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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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You just seem to have this strange idea about how politics works or is discussed in public. You are demanding the output of like lobbying firms, the groups that produce huge detailed reports for legislation but you want it to occupy the space of policy debate forums. It doesn't make any sense. Making the detailed plan about which specific regulations to cut/modify or how tax credits programs should be designed happens after you have some agreement what your goal and what the problem is. This debate happens amongst groups of analysts and lawyers employed in think tanks or lobbying firms where agreement on these topics have already been reached.

The discussions in these places are on topics like how the ITC tax credits inducing renewable energy build out by large banks have mostly been successful in getting renewable energy built out but there is a problem where these banks reach a tax capacity where they can't consume any more tax credits because their tax burden isn't high enough. A few years back the concept of a tax credit transfer was introduced and is getting some uptake but because the developers and syndicators on these deals need a guarantee that someone will be buying the tax credits the transfers are hard to set up because the institutional investors need to find companies with big and importantly reliable tax burdens to buy the credits which are hard to sell even at 95 cents on the dollar. and on and on and on.

But very little of this discussion even really needs to hit the public that is still debating whether climate change is a fake Chinese hoax or whatever.

You are demanding the output of like lobbying firms, the groups that produce huge detailed reports for legislation but you want it to occupy the space of policy debate forums.

I was literally saying that this wasn't going to happen?

But very little of this discussion even really needs to hit the public that is still debating whether climate change is a fake Chinese hoax or whatever.

And I've never seen it hit a place like here, outside of one poster who is really into California housing policy. I've never even seen such a thing linked.

I guess I have this strange idea that if you have a very well researched argument for a position that you support, then you ought to release it to convince people. Apparently this is silly?

I guess I have this strange idea that if you have a very well researched argument for a position that you support, then you ought to release it to convince people. Apparently this is silly?

There's a type error here I think. When you're doing this kind of well researched work it's to make a bill that works well. It'd be like advertising a piece of software based on how the codebase is organized. At best you'd advertise it as faster or reliable. Public debate is on a whole different level of analysis. An effort post on a policy wonk subject will have the policy wonk providing both the argument and any nuanced pushback because the proponents are just going to ooh and ah and detractors object to the whole project no matter its design.

A policy wonk might have an advantage in a debate about whether their policy should be implemented because they can effectively rebut incorrect characterizations of it but that's a small part of debate, especially in a place like this where many/most disagreements are much much more broad than what the best way to deal with tax capacity of ITC credit consuming firms.