Matt Iglesias
speaker
87 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Matt Iglesias’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That's why he's having so much problems with these things. But there are now doubts, significant doubts in my mind based on the team that he's assembled. Because he has, to your point, gotten them to sort of say that they're for tariffs. But they kept enough... caveats in that analysis, right? Like they didn't act.
If you look at Besson's statements, Marin's statements, the things that they put on paper, they did not like burn their bridges with conventional neoclassical economic analysis, which is different from there was this Wilbur Ross paper where they were like net imports are subtracted from the GDP calculus. So therefore, if we balance trade, GDP will go up. And that's totally wrong.
That's like really bad economics. And everybody wrote that, was like, these guys are numbskulls. And so that was this kind of bridge-burning movement, right, where if you're willing to make a statement like that, you are not going to be, like, welcomed back in the polite society of people who understand international trade.
Whereas, like, this Marin thing, where it's like, well, it might generate some revenue and equilibrium price effects are not actually that large, that's like... I think not what most people think, but it's reasonable. All of this is unpredictable. My wife and I are thinking about buying a new car. We were asking ourselves, like, do we need to rush out and get it before the tariffs come in?
And we're like, I don't know. It's like exchange rate might adjust. Like, we don't know what's going to happen. There could be retaliation that actually makes things cheaper. The world is complicated. And, like, that level of tariff defense that they've come up with is respectable enough to that it just kind of makes me think, like, maybe this is just for show.
And, you know, I'll leave my words when imported fertilizer all has a 20% tax and nobody can buy bananas.
Yeah, it's happening.
It's a little bit hard to say. I mean, so literally, right, it was the Obama administration created the United States Digital Service. Yes. Back when exciting Silicon Valley entrepreneurs were mostly Democrats with this idea that you could improve the efficiency of government by having an elite tech strike team. I know people who've worked there.
Doge is now going to be the new name of the USDS, which will be the United States Doge Service, so that they can reuse the logo, which I guess is efficient. And it is now zeroed in on changing IT procurement, which seems like a good idea from everything that I've heard about federal IT procurement. It is an area that is ripe for reform and some increased efficiency.
I mean, when all these Doge op-eds were flying around, I think if you looked at the more sober-minded people in conservative think tank land, they were all saying, like, guys, like, this isn't going to work. That's not how the government works. Like, you can't just come to the agency and say, ah, there aren't regulations anymore because— I mean, I don't know what to say.
Like, it's the government. We have laws. We have courts. We have the Administrative Procedure Act. It is true that the government is not run as efficiently as a well-run startup. Because unlike at a well-run startup, you can't just decide something isn't working and shut it down. You can't just lay somebody off because you think they're super. Like, all of that is accurate.
But it's like, it's genuinely true.
Right. And it's not like it never occurred to anybody that it might be more fun for the president of the United States to just be able to make stuff up or tell people what they should do. You have to implement the laws that exist.
Well, so just one thing I wanted to flag that to me is like it's small, but it really signifies what you're talking about, which is that the congressional tax writers told the transition, do not issue an executive order rescinding Joe Biden's electric vehicle regulations. We want to put that into the tax bill because since there are tax credits for people who buy EVs—
If you rescind it in a bill, that scores as saving money. And you can use that to offset the cost of the tax cuts. And then, like, there were stories of, like, it's all squared away. Like, they're not going to do this executive order. It's going to be part of the pay-fors. It was in the menu of spending reductions. And then Trump just did it. Right.
Like it was not just that he's taking action on his own rather than waiting for Congress or engaging with Congress. He did something that congressional Republicans like specifically asked him not to do because they were going to do it. Right. I mean, it wasn't a disagreement. And it would make it easier for them to do other things he wants them to do. Supposedly. And I think.
I think the paradox of Trump as leader of the Republican Party for a long time now is that he is just not as interested in changing American public policy as the typical high-level politician is. It's been very politically potent of him to just kind of like cut off the anti-abortion movement at the legs of
Once it became politically inconvenient for him, he's a very dominating presence in Republican politics. Joe Biden spent like a lot of time worrying about blowback from the left over various things and showing that he was delivering. But like with Trump, the presence, the persona, the lib owning, the announcements kind of are delivering for his core supporters.
And I don't think he stays up at night Well, if they wind up needing to settle for a temporary extension rather than a permanent TCJA, like, I'm really going to be in for it, you know? But, like, it's actually a really big deal. Like, there's a reason, like, earnest congressional Republicans would strongly prefer to find enough offsets to make this permanent.
Because if you make it permanent, that makes life a lot more difficult for the next Democratic president. If it's temporary and a Democrat wins in 2028 or 2032... That's like way better for the cause of progressive politics. It's not like Trump won't sign the permanent version or that he opposes this kind of thing.
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