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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   36622 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I noticed there is a slow drible of talk about some of Trumps Executive Orders. I kinda wanted to talk about all of them as a package, and some of them more specifically. I would advise everyone to just go ahead and read all of the executive orders (there are about 50):

https://www.whitehouse.gov/news/

They are generally short, about a page long. The titles are descriptive of the goals, so you can even skip reading many of them. And you don't need to hear about them via a second hand source.

I got the general gist of all of them within an hour or two on Inauguration day (when they were posted).

My general impressions:

  1. I like the visibility and ease of reading these. Its nothing like most legislation that goes through congress that often require a law degree, and an in depth knowledge of regulations just to sort of understand them.
  2. I don't like this continuing tradition of using executive orders to run the government. From what I remember this started in earnest under Bush 2. But its also pretty clear that congress is increasingly non-functional and uninterested in their assigned role in the constitution. Congress has delegated away its power for almost 100 years at this point, granting law-making powers to bureaucracies that are run under the executive branch. So I don't like the executive order - ocracy, but it seems there is no alternative.
  3. I care less about the culture war type orders, like renaming things. I think it is probably good to have them in there from a strategy perspective. Let your enemies exhaust themselves on silly issues.
  4. My favorite Executive order: Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce. Basically people in the bureaucracy are supposed to carry out the will and directive of the president / executive branch. If they sandbag or fail to do this, then that is grounds for dismissal. They don't have to agree with the president or be loyal, but none of this "resist" stuff. It was a little ridiculous that this EO needed to be issued in the first place.
  5. The one that I think will actually personally impact me the most: Return to In-Person Work. I live close enough to DC. Traffic is going to get worse.
  6. Two executive orders have me worried. One is about cost of living: Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living Crisis. The actual text mostly talks about getting rid of barriers and harmful regulations. I hope that is where it stops. But populist politicians have often resorted to price controls to "fight" inflation. I strongly hope they avoid that pitfall.
  7. The other EO that worries me is related to trade America First Trade Policy. The basic economics case against tariffs seems air tight to me. Tariffs seem like a classic policy failure to me. The costs are distributed among all US consumers, but the benefits are often concentrated within certain sectors, or even specific companies. I was also hoping to see an end to the Jones Act, but this EO seems like it thinks that legislation is great.

is there a name for the idea that when political parties try things against their usual tendency it isn't as dangerous because they aren't under the same pressure to hide results and double down?

i agree with you that price controls are not a good intervention but i don't fear republican price controls the same way i do democrat instituted ones, because i believe there are plenty of powerful republican constituencies that can get them removed when bad results happen

"Only Nixon can go to China" is adjacent to what you're asking, but not quite.

Price controls were pretty bad in the 70s under Nixon.

They also aren't under any pressure to change or fix the things if they are bad.

If the Democrats did some kind of immigration restriction that ended up screwing immigrants over I doubt the Republicans would be clamoring at them to fix it.

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