#david leonhardt

David Leonhardt: What do you think is the most likely mistake that Democrats would make in 2028? Richard Thaler: Choosing the candidate that Democrats like best rather than the one who has the best chance to get elected. David Leonhardt: What would you say to someone who argues that electability is unknowable — and so Democrats should pick the candidate they like most and hope for the best? Richard Thaler: To be clear, I don’t think that the mistake we are talking about is any more common among Democrats than Republicans. It is simply human nature to think that other people share our views. Lovers of cilantro don’t understand why others can’t stand the stuff. And vice versa. Both parties have made the mistake of nominating a candidate that was ideologically unacceptable to most voters – Barry Goldwater for Republicans in 1964, George McGovern for Democrats in 1972. Both suffered gigantic losses. Today, neither party has close to a majority of the voters, so the next President will be someone who can attract votes from both independents and members of the opposing party.

Democrats need to select somebody who can BOTH fire up the base AND have some crossover appeal. Looking back through history, John F. Kennedy succeeded in both ways and won a close election in 1960.

JFK was not as liberal as people may view him today. In terms of policy, he was something of a centrist during his Senate years. But he was young and could talk a good talk. And when push came to shove, he did use the power of the federal government as president to desegregate state universities in the South – a big deal at the time. In other words, he exceeded expectations.

In both 1952 and 1956 Democrats nominated liberal intellectual Adlai Stevenson. He was beaten in '52 and beaten badly in '56. Though despite the latter defeat, Dems retained control of both chambers of Congress in the 1956 election. Winning in 1960 meant broadening the party's national appeal.

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

The New York Times has recently come under fire for platforming writers who push disinformation on transgender care. In the last several months, articles from anti-trans authors such as Pamela Paul and others have repeatedly been cited to justify harsh crackdowns on trans care in Republican-controlled states. Now, in the wake of President Joe Biden withdrawing from the 2024 election and endorsing his vice president, Kamala Harris, the largest newspaper in the United States has published advice for her that many may find completely unsurprising: target transgender kids to appear more moderate. In an article published in the New York Times newsletter, The Morning, a long-time senior writer David Leonhardt listed five issues that Kamala Harris could target to appear more moderate to voters and win votes. One of the issues was transgender rights, suggesting that the Democratic Party should compromise on transgender issues to gain support in the next election.

[...]

Notably, Leonhardt makes a weak case in his advice for Vice President Harris that many will view as unsurprising. The link chosen to support his claim that Democrats are "well to the public’s left" on transgender issues merely directs readers to another New York Times article by Pamela Paul, which has already been fact-checked and found to contain false and misleading information. The Pamela Paul story falls far short of supporting the idea that the public is significantly opposed to transgender issues.

While some polls show opposition to aspects like sports participation, more recent surveys indicate that the public is against bans on gender-affirming care and does not view transgender issues as particularly salient or worth legislating over. Gallup, Navigator, and the LA Times have all released polls within the last three months showing that the American public views trans issues as a major distraction, opposes forced outing policies, and rejects bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youth. In Gallup’s case, multiple ways of asking about gender-affirming care bans did not affect the result.

[...] Ultimately, if Vice President Harris aims to win the 2024 election, she might instead consider the recession of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ panic within public opinion and the documented failures of anti-LGBTQ+ platforms in the political arena. By standing firm on protecting transgender care and rejecting far-right pressures, Harris could present herself as a candidate of integrity and empathy, rather than someone who attacks whatever marginalized group the New York Times has designed as politically expedient to do so.

NY Times writer David Leonhardt has terrible advice on transgender health issues for Kamala Harris: become more like the Labour Party on trans issues.

op-ed by David Leonhardt: Why Are Republican Presidents So Bad for the Economy? - The New York Times. Per Leonhardt:

A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.

It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. . . . The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”

First, it’s worth rejecting a few unlikely possibilities. Congressional control is not the answer. The pattern holds regardless of which party is running Congress. Deficit spending also doesn’t explain the gap: It is not the case that Democrats juice the economy by spending money and then leave Republicans to clean up the mess. Over the last four decades, in fact, Republican presidents have run up larger deficits than Democrats.

That leaves one broad possibility with a good amount of supporting evidence: Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation. Democrats, in short, have been more pragmatic.

A voluntary tax

It’s been a back-and-forth struggle over the course of American history: How much tax should the wealthy pay?

In colonial times, parts of the North taxed the rich more than Europe did, with Massachusetts going so far as to enact a wealth tax that covered financial holdings, land, jewelry and more. Southern colonies, by contrast, kept rates low and collection ineffectual, to prevent taxes from undermining slavery by eroding the wealth of slaveholders.

After the country’s founding, the low-tax advocates generally won out — until the 20th century, when soaring inequality, two wars and the Great Depression led Washington to create the world’s most progressive tax system. Then the situation flipped again, and top tax rates have plummeted over the last few decades.

Yesterday, the news organization ProPublica published a scoop, based on the tax returns of thousands of wealthy Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. An anonymous source sent ProPublica the material after the organization had published articles about the I.R.S.’s lax enforcement of taxes on the wealthy. (Here’s ProPublica’s explanation of why it decided to publish the new story, despite privacy concerns.)

The tax returns offer details on a story that has long been clear: The wealthy now pay strikingly low tax rates.

To take one example, Bezos’s wealth soared by $120 billion from 2006 to 2018, and his federal taxes during that time amounted to only 1.09 percent of the wealth gain. The situation for the average household was radically different: Its taxes amounted to more than 100 percent of its wealth increase.

‘Buy, borrow, die’

A central reason that very wealthy people can avoid taxes is that the U.S. system taxes only so-called realized gains — like wages or stock sales. But the wealthy often live off unrealized gains — in the form of stocks and other assets that grow more valuable over time. The wealthy borrow against these assets to pay for houses, islands and private planes and then use a variety of strategies to avoid paying taxes on the debt repayment.

One such strategy is waiting until after death to repay the loan — or what Edward McCaffery, a tax expert at the University of Southern California, calls “buy, borrow, die.” Robert McClelland of the Tax Policy Center called it the main revelation of the ProPublica story.

All the while, the wealthy are often able to keep their taxable income low. In 2011, Bezos reported so little income that he qualified for — and claimed — a $4,000 child tax credit. In both 2016 and 2017, Carl Icahn, who’s a billionaire, paid no federal income taxes.

Legal tax avoidance by the wealthy has become more widespread over the past half-century for several reasons. For one, inequality has soared, meaning that the rich have more wealth to protect. And tax rates have fallen significantly.

“It’s amazing how much we’ve cut taxes even since 1997 — on dividends, the estate tax threshold, capital gains and the top rate,” Owen Zidar, a Princeton University economist, told me. “All of those things have become more favorable to the top of the distribution.” The decline in the corporate tax rate — effectively a tax reduction for shareholders — has also been important.

You sometimes hear the cynical view that raising taxes on the wealthy is pointless, because they have the resources to evade any taxes the government tries to impose. But history suggests otherwise.

While some tax avoidance is inevitable, the federal government has largely succeeded in raising taxes when it has tried. The very richest Americans paid more than 50 percent of their income in federal taxes during the 1950s and ’60s (and were less successful at shielding their wealth from taxation). Today, that percentage has fallen below 30 percent.

There are three main ways to reverse the decline in tax payments by the wealthy, Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, said. One is a direct tax on wealth, like those proposed by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Two is a tax on unrealized gains — assets that have become more valuable — as Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has proposed. Three is an increase in corporate taxes, as President Biden favors. There are also more modest ideas, like a larger estate tax.

Societies can choose how much they do or don’t tax their wealthiest people, Zucman said. “For billionaires,” he added, “the federal income tax — the pillar of the U.S. tax system — has become a voluntary tax.”

Reactions to the story

Michael Linden, Biden administration official: “We already knew that some of the biggest corporations pay no income tax. Now we know that some of the wealthiest people can also get away with paying no income tax. Time for reform.”

Binyamin Appelbaum, New York Times Opinion: “The wealthy are living by a different set of rules, lavishly spending money that isn’t taxed as income.”

Jody Avirgan, podcast host: “There’s already a jaded take emerging around the ProPublica IRS reporting, along the lines of ‘what’s the scandal, this is all stuff that any rich person or financial journalist already knew about.’ But, like, that’s the point!”

This is an important article by David Leonhardt about why the U.S.’s response to COVID-19 has been far worse than the response of any other developed nation in the world. The New York Times conducted “numerous interviews with scientists and public health experts around the world” in order to better understand what happened in the U.S. Here are some excerpts from the article.

“Over the past month, about 1.9 million Americans have tested positive for the virus.

“That’s more than five times as many as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined.

“Even though some of these countries saw worrying new outbreaks over the past month, including 50,000 new cases in Spain ...

“... the outbreaks still pale in comparison to those in the United States. Florida, with a population less than half of Spain, has reported nearly 300,000 cases in the same period.

“When it comes to the virus, the United States has come to resemble not the wealthy and powerful countries to which it is often compared but instead to far poorer countries, like Brazil, Peru and South Africa, or those with large migrant populations, like Bahrain and Oman....

“First, the United States faced longstanding challenges in confronting a major pandemic.... with a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions. That tradition is one reason the United States suffers from an unequal health care system that has long produced worse medical outcomes — including higher infant mortality and diabetes rates and lower life expectancy — than in most other rich countries....

“But many agree that the poor results in the United States stem in substantial measure from the performance of the Trump administration.

“In no other high-income country — and in only a few countries, period — have political leaders departed from expert advice as frequently and significantly as the Trump administration. President Trump has said the virus was not serious; predicted it would disappear; spent weeks questioning the need for masks; encouraged states to reopen even with large and growing caseloads; and promoted medical disinformation....

“Together, the national skepticism toward collective action and the Trump administration’s scattered response to the virus have contributed to several specific failures and missed opportunities, Times reporting shows:

a lack of effective travel restrictions;

repeated breakdowns in testing;

confusing advice about masks;

a misunderstanding of the relationship between the virus and the economy;

and inconsistent messages from public officials.

“Already, the American death toll is of a different order of magnitude than in most other countries. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has accounted for 22 percent of coronavirus deaths. Canada, a rich country that neighbors the United States, has a per capita death rate about half as large. And these gaps may worsen in coming weeks, given the lag between new cases and deaths.”

It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad. Evidently America’s foremost scientific agency needs Leonhardt to prepare the political ground for them before announcing new guidance by nudging liberals to relax their hypercautious expectations a bit. And the expectations for summer camp really were hypercautious. Even by CDC standards, wanting kids aged two and over to mask up outdoors, in the heat, and to social distance as much as possible while at camp with friends was a ludicrous, borderline punitive expectation.

Thank goodness Leonhardt intervened when he did or else our science bureaucracy might have insisted on masking toddlers during games of tag after all. Here’s the new guidance:

About 2.5 million adolescents in that younger age group (12-15) have already had one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, said Erin Sauber-Schatz, team lead for CDC’s Community Interventions and Critical Populations Task Force, which wrote the guidance.

“We have this whole group of adolescents who by mid- to late summer can be fully vaccinated. … Camps are at a point where they can offer an opportunity to have a camp setting where everyone is fully vaccinated,” Sauber-Schatz said, adding that such a scenario can enable a “pre-pandemic camp experience” with neither masking nor physical distancing.

Of course, many camps serve younger children who cannot yet be vaccinated, and for those settings, the guidance became somewhat more complex. At camps where not everyone is vaccinated, the guidance says, vaccinated people do not need masks. But unvaccinated people are “strongly encouraged” — though not obligated — to wear masks indoors, and they should wear masks outdoors in crowds or when close to others for prolonged periods.

In other words, vaccinated teens can go nuts and drop all rules whereas unvaccinated younger kids are okay to skip masks outdoors unless they’re all huddled together in a crowd and to skip them indoors at their own risk. (Which isn’t much.) Much more sensible. But there’s one thing I still don’t understand. Watch this short clip from May 11, when Walensky testified about how much her 16-year-old son looks forward to camp every year — and how he wouldn’t be going this summer.

He [Trump] is the president of the United States, and he is a threat to virtually everything that the United States should stand for.