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That is interesting. I kind of feel like Charlie Brown and the football...If we agree to get rid of the safety net before UBI is implemented, I don't think the

That is interesting. I kind of feel like Charlie Brown and the football...If we agree to get rid of the safety net before UBI is implemented, I don't think the conservatives would follow through. I really don't. I don't think that they are interested in co-governance anymore.

mikeash 10y ago
Seems obvious. It's like the current talk of repealing the ACA and then replacing it with something later. If you actually mean to replace it, there's no reason not to figure out the replacement first, and do essentially an atomic swap of the two.
- clarkmoody 10y ago
  You guys are forgetting that politics is a greedy-search of the issue-space. The typical politician will say whatever it takes to obtain short-term gains in power. Come election time, that means appealing to the base. Come governance time, it means keeping the lobbyists happy and making deals to advance their own career within the legislature. Why have Republicans never taken meaningful action on abortion? Because they wouldn't be able to campaign on it every 2 years. So when it comes to government benefits / entitlements / welfare, the politician must weigh the cost of taking away goodies from the constituents, keeping campaign promises to the base, and keeping lobbyists happy. The choice will be what yields the most short-term political gain. Nobody's talking about making the real tax-code reforms that will lead to long-term benefits: eliminating the mortgage interest deduction and making healthcare benefits taxable as income. Those will never happen because tax rates would go up on the middle-class voters for both parties. But the long-term economic benefits would be excellent. There are other parts of the tax code that make no sense economically but lots of sense politically.
  - aaron-lebo 10y ago
    You are correct. This is politics 101 as put forward by David Mayhew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress:_The_Electoral_Connection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress:_The_Electoral_Connec...
    - clarkmoody 10y ago
      See also: Public Choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice
  - mikeash 10y ago
    I don't think I'm forgetting it so much as pointing it out in a roundabout way. I agree with what you say, and these seemingly weird contradictions in political talk are clearly coming from this.
aaron-lebo 10y ago
I don't think it's quite that bad. It's also not new. He described the passage of the bill as something of a “con-job” that allowed millions of immigrants in the country illegally to have legal status with a promise of workplace enforcement and other measures to curb future illegal immigration. But that didn’t happen, he said. And there was little incentive to follow through on promises of strict workplace enforcement, he said, once millions of people were legalized. “I definitely view this as the 30-year problem,” said Doris Meissner, who headed the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service under Bill Clinton and is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/todays-immigration-debate-rooted-reagan-amnesty-experts-say/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/todays-immigration-debat... Both parties are self-serving and don't trust each other for good reason.

mikeash 10y ago

Seems obvious. It's like the current talk of repealing the ACA and then replacing it with something later. If you actually mean to replace it, there's no reason not to figure out the replacement first, and do essentially an atomic swap of the two.

clarkmoody 10y ago
You guys are forgetting that politics is a greedy-search of the issue-space. The typical politician will say whatever it takes to obtain short-term gains in power. Come election time, that means appealing to the base. Come governance time, it means keeping the lobbyists happy and making deals to advance their own career within the legislature. Why have Republicans never taken meaningful action on abortion? Because they wouldn't be able to campaign on it every 2 years. So when it comes to government benefits / entitlements / welfare, the politician must weigh the cost of taking away goodies from the constituents, keeping campaign promises to the base, and keeping lobbyists happy. The choice will be what yields the most short-term political gain. Nobody's talking about making the real tax-code reforms that will lead to long-term benefits: eliminating the mortgage interest deduction and making healthcare benefits taxable as income. Those will never happen because tax rates would go up on the middle-class voters for both parties. But the long-term economic benefits would be excellent. There are other parts of the tax code that make no sense economically but lots of sense politically.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  You are correct. This is politics 101 as put forward by David Mayhew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress:_The_Electoral_Connection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress:_The_Electoral_Connec...
  - clarkmoody 10y ago
    See also: Public Choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice
- mikeash 10y ago
  I don't think I'm forgetting it so much as pointing it out in a roundabout way. I agree with what you say, and these seemingly weird contradictions in political talk are clearly coming from this.

aaron-lebo 10y ago

I don't think it's quite that bad. It's also not new. He described the passage of the bill as something of a “con-job” that allowed millions of immigrants in the country illegally to have legal status with a promise of workplace enforcement and other measures to curb future illegal immigration. But that didn’t happen, he said. And there was little incentive to follow through on promises of strict workplace enforcement, he said, once millions of people were legalized. “I definitely view this as the 30-year problem,” said Doris Meissner, who headed the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service under Bill Clinton and is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/todays-immigration-debate-rooted-reagan-amnesty-experts-say/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/todays-immigration-debat... Both parties are self-serving and don't trust each other for good reason.