2024 United States Presidential Election Megathread

[MajesticLion]

 

[FunkDoc1112]

Kamala Harris with her grandmother, Beryl, in Jamaica, 1990

"While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last."

The newly elected Vice President is the first Black person, and first person of Asian descent elected to the position of Vice President of the United States.

She literally looks like an extra in a Salt n Pepa video and mfs on this of all forums really questioning her blackness lmao

 

[JLova]

So the thing they're doing now is trying to make her seem really dumb and drunk. You got high school dropouts calling her dumb.

 

[Samori Toure]

So the thing they're doing now is trying to make her seem really dumb and drunk. You got high school dropouts calling her dumb.

It is projection, because everyone knows that Dummy Trump is as dumb as shyt.

 

[skylove4]

Come on, son. I don't like them, but this is nasty work

EDIT: Hol' up, this is real?!?!?

You deserve that hairline for being this stupid

 

[JLova]

It is projection, because everyone knows that Dummy Trump is as dumb as shyt.

Intelligent people know this...but not that cult.

 

[bnew]

Donald Trump and JD Vance: Decoding a double dose of right-wing racism

Old-fashioned "paleoconservative" racism and neocon-flavored pseudoscience, united at last on the 2024 GOP ticket

www.salon.com

COMMENTARY

Donald Trump and JD Vance: Decoding a double dose of right-wing racism​

Old-fashioned "paleoconservative" racism and neocon-flavored pseudoscience, united at last on the 2024 GOP ticket​

By​

Contributing Writer

Published August 18, 2024 6:00AM (EDT)​

JD Vance and Donald Trump (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

The Republican ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance is currently being subjected to well-deserved ridicule, but even if their venture ends in defeat, powerful antidemocratic forces behind them — such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — aren’t going anywhere, and Trump’s base won't suddenly melt into nothing. Despite what looks to be their failure (so far) to score with racist and misogynist attacks on Kamala Harris, it’s worth taking a closer look at how two distinct streams of conservative racism have come together this year.

Two recent books I have covered for Salon shed light on these distinct forms. First was David Austin Walsh’s “Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right,” (author interview here), which explains that the “mainstream” conservative movement never rid itself of its fascist element and the "paleoconservatives" who have re-emerged in the Trump era. The second book is Annalee Newitz's “Stories Are Weapons” (interview here), which features a chapter about how neoconservatives (ideological rivals of the paleocons) tried to make racism great again with “The Bell Curve,” a 1994 book whose style of racist pseudoscience has flourished in Silicon Valley, including among JD Vance’s most significant backers.

I reached out to Walsh and Newitz in an effort to expand our understanding of the present moment, what brought us here and what may lie ahead. What they told me was both simple and complex. Here’s the simple part: The paleocons can be understood as old-fashioned, antisemitic white nationalists, representing a form of instinctive racist conservatism that resents and resists all change. The neocons' first intellectual leaders, on the other hand, were Jewish, and their "model minority" assimilation into the conservative movement typified the adaptive dynamic of a more pragmatic conservatism that accepts change and seeks to master it. Among other things, this involves intellectualizing racism in evolving ways — new bottles, same old whine. Yet at root, both forms boil down to denying the humanity of Black people, Native Americans and Muslims, along with a long list of racial, ethnic and religious "others." The differences are largely about how best to do this.

What makes things more complex starts with what’s new to the news cycle, including the resurgence of "race science" thanks to Vance and his Silicon Valley backers. But as Newitz writes, there’s nothing new about it. The "Bell Curve" moment of the 1990s, as Newitz frames it, was a psyop aimed at both the right's allies and adversaries, historically linked to the "Indian Wars" of the 19th century. By email, Newitz explained that when the U.S. government was waging war against "hundreds of Indigenous nations, [it] worked with churches and other groups to set up residential schools for Indigenous children":

These children were taken away from their families, without consent, and taught English, forced to convert to Christianity and learn "Western" ways of life. The idea was that these children were ignorant, and that there was something defective about the way Indigenous communities taught their children. Their minds, in other words, needed fixing.

This idea, that America's enemies are somehow mentally defective due to poor education or simply inferior minds, has continued into the present. It fits nicely with the history of eugenics and race science, which inform more modern works like “The Bell Curve.” The thread that connects them is the idea that marginalized groups are somehow less intelligent than white people, and that therefore they don't deserve the same privileges as white people. The argument in “The Bell Curve” is aimed at white people, at convincing them that they are inherently superior. If you think about it as a psychological weapon, however, its intent is also to undermine Black people's confidence in their own abilities, and more importantly, to make it harder for them to be taken seriously by white people.

The timing here is worth noting. Writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor had decisively smashed white male literary hegemony in the previous decade. Although no one outside the academic world had ever heard the term "critical race theory," it had been developing for almost two decades before “The Bell Curve” was published. The first two volumes of Martin Bernal's “Black Athena” were published in 1987 and 1991, challenging the received notion of ancient Greece as a distinctively European or "white" civilization. Legal scholar Lani Guinier's influential articles (collected here) advocated for a more inclusive and responsive democracy. That triggered a right-wing backlash after her former college friend Bill Clinton nominated Guinier for a key civil rights post in the Justice Department. Clinton hastily backed away, as did Sen. Joe Biden, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time.

"'The Bell Curve' was aimed at convincing white people that they were inherently superior. If you think about it as a psychological weapon, its intent was also to undermine Black people's confidence in their own abilities."

In other words, there had been a flowering of serious intellectual challenges to white racial hegemony. “The Bell Curve” implicitly rejected all of them, arguing against engaging in any argument at all. If it was a neocon psyop, as Newitz argues, white America’s elites were eager to embrace it. Newitz doesn't see much difference, however, between the neocons and the paleocons:

We see the same ideas about a natural hierarchy of intelligence, and even the same pseudo-scientific language about IQ being deployed. "The Bell Curve" doesn't call for Black people to be enslaved, but it does suggest that they might be kept fenced into high tech "reservations" for people who are too weak-minded to do work. I think if we acknowledge that this is a psyop, rather than a reasonable policy document, it becomes very obvious that "The Bell Curve" is dealing in mythology rather than science. It's about vibes, about reassuring white people that they are the best.

David Walsh, on the other hand, perceives crucial differences between the pseudo-fascist "paleocons" who are the focus of his book and the neoconservatives who became "a 'respectable' faction in Washington politics in the ‘80s and '90s," providing cues to many so-called liberals:

After all, most of the neocons started out as liberals in the 1950s and 1960s before moving right, due primarily to challenges from the left with more than a little schmear of good old-fashioned racism. That’s fundamentally why “The Bell Curve” gets such a rapturous response in the pages of The New Republic.

The real stakes of the infighting between neocons and paleocons in the 1970s and 1980s was over the ownership of American conservatism and who would get the spoils — whether it would be old stalwarts and loyalists who came up in more explicitly movement and/or populist circle, guys like [Pat] Buchanan, or whether the intellectuals who moved right had a meaningful leadership role to play. This was heavily tinged by antisemitism and a sense of resentment towards Jewish intellectuals who had moved right.

Perhaps the best big-picture way to understand this fight is found in Edward Fawcett’s “Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition,” (interview here), which surveys the history of conservative politics, culture and ideology from the early 1800s, both in the U.S. and Western Europe. The most crucial struggle Fawcett describes is between hard-line conservatives fundamentally opposed to liberal democracy and what he calls “liberal conservatives,” who seek accommodation in order to preserve their power.

At the level of governance, this involves “Tory men and Whig measures,” in the words of 19th-century British prime minister (and novelist) Benjamin Disraeli. At a more fundamental level, it means redrawing the lines of who’s included in the conservative coalition, and under what conditions. Landowning conservatives in England were originally hostile to the rising merchant class, but over time began include them in their coalition. This qualified assimilation of previously excluded groups became a familiar strategic trope in the “liberal conservative” arsenal.

Walsh also considers another aspect of the story: How liberals, in various ways and for a number of reasons, permitted or enabled this to happen. That’s the focus of his recent essay at the Boston Review literally arguing that “Liberals Are to Blame for the Rise of J.D. Vance.” As his subhead puts it, the liberal tendency to embrace "responsible conservatives" — defined as "someone who offers thoughtful critiques of the excesses of American liberalism and especially of the left" — has led to Vance as a vivid if illogical end point.

There has never been a parallel desire to identify a “responsible left,” meaning left-wing critics of liberalism such as Noam Chomsky, James Baldwin or Gore Vidal. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., often misleadingly portrayed today as a unifying centrist, was almost universally condemned for proposing U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

The liberal tendency to embrace "responsible conservatives" — defined as "someone who offers thoughtful critiques of the excesses of American liberalism and especially of the left" — has led to JD Vance as a vivid end point.

 

[bnew]

In Walsh's essay, the legendary conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. serves as his primary example, transitioning from radical fringe defender of McCarthy in the 1950s to mainstream fixture with the 1970s talk show "Firing Line." Ronald Reagan, the most prominent symbol of conservatism's triumph, followed a similar trajectory, moving much of conservative culture with him. In the latter part of his essay, Walsh argues that Vance's political trajectory is unusual because, "unlike Buckley or Reagan, who began as 'radicals' and morphed into 'responsible conservatives' as far as liberals were concerned, Vance has traveled the opposite direction."

That is, Vance has transitioned from a standard “never Trump” conservative to an enthusiastic Trump flunkey. But Walsh describes another complicated trajectory: that followed by the neocons who became Buckley’s allies in the 1970s but had earlier been among the first and fiercest liberal critics of both Joseph McCarthy and Buckley’s defense of McCarthy. This left-to-right voyage may be the most striking example of liberals moving rightward to accommodate “responsible conservatives,” while dismissing critics on the left.

That complicated backstory is significant to any understanding of the neocon-versus-paleocon infighting Walsh describes, such as the "outright resentment" felt by paleocons like Pat Buchanan toward Jewish intellectual neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol:

I think that you can explain part of this — and certainly William F. Buckley’s deepening ties with Jewish conservatives — by two things. One is the popularization of the “model minority” concept — American Jews were certainly prominent in this framing in the 1960s and 1970s — which simultaneously implied Jewish exceptionalism and the ultimate fairness of American society (i.e., the most deserving and hardworking groups get ahead). The other — and it’s intertwined with assimilation and meritocracy — is racism. This is the whole flipside to the model-minority approach — groups that haven’t “made it,” to paraphrase Podhoretz, haven’t made it on the merits. And this fits neatly with Buckley’s worldview!

"There was a lot of talk during Trump’s first term about how he was the first 'postmodern' president, but a lot of what pundits pointed to was pioneered by the Bush administration."

JD Vance fits the neocon model on multiple counts. First and most obviously, his Silicon Valley backers not only embrace the eugenic arguments advanced in “The Bell Curve,” but center those arguments ideologically. This connection, bringing Silicon Valley wealth and social media influence into the picture, is clearly a dominant consideration. Newitz offered several intertwined thoughts on the subject:

While researching my book, I found that techniques the military had used for psyops had become common in culture wars. ... Before that time, psyops had been reserved for use against foreign adversaries, but now they were being used by Americans on other Americans. Psychological war became culture war. And we're still seeing the results of that, with industry moguls taking up the cause in the present day. [Elon] Musk and [Peter] Thiel are doing essentially what rich industrialists such as Henry Ford did, when he bought a Michigan newspaper and used it to publish Nazi propaganda during the 1920s. ...

I think the ruling class always wants to justify its power with a mystical or pseudo-scientific story that suggests they are truly the chosen ones and that they deserve to rule. Of course the barons of Silicon Valley are drawn to myths about their superior intelligence because they work in an industry that values smarts and rewards brilliant inventors. The "Bell Curve" myth is also a story about meritocracy — it suggests that white people control the majority of our nation's wealth because they deserve it, due to their mental prowess. It has nothing to do with luck or inherited wealth or an unequal playing field.

There are other commonalities between Vance and the neocons. Given the conservative fantasy that white men are the new oppressed minority, Vance's heartland background signifies a "model minority" member who’s made it. But Vance also casts Appalachian culture more broadly in a caricatured, negative light — a fact that most elite commentators have missed, but which experts on the region have not. Finally, Vance's wife is Indian American, representing another "model minority" group reflected in such diverse figures as Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, among many others.

As Walsh notes, "There’s a fair amount of anti-Indian racism on the right," which "Trump tapped into" with his infamous remarks about Harris' racial background, "but that hasn’t precluded the right from making inroads and alliances with Indian Americans. 'Model minorities' may be rejected by the most nakedly racist factions ... but are still more or less assimilable on the American right."

So how did these factions come together in this year's presidential campaign? Walsh frames the question this way, and answers it:

How do we explain JD Vance, who comes out of neocon-influenced Silicon Valley but has become — at least superficially — a Trumpian populist? I think the key is to be found in the shared contempt for democracy and meaningfully democratic processes. Let’s not forget that the neocons came to power with the George W. Bush administration in 2001, which was predicated on using the Supreme Court and carefully mobilized grassroots intimidation to overturn the results of a presidential election.

Thanks in part to 9/11, the soft-coup nature of the 2000 election has largely been wiped from public memory. But the parallels between the Bush and Trump eras are chilling, as Walsh notes:

Remember the Brooks Brothers riot [during the Florida recount of 2000]? It was the neocon Jan. 6! Remember Karl Rove’s bizarre but extremely revealing rant about how America is an empire now and creates its own reality? There was a lot of talk in 2016 and during Trump’s first term about how he was the first “postmodern” president, but a lot of what pundits and analysts pointed to really was pioneered by the Bush administration.

I think the selection of Vance illustrates ... that Trumpism is a syncretic movement that brings together various factions on the right united by a shared contempt for liberalism as a political philosophy and democracy as a form of politics.

As for how liberals and progressives can counter this trend, Newitz suggests that moral and intellectual clarity are paramount:

We need to treat these racist myths as what they are: weapons in the culture war, intended to coerce, mislead and intimidate. They are not good-faith policy arguments or suggestions. But that doesn't mean we should take up arms against them. I argue for a ceasefire in the culture wars, which means that we need to tell different stories — stories about Black history, Black excellence and competence.

But it also means coming up with effective ways of dealing with misinformation and propaganda in the public sphere. ... There is no way to engage productively with psyops — you can't have a reasonable conversation with someone who is telling you that you are stupid or morally defective. I've been intrigued by the Harris campaign's shift away from trying to debate the neocons with logic about democracy — instead, they are telling a new story, about a Black and South Asian woman who represents justice and thoughtful engagement with real political policies. Instead of engaging with Trump's weaponized rhetoric, they are basically shrugging it off as "weird" and moving on. That's a great response to a psyop — decline to engage with it and change the subject to something real.

"There is no way to engage productively with psyops — you can't have a reasonable conversation with someone who is telling you that you are stupid or morally defective."

What lies ahead? Walsh said he has no idea: “If Trump wins, all bets are off,” but if the Democrats triumph, the future remains murky in a different way. “Ordinarily you’d expect an American political party to go through a profound leadership crisis if it loses multiple consecutive presidential elections," he said. "But considering how the GOP is effectively an apparatus of the Trump personality cult at this point, I think he remains the paramount figure until he dies ... There’s no universally popular successor.”

That is clearly reflected both in the history of right-wing authoritarian strongmen around the world and in Fawcett’s account of "liberal conservative" leaders of mainstream parties, who have rarely been able to pass their coalitions along to successors.

Newitz sees "a lot of psyops" ahead, often "disguised as good-faith political rhetoric":

Don't be fooled: If a politician or leader is using violent threats, lies or scapegoating a marginalized group in their speeches, then you're in the realm of psyops. Those are the kinds of statements you can dismiss as just weird and myth-based. I'm not saying we shouldn't have intense debates! But "debates" involve evidence-based statements, and a grounding in history and context. They are not vibes and insults.

That's a tall order, in an age when both mainstream media and social media platforms have retreated from past standards of vigilance. To this point, the Harris-Walz campaign has set a high standard in responding to Trump’s torrents of lies and advancing straightforward, fact-based political discourse. Can we change the media environment, and restore the kind of debate Newitz advocates? Anything's possible.

 

[bnew]

Harris has the right idea on housing

It has to be managed as both a consumer good and as an asset class.

www.noahpinion.blog

Noahpinion​

Harris has the right idea on housing​

It has to be managed as both a consumer good and as an asset class.​

Noah Smith

Aug 18, 2024





Photo by Micah Carlson on Unsplash

Kamala Harris recently released a bunch of economic proposals, so I’ll be writing a few more posts about her ideas. I was definitely not a fan of Harris’ idea to outlaw “price gouging” at grocery stores (which, fortunately, she seems to be walking back a bit). But I do like her ideas on housing. And since these ideas have also gotten some flak from various centrist commentators, I thought I should stick up for Harris here and explain why I think her approach is good.

First, this requires explaining why housing policy in America is difficult, and what I think an ideal policy would look like.

Housing policy is incredibly tough in America — and in most other rich countries — because housing has to serve two functions at once. It’s both a consumption good and an investment asset. A house is a place to live, but it’s also something that’s supposed to make you wealthier over time, when its price goes up. These two objectives directly conflict — if owner-occupied housing becomes more affordable, that makes most Americans poorer.

When I say “most Americans”, I’m not exaggerating. The homeownership rate is about two thirds, with only small fluctuations. And for middle-class Americans, most of their wealth is the value of their home:




Source: Noah Smith

This fact sets up a direct and inevitable conflict between two large classes of American society: homebuyers versus homeowners. If you’re buying a house for the first time or looking to significantly upgrade, you want house prices to be as low as possible. But if you already own a home that you’re happy with, you want the price of that home to be as high as possible, so that you can make the homebuyers pay you a lot of money when you’re finally ready to sell. It’s basically a zero-sum game.

Now at this point, most people say “This is a bad system, it doesn’t have to be this way.” But unfortunately, they’re probably wrong. Lots of people cite Japan as a place where houses depreciate, but this is actually a statistical trick. Japan breaks out the value of housing structures and land separately. The housing structures depreciate, but the land under the houses — which represents 85% of the total value of housing/land in Japan — actually appreciates over time. In fact, Japan has a much higher percent of total household wealth tied up in owner-occupied housing/land than America does. America actually has the lowest percent of wealth in housing out of any OECD country:




Source: OECD

So we’re basically stuck with the homeowner wealth problem — it’s just not going to go away anytime soon. House prices are always going to be a tug of war between homebuyers and homeowners.

Given that inescapable fact, what do you do? A good housing policy needs to make housing abundant without destroying the financial wealth of the middle class. The best policy is one that walks a tightrope between the negative outcomes of “too expensive” and “too cheap”.

As I see it, this means an ideal housing policy has two key characteristics:

1. 
   It consistently creates a lot of new housing supply, and
   
2. 
   It makes housing wealth appreciate slowly but steadily over time, so that people leave the system richer than they bought in.
   

The second part is really tricky! If house prices go up too fast, people can’t buy in to the system, but if they go up too slow or fall over time, buying in to the system doesn’t yield rewards for the middle class. So the key is slow and steady price appreciation.

The country that probably accomplishes these two goals better than any other is Singapore. In Singapore, the government controls the supply of housing, because it owns about 90% of the land, and can decide how much to build. Singapore’s Housing Development Board increases supply slowly and steadily over time, so that everyone has a place to live, and so that housing — at least, theoretically — earns a modest but predictable financial return.1

In practice it doesn’t always work out that perfectly. In the 90s and 00s, Singaporean housing prices stagnated, and since 2009 they’ve risen a bit too fast, reducing affordability. Housing prices are very hard to control with supply alone, even when the government owns all the land. But in general, Singapore does a great job of ensuring housing abundance while also maintaining very high levels of homeownership (>90%), and predictable financial returns for a wealthy middle class.

Singapore also uses one other strategy to ensure predictable financial returns for homeowners. It gives lower-income first-time homebuyers a government grant to help them buy houses. These grants are currently worth about $61,000 in U.S. dollars, and you have to make less than about $82,000 U.S. in order to qualify for one. Some second-time homebuyers also qualify for a smaller grant.

This is a form of wealth redistribution. It means that as long as lower-income people buy into the housing system, they basically get a free $61,000, since the price of their house on the secondary market is the same as if they had paid full price for it. Obviously this grant comes out of government funds, which ultimately come from Singaporean taxpayers. So it is a redistribution of wealth from richer Singaporeans to poorer Singaporeans, and also from older Singaporeans to younger Singaporeans.

What does that redistribution accomplish? Well, it reduces inequality and keeps the population happier. It also gives lower-income people some property ownership, which means they have a stake in the economic system. And it creates the feeling of upward mobility, because by the time the people who got the first-time homebuyer grant are ready to sell their house, it’s worth a lot more than what they paid for it, even if the market price hasn’t gone up much.p”, so I will too. It’s basically like condominium ownership in the United States.

 

[bnew]

There’s a cost to this redistribution too — not just the cost of taxation, but also the fact that subsidizing lower-income first-time homebuyers tends to push up property prices for everyone else. Singapore handles this by increasing supply to compensate.

Obviously, there are some key aspects of the Singaporean housing system that America can’t copy — our government doesn’t own most of the urban land, like in Singapore. But I think there’s a lot we can do to approximate the Singaporean system, or at least move in its general direction. The key “Singaporean-style” approaches would be:

1. 
   Have government increase the supply of housing, through deregulation, construction incentives for cities and private companies, and government housing construction
   
2. 
   Give credits to first-time low-income homebuyers
   

And this is exactly what Kamala Harris’ housing plan does.

Here are the key elements of Harris’ housing plan:

• Up to $25,000 in down-payment support for first-time homebuyers.
  
• To provide a $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers.
  
• Tax incentives for builders that build starter homes sold to first-time buyers.
  
• An expansion of a tax incentive for building affordable rental housing.
  
• A new $40 billion innovation fund to spur innovative housing construction.
  
• To repurpose some federal land for affordable housing.
  
• A ban on algorithm-driven price-setting tools for landlords to set rents.
  
• To remove tax benefits for investors who buy large numbers of single-family rental homes.
  

Points 1-2 of these are credits to first-time homebuyers. Points 4-6 are supply expansion, with Point 6 — the use of federal land for housing construction — looking very Singaporean. Point 3 is a combination of both. (Points 7-8 are other, generally unrelated antimonopoly stuff that I think is probably fine.)

Importantly, increasing the housing supply is central to Harris’ plan. It’s certainly central to her messaging:




Biden’s rhetoric has been very similar:




Critics like to say that progressive policy is all about “subsidizing demand while restricting supply”. In this case, though, that criticism doesn’t apply. Harris has tons of ideas for increasing supply, some of which involve activist government, others of which involve deregulation:




In fact, Harris’ plan comes on top of a bunch of other Biden administration initiatives to increase housing supply, mostly using deregulatory approaches. I wrote about Biden’s moves in my roundup yesterday, but I’ll just quote some of the excerpts from that plan again here:

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is announcing the availability of $100 million…to communities to identify and remove barriers to affordable housing production and preservation…

The Department of the Treasury and HUD are announcing a major improvement to the Federal Financing Bank (FFB) Multifamily Risk Sharing Program that would provide greater interest rate predictability for state and local housing finance agencies…

Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) and Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing (RRIF) loans used for conversion projects may be eligible for a categorical exclusion under…NEPA…

The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) proposed a new tool that would accelerate historic preservation reviews for millions of federally-funded, licensed, or owned housing units…

HUD anticipates finalizing a rule to update its Manufactured Home Construction and Safety Standards…[T]he new rule, if finalized, would enable duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes to be built under the HUD Code for the first time…

The Council of Economic Advisers analyzed the importance of state and local government actions to permit and approve new developments more quickly, including examples from HUD’s PRO Housing grants…Reforms to streamline permitting processes can lead to more housing being built more quickly, which will lower housing costs.

In other words, the Harris economic program — and the Biden program — are solidly in line with the YIMBY movement that has been winning victories at the state level. The key to the YIMBY movement is that it emphasizes goals over methods — the idea is to build housing by any means necessary, including deregulation, tax incentives, and government housing construction all at once. Harris’ plan embodies this all-of-the-above approach.

Critics have lambasted Harris’ first-time homebuyer grants as just another demand subsidy that will push up prices. But Singapore does the same thing! And research suggests that the effect on prices won’t be that huge. This is from Berger, Turner, and Zwick (2020):

Using difference-indifferences and regression kink research designs, we find that the First-Time Homebuyer Credit increased home sales by 490,000 (9.8%), median home prices by $2,400 (1.1%) per standard deviation increase in program exposure, and the transition rate into homeownership by 53%. The policy response did not reverse immediately. Instead, demand comes from several years in the future: induced buyers were three years younger in 2009 than typical first-time buyers. The program’s market-stabilizing benefits likely exceeded its direct stimulus effects.

A small price increase like that — the grant was about 1/4 the size of the one Harris is proposing — seems like a very small price to pay to help lower-income Americans and younger Americans climb onto the ladder of housing wealth. And the subsidy will be paired with efforts to increase supply. Also, remember that the modest price increase from the first-time homebuyer grants will flow into the pockets of America’s middle-class homeowning majority.

So basically, I’m not worried about that.

Harris’ YIMBY plan won’t fix all that’s wrong with housing in America. Our state and local laws are too fragmented, and our NIMBYs too entrenched, for any federal plan to make the housing shortage go away. But making the U.S. just a little bit more like Singapore can only be a good thing, and that’s what Harris is trying to do here.

---

Technically, what Singaporeans own is not the land under their houses, but a 99-year lease on their living spaces. The 99-year lease thing is actually a flaw in the system, since it causes a disruption when the lease runs out, kind of like an expiring option. It would be better to just have permanent titles to the living spaces, but restrictions on passing these down via inheritance. In any case, a lot of people refer to ownership of these 99-year leases as “homeownershi

 

[bnew]

Fox’s Brit Hume Lays Out BRUTAL Reason Trump Is Struggling Against Harris: Most Americans Don’t Like Him

Hume joined a Fox News Sunday panel following an interview between host Shannon Bream and Sen. JD Vance to discuss the state of the race.

www.mediaite.com

Fox’s Brit Hume Lays Out BRUTAL Reason Trump Is Struggling Against Harris: Most Americans Don’t Like Him​

Kipp JonesAug 18th, 2024, 1:35 pm




Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume said former President Donald Trump could very well win the 2024 election but predicted it would be close because Trump is disliked by a majority of the electorate.

Hume joined a Fox News Sunday panel following an interview between host Shannon Bream and Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) to discuss the state of the race with fewer than three months until Election Day.

Bream noted Vance had told her that Republicans had a winning message but she also cited network polling that showed 65 percent of voters are not satisfied with the direction of the country. She asked Hume why Trump was statistically tied with Vice President Kamala Harris despite the fact so many voters are displeased with the state of the country.
“Because he’s Trump,” Hume said. “When you get down to it, the past eight to TEN years have been about Donald Trump. Everything has been about Donald Trump. I don’t think that the Democrats would have let Joe Biden get as far as he did if it wasn’t – if the party hadn’t been confident that the Republicans were going to nominate Donald Trump again, which the Republicans did.”

Hume concluded Trump’s issue is he is disliked by more than half of voters.

Hume said:

The fact that Biden was doing even as well as he did until the very end, is a testament to the fact that Donald Trump has a very hard, solid base of support, but it never gets above about 40 to 45 percent, maybe a little more at best. So, his weakness is the predicate for our politics going back now three elections.

He was able to surmount Hillary Clinton, a uniquely unpopular opponent, but he couldn’t beat Biden, and you know you look at the losses in the midterms – or the disappointing results in the midterms. It’s all about one thing, it’s about that. Donald Trump, no matter how enthusiastic supporters are, nonetheless, is not a majority candidate. He might win, but he’s not a majority candidate.

Bream noted that Trump is routinely advised by many capable people and asked Karl Rove why he the former president is struggling in recent polling despite having an edge on the economy with voters. Rove replied:

Well, first of all, he does listen to a lot of people, but the first he listens to is the inner voice, and we see it in these rallies, which are a particularly undisciplined form of communications. Look, think about it, two-thirds of the American people think we’re going in the wrong direction.

He leads on the issue of who’s better on the economy, who’s better on inflation, who’s better on migration. That’s all all good numbers for him. and yet this race today he’s behind and why is he behind? Because he is making this race about things other than the three big issues in this campaign – the economy, inflation, and immigration.

Rove concluded Trump is “fundamentally undisciplined.”

Watch the clip above via Fox News.

 

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OMG. Trump is so desperate. He just posted AI-generated pictures about swifties for Trump.


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The DNC projected “Project 2025 HQ” onto Trump Tower in Chicago

Trump must be pissed


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Harris will bring down healthcare costs and go after companies for price gouging

She will end GREEDFLATION

Trump will give his billionaires even more tax cuts & corporate welfare

This a no brainer, folks

Please watch and share my interview with @johnrobertsFox on @AmericaRpts

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If you don’t want Trump’s multi-trillion tax breaks for billionaires and corporations to continue, share this everywhere
Corporations should not be able to take advantage of the American people: Lindy Li | Fox News Video


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