Vermont is actually an interesting case of flood politics that not a lot of people know about. It pits rural romanticism against the realities of climate change and pragmatism about risk and public finances. Short thread. 1/10

https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1980496212613820923

When most people think of floods, they do not think of a place like Vermont. It’s inland and mountainous. But historically, Vermont developed as these little villages along rivers that created opportunities for mills. (Middlebury is a good example of this) 2/10

Democrats need a smarter approach to unions. We should support them when their interests align with the public’s but politely ignore them when they don't. Simple litmus test: "Will this raise prices or reduce service quality for the public?" (link below) 1/6 When unions are RIGHT: Building trades apprenticeship programs create skilled workers + grow the economy. Construction unions helped rebuild I-95 in Philly in just 12 days. Police, teachers, firefighters provide essential services. They deserve gratitude + goodwill. 2/6

John here has a question that I think needs answering. “How can the US have trade deficits absent other countries discriminating against us?” There are a lot of ways this can happen but I want to focus on just one here: the dollar as the global reserve currency. 1/4

https://twitter.com/carney/status/1907980093080711521

Money is for spending. Money that others won’t take isn’t money at all. Would my landlord let me pay him in Thai baht? Of course not. Because he can’t turn around and spend Thai baht. Conversely, U.S. dollars *are* money that everyone wants because everyone will take it. 2/4

Trump and his defenders have this idea that economic growth and personal freedom are expendable in the pursuit of nationalist pride and cultural purity.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day so it’s a good time to explain how Ireland’s trajectory shows the folly of that idea. Thread. ☘️ 1/12 In the 1950s, Ireland was in a deep rut economically. It was the only European country other than East German to lose population during that decade. To remedy this, Finance Minister Ken Whitaker proposed liberalizing the economy and connecting with Europe. 2/12

So this is true but there are some unique features of Vermont's tax and spending policies that someone from here might not understand. First, VT's property taxes are specifically structured to bypass lots of retirees and land hardest on working age people...1/6

https://twitter.com/DrewSav/status/1897781694733672821

Second, there are enormous tax breaks given to farmers and to a cancerous set of hyper-NIMBY institutions known as "land trusts." So most property owners don't actually pay much if any property tax. That raises rates for those who do pay (only ~1/3 pay full freight). 2/6

To understand Trump's base regarding tariffs, you need to understand what their goal is. It is not some tangible concrete objective like increased GDP or jobs growth. Their goal is to feel that their guy has imposed his will on others to their benefits. That's it. 1/4 They genuinely believe the economy has gotten much worse over the last 50 years (it hasn't) and the reason is because Presidents did not do enough will-imposing on their behalf. They throw out all the complexities of int, economics; it's just a competition of wills to them. 2/4

Pres. Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico are going to make most of what the average American household buys more expensive. Let’s go through a family’s major purchases and look at how these tariffs affect them. A thread. 1/10 First, most people’s biggest expense is housing. Well, as the NAHB points out, Trump’s tariffs on building materials -most especially lumber- is going to make building new housing more expensive, and that translates into higher rents and higher purchase prices for homebuyers. 2/10

Since we're having a big conversation about healthcare costs, I wanted to put together a thread on certificate-of-need laws, a set of under-the-radar policies that make American healthcare more expensive and worse.
The states that have them need to repeal them. Immediately. 1/ In states with Certificate-of-Need (CON) laws, would-be new medical service providers must go before a board and prove that there is a need for their service in order to acquire a ‘certificate-of-need’ that allows them to operate. 2/

There’s a chart here on US-China trade and workers that I think would surprise a lot of people. It’s definitely worth understanding if you’ve heard of “the China Shock.” It shows that, actually, most workers benefited from increased trade with China. Let me explain it. 1/13 As you can see, the vast majority of workers are to the right of zero, meaning most workers benefited. Look too at the breakout panels. Even most manufacturing workers benefited, as did essentially all non-manufacturing workers. 2/13

There’s a question here between @arindube @ArmandDoma and @mattyglesias on whether trade liberalization costs Democrats support among the working class. The conventional wisdom is ‘yes’ but the trade politics scholarship is a lot less clear on that. 1/ So let’s start w/ the paper that Arun cites. It’s got solid methodology (you don’t get in AER for nothing) but there are nevertheless several problems I see with it. First, it can’t fully control for big culture politics events of the time. 2/

To understand the reason why inflation is so politically deadly for incumbents, you need to understand what I call it the “my raise, not my inflation” dichotomy. 1/4 When jobs are plentiful and wages are increasing, more people are getting better jobs and pay raises. People work hard; and so when they get those better jobs/raises, they attribute that to their hard work (and that’s understandable and fair by the way!) 2/4

How Democrats Got to This Point: An Autopsy Told as a Five Act Play

Act I: Bill Clinton campaigned and governed cultural moderate culturally and a market-friendly low-inflation centrist economically. He was a popular 2-term President.
Obama repeated this playbook. 1/6 Act II: Hillary Clinton campaigned on identity politics and lost. Trump governed like a chaotic maniac such that much of the electorate was exhausted of him by 2020. Biden campaigned as a return to normalcy and won. 2/6

A small but great example of this is how there’s was this huge freak out out the bee population declining but then next to no one heard about the new population recovery. 1/4

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1852471963194659213

The reason this example is on my mind is I was at a housing policy meeting recently and there was this environmentalist citing bees as why we can’t allow new neighborhoods and so I showed her charts about the bee pop recovering. You’d think she’d have loved that news but… 2/4

A story that illuminates why abundance liberals are going to struggle with some progressive activists:

In March, I gave a talk on climate tech at a senior center - they loved it! In Q&A, a woman asked “how do we get people to do their part + dry their clothes on the line?” 1/7 I explained to her that we don’t need to do that and she seemed disappointed at the possibility of that being true. She didn’t want a tech solution. She wanted people to willingly choose to live more simply and more equally out of sense of shared moral obligation. 2/7

Today, the House passed the “Building Chips in America Act” sponsored by @SenMarkKelly and @SenTedCruz in the Senate last year. It’s a really cool permitting reform bill related to semiconductors. Here's a quick explanation of what it does and why it matters. 1/ @noahpinion In 2022, through the CHIPS and Science Act, Congress allocated around $40 billion in subsidies for new semiconductor manufacturing facilities known as fabs. Semiconductors are arguably the world’s most important technology and Congress wants them made HERE. 2/ @crmiller1

I think it’s important that this article gets some push back because, if Democrats listen to it, they’re going to get housing policy reform wrong, to the detriment of many millions of Americans.

The solution to the housing shortage is.....to build more housing. 1/

https://twitter.com/sandeepvaheesan/status/1834251636169998711

First, it’s important to understand where the authors’ argument is coming from. The Open Markets Institute, like others on parts of the left, holds fighting business and particularly big business as its first priority intellectual commitment. 2/

This is a common misconception about YIMBYs like me- that we have no theory of power in political economy. We actually do though. Or at least I do (I probably shouldn’t claim to speak for others).
Here’s my YIMBY theory of power. 1/

https://twitter.com/taraghuveer/status/1828424507654021416

Lots of people, particularly more socialist + populist people, when they think about power in political economy think “who has power?” And that’s fair. But another way to think about power that’s especially relevant to housing is, “what kind of power do people have?” 2/

One major advantage of an 'Abundance Agenda' approach to economic policy is that it gets Democrats and 🇺🇸 away from zero-sum thinking. We are not each other’s enemies. We are all on Team 🇺🇸. The enemy is instead a series of invisible graveyards. @ATabarrok 1/6 The great enemy of the renter is not the landlord; it is the invisible graveyard of housing that a developer wanted to build but wasn’t allowed to. 2/6

Some people think about Rome or WWII all the time. For me, it’s the Industrial Revolution. This is when humanity started to get so much more prosperous. It changed everything!
One key, underappreciated background ingredient in that was the weakening of guilds. Let me explain. 1/ Guilds were the ‘good ole boy’ networks of their day- associations of craftsmen/merchants that controlled their industry in their town. They controlled prices + managed training of new members via apprenticeships. They had huge economic + social power in early modern Europe. 2/

🚨📣 Announcement 📣🚨
Life in 🇺🇸 is too expensive.
So @ProgressChamber is launching the Democratic Cost-of-Living Agenda, the most comprehensive policy vision out there for making [flag] life more affordable. 1/12
progresschamber.org/act/bring-cost…
This policy package is part of the broader ‘Abundance Agenda.’ But we see Abundance as a means to an end. There are millions upon millions of Americans who work hard but do not feel like they are getting ahead. We wrote this report for them, and for you. 2/12

There will be a lot of commentary framing Tim Walz as a pick meant to please the progressive base. But I’m a self-identified pro-market moderate and I’m a big fan of this pick too. Here’s a brief list of what I like about him. @jdcmedlock 1/8 He signed the country’s most comprehensive Right-to-Repair law. These laws give consumers over where and how to repair their purchases (i.e. *their property*), reduce barriers to market entry, and promote competition and innovation. 2/8