Biden and Trump on Policy

Earlier this year I put together a list of most important policies that the U.S. federal government could implement which are actually discussed by candidates. The list takes into account impact both broad and deep. Also as part of my election year discussions, I’ve covered issues with our current electoral system and then, given those problems, whether it makes sense to spend time researching and voting in elections where you’re only one of many thousands or millions of voters. I conclude that in close elections where there are large differences between the major party candidates, it often makes sense to vote for one of the two candidates.

This post will take a look at this year’s presidential candidates based on their policies. I’m putting aside non-policy issues, like competence, corruption, and impact on democratic norms as I intend to cover them in my next blog post. I also think a policy-specific approach is useful to cut through tribal identities and focus on actual impacts in the real world. Extending the discussion from my last essay, I will be comparing Trump and Biden to see if there are large expected differences in their policy. As stated in that post, swing state voters should probably vote for one of these candidates since their expected value of voting would be high.

This post will be aimed slightly right of center since my policy analysis shows Trump doing very poorly compared to Biden. Based on purely policy grounds, I think swing state voters should vote for Biden, even if they are conservative. I will be taking inspiration from my previous post about important policies. If you want more background on why I think these policies are most important, I suggest skimming it first.

Great Power Relations

This is a newer issue that I wanted to focus on after reading The Precipice and its discussion of existential risk. I recommend that post, but in summary: an existential event is uniquely terrible because not only are there no humans left on earth, but any future human civilization ceases to exist. We are doing very little today to assess these risks or to plan and coordinate how we might deal with existential risks. Toby Ord estimates a 1 in 6 chance of human extinction this century. Even if that’s high, Metaculus suggests a 2% risk which is still completely intolerable when discussing the future of humanity.

Presidential politics isn’t really discussing existential risk directly, but the presidency has an outsized impact on great power relations, particularly between the U.S., China, and Russia, and catastrophic relations between them could significantly heighten existential risk. Indeed Toby Ord specifically discusses great power relations as a major risk factor in his book, and Trump’s own Defense Department notes the heightened nuclear landscape we find ourselves in their 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (Brookings Institute discussion). China and the U.S. have essentially incompatible views of liberalism, freedom, and human rights, and the world is better off with an America that promotes those ideas and thwarts China’s authoritarian ideology without resulting in dangerous tensions.

Ultimately, Joe Biden represents a pretty standard American foreign policy when it comes to dealing with China and Russia: working within the broad liberal world order to promote democracy, markets, and human rights. For example, he has committed to extending the New START treaty with Russia that limits the numbers of nuclear warheads each country can have. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is erratic, dismissive of allies, pointedly materialistic, unconcerned with human rights, and has no long term strategy. This has not yielded a particularly less threatening or less risky world.

On calls with foreign leaders, Trump seems unprepared and more focused on his own accomplishments rather than on specific policy objectives. As China continues to rise in global importance, Trump has spent a lot of his time alienating liberal allies, and waging a trade war with the EU. This has resulted in European leaders, like Emmanuel Macron, noting that America is no longer a reliable ally against rising authoritarian regimes. Pew Research surveyed citizens of 13 developed countries and found lower confidence in Donald Trump to do the right thing than Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin. Regardless of truth, perception that the U.S. cannot be relied on will lead to a more dangerous world and worse geopolitical outcomes as allies are forced to make do without us.

Conventional wisdom might suggest Trump was especially tough on China, but in reality he emphasized the exact wrong points at the expense of actual geopolitical power. He started a trade war, harming the U.S., which ultimately resulted in extracting Chinese promises to purchase additional American exports. While undertaking these trade negotiations, Trump refrained from criticizing China’s curtailing of the rights of seven and a half million residents of Hong Kong, and allegedly even encouraged Xi Jinping to construct Uyghur re-education camps. Chinese negotiators have stated they prefer Trump’s reelection because his goals are so transparently materialistic, and those goals are in areas where the CCP can compromise, unlike other American administrations’ focus on human rights. Trump also abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a Pacific based broad trade agreement meant to specifically improve trading relations between the U.S. and major Chinese trading partners, isolating China. Biden is also not great on trade, but has emphasized that he will push China on human rights, not soybean purchases.

I’ve also mentioned in the past that a huge advantage the U.S. has over China is our ability to take in new immigrants and turn them into Americans, and this is doubly true for skilled Chinese immigrants who often attend American universities. Yet the Trump administration has attacked legal immigration (even more so during the pandemic), making it harder for America to exercise an important asset in any long term disagreements with China.

Comparatively, Joe Biden is simply not that extreme. He’s been a fairly middle-of-the-road Democrat since the Bronze Age. Of course, that does means he’s voted for the Iraq War and was part of the Obama administrations’ intervention in Libya, but Donald Trump also supported the Iraq War, although he only wanted to go into Libya “if we take the oil” (?). Donald Trump has notably strengthened relationships with Israel, but Israel has little sway over China and Russia. Meanwhile, traditional important allies have been shunned.

Donald Trump is dangerous. A cold war with China is not inevitable, and a military arms race with modern technology, AI, and advanced genetics added on top of nuclear weapons is a recipe for absolute disaster. Even a small percentage increase in this risk through mismanagement could be worth millions of lives. The U.S. needs to work with our allies to confront China where necessary and work with the Chinese government to improve transparency and understanding between our two nations, while promoting human rights. Being President of the United States should perfectly position someone to make the case for freedom, free markets, and democracy against an authoritarian regime, but Trump has failed to do so, and his bad policy here should disqualify conservatives from backing him.

COVID-19 and Catastrophic Risk

This is an expansion of risk assessment from the Great Power Relations section and from the discussion in May. Catastrophic risk management is underfunded and underprioritized. We should be preparing for the next pandemic, the next earthquake, and so on. Neither candidate has really called for comprehensive congressional action on establishing better risk management, so let’s focus on COVID-19, which remains a key issue.

Donald Trump emphasized his private sector CEO skills as a key asset contrasting himself with the political establishment, and his approach to governing has radically differed from prior presidents. Therefore, when a crisis arose that required management and leadership skills, I think it’s fair to expect Donald Trump to outperform the average. His administration did not:

The U.S. has worse per capita deaths than a wide cross section of developed countries including Italy, France, and the broad EU. Germany, Canada, and Japan have rates several times lower. The U.S. rate is similar to the U.K. but is on a much higher trajectory, similar to Mexico. At best, we’re average, at worst, we are the most advanced country to still have out of control cases.

Trump revamped his National Security Council, including removing several people who were part of pandemic preparedness, altering the pandemic response policy set up under Obama. John Bolton claimed this was a cost-saving measure and allowed for better implementation of policy. Whatever the case, there’s no one to blame except Trump; he reorganized his bureaucracy in the way he wanted, and this was the policy result we got. He is also ultimately in charge of the FDA and CDC and as we discussed in April, those agencies had colossal failures. Moreover, Trump publicly discussed how COVID was not a problem, saying in February the number of cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” Meanwhile, he was telling reporter Carl Bernstein that this virus was extremely serious and deadly in February, and that he had purposefully played it down to avoid a panic. Regardless of morality, this is simply bad policy and cost American lives.

Trump should absolutely get credit for shutting down travel from China earlier than many people wanted. However, instead of acknowledging that any policy could only delay and not prevent a full outbreak, Trump then spent all of February downplaying the virus like it wasn’t a threat. Instead, given his apparent understanding of the challenge, he should have been issuing government guarantees to purchase masks, creating guidelines for how to reduce spread, encouraging indoor sporting events and concerts to consider cancelling, and more. We know much more about this virus now than we did in March. Delaying the peak from April to June or July could have saved literally thousands of lives.

Even after all this, as cases climbed in the south in the summer, Trump maintained that things were not getting worse, and seemed to make fun of people wearing masks. He even held an indoor rally in the middle of the summer.

As of September 28, the CDC estimates 208,000 – 274,000 excess deaths in the U.S. since February 1, with Metaculus estimating between 220,000 and 360,000 U.S. deaths from COVID this year. This is an unmitigated catastrophe. Not every death can be attributed to Trump’s policies, but we have plenty of evidence that his policies could be considerably better. Other developed countries have death rates a fraction of ours, and Trump has constantly made poor decisions, downplayed the virus compared to the flu, encouraged supporters not to wear masks. At this point, even small policy shifts that reduced the death toll by 10% would have saved 20,000 lives. Conservatives must hold the president accountable for failing to protect American lives.

Congressional vs Executive Power

The functionality of the U.S. government as a system for creating and executing policy affects every other policy. In particular is the glaring problems of congressional mismanagement and executive overreach. Unfortunately, both Trump and Biden have poor records, although Trump may be worse.

Conservatives ought to be concerned about the power of the executive and the reduced role Congress has played in policy-making. Moving away from a consensus building model in Congress to a winner-take-all super executive elected every four years to do anything they want is a bad idea for many reasons. For one this increases the stakes at every election and thus increased polarization. It also means more power concentrated more centrally, which conservatives should be quite skeptical of, and at least many were under Obama. And finally, there are specific things that conservatives want the government to do, like maintain a strong national defense. If we continue to pile responsibilities on the President without involving Congress or actual legislation, then our national defense relies solely on the whims of one person, who you might not trust.

I’ve criticized the Obama administration significantly on executive overreach, and Joe Biden was part of that administration. Obama invented the concept of unauthorized drone wars, complete with secret kill lists, including American citizens. Yet, Gene Healy details how Trump has essentially expanded on Obama’s work in every way, including civilian casualties, all under the guise of the 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of 9/11, even nine years after Osama Bin Laden’s death. He also bombed Syria under a separate claim of pure executive war powers which has no constitutional basis, and this year unilaterally targeted a member of the Iranian government (and a bad person) without any congressional authority. This is an unprecedented use of presidential authority to wage war, and blatant disregard of the constitution. In an absolutely insane reversal, Trump vetoed the war powers resolution passed by congress to reign in his authority. No constitutional conservative can defend this action.

Healy does note that many of the more aggressive uses of Trump’s executive power can’t be categorized as “new” power grabs; Congress had largely ceded those powers to the president even if no other president had actually used them. For example, the Supreme Court upheld a later iteration of Trump’s travel ban (although earlier ones were ruled unconstitutional), and although “there’s ample ground for disputing the Court’s decision”, Congress allowed the president to interpret national security powers quite broadly.

However, on trade, Trump clearly expanded executive authority by lying about Canadian steel imports being a national security threat. This broad interpretation of the law was again unprecedented and means that tariff levels are likely solely controllable by the president, which is an absurd constitutional farce; Congress should have the sole ability to pass tax law. Trump also declared a national emergency in order to fund his border wall after Congress repeatedly refused to allocate money (partially struck down in court). Trump needed to lead on these issues, make broad appeals to the political center, and put pressure on Congress — which Republicans controlled for two years! Instead, he failed and fell back on executive orders which fly in the face of conservative small government beliefs.

For his part, Biden has not offered to fund a border wall through executive authority, so I guess point to him. On the other hand, Biden indicated he thought FEMA should be leveraged (and presumably a national emergency declared) to fund K-12 schools due to coronavirus challenges. Again, to be consistent, school funding from the federal government really ought to come from Congress, not executive authority.

Alright, now let’s touch on impeachment. If you want my full thoughts, read this post here. In summary, regardless of legality, Trump held up Congressionally authorized funds for political purposes, trying to get dirt on his enemies. From the perspective of concerns about executive power, this is wrong, and conservatives should be terrified of progressives getting into office and doing exactly what Trump did. We need to deescalate using the state as a political weapon; Trump is not deescalating.

When asked about them, Biden has repudiated some of the powers that Trump has seized, and has criticized Trump for taking them. I’m pretty skeptical here. Obama was loose with his executive authority, and Biden was in the room when that happened. Presidential power seems to just stack, so I’d be surprised if Biden really pulled back on authority after what Trump has done.

Of course, no one is talking about what I actually wrote about in May, which was a resurgent Congress, not just a presidency that maybe didn’t quite expand executive authority as much as before. So I think overall the most important long term affects on congressional and executive power are worse with Trump, but they’re not night and day. Something like Trump gets an F and Biden gets a D.

Liberalizing Immigration

Conservatives and I may be far apart on this issue, but I think there is some common ground. The United States has perhaps the longest and most well known history of immigration of any nation on earth, and we all agree some immigration will continue to occur. Given that immigration will continue, we can also agree that an improved system is needed; current immigration rules favor family migration instead of merit and skill. We should change our immigration system to focus more on skilled immigrants, or on retaining students who pay to be educated at the best institutions and then seek to work in the most technologically advanced and dynamic large economy in the world.

Improving our immigration system to be more merit based would be a huge boon to our free market system, to our national security, to our global influence, and of course, would result in more Americans. We want the smartest people in the world to move here and innovate on the cutting edge. If we shut our doors, those people will go to other countries, and we will lose a massive advantage we have over places like China, which, as self declared ethno-states, simply cannot attract diverse talent from across the world.

Yet Donald Trump has slashed legal immigration and made it significantly harder for skilled immigrants to enter the country, or even apply for green cards. Both green card and temporary visa applications decreased 17% each between 2016 and 2019 while rules for granting green cards were narrowed. He even banned any new H-1B visas, which focus on high skilled, high earning immigrants (who are great for innovation) for the rest of this year through executive order. Given pandemic related issues are likely to continue into next year, I wouldn’t be surprised if this continued past December.

Given these extraordinary actions, particularly during the pandemic, I would estimate a Trump second term could see a million fewer legal immigrants than a Biden term. This would have long term negative effects on the U.S. economy, not to mention on those immigrants who literally want to be Americans. Trump has also shown no ability to work with Congress on reforming the immigration system, instead working through executive unilateral action.

Biden has planned to reverse most of Trump’s immigration policies. I’ve emphasized the horrific impact on high skilled immigration, but Biden focuses on more liberal talking points, particularly about children of illegal immigrants and refugees. Trump has absolutely crushed the number of refugees the U.S. has taken, thwarting a long standing Cold War era policy. While conservatives may be skeptical of the benefits of refugees (recent data shows they contribute positively to the economy), the geopolitical benefits of being a destination for refugees are clearly all positive. No refugee is picking Russia over the U.S., for example. Unfortunately, Trump has crippled that rhetorical win.

Finally on illegal immigration, I think it’s undeniable that Trump is harder on illegal immigration than Biden would be. However, I must stress that concerns about illegal immigration are often overblown by conservatives. Although caution is warranted, it’s likely that illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native born Americans. Moreover, Trump has focused on things like building a border wall (which he claimed Mexico would pay for) which the OIG found did not utilize a “sound, well-documented methodology” for where the wall would actually be built. Also, many illegal immigrants cross the border at regular checkpoints and simply overstay their visa. Additionally, the administration spent lots of effort noticeably separating young children from their parents at the border rather than on improving the infrastructure in place for immigration courts, which would actually improve the rate at which the government could deport immigrants.

Trump’s policy of harsher, haphazard (and quite frankly idiotic) illegal immigration enforcement at the cost of harming legal immigration and thwarting the American economy’s ability to integrate foreign skilled labor is simply not worth the trade off.

Housing Policy

Deregulating housing policy, especially in “blue” cities like New York and San Francisco is a key measure needed to help grow the American economy. Housing is one of the largest expenses most Americans have, yet it wasn’t always the case. Restrictive zoning has made housing exceedingly unaffordable, and conservatives ought to defend the right of property owners to do what they want on their own property. Trump actually supported deregulation ideas early on in his presidency, and then this year abruptly switched tactics to favor stronger regulation. This is anti-free market and anti economic growth. These large cities have made it harder to build new housing, which causes housing costs to rise, homelessness to increase, and the young and poor to be priced out of good opportunities. Mobility is down across the country, companies are struggling to attract employees to these high cost areas, and many are leaving. Trump is supporting this.

Network effects mean more concentrated, dense cities are much better. For example, recreating the networks that made Silicon Valley in other places is quite difficult, but as regulations make it harder to live in the Bay Area, we are forced to rebuild the aspects of the Bay Area in other places, which wastes time and energy. The same applies to every expensive U.S. city, including Boston, DC, LA, and Miami. The costs involved are astronomical, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars in lost economic productivity over years.

Biden’s housing policy is actually remarkably thoughtful and deregulatory. He proposes improving the already existing federal rental housing assistance for low income families so that all who qualify can obtain it (right now it gives out money to families until a set amount is given out instead of to all who qualify). Then he pairs that with requirements on federal housing money where municipalities must reduce zoning rules that block new housing. Obviously it’s difficult to know to what extent these policies will be exactly implemented, but if a policy even close to what Biden has proposed were to be passed, it would be a solid boon to economic growth. Moreover, it stands a good chance as it’s moderate and compromising where Trump’s housing policy.…isn’t.

Additional Issues

These issues are either where the candidates differ little, or conservatives don’t often prioritize so I’ve kept them short. Nonetheless, Biden retains an edge on these issues.

Climate Change

Many conservatives are skeptical of climate change. I found a view articulated by Russ Roberts, host of EconTalk, to be illuminating. Like nuclear war or pandemics, climate change is a risk with unknown probability. Rather than binary choice of preparing for it or not, our climate policy should weight the various catastrophic effects with the probabilities. Even if conservatives find the most dire climate predictions unlikely, some action is likely warranted under standard economic theory; negative externalities like pollution ought to be taxed. And as we’ve seen this year, it’s bad policy to shirk preparations until the catastrophe is already upon you.

Carbon taxes with offsetting tax cuts seem pretty straightforward. The Paris Climate agreement also seemed like an easy win, with countries setting their own targets. Trump’s withdrawal from this agreement seems to involve no policy calculation whatsoever since the agreement wasn’t binding anyway.

Biden’s plan is a bit aggressive for my take. It goes beyond taxing externalities and into specific government spending. Of course, Donald Trump has spent boatloads of money and would likely continue that trend. Biden spending money on green energy doesn’t seem any worse than Trump spending money on…everything. Donald Trump’s plan to do nothing about climate change seems more negative.

Fed Independence

This hasn’t turned out to be much of an issue as the Fed has been extremely active this year and we have yet to see inflation rise. Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s continued insistence that the Fed cut interest rates even as the economy was well below 5% unemployment was clearly political rather than based on any actual economic theory. This should be condemned as bad policy. Central banking should remain independent and not subject to the whims of populist rulers unless you want to be Venezuela.

Trade

Trade can have large positive impacts on the world, although trade barriers had been pretty low. The highest impact policies would be to use trade to improve relations with liberal countries and tie economic success of the U.S. to a broad liberal coalition to counter China. This is what the TPP and TTIP were, both abandoned by Trump. This is bad, free market conservatives should oppose Trump here, but Biden is not particularly free trade either.

Criminal Justice and the War on Drugs

I listed this as a large and important issue in May. However, the extent to which Trump and Biden differ on drug legalization is small. Both have expressed some interest in decriminalizing marijuana. I’m slightly more inclined to believe Biden as he has stayed with the median of the democratic party, which has largely embraced the issue, meanwhile Trump has been president for four years and done little. In overall criminal justice, democrats have as slight edge. Biden has expressed moderate views in the face of radical segments of his party, calling for reform, but also opposing calls to defund the police. Trump’s rhetoric has been rather aggressively anti-reform, but his actual policy actions seem to be small.

Counterpoints

Taxes

Joe Biden wants higher taxes than Trump. I’m against this. But I remain more positive on Biden than on Trump because of the relative weight of issue impacts. Joe Biden is not suggesting a systemic reinvention of taxation where billionaires are banned, but rather a higher level of taxation than before. I don’t know the exact details, but I would guess this would cost the American economy hundreds of billions, possibly a trillion dollars over four years. That’s pretty bad, but in a moment I’ll do a cost-benefit analysis and see how it compares.

Healthcare

I think conservatives have a strong case that Trump is better than Biden on healthcare policy, given conservative policy preferences. However, the differences are small. Trump had the opportunity to overhaul the healthcare system with a united Republican government in 2017. He provided no leadership and accomplished nothing except the repeal of the individual mandate on people who did not purchase insurance; that’s fine, but the problems in American healthcare are systemic and remain.

Joe Biden would not institute the aggressive Medicare-for-all plans of Bernie Sanders, but instead wants to create a public option. This is not a free market approach, but could actually be a good starting point to disentangle healthcare from employment. A Republican compromise that added a public option for people to buy while also reducing the mandates on what coverage employers have to provide to employees could get more people covered while also reducing reliance on employment for healthcare (which never made any sense anyway and distorts the labor market). Nonetheless, Trump could obviously try and make headway on such a system without the public option and without Biden as president, but he hasn’t. He’s mostly ignored this issue for several years.

Overall, for conservatives, I think the options are either doing nothing with a currently broken system, or see slightly worse reforms that tend to go in the wrong direction, but won’t be the end of the world. Compared to the vast differences in foreign policy, COVID-19 management, immigration, and housing policy, this just doesn’t make a dent on the enormous lead Biden has on Trump.

Justices

This is likely Trump’s biggest strength compared to Biden, however, there are some mitigating circumstances. The major one is that there are no conservative justices poised to retire soon. Clarence Thomas is 72, but many justices retire after 80. Another is that Supreme Court justices aren’t nearly as partisan as other members of the government. Many cases are decided unanimously, and many justices commonly rule against their “party” to uphold precedent. When justices do split, it’s not always clear what the lines will be. Gorsuch and Sotomayor are both strong proponents of 4th Amendment protections despite being appointed by different parties. Anthony Kennedy, despite being appointed by Reagan, was part of the majority in Kelo v New London. This ruled that state governments could seize private property and give it to private developers, which, and I can’t emphasize this enough, was outrageous. 45 states eventually passed legislation banning Kelo-like eminent domain seizures.

Which brings up another point: Congress can make laws. Remember all the debate about the Supreme Court ruling whether the President could implement his immigration bans in 2017? None of that would have mattered if Congress had simply clarified the law, and Republicans held both chambers! The level of intensity we have dedicated to Supreme Court appointments is encouraged by Congress’ inaction. We can either respond by pushing harder on court appointments, or we can respond by focusing on Congress!

Finally, judicial issues that often animate the Right aren’t always as clearly dependent on judicial makeup as we think. The rate of abortions per woman or per live birth has been steadily dropping since the early 1980s regardless of court makeup, presidential party, or Congress.

Yes, appointing good justices matters, and Neil Gorsuch is an excellent justice! But we overemphasize the importance in Supreme Court nominations, and compared to the other issues that are costing thousands of American lives, this issue isn’t enough for Trump.

The Big Picture

When it comes down to it, Biden’s tax policy is not what I want, but it’s not going to have a lasting impact on the economy. Future Republican presidents can come in and fix marginal tax rates. Trump’s housing policy will cause long term harm relative to Biden’s. The reduction in cost of living for Americans if we can properly regulate construction of new homes in cities far outweighs any tax cut and brings in network effects on American cities. Cities are the currency of the economy. To see how behind we are, look at Tokyo where in 2018 more housing units were added than in New York, Boston, Houston, and Los Angeles combined. Trump wants that trend to continue, Biden doesn’t.

Add in Trump’s growth-crushing legal immigration policy, and the choice is even more stark.

Healthcare is another area where I don’t endorse Biden’s policy. But as stated, Trump has essentially nothing to offer here despite being president for four years. From a conservative perspective, at worst, Biden could implement a public option. Note however, this leaves private insurance completely intact. There is simply not a systemic risk conservatives should worry about. U.S. healthcare already has tons of government interventions and increasing government spending in healthcare 20% isn’t good, but it’s not going to be the end of America. It will put a strain on federal government finances, but Trump has consistently demonstrated that he does not care about that issue at all.

On the other hand, Trump’s actual policy when it comes to an actual pandemic has literally resulted in 200,000 dead Americans. Again, not all of this is on Trump, but it seems plausible that his downplaying of the virus, his bungling of agency responses, and his actual rallies during the pandemic has resulted in avoidable deaths. We cannot risk another catastrophe.

Finally, there’s the question of justices. To me this seems most comparable to the long term future concerns from the Greater Power Relations section. Both issues are concerning because of their impact on the trajectory of the long term future, but one is simply much higher stakes than the other. How the U.S. manages our relationship with China determines the course of human history in this century. If we screw it up badly, millions of lives are on the line. On the other hand, if Biden is elected, he might replace Stephen Breyer with another liberal leaning justice, and as stated previously, the overall impact here is smaller than most conservatives make it out to be.

I’ve detailed the importance of how we manage geopolitics and the dangers inherent on the global stage today as they impact the long term future. Arms races are extraordinarily dangerous, and in the future humanity’s weapons will only get more powerful. Trump has not managed geopolitics well. When the COVID-19 catastrophe hit, he was again subpar and his policy was not up the task of protecting Americans. Add in his poor economic policy on housing and immigration, throw in even a fleeting concern about climate change, and the evidence against Trump’s policies in favor of Biden’s is overwhelming.

Of course, I haven’t even got to some of the most devastating critiques of Trump, since I specifically tried to avoid discussions outside of policy. However, next post, I do want to cover, if it’s even possible, all of the Trump administration’s vast corruption, gross incompetence, authoritarian acts, and his divisive and polarizing approach to politics. I think much of this “extracurricular” activity matters a great deal even though some Trump supporters may brush it aside as trolling or just politics. But even if I’m wrong, Trump’s policy record is terrible enough on its own.

A Note on the LP Candidate

I didn’t want to take too much away from the more outcome oriented discussion of the Trump and Biden, one of whom is going to win the November election. However, as I noted in my last post, many readers will not be voting in a swing state, and so may be interested in the Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen.

Her policies do reasonably well on my list of issues (not very surprising on a blog about libertarianism and politics), and since non-swing state voters have essentially no chance to impact the election, libertarian leaning voters could cast their ballot for someone they actually like without worrying about electing the worse major party candidate. Very briefly, she hasn’t impressed on the issues of great power relations and catastrophic risks, two important issues. These tend not be libertarian strengths, so that makes sense, although I maintain they are key to the long term future of the world and the U.S.

On executive power, immigration, trade, criminal justice, and taxes, Jorgensen is reiterating the standard LP positions, which are generally pretty good as far as this libertarian leaning blog is concerned. I am surprised by her lack of discussion of housing deregulation (at least I couldn’t find anything) given it’s such a key issue, as standard libertarian positions should be positive here. On healthcare, I would take more incremental steps than she would. Overall, if you’re libertarian leaning and you don’t live in a swing state, I think voting for Jorgensen or Biden are defensible positions. If you want to learn more about Jorgensen’s positions, check out her ISideWith page and website.

Picture credit: Boeing 787-10 rollout with President Trump by Ryan Johnson licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

A 2020 Policy Platform Proposal

It’s election season so it’s time to start talking electoral politics again. The Trump administration has been particularly successful in ignoring policy discussions in favor of political point scoring. This isn’t too surprising given Trump’s lack of consistent ideology, apart from perhaps opposition to free trade and immigration. Impeachment has also helped focus attention on Trump’s political situation rather than his policies or lack thereof. Don’t get me wrong, I think there is a strong non-policy case against Trump, and I think in particular Congressman Justin Amash has done an excellent job in articulating why Trump’s behavior is concerning.

However, I think there is also a policy-based critique of Trump. In order to properly make that case and compare Trump’s policies to Biden’s or other candidates, we must establish a foundation declaring which problems are most important, and what policies could be used to implement them. Criteria for these policy ideals include some utilitarian calculus, i.e., how to improve the lives of the most people in the largest way. Thus, the first of these policies is actually a meta-policy, a way to improve congressional power to pass laws and run the state. Changing the way we make policy can affect all of our future policy making.

Countering this interest in utilitarian idealism is a preference for some political feasibility; in other words, while I might prefer to emphasize revolutionary changes that significantly improve the country (changing all of our voting systems to approval voting or quadratic voting or switching taxation to be based on land value), I’ve left them off this list because they are not just unpopular, but in fact virtually never discussed. If you find a particular policy interesting, please follow the links in that section for additional policy discussion and details.

Finally, there is uncertainty here, and I’ll mention other policies that didn’t make this list at the end. Trying to filter major talking points out of a broader range of political ideas is difficult. Policies and political philosophies are interconnected, and where I’m drawing boundaries must be arbitrary. Nonetheless, these ideas should form a good basis for uniformly judging candidate policies.

Congressional Power

Any policy platform has to address the fact that our current system for governance, for crafting and enacting policy, is deeply flawed. We have uncompetitive and broken elections, we have bad ways of choosing candidates, and we have too much power in the executive branch. Executive authority compounds our problems by making each election a stark singular choice between polarized sides instead of a well rounded government built on a legislature with many interests represented. I can’t fix all of these in this policy platform, so improving the balance between the president and Congress seems like a good place to start.

The entire budget for the legislative branch, including congressional staff, offices, and congressional agencies like the GAO and CBO, is about $5 billion. Congress is then responsible for oversight and legislative action for the entire $5 trillion federal government. The CBO has a mere 250 person staff, and it can’t even research and score all Congressional bills. This is absolute insanity.

Congress needs to be able to wield its muscle. It should not be relying on executive branch bureaucracies as unbiased experts evaluating their own performance. It should have a better staffed research arm which can oversee all aspects of the massive American bureaucracy. Congressmen also need to have more and more policy-focused positions on their own staff, along with fewer committee assignments. National Affairs has an excellent in depth discussion of the thinking behind this brief overview. Legislators are currently underpaid amateurs who spend half their time outside of Washington focused on other things besides governance. This does not allow for knowledgeable congressional oversight of the federal government.

Cato also has some excellent ideas for strengthening Congress such as having a standing committee to review executive overreaches from statutory law, and forcing votes on major rules as implemented by regulators or bureaucrats. Other ideas include expanding the congressional calendar, making a new Congressional Regulatory Service to oversee the regulations made by independent and executive agencies, and requiring all civil asset forfeitures to be deposited into the Treasury to be spent by Congress, not the executive.

Unfortunately, even despite a recent impeachment trial this is simply not a major political issue in this year’s campaign, and no candidate is running with strengthening Congress as a priority. In fact, there are essentially no meta-policy ideas being floated. Yet ideas are not hard to come by!

Liberalizing Immigration

The U.S. immigration system is terrible (see section 8 here). It is esoteric, slow, and requires a complete overhaul. It should have a focus on a merit-based system rather than nation-of-origin and family ties as it does now. It should be simpler for high-skilled workers to be hired by American companies and it should definitely be easier for young workers, educated at excellent American colleges, to be hired by American companies and remain in the United States where they can pay tax dollars for decades.

Why is this so high up on the list?

This is a matter of national security. China is a growing power, but crucially, it cannot expand its influence or economy through immigration. The Chinese state has largely decided that ethnicity matters, and China is not seeking to create a multicultural amalgamation to improve the world, but rather a nationalist state. The U.S. isn’t restricted in this way; anyone can be an American. Immigrants are also more likely to start businesses and take risks. That means the most creative and ambitious people in the world can come to the United States and contribute to our culture, knowledge, technology, and wealth. Moreover, these remarkable people already want to come here. Increased dynamism and economic growth also makes the rest of our geopolitical challenges easier; it means the national debt is less of a burden, and national defense spending can be higher in absolute terms while costing less of a percentage of GDP.

This is also perhaps the best and simplest way to improve the world quickly. It’s extremely difficult to improve nations with poor institutions, yet people who struggle in developing nations can be immediately more productive if they are transplanted to the U.S. And of course many are quite willing to do so, uprooting their entire lives for a chance at the American Dream. We can pursue limitations on their access to public money, or a simple tax upon immigrating, but nonetheless we should be voting to improve the world in the most altruistic and nationalistic way possible: expanding legal immigration in order to make more Americans!

Federal Incentives to Build More Housing in U.S. Cities

This is a specific policy taken from the Niskanen Center’s Will Wilkinson. Cited on this blog before, he suggests giving federal money to urban areas that add large amounts of new housing stock. Why? Because American cities are absurdly expensive to live in, yet new housing is extremely difficult to develop due to overregulation and zoning laws.

The impact of our poor housing policy is enormous. Economists suggest housing constraints have lowered U.S. GDP by as much as a third over the last 50 years. Think about that. We could be missing a third of GDP because millions of people who wanted to move somewhere for a better job couldn’t find a place to live. It’s clear that the most productive areas in the U.S., especially cities like New York and San Francisco, are prohibitively expensive, keeping out potential new productive workers.

Wilkinson’s suggestion isn’t the only possible policy solution; another is to change zoning to be hyper local, composed by residents of a single street or city block. This would allow experimentation and innovation, instead of immovable local land interests which keep out future non-residents who can’t vote in today’s elections.

While the viable solutions are still up for the debate, the impact is clear: the lack of housing development in U.S. cities due to overregulation may be the single greatest barrier to economic growth, thus earning its inclusion on this short list of policies.

Decriminalization of All Drugs

Ever since Pete Buttigieg announced his support for this policy, I’ve had it circled for inclusion on this list. The War on Drugs has been a colossal failure, has not reduced drug use, and has radically increased prison populations. There have been extraordinary costs to the taxpayer in both civil liberties and assets. Massive application of state force has helped to give a monopoly in funding to the most bloodthirsty and gruesome organized criminal elements in the world, including terrorists. There have even been spillover effects as governments crack down on prescription pain killers, leaving patients in agony.

This policy is wrong morally, practically, and economically. It is not the place of the state to determine what substances informed adults can consume or inject. It is also abundantly clear the state has zero capability to halt the trade or consumption of drugs. Rather, enforcement of drug laws have bolstered a black market where information is asymmetric and scarce, endangering all involved. The only thing the state has succeeded in doing is making organized crime more financially viable. The resulting conflict in Mexico has killed over 150,000 people, making it one of the largest conflicts of the 21st century behind only the Iraq War, Syrian Civil War, and Darfur. It is this monstrous loss of human life as a result of changeable government policy that places this item so high on this list.

And of course it goes without saying that this massive assistance to organized crime is occurring at great financial cost. Estimates for enforcement, prosecution, incarceration, and military interventions are as high as $50 billion a year. State prohibition of private mutually consensual transactions also requires erosion of our rights in ways that frustrate measures of concrete financial cost. The ACLU notes extensive surveillance has been justified under the guise of drug enforcement while increasingly militarized police forces have abused their power to break into homes unannounced or preemptively shoot victims all in the name of stopping transactions among consenting adults. It’s time to end this failed policy.

Catastrophic Risk

It’s clear today that the federal government does not respond well to large disasters. Perhaps too much relies upon the whims of the executive who happens to be in power, but it seems likely that we could institutionalize better responses to catastrophic events. Yes, this includes pandemics, but also major earthquakes, solar flares, artificial intelligence, and even plans for averting nuclear war (for a more detailed analysis, read Toby Ord’s recent book, The Precipice).

This is a highly neglected problem and thus one of the highest impact policies we could undertake (climate change could go here, but it has not been quite as neglected a topic as other risks, so I’ve detailed it later). At the beginning of 2020, I would not have included this in the list of top policies, not because it was low impact, but simply due to the fact that it was not discussed as a major political issue. The failings of the federal government to respond to a deadly virus have pushed catastrophic risks into the mainstream. While the likelihood of any given catastrophe is low, it is the enormous impact of the tail-risk that should concern us; preparing now will mean the difference between devastation and mere hardship.

We should look to create public commissions to investigate our preparedness for various catastrophic events, identify what can be done now for relatively small budgets with larger payoffs when a disaster comes, and then pass legislation that enshrines this knowledge institutionally in ways that do not rely on the whims and competence of whomever happens to be president. It is vital that any commissions include our preparedness for other challenges besides pandemics; preparedness for unexpected events is not selected through democratic pressures, and perhaps this has resulted in our current difficult situation with COVID-19. It would be wise to use this opportunity to prepare not just for the next viral outbreak, but for other unlikely events as well.

Other Topics

There are arguments for inclusion of a lot more policies. I’ll run through several more quickly.

It matters a lot who the president appoints to the Federal Reserve, and that they are extensively qualified and independent. I’ve left it off of this list mostly because we’ve lucked out and it seems Trump’s appointments haven’t been that different from normal. When odd choices were floated, they were largely quashed. Independence is obviously still at risk with the president tweeting criticism of his own appointees, so this issue shouldn’t be overlooked, but given that I treat it like a pass/fail grade, we can reasonably hope this will be a “pass” for all candidates in 2020. I wish I could say that more definitively, but I can’t.

Healthcare is a huge part of the federal budget and has an outsized impact on the economy. We also don’t have great solutions, but this is another issue that could easily have made the list. The most important aspects are stopping reliance on employers providing health insurance (which makes it much harder for workers to take risks and switch jobs), and expanding coverage for the least well-off. How we do that is difficult to answer in such a small space, but I’m wary of radical changes that seek to quickly re-imagine the U.S. healthcare industry from the top down.

Climate change is a potentially expensive disaster waiting to happen. If the past months have taught us anything, waiting for disasters to happen is not the correct strategy. Instituting a small carbon tax seems like a good place to start. It can be refunded to taxpayers equally, or even made to incentivize carbon sequestration programs with refundable tax credits for carbon taken from the atmosphere.

Free trade has had a massive impact on reducing poverty worldwide, while also improving the economies of all countries around the world. There’s also some evidence for reduced chances of wars between important trading partners. Aligning American and Chinese commercial interests through trade will be a vital part of avoiding a war between these world powers. Free trade is also a vital vehicle for continuing the pattern of global poverty reduction seen in the last 30 years.

U.S. interventions in the Middle East have been one of the largest contributors to excess deaths from U.S. policy. Obviously there is high uncertainty over whether many conflicts would have continued even without American intervention, but that seems unlikely in at least a couple large instances (the Iraq War being the biggest one). U.S. support of regimes like Saudi Arabia also seems to show negative payoffs from a humanitarian calculus. It also does not seem that larger 21st century goals like opposing authoritarianism in China and avoiding large scale wars are served through Middle Eastern interventions.

Candidates’ Priorities Matter Too

While this is a nice policy platform, ultimately the goal is to judge candidates by their relationship with these policies.

A major problem for this approach of separating out policies isn’t that most people running for office oppose these positions, but that they might be indifferent or even positive on these high impact policies while still focusing on other completely radical ideas. Elizabeth Warren’s many proposals come to mind here. There are some meritorious critiques in Warren’s proposals; competition is vital to a well functioning market, and some of her ideas could enhance competition. But many are far more radical with, at best, unknown effects on competition and the economy generally. These include the eradication of private equity, the changing of corporate boards, and an unprecedentedly large wealth tax which could significantly curtail investment. If Warren scored highly on the top policies put forward here (she does alright on immigration, housing, and drug policy), how do we balance that with the relatively radical (and I’d argue unhelpful) economic proposals she made the centerpiece of her campaign?

Unfortunately, we have to take those points seriously and note that while I have tried to rank these policies in a somewhat utilitarian, impact- centered way (policies within the Overton Window that help the most people by the greatest amount), radical policies that backfire could have very high impacts that shove aside the ideas proposed here.

And that goes for both parties. If Trump did well on these policies (unlikely, yes), but then also centered his campaign on radical ideas like defaulting on the national debt, shutting off the internet, or throwing away nuclear arms control treaties, then not implementing those policies might become the highest impact.

There is a lot of uncertainty that remains; some of these policies could be higher on the list, and I’ve likely excluded some that are high impact that have not yet occurred to me. Major policies could matter in the future that we just haven’t encountered. And of course these are only policy preferences; as noted in my last post, simple competency is an important factor as well. Despite all of these caveats, this an important step in laying a foundation of policy discussion and analysis against which we can measure candidates. Electoral politics is messy and tribal; discussions confound concise and consistent frameworks, but when they do swerve towards policy, these points should help form the questions that need to be asked.

Links 2018-07-09

My new series focusing on policy summaries made me realize that while the political world and Twittersphere may not discuss policy much, there are groups of people who research policy professionally and have probably covered some of what I want to do with my “Policies in 500 Words or Less” series.  So after looking around, I found that the Cato Institute has an excellent page called the Cato Handbook for Policymakers. It contains a ridiculous 80 entries of policy discussions including a top agenda of important items, a focus on legal and government reforms, fiscal, health, entitlement, regulation, and foreign policies. I will definitely be pulling some ideas from that page for future policy summaries.

I recently found the YouTube channel of Isaac Arthur, who makes high quality, well researched, and lengthy videos on futurism topics, including space exploration. I’d like to take a moment to highlight the benefits of a free and decentralized market in the internet age. Adam Smith’s division of labor is incredibly specialized with the extent of our market. Arthur has a successful Patreon with weekly videos on bizarre and niche topics that regularly get hundreds of thousands of views (24 million total for his channel), and they are available completely free, no studio backing necessary. Such an informative career could not have existed even 10 years ago.

The 80000 Hours Podcast, which was recently mentioned in our top podcasts post, had Dr. Anders Sandberg on (broken into two episodes) to discuss a variety of related topics: existential risk, solutions to the Fermi Paradox, and how to colonize the galaxy. Sandberg is a very interesting person and I found the discussion enlightening, even if it didn’t focus much on how to change your career to have large impacts, like 80000 Hours usually does.

Reason magazine’s July issue is titled “Burn After Reading”. It contains various discussions and instructional articles on how to do things that are on the border between legal and illegal, such as how to build a handgun or how to make good pot brownies or how to hack your own DNA with CRISPR kits. It’s an impressive demonstration of the power of free speech, but also important to the cyberpunk ideal that information is powerful and can’t be contained.

George Will writes in support of Bill Weld’s apparent aim to become the 2020 Libertarian Party nominee. I admit I wasn’t hugely impressed with Weld’s libertarian bona fide’s when he was running in 2016, but I thought his campaigning and demeanor was easily better than Gary Johnson’s, who was already the LP’s best candidate in years, maybe ever. I think a better libertarian basis paired with Weld’s political skills would be an excellent presidential candidate for the LP.

Related: last week was the 2018 Libertarian Party National Convention. I don’t know if it’s worth discussing or whether it’s actually going to matter, but I have seen some good coverage from Matt Welch at Reason and Shawn Levasseur.

I read this very long piece by Democratic Senator (and likely Presidential hopeful) Cory Booker at Brookings. It was a pretty sad look at current issues of employment, worker treatment, and stagnant wages. There was a compelling case that firms are getting better at figuring out ways to force labor to compete through sub-contracting out labor to avoid paying employee benefits. This leads to monopsony labor purchasing by large firms, squeezing workers who don’t have the same amount of market bargaining power. He also mentions non-compete clauses and growing differences between CEO pay and average pay for workers. I don’t have good answers to these points, although his suggestion of a federal jobs guarantee seems very expensive and likely wasteful. His proposed rules about stock buybacks also seem to miss the point. Maybe stricter reviews of mergers would work, but perhaps larger firms are more efficient in today’s high tech economy, it’s hard to know. Definitely a solid piece from a source I disagree with, which is always valuable.

Somewhat related: Scott Alexander’s post from a couple months ago on why a jobs guarantee isn’t that great, especially compared to a basic income guarantee. Also worth reading, Scott’s fictional post on the Gattaca sequels.

Uber might have suspended testing of self driving automobiles, but Waymo is going full steam ahead. They recently ordered over 80,000 new cars to outfit with their autonomous driving equipment, in preparation for rolling out a taxi service in Phoenix. Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica has a very interesting piece, arguing the setbacks for autonomous vehicles only exist if you ignore the strides Waymo has made.

Augur, a decentralized prediction market platform similar to Paul Sztorc’s Hivemind (which I’ve discussed before), is launching on the Ethereum mainnet today. Ethereum has its own scaling problems, although I’d hope at some point sharding will actually be a real thing. But for now, transactions on Augur may be pretty expensive, and complex prediction markets may remain illiquid. That may mean the only competitive advantage Augur will offer is the ability to create markets of questionable legality.  Exactly what that will be remains to be seen, but this is an exciting development in the continuing development of prediction markets.