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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
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Jan 17,, 5 tweets, 5 min read
@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 The story since the 70s has been:
* Wages ⬆️ a little
* Hourly comp ⬆️ more
* Working hours ⬇️, so individual annual earnings only ⬆️ a little
* Govt benefits & investment income⬆️ so individual income ⬆️
* # of workers/household went up so household income ⬆️ a lot
@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 So overall story: Your average worker is consuming a lot more and working a lot fewer hours, but now women have jobs
@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 This is why much of progressive policy is now focused on taxing the rich to pay for child care...
@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 Also if we had a national health insurance system that could push down our inefficiently high health care prices, more of total compensation could be taken as cash earnings, which would make a lot of people happier.
@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 Thus, left-liberals are not apologists for the current system; the two main changes they seek to make (financial support for families and national health insurance) address the two biggest things holding back middle- and working-class living standards in the present era.

(end)

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 18,
At age 6 I was obsessed with the idea that nuclear disarmament could be achieved by having Godzilla eat all the nuclear warheads.
Crazy thing is that I didn't even think of using Godzilla to make nuclear power more sustainable by feeding him all the radioactive waste.
I think growing up in a house with many pets makes one perceive any animal, even an imaginary 400-foot-tall fire-breathing monster, as a potential pet
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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 13,
A graph of home affordability in the U.S.

The ratio of median home price to median personal income has increased since 1980, but only by about 15%. Image
Here you can see median home price and median income side by side, relative to their 1980s levels.

Home prices and incomes track each other very well until around 2003, then diverge, then come back again, then diverge a bit after 2012. Image
But also note that the type of homes people have been buying have not stayed constant. The median size of a single-family house, for example, has increased by about 13% since 2000. Image
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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 13,
"Americans don't have health care" is one of those things that, if you said it in real life, would cause people to look at you as if you were crazy, but which 1000 people will dogpile you on Twitter if you contradict
The truth is that Americans use lots and lots of health care, they just pay an ungodly obscene amount for it.
And this is not a technical or cute distinction; by far the biggest problem with American health care is simply its high cost, meaning that cost control measures are the most important policy that we need in order to fix the system.
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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 7,
These slides by @ramez are the most optimistic, exciting thing you'll see today. Maybe all week. Maybe all year.

dropbox.com/s/l6qr9x1zhvc4…
Look at this graph of renewable electricity costs!!
And look at this graph of learning curves for all sorts of batteries!!
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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 6,
1/Let's revisit my post from January 6, 2021: "Japanese lessons for the American coup".

In this post, I went through Japan's history of rightist coup attempts in the 1930s, and what lessons America can learn from this history.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/japanese-les…
2/Japan had five significant coup attempts in the 1930s.

All failed to topple the government.

But in the end, they forced the government to do what the coup perpetrators wanted -- invade and attempt to conquer the rest of Asia.
3/In the post, I go through all 5 coup attempts. But the best direct comparison for America's 1/6 coup attempt is the March Incident of 1931.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_Inc…
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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 6,
If America is going to succeed and thrive economically, we absolutely need to keep bringing in immigrants.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/america-need…
People don't realize how much immigration to the U.S. has slowed down.
And people don't realize what a big hole this is going to leave in our population.
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