I agree. I never got over progressives' downplaying of the significance of the ACA (Obamacare). The pre-existing conditions protections are enormously popular and had a profound impact on millions of Americans who were previously denied health coverage.
There were a lot of problems with the implementations of healthcare exchanges, and it did raise prices for certain people who were able to buy health insurance before its implementation. But it nearly HALVED the uninsured rate -- it went from over 17% to around 10%.
People like me, who had pre-existing conditions, COULD NOT buy health insurance before the ACA except through an employer, and there were few regulations on what employer plans had to cover. I grew up with parents who didn't have steady jobs with benefits and they were constantly struggling to pay for my insulin and test strips (type 1 diabetic) and trying (and failing) to get us on Medicaid. Without the ACA, I probably would have had to get a full time job at 18 to get insurance. I don't know if I would have been able to go to college. I can hardly overstate the impact this legislation has had on my life.
So why didn't progressives scream it from the rooftops that the ACA was a huge win for American access to healthcare?!? Why did they let Republicans label it Obamacare and successfully pretend it was a bad thing for YEARS?!? I have a feeling it's because they thoughr that acknowledging this landmark legislation might have cooled people's enthusiasm for Medicare for all or other, even more progressive, healthcare legislation. I doubt it, though. As you said, they should take the W.
Because it may have started out well, but within a very short time it became a very expensive waste of money for many lower income people. Before I hit rock bottom, I struggled to pay for the ACA. The problem was, I couldn't use it. I maintained it because it was the law for a long time and because I needed SOMETHING if I should become seriously ill. I was lighting $500-$700/month on FIRE because I would never be able to afford the deductibles - which gradually became astronomic. A trip to a doctor or hospital or urgent care was a luxury I couldn't afford. NOTHING kicked in until I was out-of-pocket $5000. That might as well have been $5 million to someone who can barely afford food or electricity.
"was lighting $500-$700/month on FIRE because I would never be able to afford the deductibles"
My wife and I (early-mid 60s) are lighting $2400/month on FIRE. Obamacare doubled our monthly premiums. I am all for subsidizing people with pre-existing conditions. But, beyond that, what a tremendous waste of money that goes to insurance companies.
Same here. Our out of pocket annual costs of insurance, deductibles and copays rose to over $20k. Medicare is coming in as a huge cost of living improvement as we turn 65.
Obama Care (as implemented) was a solution to some real problems, but it was and still is a terrible solution, creating as many problems as it solves. One dilemma Obama Care tries to address is that healthy people (rationally) game the system by not buying insurance until they need it. This destroys the insurance mechanism as only unhealthy people pay in. Insurance companies address this (rationally) by underwriting and excluding prior conditions. The solution to the dilemma requires both mandatory insurance and no underwriting, not just the latter. Failure of the program to do both (along with lots of other issues) has led to an explosion in costs.
Obama Care isn’t a win. It was an unforced error. I could design a smarter insurance system on a napkin in a half hour. Napkin available on request.
My wife just turned 65. We are relatively high income, so her Medicare "penalty" plus premiums ad up to about the same as her continuing on my business plan after tax (1200/mo*.55% = . So, we are not bothering to sign her up for the time being. The key here, is that our premiums can be deducted above the line (I am self-employed). If that deduction went away, then she'd be on Medicare immediately. Funny how the medicare "penalty" works ...
This is not the fault of people with pre-existing conditions though. This is because we PRIVATIZED health insurance. What you are suggesting is that anyone with the audacity to be born or acquire an illness that requires on-going treatment should just go bankrupt. If that's your premise, then there is no point in having insurance at all. The entire point of health insurance is to insure people so they don't go bankrupt over a medical condition.
One other thing. Unless you die instantly in an accident or drop suddenly of a heart attack you will eventually be one of those people with a pre-existing condition being subsidized by the healthy. Very few of us will escape that fate.
It was very expensive, inefficient, unsustainable, and basically taxed the middle to upper middle class to pay for the poor and lower middle class, while giving a away a lot of the money to the middle men to make the medicine go down.
The same could be said of the War on Poverty and every other progressive cause. The main beneficiaries are the professional class Dems providing the government paid for services with some trickle down effects to the perpetually dependent poor.
That was NYS. That was a few years ago. I had gone through a long spell of self-employment and unemployment - (better known as underemployment). And I had several years of bronze plans for which I could BARELY make the premiums - and that was the deductible. After that, I went for 2 years with no coverage because I simply didn't have the money. During that period I earned just above the cut-off for subsidized care. I had full time employment during the pandemic, so that's where the ACA journey ended in NY. However, that insurance (which I obviously paid the premiums for) had a pretty high deductible - though not as high as I had previously. It was the equivalent of a very bad bronze plan.
However, I think some of that leniency with respect to deductibles had a great deal to do with the pandemic crisis as people were losing employment right and left. I would have no confidence that that would not be reversed in the future back to very high levels.
The ACA is an even bigger deal than that. Even if you didn't have pre-existing conditions, a lot of insurance companies would periodically make cosmetic changes to their plans, and automatically re-enroll *most* of the people they covered, while making people who had picked up expensive-to-treat conditions while insured re-apply. So, even if you were covered by insurance and religiously paid your premiums, you could effectively get kicked off your plan for actually using the insurance. And even in those states with laws that forced insurers to keep you on their plans, nothing prevented them from setting your updated premiums to sky-high values.
And even some employer provided insurance plans wouldn't cover pre-existing conditions for the first year of your employment.
The ACA solved all these problems. For the first time, you could buy actual health insurance that didn't go away or get more expensive if you used it.
Now, I'll argue that the complete loss of subsidies above 400% of FPL is a problem (and one that's been temporarily remedied by Biden), but one that obviously can be fixed, and fixed a *lot* easier than doing another wholesale revamping of the insurance landscape to move to single payer.
Indeed, crank up the subsidies (which isn't that expensive, since only 20M people are covered directly by the exchanges), lower the Medicare eligibility age (to take some of the more expensive people out of the exchange pool) and you'll have a pretty reasonable insurance system.
"So, even if you were covered by insurance and religiously paid your premiums, you could effectively get kicked off your plan for actually using the insurance."
Home owners insurance works similarly. Never make a claim unless it is for a serious amount. We have a State Farm HO policy. I am told by the agent that they have no idea what it takes to get dropped, other than the number of claims within a period of time seems to matter a lot more than the total amount of the claims.
Quote from "Pittsburgh Mike" - "The ACA is an even bigger deal than that. Even if you didn't have pre-existing conditions, a lot of insurance companies would periodically make cosmetic changes to their plans, and automatically re-enroll *most* of the people they covered, while making people who had picked up expensive-to-treat conditions while insured re-apply. So, even if you were covered by insurance and religiously paid your premiums, you could effectively get kicked off your plan for actually using the insurance. And even in those states with laws that forced insurers to keep you on their plans, nothing prevented them from setting your updated premiums to sky-high values."
I'm no fan of the ACA we need single payer and better yet, a public option. However, that was not an issue in NYS. One of the reasons I had so many financial issues was a very expensive problem with my leg where a major tendon atrophied. Apparently genetic. My mother had the same thing.
Since I made my living being on my feet, this created a devastating loss of income. Which is a big part of why I got into such bad financial straits. The problem was expensive and it is STILL a major issue because at the time, the only people who could manage the issue were not on my plan - or any plan where I could afford the premiums. But I will say that no one tried to push me off my plan. Refusing to cover treatment - yes! Trying to boot me off the system or raise premiums above what other people were paying for the same level - no!
Now , NYS has some of the strictest rules regulating what insurers can and can not do. So I could see how it might have happened elsewhere.
When the ACA was before the Supreme Court in 2014, a leftist I know said he hoped it would be overturned "and then we can have single payer." We have a mutual friend who in all probability is alive because of the ACA.
I can only refer back to my days hanging around Firedoglake which pushed very hard for the public option and explained patiently that relative to single payer the public option was a compromise. There was no W for them when the public option was cut out. They lost. They could not suddenly reverse all of their arguments that this bill without a public option was just giving insurance companies new customers to treat badly.
Could you expand a bit more on your situation as a diabetic in America today? I also have type 1, but happened to live in Europe when I was diagnosed. I’ve been bouncing around the EU ever since enjoying socialized medicine (OmniPod, Insulin and GCM are fully covered) but I have been (somewhat selfishly) considering moving back to the States to increase my earning potential. However, I am concerned about the cost and stress of being diabetic in America.
What’s your experience been like? Would you recommend staying in Europe for health (care) reasons?
OK...I'm going to be brutally honest here. The cost of insulin is not going to be your only issue. You have testing equipment and far more intensive general care required to manage type 1 diabetes well.
Also, no matter how you slice it, ou have a major endocrine problem that leaves you susceptible to additional medical problems down the road. You DO NOT want to be at the mercy of the US healthcare system with something like this - EVER. My grandfather was a brittle type 1 diabetic and I also have a doctorate in immunology and microbiology - so I know from whence I speak.
That goes DOUBLE if Trump makes it back to the White House. If it weren't for John McCain's tie-breaking vote, Trump would have succeeded in destroying the ACA during his first term - with NO PLANS to put anything else in its place.
Also, you can't count on your employment taking care of your insurance needs. Employers are cutting corners everywhere on healthcare for employees. You generally get the cheapest plan they can choke down the employee's throats. And if you lose your job - good luck paying those COBRA payments to keep that insurance. Most people can't. And most states are "at will" employment states. You can be laid off on a moment's notice.
I'm not trying to be doom and gloom about your health. When my grandfather died he was still taking porcine insulin (Human insulin was just becoming available around that time). He lived a long life - particularly considering how brittle his condition was. But he could afford the best care possible. If you are in the US and not filthy rich, that will not be you.
There should have been more age tiers so fewer young healthy people had to pay higher premiums (a bid part of the “popular” resistance). And more could have been done to nibble away at employer plans, at least for the lowest paid employees), but still it was a signature achievement!
An illustration I like of the progress we have made in terms of absolute poverty (if not relative poverty) is from the National Health Examination Survey of the early 1960s, called Total Loss of Teeth in Adults, which estimated that HALF of all adults over 65 had lost ALL their permanent teeth from both their jaws (in c. 1960). Today, the CDC says it is about 10%.
Fascinating. Thank you for pointing this out. I may no longer be able to use this statistic as an argument that poverty is declining since it seems to be the case that smoking is a bigger culprit than poverty per se (eg inability to pay for dental care). Good point!
Could be, I am no expert at all on tooth loss! But I concede, triggered by Phil's remark, the point that poverty IN ITSELF may not be the reason our forebears had such high rates of tooth loss, if smoking (a personal choice, not forced upon people by poverty) and fluoridation (sic) (a government program, with no clear link to poverty I know of - I could be wrong) were bigger factors in tooth loss. That's all.
Excellent. My random anecdote seems to have sparked a debate on NoahPinion on the sources of tooth loss in the USA! So far I count 3 non-exclusive hypotheses: poverty ("I can't afford dental care"), smoking (correlated with poverty maybe but not caused by it? (I dunno)), and fluoridation (driven by government policy and financial capacity). Probably all three play a role? I'll bet there is a social norms component, too, as in "Well I figured I'd lose all my teeth as I got older, just like Gramps, so why bother brushing 'em?" If someone knows of a definitive study out there clarifying all this....
This very much feels like when Obama ran. The joy, the hope. The positive vibes. I cried the night he won and I will probably again when Kamala wins. Our country needs this win.
Kamala Harris is fresh and inspiring — while Trump seems like old news.
It's so great and refreshing to see the positive energy that Kamala Harris brings to this race! MAGAs are all negative and she is such a contrast.
Given the choice between going back and re-living another older, more boring, angrier Trump presidency or getting a new, young, vibrant, upbeat, attractive POTUS, I truly don't believe Trump stands a chance. He's adding NO new supporters. Kamala's gathering new voters daily!
That's why this "Kamala removes stubborn orange stains" t-shirt is perfect for these times 👇 🤣
The politics of perfection being the only acceptable outcome inevitably must yield to the politics of Good Enough for Now.
Activists are an important component of a dynamic society but the people in charge can't operate in perpetual reaction to their (impossible) demands.
It's good to see that the pendulum is swinging back to center. I just wish we didn't wait till weve giftwrapped the Right 1000 legitimate qualms about our overreach and hysteria.
The amount of progress that we have made in the last hundred years is difficult to fathom especially if you can textualize it against places on earth which have made almost none or have in fact regressed towards some wretched past.
Activists can't allow themselves the grace to acknowledge this (lest they lose their purpose) but the rest of us absolutely must celebrate our achievements at every opportunity.
The insinuation made by some activists that there has been no progress made on the subject of, for example, racism, in the US is implicitly an impossible demand, to name but one.
On an absolute basis, the numbers about an improved standard of living speak for themselves.
However, like it or not, people judge their economic circumstances also and perhaps more so on a relative basis to others. So being poor in one era may be not having indoor plumbing and in the next era not having a washing machine and dryer.
And a third relevant measure, related to the one above, is the standard of living relative to society's capacity to provide for the poor. Since LBJ's war on poverty, our per capita GDP has tripled in real terms.
Yup. And if you insist on some form of anchored absolute poverty: why do we anchor poverty at 1960? Why not anchor it at 10,000 BC? Everyone in 1960 lived as kings and queens compared to their cavemen ancestors - 0% poverty in 1960, 0% poverty in 2024.
If we're going to make these somewhat silly absolute living conditions arguments: I also rarely see the research teams arguing against modern poverty (Burkhauser, Meyer, Sullivan) make similar arguments about modern rich people. But wouldn't their arguments fully apply to absurdly more aggressive top-end taxation rates? Tax the very top to smithereens, but in the vast comparison of human history, top earners still have very high standards of living, so there's no problem.
That is what the measurement of absolute poverty does. It starts with a rough estimate of material standard of living of people in 10,000BC and then charts the change over time. It is really eye-opening how much absolute poverty has declined across the world regardless of public policy.
We take it for granted, but it is one of humanity’s greatest achievements:
Yes, but I would say it was the markets greatest achievement rather then governments greatest achievement, and Noah is basically saying it was government welfare that did it.
The point of my note was to say that absolute standards are not sufficient. I think that's the same point you are making. But it's not clear to me since you called what i wrote "silly."
Oh, I'm sorry for being unclear. I'm on board with your argument of relative standards (my reading of the poverty and happiness literature suggests that these relative comparisons, and issues of relative deprivation, are really important) and find the claim by Burkhauser (2% poverty today) a tad strange and silly.
Relative poverty is actually just a measure of inequality. Inequality and poverty are two completely different things. It is far better to stop using the deceptive term “relative poverty” and just call it “income inequality” or something like that.
Disagree. Addressing “income inequality” is too easily brushed aside as people wanting to soak the rich whereas poverty is more accurate in describing the actual effects of even relative deprivation on people’s well-being.
Well, maybe “income inequality” is not the correct word, but “the relative deprivation of people’s well-being” is really about Status, not poverty.
Status is about how you rank versus other people. Poverty is a material standard-of-living that is unrelated to other people.
Someone making 100k will feel low status when surrounded by people making 300k per year, but that does not make them poor.
Someone making $1000 per year will feel high status when surrounded by people making $500 per year, but they are still poor.
Much of the discussion of “inequality” is really about status. Yes, many people suffer psychologically from low status, but it is impossible to create equal status. Status is zero-sum. Poverty is not.
You should be more concerned about Upward Mobility, which is entirely different from all of above:
Certainly, and it makes sense to crank up some of the tax rates on the upper end of the scale. The top 1% make about 25% of the country's income, pay 26% of that income in taxes, and pay about 48% of total income tax receipts.
The average income of people in the top 1% is like $770K, and only about $200K is in the 37% bracket. They're paying $190K in taxes already, and if you raise that last bracket to 50% you'll pick up an additional $26K, or 13%. They're paying a total of about 48% of total income tax receipts, so you've increased those receipts by about 6%, or $240B.
I mean, that's real money, and probably we should do it, but it isn't like it going to bring paradise to earth.
If we're going to raise taxes, I'd rather focus on land value. Nobody genuinely poor owns a lot of high-value land, so burden would still end up on the rich, but it would avoid creating increased incentives to conceal income through financial chicanery.
Sure, and that's why it's understandable that people may feel like nothing has changed, but it's still worth reminding people that factually, it has. Even if we acknowledge that being in the 10th income percentile in 2024 is still very bad, it's a lot better than being in the 10th percentile in 1960, and progressive policies made that happen.
It might help to have a more qualitative description of what the 10th percentile lived then, and now.
As I look around, a lot of people today - and certainly, a lot more than 2-3% - seem to lack the money needed to live in anything like peace or comfort. Threat of eviction and homelessness, skipping basic medical and dental care, at risk of bankruptcy from even very small unexpected expenses. That’s before
considering the effects of the relative lack of money.
But maybe it was worse then. Medicare and Medicaid, imperfect as they are, probably made a difference. And social security expansion for sure has made a difference. I just wonder what it looks like.
I do not know if anyone here saw the NYT opinion piece where Chris Murphy was interviewed about his worry about a crisis of meaning in the United States but vibes are not likely to fix that. Policies that work to restore trust in government can possibly fix that.
I didn't read "Poverty, By America" and I should have. But I think a point Matthew Desmond was trying to make in "Evicted" is that people who are using all of their energy to struggle for basic needs like housing do not build character or citizenship that way. Organizations like the KC Tenants' Union do take the W because they are teaching the people they are organizing to take up public space but it is hard to take the W in general when people are simply struggling to get equal respect in society much less take and use political power.
I have run into an endless stream of heated emotions and predictions of calamity in liberal comments sections. When I try to point out that a fear might just be a bit exaggerated. I have drawn such comments as: “Don't listen to the troll. She's trying to steal your motivation.”
Trump is trying to scare people into voting for him. Harris/Walz are trying to build trust and make people comfortable voting for them.
The number one reason I am comfortable voting for Harris is that she has spent 4 years working under and with Joe Biden. Now, that was the real apprenticeship (see what I did there?).
I agree with Jonathan V Last of the Bulwark that Joe Biden is our greatest living president. JVL wrote an amazing tribute to Biden, bringing up many achievements that none of us now remember. You may enjoy this!
This is neoliberal claptrap on steroids. The rage is there because the only appropriate way to respond to the way average working people have been thrown under the bus - is with RAGE!
I went from upper middle class to very nearly being on the streets. And you know what ? For the most part, no one gave a rat's ass. Many blamed me even though I was the one that was being thrown under the bus multiple times. My situation has stabilized somewhat, but it is ZERO thanks to any federal, state or local programs. They threw me to the wolves over and over again. I had no money for groceries - I got SNAP benefits. You know how much I got? $23/month.
All the money I contributed down through the years in the form of taxation, all the volunteer work I did for our local government, all the work I produced as an employee, the two businesses I started and was able to survive on for short periods of time, the fact that I was a caregiver for both parents for a total of 15 years which took an emotional, financial and career toll on me - all of that meant NOTHING to 99.999% of the world. I was a used piece of toilet paper...easily discarded. If it weren't for that remaining 0.001% - I'd be out in the streets right now. I am forever grateful to them and will never be able to fully repay them for their help.
But the severe poverty that comes from employees being underpaid and overworked for DECADES, usually with multiple layoffs and ever lengthening periods of unemployment in between - should NOT be left to 0.001% of people willing to stick their necks out. This requires a collective effort from the entire population and ESPECIALLY from those who have profited so handsomely from what appears to be legalized crime.
People are outraged for a reason. They see that what happened to me, could happen to THEM all too easily. It's time to embrace the rage with the joy and rebuild our economy to one that actually works for "we the people".
If we don't. If Harris doesn't get elected (God forbid), or if she turns her back on the middle class and working people the way every president since Reagan (Including Clinton and Obama) did - there will be more demagogues in the wings waiting to take Trump's place.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to get back to work continuing to rebuild a broken life.
I can feel your rage from here. Only the fact that I’m married kept me from disaster. And no, he’s not rich — we’ve never made the median wage. But if I’d been single when my industry imploded, I’d have been in deep dog doo.
I'm sooooooo, soooooo glad that you avoided that fate. I hope things are more secure for you now. It's very, very scary. I'm in the PTSD stage now where I wake up shaking and realize I have to make this second chance work. Not just for myself, but for the people who helped me as well. I'm not young and have a disability in my leg/foot which means I have to work from home - so this isn't easy. I've started a small business but am PRAYING I can get remunerative employment.
One thing I tell young people - DON'T go into the sciences or even tech. These fields are way, way to cyclic to be reliable. I invested heavily in my education in the medical sciences. It was the biggest financial mistake I ever made. I was on track for a nice high-five to low-six figure income when suddenly the demand dried up completely.
What happens when a field of work implodes on people with highly specialized training? You go broke because if there is no demand for what you worked so hard to do. You aren't worth a dime more than a minimum wage employee. I'm far from the only person who has had this happen.
The abuse and exploitation of those who are not in the top 10% income-wise has to end or there will be rioting in the streets and massive civil unrest. That's what the moderates don't get. The clock on this has been ticking for 40 years and if you are on LinkedIn looking for work, you know that people have reached their explosion point.
Why do these people think a guy like Trump made any kind of political tracks at all? Both political parties turned their backs on anyone NOT in the to 10%. The fact is that a well-fed, housed, and prosperous society would never fall for a demagogue like Trump. They should learn some history and read about the Weimar Republic.
They also need to remember that the "let them eat cake" solution didn't work out so well for Marie Antoinette.
Marie Antoinette's problem was that she couldn't bring enough cake for the whole class even if she wanted to. These days, the quantity exists - or will soon enough to plan around - but there's still the question of how it should be divided into shares.
There is plenty of cake to go around. The difficulty is that the top 1% have carved a wildly outsized slice for themselves and will have to make do with a lot less. They don't want to do that.
So - the storming of the Bastille - or the US Capitol - or similarly dramatic acts social unrest is something that we will have to adopt to and accept until the cake - or bread - is finally distributed in a reasonable way.
Sadly, the only thing that will work at this point is if those at the top of the food chain FEAR the masses. And I'm pretty sure the masses will oblige by hanging some from lamp posts to set an example. That's where this is going unless a more peaceful method to redistribute wealth is found.
The only question is whether this is done by brute force or more peaceably. But people don't go quietly into the long dark night of poverty and homelessness without a a fight.
There is enough cake, it just has to be shaken loose.
During my part-time job as a Paramedic, I went into many poor neighborhoods and households.
I often thought about the generational poverty I saw. No one can deny there is a grip of poverty that is seemingly permanent. If you look at poverty rates for married black couples, it is on a par with married white couples. Immigrants of all colors tend to fall within average poverty rates.
However, a slice of data within the census had this nugget. If you were black, female, single with young children ages 6 and under, you were 42% more likely to live under the poverty level.
Studies have shown that many males in our prison system were raised by single mothers.
Every weekend in what would be called the ghetto, Chicago has a rash of shootings. Often, these are drug gangs protecting their territory or just feeling frisky. One item that is missing from these areas is a culture of education. Education is the great equalizer. Education eliminates poverty.
Our country has done a piss poor job with education. In addition, children learn from their parent's behavior. One of the miscarriages I was called to was in a house in an African American neighborhood. A neighborhood with lots of subsidized housing. We had a grandmother in her early 50s with a mother in her middle to late 30s and a 17-year-old female sitting on the toilet with parts of the fetus still attached. The young 17 had a 6-month-old baby from a different father than the one that was involved in the latest pregnancy.
This is the tragedy of systemic poverty. Young women feel that having a place in the world, such as being a mother, gives them some status within our culture. You now have a job, you get money for living expenses, an EBT card, and subsidized housing.
Somehow, we have failed to guide these young people into a different life. Drug gangs often run the neighborhood. They’ll threaten to kill a young boy unless he joins the gang, usually being made to participate in the drug trade and frequently killings. The schools have mental detectors and a sense of hopelessness.
This is the dark side of poverty. Generational poverty. We need to assist in a change of culture that makes this behavior unacceptable. I have no solutions, but I believe you need to attack each instance of a young mother and her children living in a fatherless home.
Young boys and young men need fathers, and a plethora of studies confirm this. We also need better schools, hope, and training. I know two things about being successful in life for our youth.
1) Stay in school and study. 2) Don’t let drugs and alcohol interfere with number one. 3) Do not have children before marriage. Do this, and you have a chance to be successful.
I’d like to think that we have moved on from discriminating against Asian students or Jewish students because they do well in school. Rather than discriminate, perhaps it is time that we adopt those strategies that worked for them. A culture of families, a culture of education.
How do you begin? My solution is expensive but perhaps lasting. You have to break the cycle. Young women need help. If they have already fallen into poverty with our owed lock births, you need an individual plan to support them. Offer her training, child care, and education for some time if she is willing to learn a skill or a trade or a degree. Support her children, provide an education for them and safe schools and homes.
I am not expecting success for everyone. I believe there will always be the poor. But whatever we are doing, we are simply sustaining poverty in some areas of our country.
The worst problems are those where the “solution” is actually a cause of the problem. Your comment is a case in point. The major difference between the early 60’s and now is that we created hundreds of billions in annual programs to do just what you suggest. We effectively subsidized females having sex and babies with irresponsible males without regard to who would raise the outcome. This contributed greatly to the generational poverty of single moms, drug and alcohol abuse, and a dysfunctional culture of dependency.
We don’t need a new high priced government “individual plan” for solving this problem, we need to realize that when the government stepped in with best intentions it also neutered the people really capable of designing the individual plan, that is the people involved. I may disagree with conservatives on most of their philosophy, but they are at least partially correct that it was our government help which contributed significantly to single parenting, useless males, plummeting marriage rates, divorce, and multi-generational generational dysfunctional poverty.
You recommend more education and training, yet what do you think 12 years of school, and subsidized junior colleges are? We don’t need to dig deep to fund better training, we need to evaluate who has wasted the money we already spend on educators incapable of educating.
Please note I am not suggesting we don’t help single moms or their children. I suggest we take a look at the nearly tillion dollars per year we already spend (on this and education) and refocus it in ways which doesn’t incentivize bad behavior/culture and which demands success rather than failure.
Simple answer would be replacing means-tested programs with UBI. No risk of perverse incentives if something simple like "legal citizenship and a fixed address" are the only requirements. Barely any administrative overhead. Nominally it'd be a huge government expenditure, but it pays for itself pretty quickly in tax revenue from increased economic activity, and reduced costs to various other programs for managing poverty-related crises.
I guess if you view that mother as a child. I don't know that what are effectively adults (birthing a child is a swift end to childhood) can be infinitely reprogrammed. Why we tie our hands behind our backs and don't make the injectable, lasting birth control a requirement for aid, I don't understand. You may not be able to alter that girl/woman's life prospects that much, but at the very least you've prevented a few children from entering the same cycle 15 years hence; and you've made her problems fewer when the birth control wears off in 5 years or whatever.
You've given her the sexual freedom that was once so important to feminists.
Or: you've been utterly realistic about the sexual freedom/lack of restraint of the men in her life.
Sex-positivity!
I don't understand the odd flip in attitudes about birth control. The words used to be like an "open sesame".
I'm conservative, so I don't regard birth control particularly positive - my life is worse because I for the most part pursued a strategy of sexual sterility.
But that isn't or shouldn't be the attitude of the left.
I can't imagine how large that chip on your shoulder must be. What a pathetic and uninformed statement. Having been near homelessness, that's all I've got to say for you. The rest would be unprintable.
Another piece where a YIMBY ruins a reasonable opinion with absurd exaggerations/ falsifications of NIMBY opposition to housing, while presenting YIMBYs as saints who do nothing wrong. Matthew Yglesias called; he wants his shtick where he complains about cancel-culture tactics then uses them against NIMBYS back when you're done with it. See, for example, you citing a Twitter post (bad idea): "left-NIMBY types oppose new housing construction on the grounds that it would (supposedly) make profits for developers"--and those profits would only supposedly come! Naughty NIMBYs! In fact, the Twitter-er was quoting a NIMBY criticizing policies that prioritize "profits over people," a vague comment, granted, but clearly showing that profit itself is not the problem. Who doesn't expect developers to make a profit? Even public housing conceivably could make a small net profit.
I am amused actually. But I get that, in interpreting comments on articles, our default interpretation would be to assume that outrage is being expressed. Back to the humor, though... Noah, a potential customer is objecting to your misquoting someone. The free market! Surely you will respond accordingly just like all that new housing is lowering prices. In fact, there are more restaurants than ever where I live--so I guess the prices of a meal have gone down. Oops. And more health-care providers than ever--so I guess their prices have gone down. Hmmm.
Well, NIMBY and YIMBY aren't all that clear cut in their ideology and motivations. I'm about as progressive as they come.
1 - I don't object to developers making a reasonable profit. However....
2 - Building for the sake of building - or building only luxury housing is not a solution to the housing problem.
In my neck of the woods, we've been on a building spree for about 10 years now. Trouble is that none of this has solved the housing crisis. In fact, dispossession of homes is happening at a faster and faster rate and moving UP the income ladder. The end result: more people are vulnerable to displacement even though they are at higher income levels than ever before.
Pricing has become bifurcated from median incomes creating a hot mess that doesn't necessarily respond to market forces. Because in spite of Noah's claims to the contrary, large developers are rigging the system in specific areas. The idea that because big developers only have a tiny sliver of the entire USA real estate pie is ridiculous. The fact is that they own great swaths in concentrated areas and can thus control the market.
You can add to that toxic brew a corrupt local government which is no longer monitored by local reporters informing the public and you have a recipe for big, big problems. a $1700/month studio in about 2020 is now going for $2500 - $2600/month.
Gee...how many people have had over a 40% increase in salaries in the past 4 years??? Answer: Not many. And certainly no one near the median salary has.
If thousands of units of luxury apartments were built I’m San Francisco, they would soon fill up with happy renters. Those new renters will leave their existing less than luxury apartments leaving them available for rent, and the cycle would continue on down the chain, as long as overpriced apartments exist. Some of those renters would move in from other cities, but SF would definitely have more housing. Who is vulnerable by displacement? Do you think asylum seekers are using up all the new housing?
I don't have time for right-wing crazies who want to blame everything on immigrants while genuflecting at the mere mention of "free markets fixing EVERYTHING." Neither are true, nor fully false. It's a matter of balance.
What you are arguing is that all "free markets" work perfectly. That there never is undo influence, bribery, price-fixing or other criminal or corrupt activity that could interfere with such a perfect world. Please wake up and smell the coffee perking,
You are indulging in a fantasy created by the right wing. Markets CAN be fixed, monopolies CAN distort pricing, corporate influence CAN corrupt our government officials, corporations CAN control legislation to the detriment of the public... Free markets are no panacea.
The fact is that we tried this where I live now for about 10 years now and IT HASN'T WORKED. It's made the problem WORSE, not better. A good part of this is corruption. And it's not necessarily just the Republicans. In this case, the city I'm talking about is 100% blue - and has been since about 2010.
The first thing you fail to consider is that they are not making any new land. So the developers have to get their hands on land - which is almost ALWAYS either owned by someone else who lives/works on the property, or has commercial or residential tenants. The alternative is to try and build on major wetlands - which another horror story in terms of local flooding. There is also the use of eminent domain. Why pay full price if you can force the land away from its owner?
The developers come in like vultures and try to use eminent domain to declare lower income areas blighted. Now, these areas are not even rundown let along blighted. The tenants are lower income, but none of this poorly maintained or ANYTHING approaching blight.
4 years ago a large block of small buildings that had quite a few rental units atop some Mom and Pop stores was threatened by eminent domain. It was ridiculous. A group of citizens, myself included, interviewed the tenants and successfully intervened in the process. It was thrown out by the courts. Just last week I found out they were starting eminent domain proceedings AGAIN. The hospital (that is part of big conglomerate and has more money than God) wants the land on the cheap. I don't believe they ever offered the landlord market value. They just bided their time.
Theis condemnation will displace many long-time residents. So your notion that people will start to "move in" to the luxury apartments really doesn't hold water. Most will never be able to afford the extortionist rent these people plan to charge. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's more commonly known as "gentrification" But with a twist.
Price fixing, algorithms from Real Page and collusion among landlords with tacit support of public officials create a nightmare of escalating rents that are going up close to 50% in half a decade.
That's what's actually happening. The way this is being done results in a bifurcation of rental rates from salaries. The landlords don't need (and may not want) full occupancy. They can make more by charging fewer people through the nose. And by withholding units from the marketplace (which they do) they can create endless shortages and jack up prices.
Why do you assume I am right wing and anti-immigrant, just because I stated that any housing, no matter how luxurious, means more housing supply and lower housing prices? I am actually no-wing, and I think right wing anti-immigrant people are just as wrong as left-wing anti-market people. We should get more immigrants and even asylum seekers, and they should be allowed to work, and if people like you that don’t want more housing built prevail then housing will continue to be too expensive for them to afford.
What is the monopoly that builds luxury housing, and how is it preventing others from building other housing? Eminent domain abuse is a government problem, not one of developers or free-markets. The fifth amendment protects taking of private land , except for public use and with fair compensation, so in your situation who was trying to take the rental units and mom and pop stores? It must have been the government, because luxury housing developers are not able to do that. Maybe someone tried to do what New London Connecticut did in the disgraceful Kelo case where it tried to try to force owners out of houses to build a private development in order to create jobs, which the Supreme Court sadly agreed with the city. But building luxury housing on land acquired in a free (I.e. not distorted by corrupt government actions) market is not the same thing.
Obviously there is a fixed amount of land, which only fools fail to consider, and in cities it becomes valuable. You are wrong in saying they are not making more buildable land, 20% of Tokyo is built on land reclaimed from Tokyo Bay as is the entire marina district in SF. There haven’t been flooding problems, though liquefaction is an issue and manifested in the Lima Prieta earthquake in the Marina.
Much existing urban land is occupied, but it a developer buys a laundromat, or warehouse or MacMansion and builds a high rise with dozens of high end rental units, that will add those units to the market, the previous owner is compensated, and more people have better housing, and you oppose this because the developer earns a profit for the risk and work they did.
What kind of price fixing is there other than city rent controls, which does restrict the market, and discourage building? What landlord would keep a unit off the market instead of renting it out, they still pay the insurance, mortgage and taxes on it, so they have no incentive to keep it vacant. Do you also think grocery stores have back rooms filled with eggs that don’t sell to keep the prices on the eggs they do sell higher? That is nonsensical.
""any housing, no matter how luxurious, means more housing supply and lower housing prices?""
This may be the finest demonstration of crux of the problem with YIMBY's understanding of Econ of housing.. Never a mention of what housing just got torn down to build the new homes.... The house that gets torn down is almost inevitably the cheapest home in the neighborhood and is always replaced by homes that are more expensive even when replaced by a quadplex. So, no simply adding more housing does not simply "reduce prices" by increasing supply. It actually reduces the availability of the most affordable homes in a neighborhood. While it may put some downward pressure on the upper-mid luxury segment of the market, that in no way makes homes more affordable in any useful sense (i.e. getting the marginal would-be homeowner into a home).
Noah and Matt Y are both guilty of this oversimplisitc thinking and have been laughably co-opted by the libertarians at the Mercator Center who have pushed upzoning for decades only to find foolish progressives who don't even realize they have been duped because they think they are being good anti-racists. In addition, they think the cries about developers getting rich are misplaced. However, their plans always rely on multi-family units which almost always only serve to enrich developers and landlords. Buying an apartment or 1/4th of a quadplex is not a wealth building opportunity for the marginal would-be homebuyer.
So, if part of inherent YIMBY argument is that zoning and covenants had a racist history locking people out of wealth building opportunities and this must be rectified by......locking marginal homebuyers out of wealth building opportunities while fattening the fat-cats.
Sounds like a job for land value tax. Presumably occupancy percentage would be far higher, and the market in general more efficient, if landlords were stuck paying a big chunk of that rental rate to Uncle Sam even when the unit's vacant.
Come to my community, Noah, and please help explain who is and who is not poor. You’re right, nobody is starving to death. Outside the homeless, nobody is in danger of freezing to death, either. Nobody is unclothed. These are indeed good things. Go back in time and things were far worse. BUT come on! You want to tell me someone living in a house with boarded up windows who can’t afford fresh foods isn’t poor just because that person isn’t living in an unheated garret eating gruel? Income inequality matters.
I’m sorry that your community is going through that but it’s important to point out that your community is not representative of most of America. The article gave pretty concrete examples of how things have gotten better. That does not mean everything is perfect and it will never be perfect, but it is important to take the wins where we can and continue to make progress
This is also a weird analysis for an economist. Why start your analysis in 1964? That's silly. You want to start decades earlier and see if the US's aggressive welfare state measures trended stronger in reducing poverty than the years before.
I don't think that's the case. Poverty rates in the 1930s were perhaps as high as 50%. By the time Noah's chart pops up out of nowhere, that's down to around 20-25%. So it's gone down by half. If you compare economic progress from 1939 to 1964, I think you see massively positive changes that slow down drastically in subsequent years. Yes, 1964 to 1972 was good, but so what? That's a very short period.
Exactly. A more balanced and accurate presentation of the issue would not try to hide that poverty rates were declining faster prior to LBJ than after.
How could an economist fail to recognize that the war on poverty did not just lower immediate poverty, it also changed the incentives of working and marriage, and that longer term these became giant headwinds to the success of our efforts?
I agree that optimism and recognition of success are important. I even agree that by transferring hundreds of million to the poor, we are actually making them less poor. The average poor family qualifies for over $40k in transfers per year. After taking this into account, very few people are poor as defined in the 60s.
The problem is that we replaced poverty with dependency and we now have multigenerational families of poorly educated girls (having children with irresponsible males) living off government cheese. The problems with systemic multi generational poverty are not solved by progressive policies, they are caused by them.
Do the people reading this substack not realize this? Or do they not care?
In summary…
1) Poverty has declined since the war on poverty
2) But it did so at a slower rate than prior to these “progressive” policies
3) And as a negative side effect it undermined marriage, two parent families and work incentives and created cultures of multigenerational dependency
4) Let’s hold back on the joy and celebration until we get our ducks back in order by creating institutions which foster both prosperity and self sufficiency
Some valid points, but maybe you could devote some attention to professional centrists whose only job seems to be to attack progressives (Jonathan Chait is the archetype, but represenative of a large slab of the political class). Chait wasn't at all happy about Harris bringing joy because it wasn't accompanied by enough of the sharp shift to the right he wanted to see.
I've seen this with climate change, but globally. Activists are narrow-mindedly focused on narratives like "THE PLANET IS BURNING" and "TIME IS RUNNING OUT" and refusing to emphasize success -- like the fact that since the Paris Accords, the amount of predicted warming has fallen by 2.3 degrees celsius (https://www.ciphernews.com/articles/how-we-know-the-energy-transition-is-here/).
Good point. It is important to point out the importance of natural gas, nuclear and hydropower replacing coal as the dominant fuel source. Their combined effect is far more than solar and wind.
This is really more of a Third Energy Transition rather than a Green Energy Transition:
Although this wasn't my primary field of work, I did teach undergraduate biology and the occasional course on environmental science. The fact is that we are running out of time - rapidly. When I say this, I don't mean that the earth will cease to exist. But human life may be unsustainable. I have enough organic chemistry under my belt to know that when you reach a certain tipping point, there may be no turning this around. The fact is that even if we stopped burning fossil fuel tomorrow, a large amount of warming is already baked into the CO2 cake. We have to aggressively stop using fossil fuels. Wind and solar would have a lot more potential if the oil/gas/coal industries weren't so good at quashing them.
Certainly nuclear may be a stop-gap although we have to find a solution for what might happen in an extended power failure nuclear power plant cores.
I could go on -but I have things I've got other things to do. You would gain more credibility if you actually responded with cogent arguments instead of attacking a poster with time-consuming questions.
Alternatively, we could build up immensely more wind and solar than we need for conventional industry (which is already worth doing as a hedge against intermittency), and use the excess to start actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere in a serious way.
CO2 mitigation is not something I fully understand. A few years ago, I read an article about the difficulties of mitigating CO2, and it is more complex than I thought.
• First, we produce a staggering amount of CO2
• Second, removal is extremely energy-intense.
What I worry about with respect to biology is the tipping point of a runaway warming trend and the ability of biological organisms to adapt. (In short, they can't) As more and more species become extinct, it accelerates extinction rates on the remaining species of the ecosystem that have depended on the already extinct species for survival.
We are already seeing tangible changes in climate and have had a taste of how this could accelerate. And I hate to break it to everyone, but humans can not exist without other species of plants and animals. This is not a trivial issue and it is not going away.
This link from MIT might be informative regarding CO2 removal.
Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, I don't know much about rock grinders. I was just clarifying the issue that "not worrying about CO2 levels" is no longer the option people want to think it is.
There is this structural engineer that I once knew who was working on retro-fitting the Empire State Building to be more energy-efficient. This was a long and very expensive process, but this was far, far less expensive environmentally than taking down the building and and building something bigger and more environmentally efficient. Now, NO ONE was going to even consider knocking down the Empire State Building! In most other cases, the older building would be taken down. This is a problem because the planet can not withstand the amount of construction we need.
Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. We need new construction - if the shortages are REAL and not contrived. I would suggest that we take a hard look at vacancy rates. If there is market-fixing, a lot of these "luxury units" are likely unoccupied. This is inexcusable when there is a housing crisis. Also, if that is the case, market forces that should drive rents down are not working. Put people in them and if they are paying less rent than the landlord would like - too bad. There are way too many people unhoused for this nonsense to continue.
Btw, I've supplemented my income with real estate sales. At least in my area, the price gouging is real and there is higher vacancy than people in the industry willing to admit.
> if that is the case, market forces that should drive rents down are not working.
I've got no problem with rents being high in areas where lots of people want to live - the problem is who that rent money is going to, and thus who ends up able to afford to live in those places. "My family called dibs 200+ years ago, killed the rival claimants, and have been successfully evading taxes while compounding interest ever since" is not exactly an ideal system.
High vacancy rates and underdevelopment are driven by the profit motive of speculation. In Albany NY, where I lived for a while, there's a ring of slums right next to the government offices - a common pattern in state capitals, because those offices are set up first, a matter of public record, then speculators buy the adjacent lots and wait for them to appreciate in value while spending as little as possible on maintenance. From just about any street intersection in that neighborhood you can see a condemned building, because if the structure has negative value, under the current system that means even lower property taxes for the owner than if it were a vacant lot.
A Georgist land value tax would remove that profit motive, thus resolving the whole class of behavior, and paired UBI would make even extremely high rents affordable because the more the land is worth, the more every citizen gets paid.
What the Harris campaign is doing is borderline genius and absolutely refreshing. For years, Democrats have run on a laundry list of causes. Over time, they have become increasingly specific and narrow and representative of a smaller, and more liberal, part of the overall population. It has also made it difficult to attract people with only a casual interest in politics. Then Trump comes along with all the MAGA crap, which alienated a lot of independents and traditional Republicans. Because of the large laundry list of causes, it created a set of rules to be accepted into the party. They loved Liz Cheney when she led the fight for impeaching Trump, but whoa…not so close!
Running on good vibes and values (freedom, we fight we win, not going back, etc.) allows people from a broad spectrum to align the causes important to them to the broader values. It expands the tent and opens doors for people not traditionally considered Democrats to join in. Everyone is supporting the same values, even if they disagree or don’t understand the specifics. Framing the fight for abortion rights under “freedom” is a good example of this. A lot of people will band together for freedom, but if you frame it at the cause level you get a lot of bickering over the number of weeks and what exceptions are included, etc.
It also is a great way to lead. You manage the values. Harris was doing this in the interview Thursday by firmly stating her values had not changed when pushed on her position change regarding fracking. It is easier to defend a short list of values than a long laundry list of positions, which many need to be fluid.
I'd say another reason outrage can't be the only tool is that a lot of people in the US have comfortable lives and outrage/doom just doesn't fit with how they feel. Colin Cowherd of ESPN recently called out Trump for saying the US was burning to the ground due to crime. Cowherd rightly pointed out that when he goes out in Los Angeles, he has a great, fun day; it's not Mad Max out there. Exaggerating reduces credibility.
I agree. I never got over progressives' downplaying of the significance of the ACA (Obamacare). The pre-existing conditions protections are enormously popular and had a profound impact on millions of Americans who were previously denied health coverage.
There were a lot of problems with the implementations of healthcare exchanges, and it did raise prices for certain people who were able to buy health insurance before its implementation. But it nearly HALVED the uninsured rate -- it went from over 17% to around 10%.
People like me, who had pre-existing conditions, COULD NOT buy health insurance before the ACA except through an employer, and there were few regulations on what employer plans had to cover. I grew up with parents who didn't have steady jobs with benefits and they were constantly struggling to pay for my insulin and test strips (type 1 diabetic) and trying (and failing) to get us on Medicaid. Without the ACA, I probably would have had to get a full time job at 18 to get insurance. I don't know if I would have been able to go to college. I can hardly overstate the impact this legislation has had on my life.
So why didn't progressives scream it from the rooftops that the ACA was a huge win for American access to healthcare?!? Why did they let Republicans label it Obamacare and successfully pretend it was a bad thing for YEARS?!? I have a feeling it's because they thoughr that acknowledging this landmark legislation might have cooled people's enthusiasm for Medicare for all or other, even more progressive, healthcare legislation. I doubt it, though. As you said, they should take the W.
Because it may have started out well, but within a very short time it became a very expensive waste of money for many lower income people. Before I hit rock bottom, I struggled to pay for the ACA. The problem was, I couldn't use it. I maintained it because it was the law for a long time and because I needed SOMETHING if I should become seriously ill. I was lighting $500-$700/month on FIRE because I would never be able to afford the deductibles - which gradually became astronomic. A trip to a doctor or hospital or urgent care was a luxury I couldn't afford. NOTHING kicked in until I was out-of-pocket $5000. That might as well have been $5 million to someone who can barely afford food or electricity.
"was lighting $500-$700/month on FIRE because I would never be able to afford the deductibles"
My wife and I (early-mid 60s) are lighting $2400/month on FIRE. Obamacare doubled our monthly premiums. I am all for subsidizing people with pre-existing conditions. But, beyond that, what a tremendous waste of money that goes to insurance companies.
Same here. Our out of pocket annual costs of insurance, deductibles and copays rose to over $20k. Medicare is coming in as a huge cost of living improvement as we turn 65.
Obama Care (as implemented) was a solution to some real problems, but it was and still is a terrible solution, creating as many problems as it solves. One dilemma Obama Care tries to address is that healthy people (rationally) game the system by not buying insurance until they need it. This destroys the insurance mechanism as only unhealthy people pay in. Insurance companies address this (rationally) by underwriting and excluding prior conditions. The solution to the dilemma requires both mandatory insurance and no underwriting, not just the latter. Failure of the program to do both (along with lots of other issues) has led to an explosion in costs.
Obama Care isn’t a win. It was an unforced error. I could design a smarter insurance system on a napkin in a half hour. Napkin available on request.
My wife just turned 65. We are relatively high income, so her Medicare "penalty" plus premiums ad up to about the same as her continuing on my business plan after tax (1200/mo*.55% = . So, we are not bothering to sign her up for the time being. The key here, is that our premiums can be deducted above the line (I am self-employed). If that deduction went away, then she'd be on Medicare immediately. Funny how the medicare "penalty" works ...
This is not the fault of people with pre-existing conditions though. This is because we PRIVATIZED health insurance. What you are suggesting is that anyone with the audacity to be born or acquire an illness that requires on-going treatment should just go bankrupt. If that's your premise, then there is no point in having insurance at all. The entire point of health insurance is to insure people so they don't go bankrupt over a medical condition.
One other thing. Unless you die instantly in an accident or drop suddenly of a heart attack you will eventually be one of those people with a pre-existing condition being subsidized by the healthy. Very few of us will escape that fate.
The ACA is a pretty common of Noah's "Wins".
It was very expensive, inefficient, unsustainable, and basically taxed the middle to upper middle class to pay for the poor and lower middle class, while giving a away a lot of the money to the middle men to make the medicine go down.
The same could be said of the War on Poverty and every other progressive cause. The main beneficiaries are the professional class Dems providing the government paid for services with some trickle down effects to the perpetually dependent poor.
What state was that? In New York they took the deductibles out gradually and I had no trouble seeing doctors.
That was NYS. That was a few years ago. I had gone through a long spell of self-employment and unemployment - (better known as underemployment). And I had several years of bronze plans for which I could BARELY make the premiums - and that was the deductible. After that, I went for 2 years with no coverage because I simply didn't have the money. During that period I earned just above the cut-off for subsidized care. I had full time employment during the pandemic, so that's where the ACA journey ended in NY. However, that insurance (which I obviously paid the premiums for) had a pretty high deductible - though not as high as I had previously. It was the equivalent of a very bad bronze plan.
However, I think some of that leniency with respect to deductibles had a great deal to do with the pandemic crisis as people were losing employment right and left. I would have no confidence that that would not be reversed in the future back to very high levels.
The ACA is an even bigger deal than that. Even if you didn't have pre-existing conditions, a lot of insurance companies would periodically make cosmetic changes to their plans, and automatically re-enroll *most* of the people they covered, while making people who had picked up expensive-to-treat conditions while insured re-apply. So, even if you were covered by insurance and religiously paid your premiums, you could effectively get kicked off your plan for actually using the insurance. And even in those states with laws that forced insurers to keep you on their plans, nothing prevented them from setting your updated premiums to sky-high values.
And even some employer provided insurance plans wouldn't cover pre-existing conditions for the first year of your employment.
The ACA solved all these problems. For the first time, you could buy actual health insurance that didn't go away or get more expensive if you used it.
Now, I'll argue that the complete loss of subsidies above 400% of FPL is a problem (and one that's been temporarily remedied by Biden), but one that obviously can be fixed, and fixed a *lot* easier than doing another wholesale revamping of the insurance landscape to move to single payer.
Indeed, crank up the subsidies (which isn't that expensive, since only 20M people are covered directly by the exchanges), lower the Medicare eligibility age (to take some of the more expensive people out of the exchange pool) and you'll have a pretty reasonable insurance system.
"So, even if you were covered by insurance and religiously paid your premiums, you could effectively get kicked off your plan for actually using the insurance."
Home owners insurance works similarly. Never make a claim unless it is for a serious amount. We have a State Farm HO policy. I am told by the agent that they have no idea what it takes to get dropped, other than the number of claims within a period of time seems to matter a lot more than the total amount of the claims.
Quote from "Pittsburgh Mike" - "The ACA is an even bigger deal than that. Even if you didn't have pre-existing conditions, a lot of insurance companies would periodically make cosmetic changes to their plans, and automatically re-enroll *most* of the people they covered, while making people who had picked up expensive-to-treat conditions while insured re-apply. So, even if you were covered by insurance and religiously paid your premiums, you could effectively get kicked off your plan for actually using the insurance. And even in those states with laws that forced insurers to keep you on their plans, nothing prevented them from setting your updated premiums to sky-high values."
I'm no fan of the ACA we need single payer and better yet, a public option. However, that was not an issue in NYS. One of the reasons I had so many financial issues was a very expensive problem with my leg where a major tendon atrophied. Apparently genetic. My mother had the same thing.
Since I made my living being on my feet, this created a devastating loss of income. Which is a big part of why I got into such bad financial straits. The problem was expensive and it is STILL a major issue because at the time, the only people who could manage the issue were not on my plan - or any plan where I could afford the premiums. But I will say that no one tried to push me off my plan. Refusing to cover treatment - yes! Trying to boot me off the system or raise premiums above what other people were paying for the same level - no!
Now , NYS has some of the strictest rules regulating what insurers can and can not do. So I could see how it might have happened elsewhere.
When the ACA was before the Supreme Court in 2014, a leftist I know said he hoped it would be overturned "and then we can have single payer." We have a mutual friend who in all probability is alive because of the ACA.
Oh brother! You don't "wish" for something like that being overturned unless you have something in place to take its place.
I can only refer back to my days hanging around Firedoglake which pushed very hard for the public option and explained patiently that relative to single payer the public option was a compromise. There was no W for them when the public option was cut out. They lost. They could not suddenly reverse all of their arguments that this bill without a public option was just giving insurance companies new customers to treat badly.
I had never heard of "firedoglake". Just looked it up. I will not do that again.
I was trying to be tactful and not refer to their self-destruction in Obama Derangement Syndrome shortly after that.
They probably moved on to became Twitter Howler Monkeys flinging poo at each other.
I cannot understand why it has not been the template for continual improvements, starting to nibble away at employer purchased plans.
Could you expand a bit more on your situation as a diabetic in America today? I also have type 1, but happened to live in Europe when I was diagnosed. I’ve been bouncing around the EU ever since enjoying socialized medicine (OmniPod, Insulin and GCM are fully covered) but I have been (somewhat selfishly) considering moving back to the States to increase my earning potential. However, I am concerned about the cost and stress of being diabetic in America.
What’s your experience been like? Would you recommend staying in Europe for health (care) reasons?
OK...I'm going to be brutally honest here. The cost of insulin is not going to be your only issue. You have testing equipment and far more intensive general care required to manage type 1 diabetes well.
Also, no matter how you slice it, ou have a major endocrine problem that leaves you susceptible to additional medical problems down the road. You DO NOT want to be at the mercy of the US healthcare system with something like this - EVER. My grandfather was a brittle type 1 diabetic and I also have a doctorate in immunology and microbiology - so I know from whence I speak.
That goes DOUBLE if Trump makes it back to the White House. If it weren't for John McCain's tie-breaking vote, Trump would have succeeded in destroying the ACA during his first term - with NO PLANS to put anything else in its place.
Also, you can't count on your employment taking care of your insurance needs. Employers are cutting corners everywhere on healthcare for employees. You generally get the cheapest plan they can choke down the employee's throats. And if you lose your job - good luck paying those COBRA payments to keep that insurance. Most people can't. And most states are "at will" employment states. You can be laid off on a moment's notice.
I'm not trying to be doom and gloom about your health. When my grandfather died he was still taking porcine insulin (Human insulin was just becoming available around that time). He lived a long life - particularly considering how brittle his condition was. But he could afford the best care possible. If you are in the US and not filthy rich, that will not be you.
Cite a single example of a ‘progressive’ legislator opposing the ACA, I’d like to know who it was.
No one said they were legislators. We're talking about political activists, not legislators.
There should have been more age tiers so fewer young healthy people had to pay higher premiums (a bid part of the “popular” resistance). And more could have been done to nibble away at employer plans, at least for the lowest paid employees), but still it was a signature achievement!
An illustration I like of the progress we have made in terms of absolute poverty (if not relative poverty) is from the National Health Examination Survey of the early 1960s, called Total Loss of Teeth in Adults, which estimated that HALF of all adults over 65 had lost ALL their permanent teeth from both their jaws (in c. 1960). Today, the CDC says it is about 10%.
And back in those days, over 50% of Americans smoked, which causes tooth loss. Today, it’s closer to 10%. See the correlation?
Fascinating. Thank you for pointing this out. I may no longer be able to use this statistic as an argument that poverty is declining since it seems to be the case that smoking is a bigger culprit than poverty per se (eg inability to pay for dental care). Good point!
Wouldn't flouridation of the water supply likely be an even bigger effect?
Could be, I am no expert at all on tooth loss! But I concede, triggered by Phil's remark, the point that poverty IN ITSELF may not be the reason our forebears had such high rates of tooth loss, if smoking (a personal choice, not forced upon people by poverty) and fluoridation (sic) (a government program, with no clear link to poverty I know of - I could be wrong) were bigger factors in tooth loss. That's all.
There is a correlation between oral health and poverty.
https://www.cdc.gov/oral-health/health-equity/index.html#:~:text=Oral%20health%20disparities%20among%20US,higher%20income%20households%20(6%25).
Excellent. My random anecdote seems to have sparked a debate on NoahPinion on the sources of tooth loss in the USA! So far I count 3 non-exclusive hypotheses: poverty ("I can't afford dental care"), smoking (correlated with poverty maybe but not caused by it? (I dunno)), and fluoridation (driven by government policy and financial capacity). Probably all three play a role? I'll bet there is a social norms component, too, as in "Well I figured I'd lose all my teeth as I got older, just like Gramps, so why bother brushing 'em?" If someone knows of a definitive study out there clarifying all this....
I like tooth metrics. Teeth were used to show that nuclear tests were harming children.
This very much feels like when Obama ran. The joy, the hope. The positive vibes. I cried the night he won and I will probably again when Kamala wins. Our country needs this win.
Kamala Harris is fresh and inspiring — while Trump seems like old news.
It's so great and refreshing to see the positive energy that Kamala Harris brings to this race! MAGAs are all negative and she is such a contrast.
Given the choice between going back and re-living another older, more boring, angrier Trump presidency or getting a new, young, vibrant, upbeat, attractive POTUS, I truly don't believe Trump stands a chance. He's adding NO new supporters. Kamala's gathering new voters daily!
That's why this "Kamala removes stubborn orange stains" t-shirt is perfect for these times 👇 🤣
https://libtees-2.creator-spring.com/listing/votek
Make America Laugh Again! 💙
You…cried?
The future is female. We will all be crying.
Real men cry.
As long as we're sharing T shirt designs here's one, but no one has made it into a T shirt yet.
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/notes
You will wake up too late.
The politics of perfection being the only acceptable outcome inevitably must yield to the politics of Good Enough for Now.
Activists are an important component of a dynamic society but the people in charge can't operate in perpetual reaction to their (impossible) demands.
It's good to see that the pendulum is swinging back to center. I just wish we didn't wait till weve giftwrapped the Right 1000 legitimate qualms about our overreach and hysteria.
The amount of progress that we have made in the last hundred years is difficult to fathom especially if you can textualize it against places on earth which have made almost none or have in fact regressed towards some wretched past.
Activists can't allow themselves the grace to acknowledge this (lest they lose their purpose) but the rest of us absolutely must celebrate our achievements at every opportunity.
Who are these unnamed & so called “activists” of which you speak? Sounds like a lotta hyperbole
Define “Impossible demands” andcwho made it. I’m curious.
The insinuation made by some activists that there has been no progress made on the subject of, for example, racism, in the US is implicitly an impossible demand, to name but one.
How about “equality?” That is an impossible demand that activists keep focusing on.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-achieving-equality-is-an-impossible
On an absolute basis, the numbers about an improved standard of living speak for themselves.
However, like it or not, people judge their economic circumstances also and perhaps more so on a relative basis to others. So being poor in one era may be not having indoor plumbing and in the next era not having a washing machine and dryer.
And a third relevant measure, related to the one above, is the standard of living relative to society's capacity to provide for the poor. Since LBJ's war on poverty, our per capita GDP has tripled in real terms.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA
Yup. And if you insist on some form of anchored absolute poverty: why do we anchor poverty at 1960? Why not anchor it at 10,000 BC? Everyone in 1960 lived as kings and queens compared to their cavemen ancestors - 0% poverty in 1960, 0% poverty in 2024.
If we're going to make these somewhat silly absolute living conditions arguments: I also rarely see the research teams arguing against modern poverty (Burkhauser, Meyer, Sullivan) make similar arguments about modern rich people. But wouldn't their arguments fully apply to absurdly more aggressive top-end taxation rates? Tax the very top to smithereens, but in the vast comparison of human history, top earners still have very high standards of living, so there's no problem.
That is what the measurement of absolute poverty does. It starts with a rough estimate of material standard of living of people in 10,000BC and then charts the change over time. It is really eye-opening how much absolute poverty has declined across the world regardless of public policy.
We take it for granted, but it is one of humanity’s greatest achievements:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/evidence-for-progress-global-poverty
"one of humanity’s greatest achievements"
Yes, but I would say it was the markets greatest achievement rather then governments greatest achievement, and Noah is basically saying it was government welfare that did it.
The point of my note was to say that absolute standards are not sufficient. I think that's the same point you are making. But it's not clear to me since you called what i wrote "silly."
Or were you responding to Noah?
Oh, I'm sorry for being unclear. I'm on board with your argument of relative standards (my reading of the poverty and happiness literature suggests that these relative comparisons, and issues of relative deprivation, are really important) and find the claim by Burkhauser (2% poverty today) a tad strange and silly.
Relative poverty is actually just a measure of inequality. Inequality and poverty are two completely different things. It is far better to stop using the deceptive term “relative poverty” and just call it “income inequality” or something like that.
Disagree. Addressing “income inequality” is too easily brushed aside as people wanting to soak the rich whereas poverty is more accurate in describing the actual effects of even relative deprivation on people’s well-being.
Well, maybe “income inequality” is not the correct word, but “the relative deprivation of people’s well-being” is really about Status, not poverty.
Status is about how you rank versus other people. Poverty is a material standard-of-living that is unrelated to other people.
Someone making 100k will feel low status when surrounded by people making 300k per year, but that does not make them poor.
Someone making $1000 per year will feel high status when surrounded by people making $500 per year, but they are still poor.
Much of the discussion of “inequality” is really about status. Yes, many people suffer psychologically from low status, but it is impossible to create equal status. Status is zero-sum. Poverty is not.
You should be more concerned about Upward Mobility, which is entirely different from all of above:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-progress-and-upward-mobility
Certainly, and it makes sense to crank up some of the tax rates on the upper end of the scale. The top 1% make about 25% of the country's income, pay 26% of that income in taxes, and pay about 48% of total income tax receipts.
The average income of people in the top 1% is like $770K, and only about $200K is in the 37% bracket. They're paying $190K in taxes already, and if you raise that last bracket to 50% you'll pick up an additional $26K, or 13%. They're paying a total of about 48% of total income tax receipts, so you've increased those receipts by about 6%, or $240B.
I mean, that's real money, and probably we should do it, but it isn't like it going to bring paradise to earth.
If we're going to raise taxes, I'd rather focus on land value. Nobody genuinely poor owns a lot of high-value land, so burden would still end up on the rich, but it would avoid creating increased incentives to conceal income through financial chicanery.
Sure, and that's why it's understandable that people may feel like nothing has changed, but it's still worth reminding people that factually, it has. Even if we acknowledge that being in the 10th income percentile in 2024 is still very bad, it's a lot better than being in the 10th percentile in 1960, and progressive policies made that happen.
It might help to have a more qualitative description of what the 10th percentile lived then, and now.
As I look around, a lot of people today - and certainly, a lot more than 2-3% - seem to lack the money needed to live in anything like peace or comfort. Threat of eviction and homelessness, skipping basic medical and dental care, at risk of bankruptcy from even very small unexpected expenses. That’s before
considering the effects of the relative lack of money.
But maybe it was worse then. Medicare and Medicaid, imperfect as they are, probably made a difference. And social security expansion for sure has made a difference. I just wonder what it looks like.
I do not know if anyone here saw the NYT opinion piece where Chris Murphy was interviewed about his worry about a crisis of meaning in the United States but vibes are not likely to fix that. Policies that work to restore trust in government can possibly fix that.
I didn't read "Poverty, By America" and I should have. But I think a point Matthew Desmond was trying to make in "Evicted" is that people who are using all of their energy to struggle for basic needs like housing do not build character or citizenship that way. Organizations like the KC Tenants' Union do take the W because they are teaching the people they are organizing to take up public space but it is hard to take the W in general when people are simply struggling to get equal respect in society much less take and use political power.
I have run into an endless stream of heated emotions and predictions of calamity in liberal comments sections. When I try to point out that a fear might just be a bit exaggerated. I have drawn such comments as: “Don't listen to the troll. She's trying to steal your motivation.”
Trump is trying to scare people into voting for him. Harris/Walz are trying to build trust and make people comfortable voting for them.
The number one reason I am comfortable voting for Harris is that she has spent 4 years working under and with Joe Biden. Now, that was the real apprenticeship (see what I did there?).
I agree with Jonathan V Last of the Bulwark that Joe Biden is our greatest living president. JVL wrote an amazing tribute to Biden, bringing up many achievements that none of us now remember. You may enjoy this!
The Old Man Who Saved American Democracy. Twice.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-old-man-who-saved-american-democracy
Kathleen Weber said: "Now, that was the real apprenticeship (see what I did there?)."
I LOVE IT!
This is neoliberal claptrap on steroids. The rage is there because the only appropriate way to respond to the way average working people have been thrown under the bus - is with RAGE!
I went from upper middle class to very nearly being on the streets. And you know what ? For the most part, no one gave a rat's ass. Many blamed me even though I was the one that was being thrown under the bus multiple times. My situation has stabilized somewhat, but it is ZERO thanks to any federal, state or local programs. They threw me to the wolves over and over again. I had no money for groceries - I got SNAP benefits. You know how much I got? $23/month.
All the money I contributed down through the years in the form of taxation, all the volunteer work I did for our local government, all the work I produced as an employee, the two businesses I started and was able to survive on for short periods of time, the fact that I was a caregiver for both parents for a total of 15 years which took an emotional, financial and career toll on me - all of that meant NOTHING to 99.999% of the world. I was a used piece of toilet paper...easily discarded. If it weren't for that remaining 0.001% - I'd be out in the streets right now. I am forever grateful to them and will never be able to fully repay them for their help.
But the severe poverty that comes from employees being underpaid and overworked for DECADES, usually with multiple layoffs and ever lengthening periods of unemployment in between - should NOT be left to 0.001% of people willing to stick their necks out. This requires a collective effort from the entire population and ESPECIALLY from those who have profited so handsomely from what appears to be legalized crime.
People are outraged for a reason. They see that what happened to me, could happen to THEM all too easily. It's time to embrace the rage with the joy and rebuild our economy to one that actually works for "we the people".
If we don't. If Harris doesn't get elected (God forbid), or if she turns her back on the middle class and working people the way every president since Reagan (Including Clinton and Obama) did - there will be more demagogues in the wings waiting to take Trump's place.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to get back to work continuing to rebuild a broken life.
I can feel your rage from here. Only the fact that I’m married kept me from disaster. And no, he’s not rich — we’ve never made the median wage. But if I’d been single when my industry imploded, I’d have been in deep dog doo.
I'm sooooooo, soooooo glad that you avoided that fate. I hope things are more secure for you now. It's very, very scary. I'm in the PTSD stage now where I wake up shaking and realize I have to make this second chance work. Not just for myself, but for the people who helped me as well. I'm not young and have a disability in my leg/foot which means I have to work from home - so this isn't easy. I've started a small business but am PRAYING I can get remunerative employment.
One thing I tell young people - DON'T go into the sciences or even tech. These fields are way, way to cyclic to be reliable. I invested heavily in my education in the medical sciences. It was the biggest financial mistake I ever made. I was on track for a nice high-five to low-six figure income when suddenly the demand dried up completely.
What happens when a field of work implodes on people with highly specialized training? You go broke because if there is no demand for what you worked so hard to do. You aren't worth a dime more than a minimum wage employee. I'm far from the only person who has had this happen.
The abuse and exploitation of those who are not in the top 10% income-wise has to end or there will be rioting in the streets and massive civil unrest. That's what the moderates don't get. The clock on this has been ticking for 40 years and if you are on LinkedIn looking for work, you know that people have reached their explosion point.
Why do these people think a guy like Trump made any kind of political tracks at all? Both political parties turned their backs on anyone NOT in the to 10%. The fact is that a well-fed, housed, and prosperous society would never fall for a demagogue like Trump. They should learn some history and read about the Weimar Republic.
They also need to remember that the "let them eat cake" solution didn't work out so well for Marie Antoinette.
Marie Antoinette's problem was that she couldn't bring enough cake for the whole class even if she wanted to. These days, the quantity exists - or will soon enough to plan around - but there's still the question of how it should be divided into shares.
There is plenty of cake to go around. The difficulty is that the top 1% have carved a wildly outsized slice for themselves and will have to make do with a lot less. They don't want to do that.
So - the storming of the Bastille - or the US Capitol - or similarly dramatic acts social unrest is something that we will have to adopt to and accept until the cake - or bread - is finally distributed in a reasonable way.
Sadly, the only thing that will work at this point is if those at the top of the food chain FEAR the masses. And I'm pretty sure the masses will oblige by hanging some from lamp posts to set an example. That's where this is going unless a more peaceful method to redistribute wealth is found.
The only question is whether this is done by brute force or more peaceably. But people don't go quietly into the long dark night of poverty and homelessness without a a fight.
There is enough cake, it just has to be shaken loose.
During my part-time job as a Paramedic, I went into many poor neighborhoods and households.
I often thought about the generational poverty I saw. No one can deny there is a grip of poverty that is seemingly permanent. If you look at poverty rates for married black couples, it is on a par with married white couples. Immigrants of all colors tend to fall within average poverty rates.
However, a slice of data within the census had this nugget. If you were black, female, single with young children ages 6 and under, you were 42% more likely to live under the poverty level.
Studies have shown that many males in our prison system were raised by single mothers.
Every weekend in what would be called the ghetto, Chicago has a rash of shootings. Often, these are drug gangs protecting their territory or just feeling frisky. One item that is missing from these areas is a culture of education. Education is the great equalizer. Education eliminates poverty.
Our country has done a piss poor job with education. In addition, children learn from their parent's behavior. One of the miscarriages I was called to was in a house in an African American neighborhood. A neighborhood with lots of subsidized housing. We had a grandmother in her early 50s with a mother in her middle to late 30s and a 17-year-old female sitting on the toilet with parts of the fetus still attached. The young 17 had a 6-month-old baby from a different father than the one that was involved in the latest pregnancy.
This is the tragedy of systemic poverty. Young women feel that having a place in the world, such as being a mother, gives them some status within our culture. You now have a job, you get money for living expenses, an EBT card, and subsidized housing.
Somehow, we have failed to guide these young people into a different life. Drug gangs often run the neighborhood. They’ll threaten to kill a young boy unless he joins the gang, usually being made to participate in the drug trade and frequently killings. The schools have mental detectors and a sense of hopelessness.
This is the dark side of poverty. Generational poverty. We need to assist in a change of culture that makes this behavior unacceptable. I have no solutions, but I believe you need to attack each instance of a young mother and her children living in a fatherless home.
Young boys and young men need fathers, and a plethora of studies confirm this. We also need better schools, hope, and training. I know two things about being successful in life for our youth.
1) Stay in school and study. 2) Don’t let drugs and alcohol interfere with number one. 3) Do not have children before marriage. Do this, and you have a chance to be successful.
I’d like to think that we have moved on from discriminating against Asian students or Jewish students because they do well in school. Rather than discriminate, perhaps it is time that we adopt those strategies that worked for them. A culture of families, a culture of education.
How do you begin? My solution is expensive but perhaps lasting. You have to break the cycle. Young women need help. If they have already fallen into poverty with our owed lock births, you need an individual plan to support them. Offer her training, child care, and education for some time if she is willing to learn a skill or a trade or a degree. Support her children, provide an education for them and safe schools and homes.
I am not expecting success for everyone. I believe there will always be the poor. But whatever we are doing, we are simply sustaining poverty in some areas of our country.
The worst problems are those where the “solution” is actually a cause of the problem. Your comment is a case in point. The major difference between the early 60’s and now is that we created hundreds of billions in annual programs to do just what you suggest. We effectively subsidized females having sex and babies with irresponsible males without regard to who would raise the outcome. This contributed greatly to the generational poverty of single moms, drug and alcohol abuse, and a dysfunctional culture of dependency.
We don’t need a new high priced government “individual plan” for solving this problem, we need to realize that when the government stepped in with best intentions it also neutered the people really capable of designing the individual plan, that is the people involved. I may disagree with conservatives on most of their philosophy, but they are at least partially correct that it was our government help which contributed significantly to single parenting, useless males, plummeting marriage rates, divorce, and multi-generational generational dysfunctional poverty.
You recommend more education and training, yet what do you think 12 years of school, and subsidized junior colleges are? We don’t need to dig deep to fund better training, we need to evaluate who has wasted the money we already spend on educators incapable of educating.
Please note I am not suggesting we don’t help single moms or their children. I suggest we take a look at the nearly tillion dollars per year we already spend (on this and education) and refocus it in ways which doesn’t incentivize bad behavior/culture and which demands success rather than failure.
Simple answer would be replacing means-tested programs with UBI. No risk of perverse incentives if something simple like "legal citizenship and a fixed address" are the only requirements. Barely any administrative overhead. Nominally it'd be a huge government expenditure, but it pays for itself pretty quickly in tax revenue from increased economic activity, and reduced costs to various other programs for managing poverty-related crises.
I guess if you view that mother as a child. I don't know that what are effectively adults (birthing a child is a swift end to childhood) can be infinitely reprogrammed. Why we tie our hands behind our backs and don't make the injectable, lasting birth control a requirement for aid, I don't understand. You may not be able to alter that girl/woman's life prospects that much, but at the very least you've prevented a few children from entering the same cycle 15 years hence; and you've made her problems fewer when the birth control wears off in 5 years or whatever.
You've given her the sexual freedom that was once so important to feminists.
Or: you've been utterly realistic about the sexual freedom/lack of restraint of the men in her life.
Sex-positivity!
I don't understand the odd flip in attitudes about birth control. The words used to be like an "open sesame".
I'm conservative, so I don't regard birth control particularly positive - my life is worse because I for the most part pursued a strategy of sexual sterility.
But that isn't or shouldn't be the attitude of the left.
There's a weird puritanism about it.
I can't imagine how large that chip on your shoulder must be. What a pathetic and uninformed statement. Having been near homelessness, that's all I've got to say for you. The rest would be unprintable.
You have to remember there are still many poor people who did everything “right.” Homeless college-educated people exist.
Another piece where a YIMBY ruins a reasonable opinion with absurd exaggerations/ falsifications of NIMBY opposition to housing, while presenting YIMBYs as saints who do nothing wrong. Matthew Yglesias called; he wants his shtick where he complains about cancel-culture tactics then uses them against NIMBYS back when you're done with it. See, for example, you citing a Twitter post (bad idea): "left-NIMBY types oppose new housing construction on the grounds that it would (supposedly) make profits for developers"--and those profits would only supposedly come! Naughty NIMBYs! In fact, the Twitter-er was quoting a NIMBY criticizing policies that prioritize "profits over people," a vague comment, granted, but clearly showing that profit itself is not the problem. Who doesn't expect developers to make a profit? Even public housing conceivably could make a small net profit.
Standard NIMBY outrage
I am amused actually. But I get that, in interpreting comments on articles, our default interpretation would be to assume that outrage is being expressed. Back to the humor, though... Noah, a potential customer is objecting to your misquoting someone. The free market! Surely you will respond accordingly just like all that new housing is lowering prices. In fact, there are more restaurants than ever where I live--so I guess the prices of a meal have gone down. Oops. And more health-care providers than ever--so I guess their prices have gone down. Hmmm.
Well, NIMBY and YIMBY aren't all that clear cut in their ideology and motivations. I'm about as progressive as they come.
1 - I don't object to developers making a reasonable profit. However....
2 - Building for the sake of building - or building only luxury housing is not a solution to the housing problem.
In my neck of the woods, we've been on a building spree for about 10 years now. Trouble is that none of this has solved the housing crisis. In fact, dispossession of homes is happening at a faster and faster rate and moving UP the income ladder. The end result: more people are vulnerable to displacement even though they are at higher income levels than ever before.
Pricing has become bifurcated from median incomes creating a hot mess that doesn't necessarily respond to market forces. Because in spite of Noah's claims to the contrary, large developers are rigging the system in specific areas. The idea that because big developers only have a tiny sliver of the entire USA real estate pie is ridiculous. The fact is that they own great swaths in concentrated areas and can thus control the market.
You can add to that toxic brew a corrupt local government which is no longer monitored by local reporters informing the public and you have a recipe for big, big problems. a $1700/month studio in about 2020 is now going for $2500 - $2600/month.
Gee...how many people have had over a 40% increase in salaries in the past 4 years??? Answer: Not many. And certainly no one near the median salary has.
If thousands of units of luxury apartments were built I’m San Francisco, they would soon fill up with happy renters. Those new renters will leave their existing less than luxury apartments leaving them available for rent, and the cycle would continue on down the chain, as long as overpriced apartments exist. Some of those renters would move in from other cities, but SF would definitely have more housing. Who is vulnerable by displacement? Do you think asylum seekers are using up all the new housing?
I don't have time for right-wing crazies who want to blame everything on immigrants while genuflecting at the mere mention of "free markets fixing EVERYTHING." Neither are true, nor fully false. It's a matter of balance.
What you are arguing is that all "free markets" work perfectly. That there never is undo influence, bribery, price-fixing or other criminal or corrupt activity that could interfere with such a perfect world. Please wake up and smell the coffee perking,
You are indulging in a fantasy created by the right wing. Markets CAN be fixed, monopolies CAN distort pricing, corporate influence CAN corrupt our government officials, corporations CAN control legislation to the detriment of the public... Free markets are no panacea.
The fact is that we tried this where I live now for about 10 years now and IT HASN'T WORKED. It's made the problem WORSE, not better. A good part of this is corruption. And it's not necessarily just the Republicans. In this case, the city I'm talking about is 100% blue - and has been since about 2010.
The first thing you fail to consider is that they are not making any new land. So the developers have to get their hands on land - which is almost ALWAYS either owned by someone else who lives/works on the property, or has commercial or residential tenants. The alternative is to try and build on major wetlands - which another horror story in terms of local flooding. There is also the use of eminent domain. Why pay full price if you can force the land away from its owner?
The developers come in like vultures and try to use eminent domain to declare lower income areas blighted. Now, these areas are not even rundown let along blighted. The tenants are lower income, but none of this poorly maintained or ANYTHING approaching blight.
4 years ago a large block of small buildings that had quite a few rental units atop some Mom and Pop stores was threatened by eminent domain. It was ridiculous. A group of citizens, myself included, interviewed the tenants and successfully intervened in the process. It was thrown out by the courts. Just last week I found out they were starting eminent domain proceedings AGAIN. The hospital (that is part of big conglomerate and has more money than God) wants the land on the cheap. I don't believe they ever offered the landlord market value. They just bided their time.
Theis condemnation will displace many long-time residents. So your notion that people will start to "move in" to the luxury apartments really doesn't hold water. Most will never be able to afford the extortionist rent these people plan to charge. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's more commonly known as "gentrification" But with a twist.
Price fixing, algorithms from Real Page and collusion among landlords with tacit support of public officials create a nightmare of escalating rents that are going up close to 50% in half a decade.
That's what's actually happening. The way this is being done results in a bifurcation of rental rates from salaries. The landlords don't need (and may not want) full occupancy. They can make more by charging fewer people through the nose. And by withholding units from the marketplace (which they do) they can create endless shortages and jack up prices.
Why do you assume I am right wing and anti-immigrant, just because I stated that any housing, no matter how luxurious, means more housing supply and lower housing prices? I am actually no-wing, and I think right wing anti-immigrant people are just as wrong as left-wing anti-market people. We should get more immigrants and even asylum seekers, and they should be allowed to work, and if people like you that don’t want more housing built prevail then housing will continue to be too expensive for them to afford.
What is the monopoly that builds luxury housing, and how is it preventing others from building other housing? Eminent domain abuse is a government problem, not one of developers or free-markets. The fifth amendment protects taking of private land , except for public use and with fair compensation, so in your situation who was trying to take the rental units and mom and pop stores? It must have been the government, because luxury housing developers are not able to do that. Maybe someone tried to do what New London Connecticut did in the disgraceful Kelo case where it tried to try to force owners out of houses to build a private development in order to create jobs, which the Supreme Court sadly agreed with the city. But building luxury housing on land acquired in a free (I.e. not distorted by corrupt government actions) market is not the same thing.
Obviously there is a fixed amount of land, which only fools fail to consider, and in cities it becomes valuable. You are wrong in saying they are not making more buildable land, 20% of Tokyo is built on land reclaimed from Tokyo Bay as is the entire marina district in SF. There haven’t been flooding problems, though liquefaction is an issue and manifested in the Lima Prieta earthquake in the Marina.
Much existing urban land is occupied, but it a developer buys a laundromat, or warehouse or MacMansion and builds a high rise with dozens of high end rental units, that will add those units to the market, the previous owner is compensated, and more people have better housing, and you oppose this because the developer earns a profit for the risk and work they did.
What kind of price fixing is there other than city rent controls, which does restrict the market, and discourage building? What landlord would keep a unit off the market instead of renting it out, they still pay the insurance, mortgage and taxes on it, so they have no incentive to keep it vacant. Do you also think grocery stores have back rooms filled with eggs that don’t sell to keep the prices on the eggs they do sell higher? That is nonsensical.
""any housing, no matter how luxurious, means more housing supply and lower housing prices?""
This may be the finest demonstration of crux of the problem with YIMBY's understanding of Econ of housing.. Never a mention of what housing just got torn down to build the new homes.... The house that gets torn down is almost inevitably the cheapest home in the neighborhood and is always replaced by homes that are more expensive even when replaced by a quadplex. So, no simply adding more housing does not simply "reduce prices" by increasing supply. It actually reduces the availability of the most affordable homes in a neighborhood. While it may put some downward pressure on the upper-mid luxury segment of the market, that in no way makes homes more affordable in any useful sense (i.e. getting the marginal would-be homeowner into a home).
Noah and Matt Y are both guilty of this oversimplisitc thinking and have been laughably co-opted by the libertarians at the Mercator Center who have pushed upzoning for decades only to find foolish progressives who don't even realize they have been duped because they think they are being good anti-racists. In addition, they think the cries about developers getting rich are misplaced. However, their plans always rely on multi-family units which almost always only serve to enrich developers and landlords. Buying an apartment or 1/4th of a quadplex is not a wealth building opportunity for the marginal would-be homebuyer.
So, if part of inherent YIMBY argument is that zoning and covenants had a racist history locking people out of wealth building opportunities and this must be rectified by......locking marginal homebuyers out of wealth building opportunities while fattening the fat-cats.
Sounds like a job for land value tax. Presumably occupancy percentage would be far higher, and the market in general more efficient, if landlords were stuck paying a big chunk of that rental rate to Uncle Sam even when the unit's vacant.
Come to my community, Noah, and please help explain who is and who is not poor. You’re right, nobody is starving to death. Outside the homeless, nobody is in danger of freezing to death, either. Nobody is unclothed. These are indeed good things. Go back in time and things were far worse. BUT come on! You want to tell me someone living in a house with boarded up windows who can’t afford fresh foods isn’t poor just because that person isn’t living in an unheated garret eating gruel? Income inequality matters.
I’m sorry that your community is going through that but it’s important to point out that your community is not representative of most of America. The article gave pretty concrete examples of how things have gotten better. That does not mean everything is perfect and it will never be perfect, but it is important to take the wins where we can and continue to make progress
This is also a weird analysis for an economist. Why start your analysis in 1964? That's silly. You want to start decades earlier and see if the US's aggressive welfare state measures trended stronger in reducing poverty than the years before.
I don't think that's the case. Poverty rates in the 1930s were perhaps as high as 50%. By the time Noah's chart pops up out of nowhere, that's down to around 20-25%. So it's gone down by half. If you compare economic progress from 1939 to 1964, I think you see massively positive changes that slow down drastically in subsequent years. Yes, 1964 to 1972 was good, but so what? That's a very short period.
Yes, I agree that we need to pay far more attention to the dramatic decline in poverty before the Great Society was enacted. It gets often forgotten.
You might be interested in my analysis as to why this happened:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/upward-mobility-in-the-usa-1947-1965
Exactly. A more balanced and accurate presentation of the issue would not try to hide that poverty rates were declining faster prior to LBJ than after.
How could an economist fail to recognize that the war on poverty did not just lower immediate poverty, it also changed the incentives of working and marriage, and that longer term these became giant headwinds to the success of our efforts?
I agree that optimism and recognition of success are important. I even agree that by transferring hundreds of million to the poor, we are actually making them less poor. The average poor family qualifies for over $40k in transfers per year. After taking this into account, very few people are poor as defined in the 60s.
The problem is that we replaced poverty with dependency and we now have multigenerational families of poorly educated girls (having children with irresponsible males) living off government cheese. The problems with systemic multi generational poverty are not solved by progressive policies, they are caused by them.
Do the people reading this substack not realize this? Or do they not care?
In summary…
1) Poverty has declined since the war on poverty
2) But it did so at a slower rate than prior to these “progressive” policies
3) And as a negative side effect it undermined marriage, two parent families and work incentives and created cultures of multigenerational dependency
4) Let’s hold back on the joy and celebration until we get our ducks back in order by creating institutions which foster both prosperity and self sufficiency
Some valid points, but maybe you could devote some attention to professional centrists whose only job seems to be to attack progressives (Jonathan Chait is the archetype, but represenative of a large slab of the political class). Chait wasn't at all happy about Harris bringing joy because it wasn't accompanied by enough of the sharp shift to the right he wanted to see.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/kamala-harris-tim-walz-moderate-liberal-progressive-centrist.html
Good call!
He was soooooooper happy after her acceptance speech at the DNC. Chait has annoyed me more than just about any pundit writing these days.
YUP!!! Agree completely.
I've seen this with climate change, but globally. Activists are narrow-mindedly focused on narratives like "THE PLANET IS BURNING" and "TIME IS RUNNING OUT" and refusing to emphasize success -- like the fact that since the Paris Accords, the amount of predicted warming has fallen by 2.3 degrees celsius (https://www.ciphernews.com/articles/how-we-know-the-energy-transition-is-here/).
Good point. It is important to point out the importance of natural gas, nuclear and hydropower replacing coal as the dominant fuel source. Their combined effect is far more than solar and wind.
This is really more of a Third Energy Transition rather than a Green Energy Transition:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/we-need-to-complete-the-third-energy
Although this wasn't my primary field of work, I did teach undergraduate biology and the occasional course on environmental science. The fact is that we are running out of time - rapidly. When I say this, I don't mean that the earth will cease to exist. But human life may be unsustainable. I have enough organic chemistry under my belt to know that when you reach a certain tipping point, there may be no turning this around. The fact is that even if we stopped burning fossil fuel tomorrow, a large amount of warming is already baked into the CO2 cake. We have to aggressively stop using fossil fuels. Wind and solar would have a lot more potential if the oil/gas/coal industries weren't so good at quashing them.
Certainly nuclear may be a stop-gap although we have to find a solution for what might happen in an extended power failure nuclear power plant cores.
What’s one way the oil and gas industry has quashed wind and solar?
Try reading...
https://energyandpolicy.org/attacks-renewable-energy/
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trump-administration-stifling-renewable-energy-public-lands-waters/
https://www.edf.org/blog/2013/04/26/oil-and-gas-industrys-assault-renewable-energy
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment
https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/new-joint-bicameral-staff-report-reveals-big-oils-campaign-of-climate-denial-disinformation-and-doublespeak/
https://forestpolicypub.com/2023/10/02/undermining-science-to-undermine-renewable-energy/
I could go on -but I have things I've got other things to do. You would gain more credibility if you actually responded with cogent arguments instead of attacking a poster with time-consuming questions.
Alternatively, we could build up immensely more wind and solar than we need for conventional industry (which is already worth doing as a hedge against intermittency), and use the excess to start actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere in a serious way.
CO2 mitigation is not something I fully understand. A few years ago, I read an article about the difficulties of mitigating CO2, and it is more complex than I thought.
• First, we produce a staggering amount of CO2
• Second, removal is extremely energy-intense.
What I worry about with respect to biology is the tipping point of a runaway warming trend and the ability of biological organisms to adapt. (In short, they can't) As more and more species become extinct, it accelerates extinction rates on the remaining species of the ecosystem that have depended on the already extinct species for survival.
We are already seeing tangible changes in climate and have had a taste of how this could accelerate. And I hate to break it to everyone, but humans can not exist without other species of plants and animals. This is not a trivial issue and it is not going away.
This link from MIT might be informative regarding CO2 removal.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-carbon-dioxide-would-we-have-remove-air-counteract-climate-change#:~:text=Removing%20CO2%20is%20one,tons%20of%20it%20each%20year.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/olivine-weathering/ With the right sort of rock-grinders we could make it work even if the energy involved had to come from coal plants. Solar would be preferable, of course.
Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, I don't know much about rock grinders. I was just clarifying the issue that "not worrying about CO2 levels" is no longer the option people want to think it is.
There is this structural engineer that I once knew who was working on retro-fitting the Empire State Building to be more energy-efficient. This was a long and very expensive process, but this was far, far less expensive environmentally than taking down the building and and building something bigger and more environmentally efficient. Now, NO ONE was going to even consider knocking down the Empire State Building! In most other cases, the older building would be taken down. This is a problem because the planet can not withstand the amount of construction we need.
Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. We need new construction - if the shortages are REAL and not contrived. I would suggest that we take a hard look at vacancy rates. If there is market-fixing, a lot of these "luxury units" are likely unoccupied. This is inexcusable when there is a housing crisis. Also, if that is the case, market forces that should drive rents down are not working. Put people in them and if they are paying less rent than the landlord would like - too bad. There are way too many people unhoused for this nonsense to continue.
Btw, I've supplemented my income with real estate sales. At least in my area, the price gouging is real and there is higher vacancy than people in the industry willing to admit.
> if that is the case, market forces that should drive rents down are not working.
I've got no problem with rents being high in areas where lots of people want to live - the problem is who that rent money is going to, and thus who ends up able to afford to live in those places. "My family called dibs 200+ years ago, killed the rival claimants, and have been successfully evading taxes while compounding interest ever since" is not exactly an ideal system.
High vacancy rates and underdevelopment are driven by the profit motive of speculation. In Albany NY, where I lived for a while, there's a ring of slums right next to the government offices - a common pattern in state capitals, because those offices are set up first, a matter of public record, then speculators buy the adjacent lots and wait for them to appreciate in value while spending as little as possible on maintenance. From just about any street intersection in that neighborhood you can see a condemned building, because if the structure has negative value, under the current system that means even lower property taxes for the owner than if it were a vacant lot.
A Georgist land value tax would remove that profit motive, thus resolving the whole class of behavior, and paired UBI would make even extremely high rents affordable because the more the land is worth, the more every citizen gets paid.
Great piece, thanks for posting it, I did not know about that success.
What the Harris campaign is doing is borderline genius and absolutely refreshing. For years, Democrats have run on a laundry list of causes. Over time, they have become increasingly specific and narrow and representative of a smaller, and more liberal, part of the overall population. It has also made it difficult to attract people with only a casual interest in politics. Then Trump comes along with all the MAGA crap, which alienated a lot of independents and traditional Republicans. Because of the large laundry list of causes, it created a set of rules to be accepted into the party. They loved Liz Cheney when she led the fight for impeaching Trump, but whoa…not so close!
Running on good vibes and values (freedom, we fight we win, not going back, etc.) allows people from a broad spectrum to align the causes important to them to the broader values. It expands the tent and opens doors for people not traditionally considered Democrats to join in. Everyone is supporting the same values, even if they disagree or don’t understand the specifics. Framing the fight for abortion rights under “freedom” is a good example of this. A lot of people will band together for freedom, but if you frame it at the cause level you get a lot of bickering over the number of weeks and what exceptions are included, etc.
It also is a great way to lead. You manage the values. Harris was doing this in the interview Thursday by firmly stating her values had not changed when pushed on her position change regarding fracking. It is easier to defend a short list of values than a long laundry list of positions, which many need to be fluid.
I would like this more if I could
I'd say another reason outrage can't be the only tool is that a lot of people in the US have comfortable lives and outrage/doom just doesn't fit with how they feel. Colin Cowherd of ESPN recently called out Trump for saying the US was burning to the ground due to crime. Cowherd rightly pointed out that when he goes out in Los Angeles, he has a great, fun day; it's not Mad Max out there. Exaggerating reduces credibility.