Trump is a Price is Right contestant, but instead of bidding for a new couch, he’s trying to guess exactly how much xenophobia will win him the election.

People forget but this is what he did in 2015. In the primary, he started out with speeches about his business dealings -and Republican crowds were bored by that- but every time he said something anti-immigrant they loved it. So he kept calibrating to say more and more of that.

Recent American political history

This is a good example of right-wing anti-capitalism. It's cultural politics around a very particular idea about virtue and worth, seeing that markets don't particularly reward that idea, and then wanting to toss out capitalism rather than rethink the cultural politics.

I know that to economists this is all well-trod ground, but much of the general public is in denial about the looming Social Security shortfall. Kite & Key Media has a great new video explaining the scale of the problem. kiteandkeymedia.com/videos/can-soc…

I like that the Harris campaign is trying to make sure that Haley voters know how much contempt Trump has for them. I would love to see them put even more effort into courting Haley voters.

I have a new essay about Senate Democratic leadership continuing unwillingness to nominate commissioners to NRC who take regulatory modernization seriously. NRC is deeply broken. Business as usual will not be a recipe for a thriving nuclear sector in US in coming decades. 🧵

I just accidentally closed all of my tabs. It's fine. Zero negative consequences to that. I will learn nothing from this.

Good. It’s perfectly reasonable to argue for lower taxes as a policy choice. But if the law says you owe X amount, you owe X amount. We should look on tax dodging with the same visceral disdain we have for graffiti.

100% of the pushback I saw to Carlson’s interview was to the repugnance and historical illiteracy of the substance. That’s countering speech with more speech, which is what Carlson claims to support.

American politics is, in a way, becoming more European. After WWII, the rest of the political spectrum decided that it would do whatever it had to do, make whatever compromises it had to make, to fend off the danger of the populist nationalist hard right. So it is here and now.

Some on the left don’t *want* there to be a technological solution to climate change. They think people should live more simply + more equally and hope to use climate change to force people to do that. Some on the right dislike literally anything like solar that’s left-coded. 1/3

On the left-right spectrum, I think of myself as pretty moderate, but if you look at it in terms of James Pethokoukis ⏩️⤴️ Up Wing/Down Wing spectrum, I’m about as radically Up Wing as it gets. The package of technology, globalization, growth, and capitalism is a miracle in my eyes.

Do you want to spend a larger share of your income on manufactured goods so that a rich person can buy a second yacht? Boy do I have the plan for you

I understand that credit scores serve a purpose and aren’t designed at random, but it does feel a bit illogical that my credit score went down as a result of me paying off my car.

I agree with John that it is indeed extraordinary. But it’s also a testament to just how much the threat of Trump has a way of focusing the mind and uniting extremely odd bedfellows.

Maybe it’s because I live in Vermont, but I run into real live in-the-flesh degrowth leftists ALL THE TIME. You don’t have to make them up. They exist. They’re like the characters in Portlandia but with less self-awareness.