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Matthew Yglesias Profile picture
Matthew Yglesias
@mattyglesias
Slow Boring, cohosting https://t.co/wxUj3JFSFf, Bloomberg columnist
44 subscribers
Feb 18 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
A lot of the discussion from the Tech Right about how impressive Elon Musk is totally elides the question of goals.

I 100% believe based on his record that he is hyper-competent with skills that apply across multiple domains.

But what is the evidence that he cares about me? Cutting nutritional assistance and medical care for tens of millions of poor Americans to partially offset a corporate income tax cut might get a rocket to Mars faster but … is that good? Is that what I want?
Feb 18 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A somewhat frustrating dynamic at work here.

Critics of “woke” politics tend to focus on the most superficial manifestations because they are trying to proceed cautiously, but then counter-critics — like Traister here — counter that such superficial stuff can’t possibly matter. The dialogue eventually needs to pass into the less superficial issues that are genuinely in play — the rise of extremely simplistic disparate impact analysis as a controlling consideration in progressive policy.

slowboring.com/p/common-sense…
Jan 23 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I just want to clarify that I, personally, was not like secretly critical of this until Trump won. Here's my article from May 2021 about Tema Okun.

slowboring.com/p/tema-okun
Jan 17 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
To both agree and disagree with @ddayen's take, what happened is that Jake Sullivan, for national security reasons, tapped a bunch of people who reject conventional economic analysis to run domestic policy — but the people he platformed don't share his national security goals! I wrote a long series about this effort to create a "post-neoliberal" economic policy vision for America.

It's original sin is that it was based on the false premise that 1970-2020 was characterized by a "growth at all costs" paradigm.

slowboring.com/p/what-was-neo…
Jan 5 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I was well-informed about the Rotherham gang rape scandal ten years ago because I am a loyal consumer of the mainstream media Image
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Image [Guy who doesn’t follow the news] How come the media didn’t cover this? Image
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Dec 22, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I know a lot of people in the technology industry have deep admiration for @elonmusk and find it baffling that many others have a negative reaction to him despite his lofty ideals and undeniable achievements.

I have a theory about why some see him negatively. Just yesterday, Musk did a tweet in which he expressed totally unqualified dislike for old politicians.

And yet spent the recent campaign enthusiastically supporting Donald Trump over his much younger opponent. Image
Dec 18, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I wish philanthropists would pay more attention to what they are actually funding … is this Jeff Bezos’ politics? Image
Image I love Amazon so much but my guy’s last two tweets were kissing up to Donald Trump and he’s also giving millions of dollars to bizarre leftist groups … there is a happy medium to be found. Image
Dec 9, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I don’t think lack of age controls is even a top ten problem with Piketty, but we’re in right-wing backlash mode now so people can just post whatever and it’ll be popular. The first big issue that emerged very quickly after publication was exactly how much of this was purely a housing / land use issue, and of course this has become a much more mainstream concern over the past decade.

vox.com/2015/4/1/83209…
Dec 8, 2024 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion — pretty good stuff, gave lots of people access to health coverage and saved a ton of lives.

thelancet.com/journals/lanpu…Image But of course health insurance isn’t just about health — it’s a financial product that led to much better financial well-being for poor people.

nber.org/digest/aug16/f…Image
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Dec 5, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The cost savings in single-payer health systems come overwhelmingly from lower payments to providers rather than reduced administrative costs. Singapore’s system has a lot of virtues but conservatives don’t like to admit that it’s all underwritten by the Ministry of Health doing nationwide all-payer rate setting.
Nov 27, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I will say that I do not “want a politics organized around blaming economic bad guys like private equity.”

Businesses need to be regulated for various reasons, but I don’t think specifically demonizing a particular ownership structure makes a lot of sense. If someone is dumping toxic chemicals in the drinking water, I don’t really care if it’s a small family farm or a publicly traded agribusiness conglomerate or a private equity play or anything else.

The issue is the conduct and what the costs and benefits of banning it are.
Nov 21, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
One salient example of “identity politics” that hurt Democrats recently was the decision in 2020 to make Kamala Harris the VP nominee despite her poor electoral track record and unimpressive performance on the campaign trail because Biden “needed” to pick a black woman. But this also worked in the opposite direction, as when Democrats became so sure in 2024 that Harris’ vulnerabilities were identity-based rather than issue-based that they selected Dopey White Guy Tim Walz rather than someone more impressive or who could help her in key states.
Nov 19, 2024 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
A true fact is that I have some readers in the Biden White House and some good relationships there.

A non-true fact I have seen on social media is that the Biden administration "did everything Yglesias wanted."

A few examples: In March of 2021, I wrote that Biden's approach to the asylum issue was too lax and posing big political risks and he'd need to crack down. This happened, but it took *years* and I think was obviously politically costly.

slowboring.com/p/america-need…Image
Nov 19, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
No, what happened is that in countries with disparate economic policies — ranging from the robust welfare state of Germany to the highly regulated labor market of France to the United States and beyond — working class voters have swung against left stances on cultural issues. In the US context, if you roll the tape back to 2014 it was universally understood at the time that things like DAPA and the embrace of criminal justice reform were political risks. And despite those risks they nearly won in 2016. But it hasn’t worked out.
Nov 9, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The thing to consider is that people who pay the least attention to politics are likely to align with whichever coalition seems like it has the chiller, larger tent and makes the fewest demands of what it counts to be on the team. To be a resident in good standing of MAGA Island you need to basically say nice things about Trump — that’s a huge leap for many (he’s actually a scumbag!) but it’s pretty simple.

To be a Progressive In Good Standing is hard, long list of items to follow.
Nov 9, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
What’s tragicomic is the extent to which the very existence of The Groups is largely a silly misreading of like one Theda Skocpol essay.

The whole machinery could (and should) be turned off. Skocpol has a long line of scholarship about the role of social movements and mass membership organizations in American politics, and she’s critical of the replacement of that form of politics by a politics dominated by professionalized insider lobby shops.
Oct 28, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
If you deprive Social Security of revenue, the benefits get cut.

That’s the facts and the law.

If you don’t want to believe a Committed for a Responsible Federal Budget chart because you’re invested in simping for plutocrats who hate you, that’s your right as an American. Something I think you see every time I get into it with these people is that MAGA is sincerely terrified of discussing the concrete policy stakes — tax cuts for billionaires that explode the deficit, raise interest rates, and bankrupt social security.

It’s not fun for them.
Oct 15, 2024 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
A top think tank put out a report about how to build solar power faster, but all of their recommendations — tougher protection for forests & “arid landscapes,” more community benefits, project labor agreements — would make it harder and more expensive.

slowboring.com/p/tradeoffs-ar…Image It reads almost like an op to keep the electricity grid as dirty as possible, but the real truth is dumber — they’ve convinced themselves that if you layer on enough process you can do things without tradeoffs.

slowboring.com/p/tradeoffs-ar…Image
Oct 10, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
So I was doing a panel discussion with @DKThomp today about the idea of "abundance" and this bunch of jackasses funded by a Getty Oil heiress showed up to yell at me because I agree with VP Harris and Joe Biden that we shouldn't ban fracking. In addition to slandering hotel staffers by pretending he got pushed, this guy and others kept yelling "why do you support fracking!?!?"

I said they know I support fracking because I wrote an article about it — the reasons are in the article!

slowboring.com/p/harris-is-ri…
Sep 12, 2024 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
You are absolutely being lied to, by Elon Musk and Donald Trump who are peddling bullshit about crime statistics to try to frighten you into cutting taxes for Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Image This entire conspiracy theory is based on data reporting problems *from 2022*

Please look at a calendar and report back to me what year it is today. Image
Aug 17, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Trump says: "A tariff is a tax on a foreign country. That's the way it is. And a lot of people like to say, 'oh, it's a tax on us.' No, no, no, it's a tax on a foreign country."

Not true IMO. Tax incidence is complicated, but a good rule of thumb to any question of the form “who pays the tax?” is that it’s some of both.

Note that unless consumers pay much of the incidence of a tariff it can’t help domestic producers!

slowboring.com/p/the-surprisi…