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Apr 6, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Is the point of the part about a carbon tax that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good? Or are we really dismissing it outright because it's regressive? You can just create a dividend, or increase the EITC, or fund a permanent expansion or the CTC. Easy fix.

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Great piece!

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Confronting climate change is by the fuzziest part of Biden's agenda. The most serious effort yet is automobile fuel-efficiency standards. My opinion is we first need as a society to honestly confront the science, and while the right is of course the main problem, the left is also dodging, resorting to vague populism about a "Green New Deal" and pandering to the fake-green solar lobby. We are a consumerist culture and we want to be told that there is some product we can buy that will reduce our carbon emissions. The reality is that above all else we need to stop or reverse population growth, improve energy efficiency, reduce waste and unnecessary packaging, and restore forests. We live in a world with powerful opposition to all of those things, and I have yet to see any movement in politics towards coming up with a serious plan.

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The author misdiagnoses the great depression. We got in there because of monetary policy, we got out because of monetary policy, and all the New Deal did was generally make things worse. Wherever they might have a stimulatory policy, they’d undo it balancing the budget or getting all the manufacturers to collude on prices through the NRA. There’s nothing to celebrate in the New Deal save the REA (which was basically a loan program, mind you) and some of the infrastructure projects, and it’s absurd we might want to do it all over again.

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