]
Trump barely won with 62 million votes; lost an arguably rigged election with 75 million votes. Any, and every, analysis that fails to address Trump's genuine popularity, with known and relevant numbers, is offering some level of BS. [Mail-in ballots are subject to fraud, not used in most democracies. In a Free and Fair election, true news is not censored - news of H. Biden's laptop and Biden corruption was censored, 2020 election was NOT 100% Free and Fair]
The New Right is increasingly non-college workers. That's a less binary thing, so far: college grads go Dem, workers go Republicans who don't want to outsource US mfg jobs to commie China running semi-slave camps, and making CCP billionaires, who compete with US globalist billionaires. Very much white workers, but increasingly Hispanic, Asian, and even black workers, tho still far more men than women.
Trump has declared, Trump will win the GOP primaries where only registered Republicans can vote; Trump will be the 2024 Rep candidate. College educated Reps who don't like Trump's ego-driven personality will try to rationalize their dislike of him. Maybe the new kangaroo court special counsel will indict him. [...and even get a (unfair) DC conviction on something that he'll appeal and eventually win a not guilty].
I'll support him, again; and he'll probably lose again due to Dem demonization and the failure to have 100% Free and Fair elections, because so many Dems are so fraud friendly. And because college grad GOP folk can convince themselves he is somehow terrible DESPITE 4 years of him office without any clearly terrible policy. He was not so good on COVID, but not clearly worse than average OECD leader.
Christian Nationalism is not quite the same as the NatCons, but will become as important to Republican victories, when they happen, as the black vote has been for Democrats. Their often single issue voting on pro-life policies were crucial to reversing Roe, after 50 years of losing -- which unsurprisingly caused an increased intensity of the pro-choice (/abortion) who had been winners for so many decades. Losers have to try harder if they want to win later.
She correctly complains that many NatCons, and Christian Nationalists, and both GOPe Reps and other Republicans don't know many of the details of the failed attempts to reduce fraud.
She notes how little publicity these efforts have gotten - part of Dem media power is to censure, or ignore, the good stuff Reps do or try to do.
She also thinks Reps should choose to dump Trump; one of the few times I think she's wrong, as is Harsanyi (and Arnold). Or is it me?
Harsanyi is going to learn the awful truth in 2024 when DeSantis (or Youngkin or Kemp, or a combination of any two of them) runs and loses in the general election. I predict, when that happens, he will call DeSantis/Youngkin/Kemp a losing National Conservative. In short, I doubt there is a coalition that can elect a Republican of any stripe any longer. The only way to get there is probably to let the Democrats burn the country to the ground.
Great piece from Harsanyi. Natcons are electoral losers except in deep red states, that is very well established now. Trump barely managed to be less of a loser than everyone's least favorite person Hillary Clinton in 2016, and that razor-thin "success" fooled everybody into thinking that what works in deep-red primaries can also work on the national stage.
Harsanyi: But Republicans do not, as far as I can tell, actually HAVE any ideas about how to reform public schools, promote freer trade, improve municipal finances, incentivize larger retirement accounts or reduce costs of health care. Democrats ought to be vulnerable for not promoting high-value immigration and for not reducing the deficit, for not choosing the lowest cost ways to reduce climate, for jut not being very interested in inclusive growth. Unfortunately, Republicans seem no more or even less interested.
Torenberg: There is more than enough work for these administrators gradually chipping away at regulations and administrative practice that are not guided by growth-promoting, cost benefit considerations. Politicians have not created the demand for them.
Blue States have an income tax of around 10% on professional workers. Purple states 5%. Red States 0%
Blue states/counties property taxes have about 2.X%, red states/counties usually have a property tax rate of 1.X%. Assessed values are lower in red areas too. The difference is mostly bloated blue school district budgets.
People move away from blue states/counties to red states/counties.
Like housing, medical costs are higher in blue areas. The largest expansion of health spending was done by democrats, Obamacare, which is dramatically over budget compared to what it was pitched as.
So ... blue states/local jurisdictions need to reform land use restrictions so that a) more people can move to where they want to and BTW raise property tax revenue in those places to pay for better schools and policing.
I don't think ACA was ever supposed to reduce health care costs. [It would have been nice if it had, but I don't recall any "repeal and replace" people with any ideas about how to do that.] ACA is about making access to subsidies for health insurance that most people receive through policies purchased by employers available to people for whom that doesn't work so well.* Since it does not reduce the subsidies through employment, it clearly has to increase the total amount of subsidy. Sorry, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
*Having employers purchase your health insurance for you is a really dumb system. a) It is not very good at matching coverage with what people want. [The extreme in this is employers choosing coverage based on THEIR philosophical/religious beliefs instead of acting, as best they can, as the employees' agent.] b) It in effect makes employing low remuneration workers proportionately more expensive than higher remuneration workers. c) It is financed in effect with a wage tax which discourages employment relative to using a VAT which discourages consumption.
Do you not remember “bend the curve”? (Not “two weeks to flattens the curve” -- the similarity in the words made me discover that they are inappropriately parked right next to each other in my brain.) “Bend the curve was all about reducing the rate of increase in health care spending to be less than the economic growth rate.
Yes. My (maybe too charitable) interpretation of this was that it was part of the objective when health insurance reform as going to be bipartisan. Democrats wouldn't be able to take all the credit from extending access and Republicans would not have to take all the blame for cutting costs. When Republicans bailed, Democrats just went with extending access with a few cost cutting measures (like the Cadillac tax that didn't survive). A disappointing result, though better than nothing.
I worked on Obamacare and my impression is that it was an incompetent special interest clusterfuck whose only grease was shoving enough money into the existing bullshit system to oil enough gears.
Could you be more specific? How would you have changed it? It seems to have worked pretty well, though I do think that it did not have enough age brackets, making the premia for younger insured pretty high.
I was referring to political strategy. Democrats were not willing to take the political heat for cost containment. SHOULD they for the good of the Republic? Of course.
What kinds of cost containment would you have suggested in addition to making immigration of medical personnel?
Blue jurisdictions have tons of tax revenue, they just squander it. They spend plenty on schools and police but it's all counter productive. It's a bottomless pit.
They need zoning because they encourage underclass behavior and zoning is the only way to keep it away. Also, most leftists I've met have a general anti-growth mindset. The anti-growth candidates in all the local elections were all Democrat aligned, when I talk to people who vote for them they have an anti-growth mindset born out of their resentment and pessimism (common for leftists).
People are moving were they want...away from leftists.
1) The bottom line is that the left has no healthcare reform strategy that reduces medical cost trend. Every single idea they have just throws more money into the system and often requires it to do things that increase cost trend. Even inaction would be superior to further meddling of this type.
2) The fundamental problem is that people on the lower end are not productive enough to pay for the level of healthcare Dems feel they deserve, and as more and more low productivity people are imported the cost of that subsidization grows more unsustainable. Simply put, I don't consider someone working a job where they do not generate enough tax revenue to cover their medical/educational/external costs to be a productive member of society. They have a make-work job subsidized by the productive.
I agree with many of your complaints about Leftists. You and I agree about growth and efficiency improving reforms (among which I count deficit reduction, higher levels of skilled immigration, freer trade, and taxation of net CO2 and methane emissions). I want to retain a lot of redistribution, however: subsidized health insurance, "progressive" benefits in SS, more generous and automatic unemployment insurance (these financed with a VAT, not a tax on wages) child tax credit, EITC.
I'd love to be shown that Republicans are more likely to move in these directions than Democrats.
One of the (many!) reasons to dislike having insurance run through employers is that people move jobs very frequently. That means that they move insurance very frequently. And that’s putting aside the fact that employers switch insurers from time to time. All that means that your insurer is going to change on average every 2.7 years. [Source: I made that up! Five minutes of desultory web searching didn’t give me what I was looking for.] Regardless of what the exact number really is, it means that your insurer has little incentive to invest in your long-term health. They know that, before the long-term arrives, the health-insurer roulette wheel will have spun you around at least a couple times.
Thomas, I agree with your assessment of Republicans. The Democrats have made themselves vulnerable on all sorts of issues. Yet the Republican leadership doesn't seem to care. Individual Republicans have formulated campaigns and arguments. And of course the right-wing pundits are all over the failure of Democratic policies. But Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney seem nonplussed, and in fact appear more agitated by Conservatives being angry at government, than in recognizing government has failed.
Torenberg is completely correct- we are increasingly producing nothing but bureaucrats at every level of our society. There will be a reckoning at some point.
I now think of this as an inevitable increase of middle managers trying to appear to do high-salary justifying work, meetings & reports, while actually doing very little.
Would be a smaller problem with more small firms. Republican (& Libber) support for most big mergers have contributed to this plethora of BS work.
What's the worst thing about Twitter as a company?
Musk tweeted "It seems there are 10 managers for each coder."
Lots of fat in all the "cash cow" quadrant companies, where so much tech has grown into.
"And one strongly suspects they would rather see public school reform, bigger retirement accounts, and lower property tax bills"
Sure, but are any of those possible? Seriously.
What do parents mean by "public school reform"? I think they mean that somehow the schools will teach something, something called education, and by so doing will cause their children to be prosperous after they leave school. But the schools can't. But the schools can't. At the most basic, nobody knows what makes someone prosperous, and a fortiori, how to teach that. Redoing how you teach Algebra Two or American History isn't going to do squat for making students prosperous. Both parties honestly believe they can "fix" the schools to do something like that. They are delusional, as the history of the past sixty years pretty strongly suggests.
In the long run, "bigger retirement accounts" come from economic growth. But in the short run, it's "animal spirits" and asset inflation, the latter often from policies that have long-term harm. Policies that promote long-term growth don't show results until the, um, long-term. Which doesn't help at the next election.
"Lower property tax bills" either mean the local government does less, or the state or federal government pays for more local expenses. Which eventually means higher sales and income taxes. Or the inflation of consistent deficits. As far as I can tell, there is very little constituency for "cut local spending", which means there is probably not much serious constituency for "lower property tax bills". When the local government says, "If we lower property taxes, we'll have to cut X, Y, and Z services", the people who called for lower property taxes will fold.
So De Santis, despite literally being the embodiment of "The New Right", isn't the New Right.
No True Scotsmen Indeed.
He flies illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard, but he's not a chauvinist.
He picks culture war fights against powerful institutions people like the author wouldn't touch with a ten foot poll, but he's not a culture warrior.
He's insanely pro growth, low tax, and low regulation...but the New Right is basically SOCIALISM.
All of these mixed use white collar neighborhoods are being built in Red States. When built anywhere else they are built in the reddest possible area within commuter distance. I live in one. I drive past them all the time. The statistic bear this out.
Zombie Reaganism lost California. It made the coasts non-competitive. It squandered all its victories.
These people should make up their minds. One minute De Santis is a mini-Trump just as bad as him and maybe even more dangerous. The next he's really been their guy all along.
The republic needs law & order and common sense leadership. This message won in Virginia and Florida and even pushed the needle in New York state. The foolish pundits can agitate about political labels. I don't care. If people vote for insanity then they deserve to get it. "Good and hard".
Harsanyi remains an elite globalist, but most GOP voters increasingly are not.
"My friends believe the Republican Party establishment is incompetent and cowardly. Maybe. Thankfully, we don’t have a binary choice. May both factions fail."
Democrats or Republicans will win - 99% binary choice. (Sanders independent? Ventura was Reform).
If the GOP wants 100% free and fair elections, the GOPe (Rep establishment) is incompetent - but if the GOPe wants to talk, like Dems, of "free and fair" but actually wants rigged elections with censorship against politically inconvenient news, they got what they really wanted. Dishonest, but not incompetent. Many, most?, GOPe would rather lose races with Trump supported candidates than have MAGA guys win and reform their club. (Shown objectively by spending in races]
Trump barely won with 62 million votes; lost an arguably rigged election with 75 million votes. Any, and every, analysis that fails to address Trump's genuine popularity, with known and relevant numbers, is offering some level of BS. [Mail-in ballots are subject to fraud, not used in most democracies. In a Free and Fair election, true news is not censored - news of H. Biden's laptop and Biden corruption was censored, 2020 election was NOT 100% Free and Fair]
The New Right is increasingly non-college workers. That's a less binary thing, so far: college grads go Dem, workers go Republicans who don't want to outsource US mfg jobs to commie China running semi-slave camps, and making CCP billionaires, who compete with US globalist billionaires. Very much white workers, but increasingly Hispanic, Asian, and even black workers, tho still far more men than women.
Trump has declared, Trump will win the GOP primaries where only registered Republicans can vote; Trump will be the 2024 Rep candidate. College educated Reps who don't like Trump's ego-driven personality will try to rationalize their dislike of him. Maybe the new kangaroo court special counsel will indict him. [...and even get a (unfair) DC conviction on something that he'll appeal and eventually win a not guilty].
I'll support him, again; and he'll probably lose again due to Dem demonization and the failure to have 100% Free and Fair elections, because so many Dems are so fraud friendly. And because college grad GOP folk can convince themselves he is somehow terrible DESPITE 4 years of him office without any clearly terrible policy. He was not so good on COVID, but not clearly worse than average OECD leader.
Christian Nationalism is not quite the same as the NatCons, but will become as important to Republican victories, when they happen, as the black vote has been for Democrats. Their often single issue voting on pro-life policies were crucial to reversing Roe, after 50 years of losing -- which unsurprisingly caused an increased intensity of the pro-choice (/abortion) who had been winners for so many decades. Losers have to try harder if they want to win later.
Neo does a fine job describing how hard it is to change voting rules with fraud friendly Dems in power. https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/11/25/what-has-kept-election-security-reform-from-happening-in-many-states/
She correctly complains that many NatCons, and Christian Nationalists, and both GOPe Reps and other Republicans don't know many of the details of the failed attempts to reduce fraud.
She notes how little publicity these efforts have gotten - part of Dem media power is to censure, or ignore, the good stuff Reps do or try to do.
She also thinks Reps should choose to dump Trump; one of the few times I think she's wrong, as is Harsanyi (and Arnold). Or is it me?
Harsanyi is going to learn the awful truth in 2024 when DeSantis (or Youngkin or Kemp, or a combination of any two of them) runs and loses in the general election. I predict, when that happens, he will call DeSantis/Youngkin/Kemp a losing National Conservative. In short, I doubt there is a coalition that can elect a Republican of any stripe any longer. The only way to get there is probably to let the Democrats burn the country to the ground.
Great piece from Harsanyi. Natcons are electoral losers except in deep red states, that is very well established now. Trump barely managed to be less of a loser than everyone's least favorite person Hillary Clinton in 2016, and that razor-thin "success" fooled everybody into thinking that what works in deep-red primaries can also work on the national stage.
Harsanyi: But Republicans do not, as far as I can tell, actually HAVE any ideas about how to reform public schools, promote freer trade, improve municipal finances, incentivize larger retirement accounts or reduce costs of health care. Democrats ought to be vulnerable for not promoting high-value immigration and for not reducing the deficit, for not choosing the lowest cost ways to reduce climate, for jut not being very interested in inclusive growth. Unfortunately, Republicans seem no more or even less interested.
Torenberg: There is more than enough work for these administrators gradually chipping away at regulations and administrative practice that are not guided by growth-promoting, cost benefit considerations. Politicians have not created the demand for them.
Blue States have an income tax of around 10% on professional workers. Purple states 5%. Red States 0%
Blue states/counties property taxes have about 2.X%, red states/counties usually have a property tax rate of 1.X%. Assessed values are lower in red areas too. The difference is mostly bloated blue school district budgets.
People move away from blue states/counties to red states/counties.
Like housing, medical costs are higher in blue areas. The largest expansion of health spending was done by democrats, Obamacare, which is dramatically over budget compared to what it was pitched as.
So ... blue states/local jurisdictions need to reform land use restrictions so that a) more people can move to where they want to and BTW raise property tax revenue in those places to pay for better schools and policing.
I don't think ACA was ever supposed to reduce health care costs. [It would have been nice if it had, but I don't recall any "repeal and replace" people with any ideas about how to do that.] ACA is about making access to subsidies for health insurance that most people receive through policies purchased by employers available to people for whom that doesn't work so well.* Since it does not reduce the subsidies through employment, it clearly has to increase the total amount of subsidy. Sorry, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
*Having employers purchase your health insurance for you is a really dumb system. a) It is not very good at matching coverage with what people want. [The extreme in this is employers choosing coverage based on THEIR philosophical/religious beliefs instead of acting, as best they can, as the employees' agent.] b) It in effect makes employing low remuneration workers proportionately more expensive than higher remuneration workers. c) It is financed in effect with a wage tax which discourages employment relative to using a VAT which discourages consumption.
Do you not remember “bend the curve”? (Not “two weeks to flattens the curve” -- the similarity in the words made me discover that they are inappropriately parked right next to each other in my brain.) “Bend the curve was all about reducing the rate of increase in health care spending to be less than the economic growth rate.
There are only three ways to bend the curve:
1) Make people pay enough for their own healthcare that they ration it based on their own local knowledge of their situation.
2) Make people who engage in unhealthy behavior pay for it themselves.
3) Give people some option at the end of life besides blowing other peoples money on useless nonsense.
The Dem healthcare plan is to hide as many welfare based cross subsidies inside "insurance" as they can.
Yes. My (maybe too charitable) interpretation of this was that it was part of the objective when health insurance reform as going to be bipartisan. Democrats wouldn't be able to take all the credit from extending access and Republicans would not have to take all the blame for cutting costs. When Republicans bailed, Democrats just went with extending access with a few cost cutting measures (like the Cadillac tax that didn't survive). A disappointing result, though better than nothing.
I worked on Obamacare and my impression is that it was an incompetent special interest clusterfuck whose only grease was shoving enough money into the existing bullshit system to oil enough gears.
Could you be more specific? How would you have changed it? It seems to have worked pretty well, though I do think that it did not have enough age brackets, making the premia for younger insured pretty high.
I was referring to political strategy. Democrats were not willing to take the political heat for cost containment. SHOULD they for the good of the Republic? Of course.
What kinds of cost containment would you have suggested in addition to making immigration of medical personnel?
Blue jurisdictions have tons of tax revenue, they just squander it. They spend plenty on schools and police but it's all counter productive. It's a bottomless pit.
They need zoning because they encourage underclass behavior and zoning is the only way to keep it away. Also, most leftists I've met have a general anti-growth mindset. The anti-growth candidates in all the local elections were all Democrat aligned, when I talk to people who vote for them they have an anti-growth mindset born out of their resentment and pessimism (common for leftists).
People are moving were they want...away from leftists.
1) The bottom line is that the left has no healthcare reform strategy that reduces medical cost trend. Every single idea they have just throws more money into the system and often requires it to do things that increase cost trend. Even inaction would be superior to further meddling of this type.
2) The fundamental problem is that people on the lower end are not productive enough to pay for the level of healthcare Dems feel they deserve, and as more and more low productivity people are imported the cost of that subsidization grows more unsustainable. Simply put, I don't consider someone working a job where they do not generate enough tax revenue to cover their medical/educational/external costs to be a productive member of society. They have a make-work job subsidized by the productive.
I agree with many of your complaints about Leftists. You and I agree about growth and efficiency improving reforms (among which I count deficit reduction, higher levels of skilled immigration, freer trade, and taxation of net CO2 and methane emissions). I want to retain a lot of redistribution, however: subsidized health insurance, "progressive" benefits in SS, more generous and automatic unemployment insurance (these financed with a VAT, not a tax on wages) child tax credit, EITC.
I'd love to be shown that Republicans are more likely to move in these directions than Democrats.
One of the (many!) reasons to dislike having insurance run through employers is that people move jobs very frequently. That means that they move insurance very frequently. And that’s putting aside the fact that employers switch insurers from time to time. All that means that your insurer is going to change on average every 2.7 years. [Source: I made that up! Five minutes of desultory web searching didn’t give me what I was looking for.] Regardless of what the exact number really is, it means that your insurer has little incentive to invest in your long-term health. They know that, before the long-term arrives, the health-insurer roulette wheel will have spun you around at least a couple times.
Thank you. I will incorporate that into future rants against employer "provided" health insurance. :)
Thomas, I agree with your assessment of Republicans. The Democrats have made themselves vulnerable on all sorts of issues. Yet the Republican leadership doesn't seem to care. Individual Republicans have formulated campaigns and arguments. And of course the right-wing pundits are all over the failure of Democratic policies. But Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney seem nonplussed, and in fact appear more agitated by Conservatives being angry at government, than in recognizing government has failed.
"overproduction of elites" was common parlance at least going back to 2019 and I'm quite sure I was late to the party back then.