“it only seems fair to point out that the only major surge in crime in 40 years occurred while Trump was in the White House.” @radleybalko https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-ted-cruzs-fearmongering-rnc-105151488.html
"no tax on tips" plus the supreme court's recent legalization of gratuities promises an exciting new revenue stream for almost everyone in a position of influence.
the freak show we just watched represents itself as america. but it is not america.
"'The Vibes' are no more and no less than a given political elite’s theory of public opinion. This theory provides some information about public opinion, when the political elite is not completely disconnected from it. It usually provides much more information about the beliefs and ideology of the relevant political elite" @henryfarrell https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/what-should-we-do-with-vibes-based via @ryanlcooper
who knew Bukele’s untried indefinite detainees were detained on America’s streets. shocking!
you learn something new every convention speech, i guess.
@djc it is politically untenable, but any higher-ed payments reform is politically untenable under our contemporary sclerotic Congress. the administration could do this under existing law, so it did, by executive order. it’s taken extraordinary stretches to judicially stop it.
(states’ standing claims were based on their “injury” because state agencies that administer Federal loans would have fewer loans to profit from servicing.)
@djc you are getting it right. and yes, it would be better if we could build in the price controls up front. but politically, we don’t eat our vegetables until a crisis forces us to. SAVE is a half solution that provokes a crisis until the other half is filled in. it’s not how you’d want to do things. if we had a more functional legislature, we might impose a full, rational fix. but it does create conditions under which about the only way to fix things is higher-ed price controls.
@djc it’s not trust me. you are right to think it’s weird. it works by more openly breaking a thing to create the conditions under which it can politically get fixed. under conventional loans, there’s no budgetary cost to overpaying colleges, because in theory and until recently in practice, in aggregate, whatever the state overpayed colleges was offset by an asset, student IOUs. there was no fiscal cost. 1/
@djc students failed to impose price discipline, but it was students who were on the hook for their failure to impose price discipline. the state could afford to let colleges prey. the victims were the students themselves, who could be made patsies, blamed for “their own poor choices”. 2/
@djc under SAVE, if the state fails to impose discipline, the state will face accelerating fiscal costs, on its own balance sheet. oddly but unfortunately, that’s a lot less politically tenable than pretending the predation was just arms-length, eyes-open freedom-of-contract by consenting just-barely-or-not-quite adults. /fin
@djc it’s not at all about what the college receives. as you say, it’s about what the student pays, which becomes disconnected from what the college receives. what the college receives plus interest sets a max on what students pay, but that will often be much more than what students ever repay.
once what colleges receive is decoupled from what students repay, then obviously students can’t be the providers of price discipline. the state will have to take up the role.
this convention is hosted in Stepford, Connecticut, right?
@djc it limits payments students are on the hook for. that is, it effectively caps what people pay, and so removes the pretense that it is college students who pay the rates that colleges charge. the government pays that. it’s a quiet corollary that the limiting factor becomes how much the state is willing to advance, since there can be no pretense it is how much students choose to take on. https://studentaid.gov/announcements-events/save-plan
@djc it’s gone under the radar, but a much bigger deal than past debt forgiveness.
The SAVE plan would be, should be, a remarkable restructuring of higher-ed finance—not about remedying the catastrophe of past lending-based finance but ensuring that going forward, college is always affordable and cost negotiations would be between colleges and the Federal govt, rather than on the back of 18 year olds.
A court just blocked it, in a case with standing so thin it should never have passed go. I guess we have to place our hopes with, um, the Supreme Court? https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-blocks-all-biden-student-debt-relief-plan-2024-07-18/
@buermann @franktaber @DetroitDan i think he makes his living mostly from antitrust oriented thinktanking which (like subscription letters) is an inherently corrupting line of business, but often the best people can do. https://www.economicliberties.us/matt-stoller/
@franktaber @DetroitDan he does, to his credit, puncture and reality-check some of Andreeson and Horowitz self-flattering claims. he does not, so much, of Vance, which I agree is disappointing. for example https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2024/07/vance-cool-on-credit-card-bill-lobbyists-say-00169011 although maybe that was too close to breaking news to be included.
@franktaber @DetroitDan I agree with you!
But I still think it’s a good piece precisely because it grants Vance and his dance partners the benefit of the doubt and explores the plain contradictions in their coalition in the most sympathetic plausible terms. Even if you take these people more seriously (and more morally) than they deserve to be taken, where do you end up? Not in a very persuasive spot, I think, but Stoller does give fair consideration.
in their early years, they asked us all to trust them, they were the good guys — “don’t be evil” was their mission! — they only make money when the web grows richer and deeper, they said.
trust us, they said, but they soon proved there is no trust they won’t violate if the P&L doesn’t pencil, even at the most trivial scales, or if some strategic brainstorm has them prefering we gravitate towards a next big thing. cf @danilo https://hachyderm.io/@danilo/112809807306890936
@buermann @franktaber @DetroitDan Yes. Stoller, to his credit, delves into that. I think the place he arrives is ultimately too credulous, grants all of Vance and Andreeson and Horowitz too much benefit of the doubt. But the piece is the opposite of simply pretending the, um, tension doesn’t exist. It’s an attempt to make sense of exactly that.
@franktaber @DetroitDan Stoller’s beat is antitrust first, economic populism more broadly second. I don’t think he’s interested, for example, in distinguishing between a kind of herrenvolk populism and the universalistic kind you and I might support. Which is a way of saying—perhaps unflatteringly—I think broader questions of fascism are just outside of his focus. He’s trying to figure out whether Vance’s purported economics can be taken seriously, despite his (ugly) affiliations.
@franktaber @DetroitDan whether well or poorly (i'm sure Stoller gives Vance more benefit of the doubt than you think he deserves), that is the contradiction Stoller is trying to explore.