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It is probably worth tackling the elephant in the room when it comes to housing costs: every purchase of a house for a price that the buyer thinks is astronomical and indicative of the sheer lunacy of the housing market, is also a sale of a house that the seller thinks is a potentially life changing influx of cash in exchange for an asset that they invested in and feel entitled to profit from.

There is a generation of people who are counting on the sale of a house at a high price to partially fund their retirement. Any policy designed to provide relief to the buyer in that situation will, by definition, also provide pain to the seller. And those sellers are very typically older people (boomers, often), who vote.

So in truth, we will not deal with housing until we are ready to turn the page on the boomer generation. Because we have to piss off the old people to fix this, and to date our country has been categorically incapable of committing to any course of action that does that. So we won't fix the housing market until we are capable of crossing that bridge. And I wholeheartedly support racing towards that goal.

This would be a huge deal. Perhaps the most important thing that our country could do. Our governments at every level are currently struggling under the accumulated weight of having to deal with 50 years of boomer bullshit. Every stupid political battle they had, every compromise to please the special interests of their generational priorities, every convoluted plan to deal with (or avoid dealing with) all of the self-indulgent nonsense that they marinated in since the 70's.... All of it has crippled our institutions and enfeebled our government.

Now that the people themselves are clearly so infirm as a generation, can we finally take power from them and move on? If we can't, then we will allow our country to be driven over a cliff by what is essentially a ruling class of senile, barely lucid octogenarians.

Instead, we should make housing the first stand in this generational battle. Piss off the sellers (the elderly) for the greater benefit of the buyers - families, students, workers - you know, the future of the country! Any society whose decisions favor the past rather than the future is doomed to collapse. So let's prioritize prosperity for the future rather than for the past.

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I think a huge cause for Biden's unpopularity is inflation, and the average American falsely assuming that the President is the one primarily responsible for controlling it.

If this global inflation had not occured, and we were instead in a "regular" economy, the average voter could easily have gotten on board with focusing on climate change, cash benefits, voter rights reform, and the like.

I imagine the history books are going to include a quip about how inflation was very high under Biden's Presidency. But will they also mention how any economist would attest that the vast majority of power to control inflation is vested outside of the Oval Office? I doubt it.

And that's kind of bullshit, frankly: how someone can do the right things, but bad events happen outside their control, so people just assume it's their fault. Everytime I read an article that casually mentions Biden's approval and inflation, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. How hard is it for the media to acknowledge that it's mostly outside of the president's control? And why do even the more enlightened writers, including yourself, simply take it as a given that people will blame the president for inflation or the economic cycle in general, without stopping to comment on how unfair that is? Why is this a thing that we are ok with, or don't bother trying to fix?

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>>>A big pillar of Biden’s agenda was the “care economy” — the idea that as manufacturing jobs get automated away, people will move en masse into health care, eldercare, education and child care. In fact, this has already been the trend for many decades now. So Biden wanted to speed the transition along, to ensure mass employment with good wages.<<<

I've read Noah's commentary on this previously. If this really is one thing the Biden people were up to—and I have no particular reason to doubt his analysis—the stymying of Bidenomics—at least for the time being—might not be, erm, an entirely negative development. There are a few reasons for this:

1) As Noah points out, it's far from clear this sector needs "strengthening"—care jobs are growing on their own.

2) Some of the subsidization methods in question appear likely to make certain kinds of care in America less, not more, affordable.

3) It's hard to imagine the care sphere isn't a pretty low productivity sector. It seems questionable helping a low productivity sector get even bigger is likely to boost general economic performance or living standards.

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First recession where the root cause is *too many jobs*.

We’d have more abundance, but the tech sector, which is where productivity improvements come from, has been too busy chasing ad-tech and stupid crypto schemes versus deploying industrial automation.

Most of that is reversing, and my hope is we get back to building real stuff over technology to manage NFT collections.

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You need a name for this insurance system if you want it to catch on. Maybe partial-medicare-for-all

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The "common progressive belief that inequality trends upward without a big corrective push by the government" has never been about wages. It has always been about investment income, inheritance, and the like.

Wealth levels, not wage levels, do trend upwards without a big corrective push by the government.

EDIT: Here is some data to back it up:

https://realtimeinequality.org/

You see in the top half of the page, income inequality is decreasing. But overall wealth inequality is increasing.

Wealth is the important unit here. Income can't be spent directly. It gets converted to wealth, however briefly, before being spent.

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Noah, interested to understand why you recommend the Japanese and Korean model for a national health insurance structure to address our health care crisis in the U.S.? Is it political expediancy or do you think that it has the most merit from an economic, societal and HC quality perspective?

Healthcare is like energy. It drives the cost of every other piece of the economy. There is no other segment of our economy where change could bring about greater economic prosperity or healthy societal impact. Where could we save $2T a year (~the size of the 8th largest economy) in the world and re-deploy those resources to address climate change, education, infrastructure and housing? Political compromise isn't the answer here. It is making U.S. Citizens aware of the biggest government subsidy ever in the history of the world and how it is keeping their wages low, reducing their ability to change jobs or start their own business and how it is making the U.S. increasingly uncompetitive in the global economy. This is a winnable fight if it is conducted properly. But very interested in hearing yours and others perspective.

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Why does it feel like Noah’s approach is just parasitic on Ezra Klein’s supply side progressivism (itself inspired by the left’s GND) with a lot of ‘centrist’ rhetoric to appeal to his readers, who it must be said, are not very smart…

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>>>But the other two pillars — a big push for care jobs and a big increase in cash benefits — look more suited to 2009 than to 2022.<<<

Hindsight, unfortunately, tends to be a lot more accurate than foresight. Democratic policy people got some things pretty badly wrong in 2021, but it's easy to see why. Essentially, the lessons of 2009 were over-learned. And then some. For years we heard about insufficient demand. We also heard about how inadequate stimulus in the wake of the Great Recession reverberated for years, politically, to the detriment of Democrats. And so in 2021 the party of FDR was determined not to repeat those mistakes. The future is hard to predict!

For the record, I'm not overly disappointed with the way things have played out for a couple of reasons. First, I was personally pretty nervous in November/December of 2020 that Biden might not even be able to secure an Electoral College victory (due to GOP shenanigans), much less get a bunch of far-reaching policies enacted. So my expectations were modest from the get go. Relatedly, I thought Democrats if lucky would probably win only one of those Georgia Senate races in January, 2021. I figured if the country (and Democrats) were lucky, Biden would secure the White House and might be able to get some judged confirmed, and sanity might return to foreign policy and executive branch operations. And that was about it.

And yet both those races were won by Democrats, and a covid relief bill, and an infrastructure bill and a gun control (!) bill have all become law. We also got out of the disastrous Afghanistan quagmire, job creation has been great, and our tattered alliances have been stitched back together. And daily average covid deaths are down by over 90% since Trump's last week in office.

I think there's a pretty strong chance that, say, 24 months from now, not only will inflation have been substantially tamed, but the US economy will be on the far side of a period of weakness (that is, in recovery from recession), and so Joe's chances for a second term will be looking good. I know a lot of people don't agree with that. But in my experience must humans are prisoners of recency bias.

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Funny not one mention of deficit in article or comment fields. That says something! Certainly low interest rates and ballooning debt set the stage for inflation. But the sparks that ignited it began with chip (electronics) shortages and then energy consumption at the margin by crypto and the inane tariffs implemented by the previous administration. Then the pandemic hit and PPP added fuel to the fire. Ukraine just kept it burning. Early in 2021 Biden should have removed tariffs and put an enormous climate tax on crypto; regardless of the source. Energy and commodity costs would have tanked and Russia would never have attacked. Biden should then have focused on improving the tax system and shutting down loopholes. Along the way there should have been a concerted, early effort to address both low interest rates and high deficits. The economy would have progressed nicely, people would be more trusting in the outlook and the government and inflation would be subdued.

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I find it strange you are blaming President Biden for a legislative programme that has not managed to pass through Congress. Why aren't you blaming Congress?

Or, for that matter, the gerrymandered Electoral System that gives voters in poor, agrarian states disproportionate power compared to other states?

Moreover, as you can see arguments by Manchin against key areas of the proposed packages -- how in the world do you think we will pass a National Healthcare system?

Your analysis is extremely cogent but you undermine it by blaming what is arguably a figurehead in the process. At this stage, Biden is more a symptom of the problem rather than the root cause of it.

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I wonder how the effect of the subsidies we are not getting compares to the effect of the high energy prices we are getting now compared to the previous decade. Hoping these prices spur on more clean energy and transportation growth, but maybe the market is predicting the prices not to last long enough for real ROI.

Has anyone done any guesstimates on this?

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I have to take exception to the characterization of child care and elder care as overpriced. It's like calling a good surgeon overpriced- they're expensive, but hopefully worth it. The difference being that those employed in the child care and elder care fields make far less and have far fewer benefits than a surgeon or almost any other job, while carrying a fairly heavy load of responsibility.

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All-payer systems (of the kind we see in countries such as Germany or in states like Maryland) could be a way forward in Healthcare reform, although it will still entail taking on the very powerful Pharma and insurance lobbies, which has usually frustrated rational reform of the kind proposed here.

We also need substantial upgrades to our electricity grids, as the problems in states such as California and Texas illustrate. There will probably be a need for some baseline energy component in gas (or nuclear) to deal with the intermittency and power density issued in renewables, although the latter are certainly becoming more cost effective

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“ instead, it should be a system where the government pays some portion of every medical bill and leaves the rest to private insurance.”

If that sort of thing actually works, it should be applied to college tuition costs.

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Jul 20, 2022·edited Jul 20, 2022

Government spending as “investment…”. JFC.

and for heaven’s sake, “employment” figures don’t include the millions who are not actively looking for work. Such “data” is skewed and misleading.

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