Soriek
1yr ago
they sabotaged white South Africa until they gave up:
American sanctions didn’t have much impact on the Safrican economy, most of their econ indicators get slightly better after 86 even. This is likely in large part due to Reagan being opposed to them (they were passed over his veto) and slow walking their enforcement. The Treasury said they had lists of Safrican SOEs but not lists of which goods originated from them, so they were pretty limited in application. There was I believe a GAO report saying basically “sanctions didn’t hit most companies, those it did hit just rerouted trade through third party intermediaries in neutral countries”
Soriek
1yr ago
Isn't the obvious objection here that during the first period, citizenship and power in institutions mostly rested with WASPs and similar demographics while in the second one, although immigration had been restricted, now a large share of the native born population consisted of (descendants of) Italians, Irish etc., i.e. ethnic groups that down to the present day have markedly different attitudes towards redistribution or even things like free speech in comparison to English- or German-Americans?
I've seen people try to track with data that various European groups have consistent attitudes on policy over time, but I feel like it's pretty hard to square with how things actually worked in practice. Those same ethnic groups that supported the New Deal democrat party also supported the Democrats when they were the extreme laissez faire, anti-interventionist party, while the WASP-dominant Republicans were much more pro-intervention. I think an easier explanation is just that immigrants probably cluster around the pro-immigration party. The bulk of Irish and German immigration happened in the mid nineteenth century, but it wasn't till the better part of a century later than they (and southern whites and many other native demographics) were sold on more statist policies, so it's hard to draw a straight line from their entry into America towards larger redistribution.
I'd wager that continually adding more people who come from countries that practice more distribution and, when asked in surveys like the GSS, explicitly say that the government should intervene more and reduce income inequality, will in fact eventually result in a society that redistributes more and values economic freedom less.
This was the OP's wager as well and it's not unreasonable. But I don't think it's a claim we see much demonstrated in our own long history of mass immigration. Also worth remembering that immigrants are not perfectly representative of their own countries. The kind of person who crosses an ocean or a desert to start life all over is gonna be a little unique.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you or you meant spending coming back down from the highs of WWII, this claim doesn't seem true, whether for overall spending or social spending in particular, both of which have a strong upward trend starting in the early 20th century.
You're right, I overstated his actual claim, which was that the rate of growth of spending as a percent of GDP slowed.
The federal government radically restricted immigration from 1922 to 1967, when federal expenditures grew from 4.5 percent to 18.3 percent - a four-fold increase...In the 45 years after the modest immigration liberalization of the late 1960s, federal expenditures climbed to 20.6 percent, a mere 8.7 percent increase...The New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and other large expansions of government all happened when the border was closed.
From the Civil War till WW1, the heyday of mass immigration, federal expenditures as a percent of GDP stay barely above 0% and even fell over time.
Soriek
1yr ago
Notably these are the highest tax areas in the United States. My point is redistribution has a pretty questionable impact on innovation and growth.
Soriek
1yr ago
because I remember him posting in that specific style over and over and over again
Sure, I remember it differently - same place we were in at the start of this conversation. I'm more than happy to agree to disagree, but you're not going to convince to me by linking to some random comment from somebody else. I don't think that comment is good. There are lots of comments I see here regularly that I don't think are good, or in good faith, but I don't publicly call users out or complain about them the way I see people do for him.
Soriek
1yr ago
A true Mottezan at heart! He was definitely pretty contrarian and ruffled folks regularly, but also made the rare articulate defense of positions we don't see too often here, which I thought made for some interesting discourse.
Soriek
1yr ago
I always have the same question: can you name a community that does more than us in this regard.
No, for our faults we're probably still the best forum you're gonna get on the internet. That may say more about the rest of the internet than us, but we still deserve a little credit.
Soriek
1yr ago
Everyone understands this, they're clearly talking about earmarked tax payments plus interest exceeding defined tax outlays. If you want to be precise and call it accumulated payroll tax receipts plus 6% of money the US government will pay on treasuries, you can, but who cares? This is a semantic argument that doesn't have implications for the fiscal operations of the trust funds.
Soriek
1yr ago
Everyone including the SSA themself refers to the trust fund's accumulated surpluses as reserves.
Soriek
1yr ago
Where did you get that number from? In 2017 the average person paid about $3,045 in SS tax. Even if you multiplied that by two for a household, a 3.44% increase in the tax wouldn't come close to $2565.
Remember that even though workers really shoulder the full burden of the tax, half of it comes from your employer's account so that's not literally a 3.44% increase on whatever your takehome salary was before.
Soriek
1yr ago
This proposal doesn't hit people making over $160k, it hits people making over $250k, about 100 stacks more and solidly in the top 5% of the nation. I empathize with their higher cost of living, but if we have a funding shortfall, who other than the most well off should we be raising taxes on first?
Soriek
1yr ago
Yes wealthy people would be paying a larger share under this sytem and the benefits would be distributed downwards, like most other taxes.
Soriek
1yr ago
I will strongly oppose any increase/stealth increase (raising the payroll cap/widening the tax base) in taxes. Raising the payroll cap is just kicking the can down the road as the CBO mentions
I'm referencing the second of the two options they describe:
The second alternative would apply the 12.4 percent payroll tax to earnings over $250,000 in addition to earnings below the maximum taxable amount under current law. The taxable maximum would continue to grow with average wages but the $250,000 threshold would not change, so the gap between the two would shrink. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the taxable maximum would exceed $250,000 in calendar year 2039; after that, all earnings from jobs covered by Social Security would be subject to the payroll tax. Earnings under the current-law taxable maximum would still be used for calculating benefits, so scheduled benefits would not change under this alternative.
Soriek
1yr ago
Agreed it is nonsense to consider Korea an exceptionally feminist society, at least for the developed world, and they genuinely do have a very large anti-feminist movement that played a big role in the last election. It should be said though the Ministry of Gender Equality wore a lot of people's patience thin for non-ideological reasons, like their attempts to ban videogames, or reduce prostitution by issuing checks to anyone who promised not to visit a prostitute.
Soriek
1yr ago
Their entire logic rests on the assumption that the higher spending is causing higher test scores.
If they're taking two neighborhoods and controlling for income, cost of living, demographics, population, pop density, and so on, and find that the difference in the better performing school is more funding per student, this is a reasonable argument to make. As far as I can tell you haven't made a counterargument here. If anyone has any actual objections with the adequacy model they're welcome to raise it, but the entire thing is besides the point because, again, the EPI paper isn't saying "funding is equal but they should be given more for the adequacy score," they're saying "poor districts are funded worse, period." It's also besides the point because my OP isn't some philosophical argument about who deserves what or what's the best way to fund schools; I'm asking a pretty specific question about how these two different think tanks found different conclusions from the same data.
Is that not what you’re referring to with this passage?
History is littered not only with incompetent male rulers, but also men who very competently and effectively executed their vision for society, to the immense detriment of everyone involved because their philosophical premises were rotten. The masculine virtues of course have their corrupted forms, and I would dread living under a regime run by men who embodied those corrupted virtues. (Being sent off to get butchered in some pointless war waged merely to satisfy some red-blooded moron’s bloodlust and pig-headed sense of honor would be a nightmare scenario for me personally.)
A discussion of “the more disastrous decisions in the 20th century” and “pointless wars caused by masculine leaders” that didn’t include fascism would be an odd one indeed. We could certainly add other countries, but ie the Soviet Union of course was no more reliant on women’s support than any other dictatorship from that era.
I like this piece, but then and now feel like he's a little too dissmissive of the "cons" side of the calculation. Study #9, for instance, estimates that European-style price regulation could decrease innovation by as much as one third. I could reply with the Kaiser Family Foundation statistic that right now one third of people can't pick up their perscriptions at all because of the cost. If we reduce innovation by a third while expanding access to existing (and still increasing) innovation by a third, I'm not so sure we actually did that badly for ourselves.
I understand the study tries to account for the access side of things, but when they say that x reduced dollars leads to x less life years, I have to ask: aren't we basically already at about the peak of how long humans live? Are these extra life years at the very tail end of someone's life, low-quality, painful years that I probably wouldn't weight as highly as people who have their whole lives ahead of them gaining better medical care now? (As one commenter pointed out, if we really value all future life years equally, then the policy responsible for "worst thing in human history" would just be contraception). I could also add that this policy suggests Americans would get thousands more in savings, and that increases in income add life years in of themselves; likewise debt is a major driver of suicide - things I don't think the study accounts for in their life year ledger.
Also (unless I'm misreading) these studies seem to be addressing actual, old fashioned price controls, not pricing negotiations, which seem less drastic - it's what PBMs already do right now and no one seems to think they decrease innovation. I could be misunderstanding though.
This isn't to say that I don't take the argument seriously; we clearly gain from innovation and there should definitely be a big financial incentive to keep pharma companies churning out drugs. I'm just not sure if we're at the reasonable cutoff. When I tried googling, for instance, if we saw more pharma patents after Trump raised the patent period by four years, I couldn't find anthing. And as Scott points out, pharma companies wouldn't need to secure returns quite so crazy high if we didn’t make them go through a $billion+ ten-year approval process first.
But the guys in the 2-Gun Action Challenges understand that guns are lethal even without actually being shot, and someone who has trained or sparred in bjj would understand the implications of a rear naked choke hold.
Soriek
2yr ago
No, you practice it live too. We have children do this, I’d be shocked if actual marines don’t as well.
Soriek
2yr ago
Works for me, but doesn't change that the argument that freedom of association is listed in the constitution is incorrect, hence why the states were capable of infringing upon that right during segregation.
As best as I can tell, the first time the Courts ruled that we did have a right to freedom of association it was NAACP vs. Alabama, which is much my point above - that the Civil Rights Era was a legal expansion of freedom of association rather than a contraction of it.
It’s the same reason that people like Eisenhower refused to prop up the British or French empires after WW2, because they genuinely believed that America, as a former colony itself, must be on the “anti colonial” side.
Sometimes the west does stuff for ideological reasons, though just as or more often because of realpolitik. To pettily focus on just one part of your post, having just read his biography, Eisenhower (and the mid-century foreign policy blob in general) really didn't side against Britain and France in Suez for ideological reasons, but rather because:
1: He didn't want to lose undecided countries to become Soviet allies following the terrible PR of the invasion getting condemned everywhere.
2: To diffuse a situation that at worst could have spiraled towards nuclear war following the Soviet Union threatening to do anything to get them out - and the USSR was genuinely desperate to rehabilitate it's anti-imperialist credentials right after all the bad press they were getting from crushing the Hungarian uprising
3: Britain and France lied to the US about their intentions and plans and had their diplomats intentionally deceive ours while launching a military strategy we had expressly forbidden. If you're gonna be the hegemon you can't be tolerating that.
As for Vietnam, America just didn't want another Korean War.
Remember, this is the same guy who signed orders to coup anti-colonial leaders in between rounds of golf, he didn't identify with their movement.
Soriek
1yr ago
I have nothing super insightful to add, just thought this was a great post. Adaptations and repurposing cultural narratives are as told as time and as trad as Rome.
Soriek
1yr ago
I’m terribly sorry to hear everything you’ve been through and I hope very much your luck turns around.
Soriek
1yr ago
So your principle is that, if someone threatens you after they suffer the consequences of bad decisions, then you'll give them what they want?
My principle is that if you can 100% count on people to mess up, prudence suggests preparing in advance. To not do so is poor governance.
This falls foul of the Lucas Critique: you're inferring saving behaviour under Policy Regime A from behaviour under Policy Regime B, when a switch from B to A would change the incentives for saving behaviour.
Well, that was why I tried to look into real world examples of what the system looked like in practice. Per the quote in the Brookings Report: “the system [in Chile, Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Colombia, Argentina, and Bolivia] has done little to stimulate voluntary savings; few workers have channeled additional resources to their accounts.”
(Of course, someone might argue that European social democracy is preferable even given this relative stagnation, but that's a different argument.
I would be one of those people in favor for social democracy, partially because I’m pretty unconvinced taxation is really the root of their slower growth. Europe has had consistently high taxes than America for a long time but the divergence is only in the last 20 years, if anything a period marked more in Europe by slightly falling taxes. But as you say, that’s another argument.
My thesis is only that funding Social Security via increased taxation is one more step in that direction, and that that direction is not without costs.)
Sure, no disagreement there, my position is just that cutting SS by almost a quarter also has costs, and they seem larger to me than a small tax raise.
Sure, I don't disagree with any of that. Though I'm personally not a fan of driving I do think there's a place for both cars and trains in society and that each accomplish better efficiency in different areas. Among new urbanists this is the much maligned "cars- and- trains" take but I don't really see how anything else would work for America. All I want is for both to better serve customers . Insofar as transit's contingent lack of success is used by folks like O'Toole to argue for cuts to productive funding, that's all I'm personally against.
All true, but while there are public policy situations that are genuinely so daunting they might as well be imaginary, I don't think this should include systems that we see a bunch of peer countries having solved. In truth these countries haven't built paradise either - they all deal with project delays and cost overruns as well - but they have managed to make things function well enough that transit can turn a profit, and that's the really important question for me.
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