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Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
, 4 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
The core of the Green New Deal - a huge industrial policy push for green energy that will also directly employ a lot of working-class Americans - is a very centrist idea, and not a new idea by any means.
That core idea is a GREAT one. And we absolutely NEED to do it.

But I think we shouldn't package that core idea with pie-in-the-sky income redistribution that has little to do with climate change:
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Also note that the Green New Deal has a little-discussed third idea - environmental justice - which is REALLY important, and is the single most under-emphasized idea on the left today.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
So I think the Green New Deal should:
1. Emphasize the ideas of green energy and putting people to work
2. Increase the emphasis on environmental justice
3. Drop UBI and universal health care from the package, and introduce these as separate things
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Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
A rough calculation says that if Central American immigration pressure lasts for another 20 years, then stringent, draconian Trump-style policies might be able to prevent at most around 750,000 Central Americans from coming to America, in total.
We have to ask ourselves: Is it worth militarizing the border and turning the entire border zone into a "papers, please" police state in order to keep out 750,000 Central Americans?

That's an absolutely ridiculous tradeoff.
And keep in mind that so many Mexicans are going back to Mexico that even with the Central American influx, the overall number of undocumented immigrants is dropping year after year.
Read 4 tweets
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Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
Americans have been massively misinformed about the nature of immigration in their country.
See also:

I bet even fewer Americans know that net illegal immigration ended 12 years ago.
Read 3 tweets
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Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
1/Violence in America has declined so much that I feel like I'm living in a different country than the one I grew up in.
2/When I was a kid, it was just assumed that fighting was a thing everyone did. Kids at my school got disfigured and disabled in fights. Kids drove around with guns. And we all knew that this was one of the safest towns; cities were assumed to be no-go zones.
3/Movies like "Escape From New York" (a little before my time but still representative) would show cities descending into chaos. Everyone assumed that things would just get worse and worse.

imdb.com/title/tt008234…
Read 18 tweets

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Erik Loomis
@ErikLoomis
This Day in Labor History: December 14, 1945. The Employment Act of 1946 is introduced in Congress. Let's talk about the need for full employment policy and why it has never happened, a very important issue for the present!
World War II ended the Great Depression. But policymakers knew that the war would end and they didn’t know what would happen to the economy. There was disagreement over the extent to which the underlying factors that led to the Depression had dissipated.
Many economists believed that the Great Depression was the natural state of a mature economy and would return without significant government intervention. This was a serious concern as the war ended, with widespread fears of a massive economic downturn.
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Keri Leigh Merritt
@KeriLeighMerrit
This was one of the best & most nuanced conversations I've ever had about #class & #poverty in America (& that intro!😭 Wow, thank you, @thebradking).

1 of the only podcasts I coulda talked abt the significance of po' white #RuthLangmore from @ozark wearing a #Tupac shirt.🔥🔥🔥
Wow - I forgot about all the cool stuff we discussed: state-level poverty programs, switching to a service-based economy in rural areas, the Case-Deaton white death paper, the liberal elite write-off of working class whites, white economic privilege, & class anger/resentment.
...specific ways for historians to get *real* history to average Americans, how to combat racism through class & labor issues, the pain & anguish of the "psychic death" of rural whites, & adapting a federal jobs program to the state level...
Read 4 tweets
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Linda Tirado
@KillerMartinis
Okay then, I am in a hotel with two weeks worth of groceries for a family of four (really don't ask about my day) but there is wine and I've been putting this off so welcome to this evening's cultural activity! It is a reading of Amy Chua's book Political Tribes! There's wine!
I need a few minutes to breathe and start everything charging and figure out this food situation because ironically I have stuffed this mini fridge to capacity and also have nothing I could actually eat for dinner. There has to be pizza delivery to the motel near nothing right?
For those of you new to my feed, I often do things so you don't have to, and reading books that you should know exist but shouldn't spend time or money on is one of them.

Eventually I will prejudge a book wrongly and feel very chastened but I keep spinning that wheel!
Read 178 tweets
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SFWA, Inc.
@sfwa
Gearing up for the #nebulas2018 panel on “How to decolonize your fiction,” with Bill Campbell, Rebecca Roanhorse, Fonda Lee, JY Yang, DongWon Song. This is going to be great!
DS: We’re going to talk about decolonization, and about how to represent other cultures in your writing. But first, intros.
BC: I’m in publishing, and we specialize in SF and comics, with a multicultural flair. And I’m originally from Pittsburgh!
Read 67 tweets
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Joy Reid
@JoyAnnReid
An interesting take from a survivor of Chavismo in Venezuela. Bottom line: you can’t beat a fauz populist wannabe strongman with scandal outrage, because scandal only drives his supporters deeper into the bunker.
A clip:
And this, about recognizing that in the minds of an authoritarian strongman’s supporters, you are not a truth teller: you are the enemy.
Read 12 tweets
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Tom Cotton
@TomCottonAR
I have a few thoughts on this story about @realDonaldTrump & his immigration policies... mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/23/us/…
1. It's a very peculiar view of American democracy to say the elected president is "defying" the unelected bureaucracy. I suspect @nytimes would never run that headline about, say, President Obama.
2. It's not a "nativist view" to say immigration policy should be crafted to benefit American citizens, not foreigners. Slandering "white working-class Americans" with that term is an example of the closed thinking that helped Trump win.
Read 11 tweets

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