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I was under the impression that 'the left' was coming off an election win high. Can they not just continue to do what they are doing and win over and over again as right wing policies like 'legal immigration' hand them victories like in NY?
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The party in power is not owed the votes of the minority. That said, minority demands can clearly be unreasonable. Give us full communist revolution or we won’t support your budget. This entire situation comes down to how reasonable you think each side was, and naturally people will just go with their priors on this question. I tend to think, by rejecting the CR, the Democrats were less reasonable. However, they control media and people will generally primarily blame the party in power if anything goes wrong. On the whole I think Democrats won this one. They can spin their surrender as compassion for their state-supported pet classes.
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> control all 3 branches of government
> propose a budget that sucks
> you know other side must vote for your budget, refuse to make it not suck, refuse to negotiate
> refuse to change the insane procedural rule (filibuster) that would also allow you to get your budget through without them
> "wahhhhhhh why would the Democrats do this"
Literal skill issue
Also don't pretend like if President Kamala Harris was trying to pass the "trans surgery bonanza budget" you'd be saying that the Republicans should suck it up and just vote with the Dems to pass it for.... reasons - in the way you're saying Dems should now.
Why should they vote for the budget they don't like? Justify that.
I didn't see any Democrat making the case that the budget sucked. I certainly can make my case, almost everything should have been cut, but Democrats don't agree with me, so I dont see the case for the budget sucking from a Democrat POV.
They didn't vote for it? The government shut down?
"Suck" in this context = unable to pass as is
Sure, but why? The Democrats when they were at their most coherent were stating that the shutdown was over sunset provisions to PPACA subsidies that they had passed as part of emergency measures when they had a trifecta during the Biden years, which actually wasn't a topic in the CR at all. So what you had was a continuing resolution on a previously bipartisan budget that failed to address a minor issue Democrats had created on their own 3 years prior and had 3 years of foreknowledge it was coming up.
Hardly "suck". At worst "mid". In reality "contrived complaints". This budget doesn't "suck" for anyone but fiscal conservatives. Almost all the covid era money from the sky programs continue its basically the Biden budget plus inflation adjustments. Republicans didn't pass a budget where all SNAP dollars are redirected to ICE and Medicaid is returned to 2007 levels. Welfare eligibility continues to be at levels Bill Clinton would have objected to, from the right. There is no case to be made. Or, at the very least, no case WAS made. Instead what happened was a niche issue that polls well for them was selected as the point of agitation, and Democrats leveraged their continued, but dwindling, media advantages to eek out some minor PR victories until a minor victory for them was achieved, likely right before a terrible PR situation for them was about to be dumped into their lap.
As a small point of clarification. The actual budget for FY 2025 (HR 1) was not bipartisan at all, in votes. It was passed via reconciliation which means it did not need 60 votes for cloture in the Senate. No Democrats, in either the House or Senate, voted for cloture or passage on the final bill.
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It was literally the exact same budget that the government has been operating under. The Democrats were in no way opposing changes they disfavor, they were rejecting the status quo.
ETA: A status quo they previously voted for, mind
Regardless of the content of the budget, forcing a shutdown was good hardball politics from the democrats. They need to do a lot more of that - obstruct, filibuster, anything to keep Trump from accomplishing his goals. We have an authoritarian fascist regime in office and democrats should be doing everything they can to win this civil war.
I’m going to head off the reports at the pass.
We have warned you, repeatedly, to avoid naked culture-warring. Whether or not you sincerely hold these beliefs, you are required to follow the rules when presenting them.
One day ban.
okay, in the future I'll be sure to use more euphemisms and censor what I actually believe to avoid offending anyone.
Stop this tedious whining.
If all you believe is "My outgroup sucks," then this isn't the place for that. Trade barbs on reddit or Twitter.
You can absolutely say what you believe about Republicans or Democrats or Trump or whoever. But if the content of your post is 100% culture warring, nothing more than ranting about the evils of your ideological opponents, you are not saying anything meaningful or worthwhile.
We know some people just want to come here to vent and to rage. (And sometimes to troll.) We don't care.
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Except it's the exact same logic the Republicans used when they claimed that making the tax cuts permanent wasn't new spending because it was just "maintaining" the status quo, a status quo they voted for to begin with, specifically because of how it became impossible to undo the Bush tax cuts.
True, and they were blamed accordingly
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Oh sweet, so all the previous shutdowns are retroactively the Democrats' fault now.
I mean, in either case I'd be un favor of them doing what they think is necessary, and taking responsibility for it. If the Dems think this is worth shutting down the government over, it's their choice, I just want them to own it.
I mean, yeah? I'd assume so, I have 0 knowledge of any previous shut downs. They should probably have negotiated better. Given all the shut downs ended, I'm sure they eventually did.
Idk why the immediate assumption to dunking on Republicans is "oh you must gargle democratic balls"
No, I love shitting on the Democrats.
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Who admitted to that? When?
Kaine was the closest I've seen who explicitly tied it to the recent elections.
https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1987772242093343109
Considering they got nothing else in the deal (this same package was rejected early in the shut down) it does seem like the goal may have been to fire up the voters.
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There's no content here but culture warring and "boo leftists."
Even some rightists are noticing that the Motte is converging into a rightoid hivemind. Maybe that is inevitable, and posting rightist opinions is fine, but you're a newly-rolled account with a grand total of two comments that amount to nothing more than "Boo hiss leftoids." I don't even care which permabanned returnee you are. Write something more interesting.
What if we had a ‘hear the other side’ cwr every few weeks? I want more neoliberals policy wonks in here. Tariffs are on pretty bad footing and nobody’s taken a crack at it. Economic arguments for high immigration etc. Theres been a lot of bad faith posting lately and we’ve been taking the bait.
Hello there.
...General Kenobi?
You know, I haven't even seen that movie, and yet that clip popped into my head when I was writing the comment.
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The problem is that these low-key aren't real. It's more "Aaron Sorkin aesthetic" than anything intellectually rigorous. They're about as capable of conjuring policy wonkery as goth kids are of summoning demons - and the internal experiences are probably isomorphic.
This is as bad as the OP. "My enemies are incapable of producing real arguments."
You're on a roll lately, and not in a good direction. That probably applies to the Motte in general, but if you cannot even conceive of having worthwhile discussions with people whose politics are different from yours, you are in the wrong place.
No, my argument, which I have been bleating about for years, is that no one is capable of producing real arguments, at least of the sort people mean when they say "neoliberal policy wonk". People have this image in their head of Leslie Knope mic dropping a 5" binder full of colorful tabs and highlighted text that covers an entire policy field. I've been looking for 20 years and no one in the real world actually does that. The people I've known who think they can do that are all just putting in enough effort to impress the teacher, scoring some rhetorical cheap shots, and then slowly getting jaded. Look at us here. Whole community full of smart autistic nerds addicted to political discussions.
Whither policy wonking?
We get essays and explainers and effort-posts, but the closest thing to policy wonking is Gendal-khan's posts on California housing issues, and even those are mostly updates on ballot initiatives rather than thorough, systematic wonk-papers on the housing industry/regulatory regime as a whole. Where are the "I know everything about trains" type posts laying out a sensible, state level energy policy? Anyone have an expansive-yet-granular solution for healthcare?
Does anyone have a spare effortpost covering a policy at the level of understanding, skill and insight that matches what we see on Friday threads about 4X games?
The difference, IMO, is that a 4X game is human-level comprehensible, and policy fields are generally not. It would probably take multiple life-times just to thoroughly understand the electrical infrastructure of a single mid-sized state. Working groups throw dozens of people and thousands of man hours into papers that are such pointless slop that no one ever bothers to read much less reference them. No one turns them into policy successes, no one has victories to celebrate and point to as justification.
The most relevant on we've seen was freaking Project 2025, and it was just a collection of essays with lines like "The Secretary should initiate a HUD task force consisting of politically appointed personnel to identify and reverse all actions taken by the Biden Administration to advance progressive ideology.". Anyone want to call that a triumph of wonkery? Point to a superior neoliberal version?
Because if you can, I would love to see it. I am not like this because I think policy nerds are gay and stupid and deserve swirlies. I say things like that post because I've been looking for 20 years and all I see in the policy wonk department is posers. If a bunch of neoliberals and progressives want to start posting detailed, wonky effortposts to own the chuds and make us all look like uneducated fools, then that sounds utterly amazing. Thank you! I'd ask what took them so long and where they've been hiding, but I'll be too busy devouring the insight porn and stirring my long-dormant technocratic urges from their deep slumber.
But until then, I'll keep pointing out that the wonks aren't wonking. They just produce boondoggles like California High Speed Rail and "affordable healthcare" and Covid lockdown. This matters when their claims to wonkish-mastery are being used to justify an increase in their political power, when they seem to have about as much relation to their fictional counterparts as Chuunibyou 8th graders do to Naruto.
And you shall know the wonks by their fruits. Part of the meltdown post-2010 was that the wonks had gotten a lot of stuff singularly and spectacularly wrong, and suffered little to no political or financial consequences for their failures.
That having been said, I am still open to accept (liberal) technocratic expertise for engineering a more perfect society based on the strength of provided evidence. I have yet to be satisfied, though, and given my limited personal power these improvements are more likely to be forced upon me than enabled by my presence.
Isn't wanting to engineer a perfect society from the top down, basically a Marxoid cabal by definition?
I wouldn't have thought so. Fascism, certain varieties of Christianity, transhumanism, neoliberal technocracy... In practice, a lot of right wingers square the circle by claiming that any ruling ideology (any ideology that has authoritarian tendencies and a vision for a 'better' society) is Marxist by fiat but I don't find that convincing, in part because I don't see a mutual throughline and in part because the differences seem large enough to be meaningful (as opposed to People's Front of Judea vs. Judean People's Front). I think 'the King should make things better' is just built into humanity at a base level.
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To be fair, outside of professional political science related fields finding someone able to have enough information to have a deep level conversation more than a sixth grade level of research. Most people have other things they spend the majority of their time on and at best they read a few articles a week.
I’d be perfectly interested in creating a case for some liberal policies that I differ with you guys on. But keep in mind that because I have a regular day job that im not really a wonk.
And all the actual wonks are busy writing white papers for CRS and the Rand Corporation, not shitposting on a Silicon Valley Harry Potter fan fiction enthusiast’s forum.
I would think the OP would point to them as just being fake email jobs where nothing of actual policy value is produced as well.
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If you paid me a bunch of money I'd write one for you. But producing these is a full time job so you'd have to employe me in lieu of my current job.
Exactly (I can't comment on the "no one reads them" part). Effort posts on that level of "basically actually government policy" are epic undertakings that 0 people on the Motte will do for free, as it's an actual job.
The best you'll get here is effort posts, which I guess you don't find good enough?
I was pretty happy with mine the other week explaining that why even if adding people to a city brings down average income, it's still accretive to overall city value/GDP/wealth.
Really? It wasn't a bad post, but it was hardly a really good one. It was a few "I think that [blanks]" and first-thought guesses. (Edit: Nevermind, I found the post before the one I was looking at, which is actually a solid bit better. That's the sort of post I come here for... it's just not what people mean when they talk about policy wonkery.) I've put ten times that effort into posts explaining how armor scales in World of Warcraft, which is much simpler because it only involves 2-3 fully understood numbers.
Which is my entire point. I can casually drop an authoritative essay on that topic because it is simple, if not intuitive. "Is it good or bad when poor people move to a city?" is a much, much, MUCH more complicated question, to the extent that no one even seems to try to answer it in a definitive manner.
Back to your earlier point, I shouldn't need to pay you a bunch of money because Left Inc already has tens of billions of dollars slushing around ten thousand NGOs and Think Tanks, and I very much notice that all of that produces approximately nothing that anyone wants to point to as a rigorous policy wonk argument.
If I were wrong here, people wouldn't be writing "I think" first thought replies, they'd just be linking me to Neoliberal Project 2026 or whatever. If I were wrong here, we wouldn't need a 50 person team and a billion in funding and ten years to produce something uselessly mediocre for any purpose but partisan propaganda.
Why would they even need to though? We can't even get the Jones act repealed which is straightforwardly and obviously harmful. What is a long detailed report, which I'm sure does exist written by lobbying consultants and never posted publicly because no one would read them, going to do if we can't even get the "don't even use your ridiculously efficient internal waterways for shipping so that a handful of special interest companies and unions can rent seek" act taken down?
Our problems aren't usually about what a rational governing body would do, they're about politics, they're about handouts and elections. We know rent control doesn't work, we're going to do it anyways in new york, how much more abundance agenda ink should we spill pointlessly on the ground?
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Oh I see what you're saying. Yeah fair enough I guess, that is definitely true.
They're too busy paying administrators to figure out the most equitable way to deliver money to the
homelessunhousedperson experiencing a lack of a structural roof temporarily but oops! we spent it all on administrator salaries.I'm not entirely sure what that has to do with The Motte but maybe my reading comprehension today sucks because I'm really tired.
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Read some political biographies. There are politicians (and staffers to politicians) who do in fact have a comprehensive and wonkish understanding of policies and regulations. No, they aren't going to produce witty unrehearsed speeches about them like the dialog on West Wing and they probably aren't writing blogs. They are doing boring unglorious work in some DC office. But such policy nerds exist. If you had as much interest in housing policy as some people have in 4X games, you'd be writing posts about it.
We may not have that quality of posting here (though I have seen some really good posts about housing policy, for example) but it's simply not true that policy nerds don't exist.
I happily don't work in policy, but I do work in an office with a bunch of people who do. Most of them are very focused on an extremely narrow part of the policy.
Without doxing myself, so using an example from outside my field, no one is an energy policy wonk. Rather, there's 15 people one who does coal emissions policy, one who does renewable credits policy, one who does energy affordability policies all across the industry. And the senior managers cover all the policies but usually at least one level of summary and rely heavily on their staff's analysis.
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Yes, I remember being told this about Obama. More to the point, I was good friends with a few of them, who now have jobs like "Director of a Department with a budget in the billions". The "witty, unrehearsed" lines was actually what they were good at - dropping sick burns on the conservative firebrands they sparred with. It was a sad and sobering day when I realized that in spite of all the years of close association, I'd never heard them talk about the policy stuff that they were supposedly getting a Masters in. Every story was actually in the form of "I took a policy discussion and made it uncomfortably personal and dared the conservative guy to look like a jerk and instead he just stopped talking. LMAO pwned!"
Neat. Is there some systematic reason why not a single one of them is writing anything for public consumption? Given the general pitch of "you should vote for us because of our mastery of policy wonkery", you'd think someone would notice the massive alpha in demonstrating an existence proof.
I don't think it's possible to meet your quality requirement as I understand it and also be even remotely consumable for the public. If it's consumable, it's going to be short, high level, and summarized.
If it's a "massive research undertaking to inform an actual laa or policy" it's going to be 100s-1000s of pages and an absolute snore fest of stats and legalese.
There's a fair bit of substacks and blogs that discuss econ/politics/infrastructure but they're short and readable, by definition
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Are there as many boring tomes as I would expect working over evidence for minor policy changes? I realize some of it is probably sensitive, but I'm not sure where I would go look for things like "the anticipated implications of banning [product] in [industry]" or "the impact of marginal tax rate changes"?
Are there policy works on the government side writing these, or are there just competing narratives in the regulatory docket comments and some judgement summary of the bureaucrats in making their final decisions?
Schoolhouse Rock didn't cover regulations or notice and comment periods.
When you actually read the Federal Register entries announcing proposed or promulgated changes, it is hard not to be awed by the sheer scope of what some guy at a desk in Washington has been up to for the last 6 months.
I looked-up a semi-random regulatory docket just for fun. Here are 60 pages from NOAA outlining the legal and factual basis for their plan to upgrade the Port of Alaska while complying with the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
For bonus hilarity, click over to the public comments tab. I assure you, this is a quite representative sample of who actually comments on these things and what they say.
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I feel pretty real. We could argue tariffs or whatever if you like but the conclusion that broad tariffs are terrible trade policy is pretty uncontroversial so it'd be kind of a boring discussion. Targeted tariffs can be defended but tariffing your industrial inputs while trying to encourage manufacturing is just indefensible. autarky is a child's understand of economy.
I'd love to see some actual effort posts on tariffs.
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It works great in Victoria 3 though
Although ironically even in that, once they implemented the world market simulation earlier this year average AI GDP shot way up lmao
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…this IS the “hear the other side” thread.
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Hello
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Be the change you want to see. Nothing wrong with either of these topics, but they're hardly groundbreaking conversations, we've had them many times before.
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The post was filtered. I have approved it on the sole theory that you would have banned the person if you thought more than a warning was necessary, not in an endorsement of its worthiness.
I think a ban was/would be perfectly appropriate
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You are dissing a filtered post.
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