December 11, 2024

Thoughts on Political Discourse

Democrats will be arguing for a long time about what went wrong in the 2024 presidential election. Harris waged a mostly competent, rather normal, if abbreviated campaign; Trump, lied his way to victory. Both candidates offered policy proposals with little analysis, a time-honored tradition of political discourse. Trump frequently made ad hominem attacks on his opponent and on other Democrats. That was decidedly not normal, but his fans loved it. Harris too often ignored it.

Not every proposal needs an elaborate explanation to be seen as credible, of course. Harris’s plan to build more housing implicitly acknowledged a housing deficit, which would likely be ameliorated by increasing the housing stock. Yet even “obvious” solutions can have unanticipated, non-obvious consequences. And even obvious consequences of a policy are seldom mentioned. How much will it cost? Where will the money come from? Who might be harmed by the policy?

The idea of making tips tax-free is an interesting case. It is difficult to believe the Trump proposal was anything other than an attempt to buy votes among a particular (presumed) low-income group. As a policy position, it is arbitrary, will anger low-income citizens who do not earn tips, will encourage gaming the system, and will take revenue from a government already running a huge deficit. It is a classic solution in search of a problem, and one whose consequences were likely never considered beyond gaining the votes of tip-earning workers. I was distressed that Harris, rather than stigmatizing the Trump proposal as a cynical, ill-considered, counterproductive opportunistic political ploy, adopted the policy as her own. It was not her finest hour as a campaigner. 

Both candidates offered policy proposals without clearly articulating the problem being addressed, the underlying causes of the problem, or explaining how the proposed policy is expected to ameliorate the underlying problem without creating new ones. Trump lied about the facts. Crime, for example, has been on the decline, yet Trump would have you believe that the nation is experiencing a crime wave. No analysis of policy is useful if it relies on a distorted or intentionally false version of reality. Harris did a poor job of attacking Trump’s “alternative facts.”

One can only hope that, someday, opposing candidates will agree on a set of facts and campaign on rival proposals to address those facts. Alas, that may never happen.

December 5, 2024

Mike Johnson’s Agenda

 I heard Speaker of the House Mike Johnson today saying, “We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state.”

It is worth thinking about why we have federal regulations. In large measure, regulations are of two kinds. Some regulations benefit special interests. The IRS provisions for carried interest are of this sort. Other regulations are intended to benefit the public at large. Included here are regulations that protect our food supply, ensure that we have safe drugs, and protect people from financial predators.

I suspect that Make Johnson’s blowtorch isn’t going to be aimed at the special regulations that benefit wealthy individuals and corporations. He more likely will go after the public-safety regulations, those that give us clean air and water, protect wildlife, and ensure safe workplaces. Is this really what people voted for?