Dylan Scott
speaker
698 appearances
10 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 16 Sep
Dylan Scott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Larry Summers is probably the most famous of them, but was warning that This was such a massive package that it would predictably cause inflation. And at the time, I thought that was ridiculous. I no longer think it was ridiculous.
Yeah, my brand as a journalist is I'm wrong a lot. I don't know why people keep paying me for that, but...
So I don't know. I know a lot of people who are very enthusiastic about the Inflation Reduction Act. I can't name a single one of them who thinks it reduced inflation. I think there's like near unanimous agreement that that was like a marketing exercise. Yeah, a good one, maybe. But yeah, I think...
The core of my critique of Biden is his handling of the Build Back Better process, that this was his big initiative domestically in the first two years. He had a congressional majority. It was like the two years when Obama passed Obamacare or George W. Bush passed the Bush tax cuts, Trump passed the Trump tax cuts.
It was this window that presidents often get where Congress is on their side and they can pass something big domestically. I think the big error of Biden is that Build Back Better from the beginning was not one thing. It was a hodgepodge of a lot of different things.
Nearly every Democratic priority. And when it became clear that they could not do all of those things just politically, that they didn't have the votes to pass everything they wanted... they never decisively made a choice to do one of them and to do it well.
And the problem was they had a very thin majority in the Senate that included sort of two problem senators in Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. December 2021, Manchin made an offer that would include universal pre-K permanently, as well as expanded health care subsidies and clean energy credits. So it's a lot of what they want. It's not everything.
Biden said no and put out a statement blaming Manchin for the impasse.
And Manchin went on Fox News and told Biden the bill was dead. I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can't. I've tried everything humanly possible. I can't get there. And then Biden put out another statement calling Manchin a liar. Saying Manchin's comments were, quote, at odds with his discussions this week with the president. And that it all broke down.
Biden, despite decades in the Senate, knowing that senators are petulant little babies who you have to appease, just like didn't do it. And I think to some degree, this speaks to his weakness is reading accounts of this. He just comes across as a guy who could not stand people being mad at him.
And that's a person who cannot make clear decisions, because if you make clear decisions, someone is going to be disappointed by them.
So I'll disagree with one part of that, which is just to say that I think while the actual evacuation from Afghanistan was bungled, just choosing to go through with withdrawing showed more decisiveness than most American presidents had showed on Afghanistan for the previous two decades. Fair. Yeah. But I think on Israel and on Ukraine, there's definitely something to that.
Biden embarked on a strategy of sucking up pretty relentlessly to Netanyahu, even as tens of thousands of civilians were being killed by bombs. That is an important part of his legacy. On Ukraine, I do think they've been weirdly coy about releasing certain weapons that the Ukrainians need.
Things like ATAKMS and F-16s took a while for the US to agree to send them because they were worried about Russia's response. It sort of speaks to this indecisive, not willing to take a clear stand mindset that they brought to a lot of issues. Like, do you want to win or not? And similarly in Israel, like, do you want to stop the killing or do you not?
So I think I want to speak up having just trashed it for the American Rescue Plan here. What? So some movies that I think are sort of okay, I think are okay because they're like boring and fine. And others I think are okay because some parts I think are brilliant and other parts I think are terrible.
yeah and they just like exist in the same movie and the american rescue plan is like one of those movies um it's the megalopolis of bills so go back to the club wow it did i think uh increase inflation uh in in a way that proved very politically unpopular it also ended what recession existed and got us back to sub 4% unemployment, like really, really fast.
Wages started growing, especially at the bottom. You saw like a big reduction in inequality in the years like 2021 to 2024. That's a hard thing to do. We didn't do that in the 2010s. I think that's one part that I think will endure. I think the commitment to bringing chip manufacturing specifically back to the US seems like it's been more successful than I thought it would be.
TSMC, the big Taiwanese chip maker, has a plant in Arizona and they're saying that their workers there are as good as their workers in Taiwan and it's all going according to plan.
That's not something that I think anyone voted on in 2024, but making sure that the world has a process to build these things that the world runs on that is not entirely located on a tiny island that is constantly on the verge of being invaded.
It's not great. The Inflation Reduction Act was all carrots and no sticks. And I think to some degree that was a smart political decision. The sticks in this case would have been something like a carbon tax, something like cap and trade, something that actually put a price on polluting. And it became clear that there weren't the votes for that.
Showing 661–680 of 698 · page 34 of 35
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