“Trump is not enthusiastic about implementing popular policies, or really thinking or engaging on policy at all. Even when his administration has implemented policy, he has seemed confused, checked out, or even at odds with his own administration’s positions or actions — including on a massive tax cut package, agency-level deregulation, installation of judges, and the response to Covid-19.
Trump, it turns out, is extremely enthusiastic about Trump and other people who are enthusiastic about him, regardless of whether they are hardline conservatives or conspiracy theorists, rather than Republicans in line with his populist rhetoric. He is extremely enthusiastic about attacking those who are not enthusiastic about Trump. The result is that Trump functions as an opposition leader, defining himself and the Republican Party not by a set of policies but by their opposition to those who oppose Trump. Meaning, most importantly, the left.”
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“Even before the pandemic, there was comparatively little Republican voter support for cutting federal spending on health care and education. Before “Infrastructure Week” became a long-running joke, it was a Trump campaign promise, one with high levels of support from Republican voters. And that hasn’t changed — according to Fox News polling conducted earlier this month, 57 percent of Americans want more assistance from the federal government, not less.
Teles told me, “The problem is that the Republican Party’s actual voters — as well as those they aspire to attract — have shifted in a working-class direction. And those voters need government to actually do things for them. They need something like a coherent program for driving economic growth, they need new systems of social insurance, and they need a functioning public health system that would allow them to go to work. All of that requires a kind of planning and implementation capacity, and a relationship between a large base of technical expertise and networks of officials across government to drive change, that does not exist.”
RNC internal documents obtained by the Washington Examiner and released this week show that the GOP is well aware of its voters’ discontent. As detailed by writer Joseph Simonson, voters who switched from Obama to Trump in the Rust Belt “favor stronger social safety nets and hawkishness on trade, rather than typical GOP orthodoxies such as lower tax rates and an easier regulatory environment for businesses. That is not to say these voters oppose those things, but the rhetorical obsession from GOP donors and members of the party do little to excite one-time Trump voters.””
“It’s quite the list, but this level of lying and misleading isn’t new to Trump. According to the Washington Post, Trump has now made more than 20,000 public false or misleading claims since he assumed office.
As my colleague Matt Yglesias has argued, there’s something more to this than just lying — it’s bullshitting. Here’s Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt, explaining the concept:
“For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
It’s not just that Trump is lying. It’s that Trump doesn’t seem to care at all for the truth. What he says is only meant to make him look good.”
“If you live in Chicago, you might be thinking about buying a gun to protect yourself, your family, your home, or your business against rioters, looters, and assorted violent criminals. But before you can exercise your Second Amendment rights in Illinois, you need permission from the state police, a process that can take months.
Contrary to a state law that requires approval or denial of an application for a firearm owner’s identification (FOID) card within 30 days, Illinois residents often wait two or three times as long. Such delays are plainly unconstitutional, according to a federal lawsuit filed last month by the Goldwater Institute on behalf of four Chicago area residents and two gun rights groups.”
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“Illinois is one of just two states where residents need a license to possess long guns as well as handguns. In theory, the process is straightforward: As long as you are not legally disqualified from owning a firearm (because of a felony record, for example), the ISP has to give you a FOID card.
But the program has for years been plagued by insufficient funding and staffing. According to the Illinois State Rifle Association, another plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, FOID delays are only getting worse.”
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“Illinois politicians, especially in Chicago, do not seem especially keen to respect that fundamental right. The city’s handgun ban, which it vigorously defended to the end, was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark 2010 case.
After that defeat, Chicago passed an ordinance that required would-be handgun owners to receive training at firing ranges and simultaneously banned all such businesses within the city. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit blocked enforcement of that ordinance in 2011.”
“the belief is that when the government takes a dollar out of your pocket, puts that dollar through the political process, and decides where to spend it (based on input from special interest groups), the economy will somehow return more money in growth than the money invested, even after Washington bureaucrats take their cut. It’s magic! Sadly, these arguments ignore recent empirical evidence that the costs of increased government spending far outweigh the benefits to the economy.
For starters, contrary to the claims of pro-government spending proponents, economists are far from having reached a consensus about the actual return on government spending. While some economists find that a dollar spent by the government generates more of a return than the dollar spent, others find that the return is less than one dollar. And yet others find that if you take into account the future taxes needed to pay for the dollar that’s spent, the multiplier is actually negative, and the economy takes a hit.”
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“there are narrow cases when government spending can stimulate the economy, but for that to happen, the environment in which the spending takes place is important. Work by economists Ethan Ilzetzki, Enrique Mendoza, and Carlos Vegh on the impact of government fiscal stimulus shows that it “depends on key country characteristics, including the level of development, the exchange rate regime, openness to trade, and public indebtedness.” Many other economists have found the same. Unfortunately for the proponents of fiscal stimulus, the United States has the features of a country where stimulus by spending does have an impact and, in fact, can have a negative impact on growth.”
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“even if you had a country with little debt and the right environment, implementing the spending correctly is a key to getting a multiplier that’s larger than one. As former Treasury Secretary and former Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers has explained, stimulus spending needs to be timely, targeted, and temporary. Unfortunately, evidence from the last recession shows that it rarely is.”
“The irony is that the term Hispanic is inclusive and gender-neutral but, as the Pew study explains, it spurred “resistance” in the 1990s because “it embraced a strong connection with Spain.” However, its gender-specific and hence suddenly problematic replacement, Latino, hardly severs all connections with Spain, let alone with European imperialism.”
“the majority of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) consumed by Americans were produced right here in the United States, according to a recent report from the health care consulting firm Avalere. When it comes to foreign supply chains, about 19 percent of the active ingredients used in America’s drugs come from Ireland. China accounts for just 6 percent.”
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“Before risking hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on loans to companies with unproven track records of producing pharmaceutical drugs or their chemical components, you might expect the White House to assess the seriousness of the underlying problem it is hoping to solve. But so far, all the available evidence suggests that China is not responsible for making most—or even much—of America’s pharmaceutical drug supply. Lobbyists and politicians are using a manufactured crisis to advance their own interests.”
“A Florida deputy is on administrative leave, thanks to a video of him telling a teenager as he arrests him that he’ll show him “what fucking freedom of speech is.”
The exchange occurred between Charles Rhoads of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and 19-year-old Kevin Wygant.”
“Rolling electric power blackouts afflicted as many as 2 million California residents last week as a heat wave gripped the Golden State. (It’s apparently eased up for now.) At the center of the problem is that power demand peaks as overheated people turn up their air conditioning in the late afternoon just as solar power supplies cut off as the sun goes down. In addition, output from California’s wind farms was erratic. Currently, about 33 percent of California’s electricity comes from renewable sources as mandated by state law. Until this summer, California utilities and grid operators were able to purchase extra electricity from other states, but the current heat wave stretches from Texas to Oregon so there was little to none available to make up for California’s power shortage.”
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“Completely ignored in the reporting is that California has been shutting down a huge source of safe, reliable, always-on, non-carbon dioxide–emitting, climate-friendly electricity—that is, nuclear power. In 2013, state regulators forced the closing of the San Onofre nuclear power plant that supplied electricity to 1.4 million households. By 2025, California regulators plan to close down the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant that can supply electricity to 3 million households.
The problem of climate change, along with the blackouts resulting from the inherent vagaries of wind and solar power, are an indication that California should not only keep its nuclear power plants running but also build many more of them.”
“Instead of actually ending the drug war, the 2020 platform’s emphasis takes the same approach as the 2016 platform in calling for the expanded use of drug courts and diversion programs “for those struggling with substance use disorders.””
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“Drug courts, in practice, have been shown that they do not reduce policing encounters; some evidence supports the idea that they reduce incarceration rates or recidivism. A 2018 report from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) analyzed drug court systems in the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and found many cases where drug courts actually increased, rather than reduced, a drug users’ interactions with police and the criminal justice system. The SSRC analysis of five years of New York City drug courts determined that sentences for those who “failed” drug court were two-to-five times longer than those who just accepted a conventional sentence for drug possession. In other words, they would have been better off just pleading guilty.”
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“The Democrats say they don’t want to see people incarcerated “solely for using drugs,” but that’s what happens if you test positive for drugs while enrolled in drug court: you get incarcerated. Drug courts and compulsory drug treatment programs are enforced by men with guns, and you can’t end a war if you’re not willing to stop pointing guns at people.”