https://twitter.com/sadgrlships/stat...80747005943810

Jay Inslee (governor of Washington, which is, according to US News and World Reports, the best state to live in) has little chance of winning the nomination. However, he is doing good work as an issue-focused candidate running on the need to combat climate change. Here is his website issue page, which focuses exclusively on climate change. Here is Vox reporter David Roberts on his fairly detailed plan. A few highlights:

-costs $9 trillion over 10 years ($3t in public and $6t in private)
-$3 trillion to infrastructure.
-$2 trillion to subsidies for clean manufacturing
-$350 billion to research
-subsidies to building upgrades to make them more energy efficient.
-subsidies to job programs for former coal workers and a "G.I. Bill" and other green job programs
-requiring all new cars have to be 100% zero-emission by 2030
-investing in EV charging infrastructure
-requiring federal buildings be carbon neutral.
-subsidies for energy efficiency in new construction

And much else.

It's tough to win when dealing with specifics like this.

Once again, the perfect candidate is Lori Lightfoot. If you want identity politics, then put your money where your mouth is!

I have vague plans to actually start paying attention to specific policy proposals from candidates soon. At least before the debates. There's a fair amount at Vox which I haven't really looked at closely.

Noteworthy today: Beto O'Rourke's Immigration proposal (PDF here)

A lot of stuff you'd expect (stop building the wall; support for a path to citizenship for the currently undocumented, etc.) and probably a lot of ideas that won't pass Congress, but worth a look. Some other interesting bits:

It looks like it's gonna be Biden. Personally, I think Biden is too old.

Joe Biden... or the progressives will have to rally around one compromise candidate. i think it'd be Elizabeth Warren. but i doubt Bernie Sanders will do that.

Joe Biden’s $5 trillion climate plan: Net zero emissions by 2050

The article provides some other details about the proposals, and there is more on Biden's website.

I'm not sure how important, in practice, the differences between the candidates' climate proposals will be.

It seems everyone’s policies are going to be so substantively different (at least on paper) to what the Trump administration is doing, the nuances seem insignificant compared to the importance to get him out of office by picking the best candidate to do that.

Elizabeth Warren’s latest big idea is “economic patriotism”

I assume some of those bullet points are going to seem a little reminiscent of central planning to some observers, like "various rules to ensure that the federal government captures the financial upside of commercial products that depend on federal R&D", but it at least seems interesting to me. I have basically no idea how to evaluate this plan overall. I'm curious to hear her talk more about it (I'm sure she has and will).

I think the idea of a Dept. of Economic Development sounds interesting, if bringing together different parts of the bureaucracy can rationalize some decisions tying together R&D with job training, and so on.

Imo, the difference is Inslee has an actual integrated plan that while costing more in the near term will pay off significantly more in the future due to the significant productivity investments both in terms of technology, infrastructure and most importantly investment in human capital to improve employee skill.

Like OrP said, he probably doesn’t have a chance, but if he actually wants a shot at winning he really needs to get out of the ‘climate change’ lane and focus on the economic side of his plan because Dems are already sold on climate change. So he’s basically preaching to the choir with that. What they along with a lot in the middle are not sold on is how we’re going to go about things in a somewhat fiscally responsible manner without giving the government a carte blanche mandate to do whatever. He also needs to be upfront about who is ultimately going to foot the bill for all this—everyone earning above average income, not just corporations and the rich. The latter is b.s. no matter who’s peddling it.

So there's an open lane for him, imo. And if he gets an endorsement from the Gates-Buffet crowd and in some bizzaro world AOC drops her allegiance to Democratic Socialism and buys into Inslee's social democracy model.... We now return you to your regularly scheduled program: Reality.

Cory Booker's most distinctive policy is his "baby bonds" proposal. This legislation would give every newborn a $1000 bond held by the government (so 2-3% increase per year). Each year until the age of 18 they would get an additional amount added based on family income, ranging from $0 - $2000. Then at 18, the kid can use the bond for a limited number of purchases, such as college tuition, down payment on a house, or retirement. The range of a baby bond for an 18-year-old would be between $1681 and $46,215.

The plan would cost about $80b p/year and Booker proposes paying for it through an increase in estate taxes and the capital gains tax.

I remember reading about that and thinking it seems like a pretty cool idea.

For the love of god, not Biden...

The part you quoted is based on the work by Mariana Mazzucato.
It's definitely not like state planning, but does have some characteristics of state capitalism (think Norway's sovereign wealth fund). She basically laims that most of the groundbreaking innovation is actually government funded research, so the government should receive compensation for the innovation so that it can fund more basic research. Below is a link to the pamphlet she wrote as well as a condensed version for Foreign Affairs and a Ted Talk she did on it.
Entrepreneurial State
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/artic...novative-state

FWIW climate change policy is not a winning issue for the Dem POTUS candidate in the general.

10 best selling vehicles in the United States 2018 were mostly trucks and SUVs

yes it is

Maybe I'm out of touch, and I don't have my finger on the pulse of the American voter, but I'd lay big odds that it's Warren who's out of touch. Championing some economic scheme of shifting around a bunch of bureaucracy which emulates foreign governments is not how you grow a voter base. I think she's been dead in the water anyway since that 1/1024th fiasco, although her utter lack of charisma as essentially an ersatz Hillary probably precluded her long before then. To be fair, maybe she asked a bunch of voters what issues they cared about and a lot responded, "Our economic bureaucracy's structure and role in private investment." So maybe she's on the right track.

That Cory Booker plan also seems like a big misstep, although since he's already defined himself and his campaign as the race-card wealth distribution platform, I'm not sure what other options he had. His "modern-day lynching" of his friend Smollett didn't redound to his credit, especially after he refused to walk back his comments in light of it all being a hoax. Now reading that VOX article, it presents his "baby bond" plan as essentially reparations, breaking it down by race to say that white kids will get on average $11,500 less than blacks, and the money will come from mostly rich whites. So he's going to raise taxes to redistribute more money, despite the fact the bottom 50% of tax payers pay only 3% of the income tax burden. And I assume it's even less for estate taxes and capital gains. I can't imagine his race-based wealth distribution plan is going to resonate much with the majority of the country.

her utter lack of charisma


Warren has plenty of charisma but maybe you're just thinking she should smile more.



Elizabeth Warren Had Charisma, and Then She Ran for President
Female candidates face a “double bind,” researchers say. When women are perceived as competent, they’re less likely to be seen as inspiring.

APR 9, 2019

Peter Beinart
Professor of journalism at the City University of New York
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/elizabeth-warrens-charisma-didnt-suddenly-disappear/586690/

Which primary do you think Booker is running in? Raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for social programs that benefit the less well-off is pretty popular among Democratic voters. And this isn't just Democrats either, a 2015 Gallup poll showed that 63% of American adults believe that wealth should be more evenly distributed and only 31% believed the current distribution is fair.

Also, seriously "race-based wealth distribution plan"? If you are opposed to race reparations and affirmative action, then this is exactly the kind of plan you should support. The benefits are not race-based, but income-based. The reason that black people benefit more than white people is because on average black people have a lower income.

I think the people responding in those polls are ignorant of the statistics of who pays what in taxes. I'm confident I could create a poll where I ask people, "What percentage of total income tax revenues should the bottom 50% of taxpayers pay?" and a huge number of respondents would say 50%, and people with a higher IQ would say something lower, maybe 25% or 10%. Maybe a few people wearing Che shirts would say zero. And then when I total up the average that would surely be higher than 3%, I could publish my results in Breitbart with the title AMERICANS BELIEVE WEALTHY ARE OVERTAXED.

But that's more of an aside to what I said in my post. I don't know if Booker's redistribution policies are more extreme than any other Democrat's. If you read my post, you'll see what I'm saying is quite different. What I'm saying is that the race element that is being pushed (by Vox in this case) is what redounds to Booker's detriment. Obama, Yang, Tulsi—they manage to run their campaigns without pounding you over the head with the race card. That article could have presented Booker's plan without ever mentioning race, and yet it insists on mentioning it many times, portraying the plan as a white-to-black redistribution. A politician with a real chance to win the presidency would be chagrined by Vox's article, but the reason Booker's chances are negligible is because Booker would have written it the same way—he's all about the race card.

Booker isn't running for the Presidency though he's running for the Democratic nominee for President. Then he'll run for the Presidency.

I would love to see a reliable study of the voting habits of people who use the phrase "race card".

A couple points. First, this doesn't defeat my point. You claimed that Booker putting forward a policy that redistributes wealth from rich people to poorer people was a campaigning mistake. I pointed out that such a policy is popular among people. Your response doesn't show it is unpopular, only that you don't know whether it is popular because you don't trust surveys.

Second, you should trust surveys when they are done by reputable sources like Gallup. What better source do you have for knowing people's opinions? Your made-up survey would be published in Breitbart because it is an obvious hack job and Breitbart is a hack rag, not because it shows Gallup's surveys are wrong.

I don't care what Yang or Tulsi do regarding race - neither of them have any chance of winning the nomination and so don't tell us much about how to run. As for Obama, my memory is that his most well-known and important speech during the 2008 election was "A More Perfect Union," which was largely about his own experience as a black man in America experiencing racism and how he squares that with a positive and patriotic attitude towards the US. So I don't agree with your characterization of his campaign.

Second, your objection here is not towards Booker's policy, or even his campaign, but rather that Vox, a magazine oriented primarily towards woke liberals, emphasized the fact that his "baby bond" policy would have a greater impact on black people than white people (even though it is race neutral). If you want to criticize Booker for playing the "race card," do so when he actually does so, not when some other organization that isn't affiliated with him does so.