21 Comments

Haley, of course, was correct- the horrid finances of the federal government are a bipartisan project and have been my entire life except for a brief period from 1995 until 2001 when we had the perfect combination of fiscal rectitude- a newly empowered Republican majority in both the House and Senate for the first time in 40+ years and a Democrat President who had the political need to govern as a fiscal conservative to get re-elected. There is no fixing this, however, it will have to collapse in a hyper-inflationary spiral. The last chance to fix it went away with Ben Bernanke and the response to the Great Recession. Trump and Biden have just pour gasoline onto the fire and Powell is trying to put it out with a squirt gun.

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Haley is a brain-dead phony, positioning herself as a maverick on spending, but advocating for squandering yet another tens of billions of dollars on the Ukraine quagmire ('less than 3.5% of our defense budget has been given to Ukraine'), with no clearly specified political or military objective (just some mindless boilerplate about the American President needing to know the difference between right and wrong, and good and evil), and no clue about how further spending or military aid is going to achieve any objective when it has failed so far to do so. Anyway, I agree with your comment below about the likelihood of any Republican candidate being elected.

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I don't disagree, only pointing out that she was right on that one statement isolated as it was.

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Vivek reminds me of Andrew Yang. He also had a bunch of goofy positions that fit the same class worldview but from the left.

Sometimes he is so loopy I can't even agree with him on stuff I agree with. I totally favor making peace with Russia, but this idea that they will "abandon China" in exchange is bonkers. This isn't a game of Risk. How is Vivek going to enforce this "agreement"? Maybe he can marry one of Putin's daughters (does he have a family, I don't even know). And Vivek can send one of his relatives to foster at the Russian imperial court as a kind of friendly hostage for good behavior.

Vivek will come and go and wouldn't have total power even as president. Putin is like 70+ or something. No deal will last. They are not 18th century monarchs trading alliances.

In Russia's time of need China sold them microchips and other things they needed to stay afloat. If China ends up in need Russia will probably sell them energy while staying neutral. They share a border, nobodies going to stop it. That's basic national self interest.

Ending the war in Ukraine is a good idea because the war is terrible for everyone involved. A nice possible side benefit would be reducing antagonism with Russia so we have fewer acute enemies, but that would flow from Russia's self interest post peace and not from some "deal".

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Actually, one of Putin's daughters is a doctor

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Favorite Russian family story.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10128323/Russian-woman-24-welcomed-TWENTY-ONE-surrogate-babies-just-year.html

Elon Musk only has ten kids via IVF. He got beat by a Russian woman.

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I feel like this is fairly well known if one looks into it a little bit and kind of think I am stating something obvious, but nursing home and very infirmed elder care economics is mostly downstream of the funding mechanism. Medicare doesn't pay long term nursing care. So if you have any assets and you need to go to a nursing home you are going to need a medicaid spend down. If you can get on hospice, Medicare pays the hospice program a daily (per diem) rate. So even if you have like $50K in the bank and 3 to 6 months to live, like my wife's grandmother last year, it makes sense to stay at home and pay an extra $10K total out of pocket for home health aides in addition to family members helping out. It would have been significantly more money per month to be in the nursing home. Round the clock home health aides would have eclipsed the nursing home total costs or been on par with them, but she wouldn't have gotten to be in her own home with family (She lived with her daughter already). Like a lot of debates going forward with regard to government policy and funding I see one of the most pertinent dividing lines being between those who have children and those who don't. I live in a place where they actually build things, so you can purchase a new 3/2 home for under 400K. There are also new assisted living facilities recently put up and new hospice facilities, but not new nursing homes. Like a lot of things there may be national trends, but if the unit of analysis is America there is a lot of the story being missed. I don't doubt some places are lacking in nursing homes for a graying population. If you ever do a zoom on this topic Megan McArdle would be a good guest because of her economic literacy and she had to deal with this system with both her parents in the last 3 years.

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"I still owe you an essay on why I think that the Republican establishment is under-rated."

There is nothing underrated about several decades of spending political capital on entitlement reform that they have no chance of passing.

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The "Republican establishment" also:

+ Got us the Iraq War

+ Helped shepherd the defense industry into impossible concentration and complete regulatory capture

+ Went willingly along with TSA, NSA, etc.

+ Allowed the bureaucracy to become an arm of the Democratic Party

+ Went willingly along with completely abandoning fiscal responsibility.

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You assume that the GOPe was ever serious about it. They’ve never been serious about enforcing immigration laws going back to 1964. They have repeatedly campaigned to change or cut only to find reasons not to do either once elected: boob bait for the bubbas, nothing more. The most amusing part of AK’s post is the assertion that the focus on “woke” is coming from...the donor class. DeSantis is the most anti-woke politician in the whole gaggle - has won in landslide in Florida openly campaigning as such. And for his trouble has had Thomas Peterffy - a deep pocketed donor - “pausing” his funding until DeSantis “moderates” his anti-woke views. Sure...Mitt and Mitch are well known for the strident anti-wokeness among the petite-bourgoise.

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My feelings as well, however, I would make one distinction- I think the GOP in D.C. is horrid and definitely not under-rated. GOP governorship at the state and local level is a different matter, however- far superior to that by Democrats at those same levels.

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All modern politicians at the federal level are narcissists. No normal human being would subject themselves to permanent eye of media attention. I like Josh Barro for the most part- he is one of the more interesting economic commentators, but I can pretty guarantee you that he was a "section guy", too. Media commentators are narcissists, too.

Ramaswamy is probably the smartest of all the candidate by a wide margin, but he seems to me to be a bit naive about how the federal government works having come from outside of it- very similar to Trump's major weakness as a President. Now, I don't think any of the Republican candidates can win the election next year- mail-in-voting has given the Democrats an insurmountable advantage in the electoral college. Only Trump makes the upper midwest and Pennsyvania competitive- the Democrats won't even have to cheat to beat DeSantis, the guy I want as the nominee.

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My parents went into one of those fancy retirement homes that market themselves as cruise ships with assisted living attached for when you age into it.

While they enjoyed it in some ways it was mostly an oversold disappointment. Also, while the sticker price is high the actual price ends up being a lot higher. Most of these places have lock-ins built into the contract so they figure you are stuck once you're in.

We were lucky to get them out right before COVID. Once COVID hit these places became concentration camps at best.

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"It’s like the voting public’s ideal date is a Dark Triad pick-up artist."

That's because dark triad isn't just about pick-up. Those behaviors and personality displays are effective methods for charismatic influence that work on lots of people in lots of contexts. That's nothing new in politics. The founders were quite aware of and worried about the risk of a demagogue of just such a type being voted into power by the masses (see, e.g., Washington's correspondence with LaFayette) and tried to introduce various factors to reduce the likelihood and severity of such an occurrence.

That's why elites tend to hate what's popular with the masses, (i.e., populism, i.e., actual democracy) because "Them, The People" have bad taste and counterproductive preferences, and make terrible choices. So they feel it necessary to redefine 'democracy' as a system with, ah, "institutional guardrails" (that is, where the elite can effectively veto the masses).

A lot of "The Party Decides" anti-Trumpers bemoaned the failure of the GOP establishment to keep Trump out of the party and the primaries, and, in the most absurdly hysterical fashion, encouraged the party to never let anything like that happen again, by any means necessary.

And, perhaps if you spoke to them in private, they'd admit, "Yeah, well, the problem is our voters, who don't like us, and who like people like Trump. And, if you put Trump on the menu, then that's what they'd pick. So, we need a kind of general conspiracy - I mean, 'institutions!' to keep Trumps off the menu."

If that sounds reasonable to you, then replace 'voters' with 'women' and 'demagogue' with 'bad boy jerk cad' and "democratic choice" with "sexual autonomy" and you might feel differently about it, though the underlying logic for paternalistic choice-restriction conspiracy really is the same. One on the hand, Patriarchy, on the other, Partyarchy.

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Josh might be correct about Vivek, whom I kinda like (outsider) and very much like his "8 year term limit for Fed employee bureaucrats".

Nikki Haley's comments about consensus on abortion were great.

On the elephant NOT in the room;

Bari: "I hate myself for feeling this way, but as I was watching the Trump-Tucker interview, I felt that it was more objectively entertaining than what was happening on the debate stage in Milwaukee. "

Trump IS more entertaining to many.

Batya made the most important points about Pence & then DeSantis and most Trump supporters:

"this is something that I think is very hard for people to understand: working-class conservatives hate the Republican Party. They hate, hate, hate the Republican Party. And Mike Pence really represents that thing that they hate. "

I don't hate, but often strongly dislike the GOPe in practice. And Pence, like Jeb Bush, is GOPe. The Republican Party has become the working American's party.

"Ron DeSantis misunderstood the Trump voter in exactly the same way that the liberal media does. He assumed, like the liberal media does, that people voted for Trump because they were anti-gay or suspicious of black people. The truth is the exact opposite: the Trump voter is very pro-gay, like Trump. They’re also not suspicious of black people. There’s a lot of unity around that. They’re very eager to show that they are tolerant and have moved on from that stereotype about Republicans. So to me, the thing that draws Trump’s voters is the economic policy that’s geared towards the working class. The reason Ron DeSantis will not be able to recover is because he doesn’t agree with Trump about creating an economy that does that. "

College Republicans want to fight woke, non-college Reps want a US economy that's good for low IQ working Americans (without noting the low IQ). I like both.

Arnold won't gain any readers who are non-college Trump supporters with any "GOPe underrated" essay, so it might be better to push an essay of underrated GOP policies that have been good.

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I think that Ungar-Sargon and Weiss’ understanding of the “working class” is about the same, which is to say, not very. They leave me with the sense that they project too much of themselves and their own desires onto the objects on which they report. Ungar-Sargons comments on DeSantis, which you highlight, are revealing. DeSantis would not have won the landslide he had in Florida, across the board, even in Miami-Dade, as the candidate she now describes ... and he has not changed. So who is she describing really? This from a national reporter, and all too typical of the species these days. Members of the working class have been voting for Republicans and “conservatives” such as they are since the days of Eisenhower - and I’m old enough to know. Who does she think made up Nixon’s Silent Majority? Manhattan office dwellers - like herself? Apparently the Teamsters weren’t working class. Who knew? Honestly, I read explainers like this and just laugh.

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Due to an omnibus bill passed back in the ‘80s, CNAs (low skilled nursing) have to pass a bullshit course where they teach you literally how to make a bed (among other things). The course is short, but I am sure it does not help.

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I read a profile recently of a successful hybrid model WFH company. They designated about half the weeks a year "core weeks" and said that people needed to be in the office 50% of the time during those core weeks (so 25% of the year total). Individuals and teams were free to determine when or how they would do that and anyone could live anywhere they wanted.

That feels about right to me. I would set it more like 10% but you get the picture. I think 0% is too low.

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Loss in an unfair election doesn't make the unelected guy a loser. Kling's idea is that Trump "lost in 2020. He is probably the candidate most likely to lose to Biden in 2024. " Trump's votes went up from about 62 million to almost 75 million real votes. Voting turnout went from around 60% (usually less) to a post Vietnam record breaking 65%.

2020 was rigged - the truth about Hunter Biden & Joe Biden's corruption was censored. Every American who wants Free and Fair elections should be outraged - but, thanks to constant demonizing of Trump, most Dems and college educated Reps & non-Dems (like Kling) & FIT folk similar to Sam Harris, accept Dem cheating in order to deny Trump victory.

Loss in an unfair election doesn't make Trump a loser - nor does conviction of sexual harassment from a few decades ago in a she said - he said trial. Trump being a blowhard braggart is far less bad than Obama's lie about "you can keep your doctor".

Demonization works, and the Dems' hatred of Trump is hot, red-hot, genocidal hot. Just as many Germans accepted Nazi lies about Jews in the 30s, including the highly educated Germans against their educated Jewish colleagues, today's college educated folk like the Gurwinder accept lies about Trump, whom he calls a "pathological liar". Then links to a WaPo site documenting 30k+ lies of Trump (same lie counts multiple times in multiple places).

First one is Trump's economic claim: "“We also built the greatest economy in the history of the world"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?itid=lk_inline_manual_11

But the dishonest WaPo doesn't then link to FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GNP

Which shows Trump's claim is accurate, highest GNP in history. Tho it would also be accurate for each prior President.

WaPo claims "under just about every metric, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton had more robust economies during their presidencies. " In the database article they give facts about economic growth, but not GNP.

The main "economy" metric is GNP - and it was highest under Trump. WaPo lies, Gurwinder believes it. What kind of NPC is Gurwinder? Spreading untruths in an article about how much untruth is spread by the internet by NPCs - and probably influencing Kling and other FIT folk to believe the untruth. I'm glad Arnold seldom spreads misleading info about Trump - I'm sick of it and outraged at how neither he nor most of the FIT folk care about the censorship of the truth in order to rig the election. Since part of Trump's appeal is his claim to be a "winner", it's important to address the idea that he's a loser.

Biden is President.

Important, relevant truth was censored before the election (as well as not being acted upon by Barr's DOJ nor Wray's FBI).

Censorship of the truth in an election is one way of rigging the election. 2020 was rigged / stolen.

Trump is wrong about lots of other, mostly minor stuff. He's wrong about Ukraine (I'm not a disciple!), but his is right about 2020 being rigged; he's more a victim of unfair election theft than a loser. And Biden's coddled politically chosen Secretaries are almost all uniformly worse than those of Trump - where Kling complained about Trump's picks but no mention of Biden's.

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>>Maybe she also thinks that PUA’s are authentic.

Seduction artists learn to be authentic and to authentically present their best selves.

Which seduction artists have you seen work? Where? In what circumstances?

When I was teaching my buddy Zach, he went from seeming inauthentic to being authentic, https://theredquest.substack.com/p/teaching-zach-the-basics-of-talking

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Yes- the nursing homes aren't filled with 65 year olds- they are filled with 80+ year olds. That is the population you look at to determine the need for non-family caregiving.

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