honeypuppy
No bio...
User ID: 1250
honeypuppy
3mo ago
This has been a relatively popular idea in wonky libertarian circles for while.
Although the proposals I've seen are that you have a flat and relatively low tariff for every single immigrant (e.g. $50,000 and a background check and you can become a US citizen), with borrowing schemes available. The main ideas is that a) a lot of people are paying coyotes and such high fees anyway, so better the US government collect this income and b) it alleviates a lot of the concerns of immigrants being a "drain" on the US. ($50,000 is just an example, it could be considerably higher ot lower).
honeypuppy
7mo ago
Selzer deserves to be knocked down a peg (although I think "totally ignored" as some want it seems excessive). But that's mainly because she was incredibly far off on the final result. The equivalent for Nate would be if he were predicting a Harris +7 PV win or similar.
With hindsight, given that Trump has been underestimated three times in a row now, it seems reasonable to think that polls have likely systematically underestimated Trump. But before we got the results, it was only twice in a row, and so a lot more likely to be a coincidence. Nate has written extensively on how hard is to predict the direction of a polling error, and many have been burnt assuming that one or two polling errors in a row necessarily predict a polling error in the same direction in the next election. And with Trump off the ballot in 2028, we'll be back to square one.
honeypuppy
7mo ago
I am unimpressed with those who have called out Nate as supposedly being obviously wrong about [latest election] without looking at his overall track record and comparing their own with his.
In any given election, if Nate doesn't absolutely nail it, he inevitably gets a barrage of criticism. But how many of his critics merely end up being "broken clocks" who tout their overperformance over Nate in one election, only to crash and burn on the next one?
How many of those confidently predicting Trump this time (or in 2016) did well predicting elections from 2018-2022? How many pet theories about "here's why you should ignore the polling averages this time and trust in [X]" consistently work?
This isn't Nate's first rodeo. He called both 2008 and 2012 as solidly for Obama when some people had elaborate theories on why the races were tossups or the polls were wrong. But it's not just a pro-Democratic bias: he called the 2014 midterms for Republicans even when some Democrats over-learnt the lesson of 2012 to believe that polls would be biased in their favour.
Contrary to what some people in this thread appear to believe, Nate doesn't just hedge everything near to 50:50 and claim he was always approximately right, or do nothing more than aggregate poll results. Nor does he claim to never have made a prediction that was wrong ex ante- he admits he was fundamentally wrong about Trump's 2016 primary victory.
Early in his career, Nate got an undeserved reputation as being almost clairvoyant, which he explicitly disavows. It's left him open to criticism whenever he doesn't reach this unrealistic target. But overall, I think he's consistently been a better political prognisticator than anyone else.
What is also looks like is Trump trying to find a way to punish his enemies for investigating his attempted coup.
Unfortunately, this probably won't hurt him all that much politically (much like his actual attempted coup).
More options
Context Copy link