I’m more amused than anything. I have some sympathy for Musk because he’s 100% right on the bill on the merits so breaking people on principle is always a plus in my book.
That being said: Musk fucked up. Supporting Trump was a stupid idea and he got nothing out of this; Trump used Musk and then dumped him. Shocking I know (narrator: it was not shocking), but this was a hilariously short marriage of convenience.
I have zero sympathy for Musk. His aim was never efficiency. It was to kill any accountability to which he would be subject. He targeted any agency that would have oversight over his businesses to cripple them, and then helped himself to our personal, financial and health data.
His fake aping of fiscal responsibility is an act that I am tired of hearing lap dogs cheer.
This is mostly true. However, Elon is many things but he's not stupid. I think he knew it would end this way. His support of Trump was a revenge tour against the slights from the state of CA and the the Biden admin. I think he felt that Trump was the only politician transactional enough to allow him to buy access and start a process of reducing the federal bureaucracy. Elon is not motivated by money at all. His ego, which is unfathomably massive, is fed by hacking problems and that's mostly what motivates him.
Not motivated by money at all…. Hilarious comment.
That is quite clearly the ONLY thing he actually does care about. His ‘businesses’ are all 100% long term grift plays, extracting market value off reselling carbon credits, Mars settlements, bitcoin, and other alleged investments in our collective future.
Who is John Galt? He’s a Joker and a Thief.
Grift knows grift which is why they had such a beautiful weekend together at Couples Resort. It was never meant to last.
I'm not a fan of Elon, but I have worked with him a bit, and this is just my observation. What I mean is that he is not motivated by money in the way that most people are motivated by money. He is interested in money primarily for its utility to solve problems. I don't think he solves problems altruistically in the purest sense, I think he solves problems to feed his ego, which is insatiable. In his defense, I don't think he is self aware about this. I think he truly believes he is trying to save mankind from itself.
Don't think that's quite fair - he obviously threw himself into Tesla with or without government subsidies. Much of Tesla's history has been under Democratic presidents eager to bribe people into switching to EVs, of which Musk's products were just the most obvious choice for a long period.
I get that both-sidesism has become a big part of your brand, but the repeated suggestion that the parties are equally hypocritical about deficit reduction is downright disingenuous. We've now lived through multiple cycles of GOP leadership tanking the economy while exacerbating deficits with tax cuts and increased military spending. The succeeding Democratic administrations have had to embrace aggressive stimulus to stave off recessions, and then have endeavored to moderate spending while raising taxes on higher earners and businesses. The filibuster has rendered increasing revenues nigh impossible, so it becomes a one-way door. Democratic spending priorities are also more inherently stimulating, given the programs and beneficiaries they target, and thus exacerbate deficits less than GOP actions.
You don't think Biden's administration over-corrected and over-spent dragging the U.S. out of COVID lockdowns? I thought that had been well established.
Do agree that it's not a 50/50 contribution. Obama had deficits coming down, and Clinton ran surpluses.
Biden couldn't roll back the Trump tax cuts. Not during the Covid recovery, and not after the D's lost the House.
If you look at the graph of deficit as a % GDP, the trend before and after Covid is pretty clear.
Biden may have spent more than necessary, but how much more is up for debate. The US certainly recovered better and faster than places that went on austerity diets.
My sources say that every president has been crap on the budget deficit since Clinton.
They also say that Obama improved things from disastrous to merely terrible, then got worse again.
It’s astonishing how much I look back at the Clinton/Gingrich era now as an era of good government when at the time I disliked both of them and would have happily seen them both replaced. At least they could come together and solve problems despite their differences.
At the end of the day, who cares if it is a 50/50 problem? Both parties have been terrible on the deficit. Debating who is worse is pointless in my mind when both parties have been so obviously bad.
Sorry, but no. One party cuts taxes and tries to defund services for the poor and middle class. The other is not nearly as bad. You're as guilty as Nate for the transparent both-sidesing of the difference between the economic policies of the parties.
Whether you agree or disagree with the policies (or methods or motives) of either party is entirely orthogonal to the question of how they have managed the deficit.
That's just an argument to ignore the leading source of the deficit increases, the constant drumbeat of tax cuts, biased to the wealthy, that have gutted revenue for decades.
When people want to ignore nuance and context, there are reasons.
I’m afraid that your belief does not reflect reality.
Since 1960, taxes have generally stayed in the 15% to 18% of GDP range, with a maximum below 20%. This seems to be the range that the US public (and therefore politicians) find acceptable.
Spending since 2001 has been above 18% of GDP and since 2008 has been above 20% of GDP.
The suggestion that Silver is writing from the point of view of a brand is unfair. It implies insincerity. His voice has been consistent going back to Prospectus. If he were building a “brand,” I think his voice would have changed more. The fact that there is a market for nuanced writing does not mean the writer crafted a voice for that market.
There’s nothing really insightful in here. It’s a litany of obvious stuff that is probably 80% kinder than it should be to both of the egotistical, sociopathic man-babies.
Nate even ignores the history of fascist governments where the powerful initial supporters are the first against the wall.
An idiot focused party very much did win last year and now we are suffering the consequences. My wish is for the idiot constituency to be split and allow the center (Democrats) to regain power
I still think what you are describing already happened. A bunch of people like Musk, Rogan, RFK etc. who used to like Democrats more flipped to Trump last year and brought over millions of idiots into this coalition. The idiots have won. They came from both “sides”. We are living in their world now. If there could be a way to split them or just siphon off a few votes, we could maybe avoid being dragged down by them
The odds of Elon successfully forming a third party seem absurd to me, so tiny they should be rounded down to zero. What's his constituency? His approval was already down to -14% with 80+% of Republicans supporting him; what's that going to look like after today's tirade, especially if Trump really starts hammering him?
I'm not really sure what his platform would be other than Not-R/D and some techno utopianism. He sure as heck can't claim to be a savvy manager of the government. There are some pockets of people who deeply admire his work and love the futurism stuff, but even within tech and other nerdy communities his haters greatly out number his supporters at this point. To the rest of the country he looks like an awkward and annoying rich guy who posts like their racist uncle on twitter. His recent history of gleefully wrecking the lives of a few million people isn't going to endear him to the masses.
I do agree with Nate that it would be interesting to see the natural experiment of just how far he could get with money and twitter, but I think even Elon will realize what a ridiculous idea his own party would be when he wakes up sober tomorrow.
The only surprise for me is that it took this long to happen. Both protagonists are used to being the capo di tutti capi. Trump's patience with Musk more than likely had more to do with Musk's wealth than anything else.
DOGE was an abysmal failure, falling way short of a trillion with something close to 1% of that figure. I can't imagine why. Who wouldn't want someone with the sobriquet "Big Balls" poring over their Social Security records, or stumbling into a high security network that deals with US nuclear defense?
Ultimately, Musk met the same fate as others who tied themselves to the Trump wagon. Just ask Rudy Guiliani how well that worked out for him.
Besides, the notion of a "friendship" between a narcissistic sociopath and anything made up of atoms is absurd on the face of it.
And now we get to enjoy a shit throwing chimp fight between Musk and Trump in real time. Where's the popcorn?
Musk isn't wrong about the BBB being an "abomination". It's that and more. Besides its ideologically driven economic stupidity its got some gems buried in it, like the one that is intended to strangle the authority of that pesky Judiciary to interfere with Trump's edicts and almost any governmental action.
But Musk's reasons for hating it are only partially aligned with mine. We agree that deficit spending needs to stop, and Moody's agrees with us. But I want taxes increased for the richest Americans, who may want a cut but don't need it, nor deserve it, and I want tax loopholes, like carried interest and "invest, borrow, and die" closed, AND I want the Tax Gap addressed, unpaid taxes that amount to close to half a trillion dollars a year, year after year. Musk wants all entitlements cut, Medicaid, Medicare, and that Ponzi scheme, Social Security.
Republicans want cushy jobs on corporate boards after they retire or get kicked out, so they want to protect the interests of their keepers, like the good little lackeys that they are. I'm not saying that Democrats aren't up for that as well, but they have a limit, at least, so far. They aren't going to kick Grandma out into the snow to get run over by a Lamborghini. And if that were to happen they would at least send a sympathy card to General Delivery.
What I am sure of is that the GOP will do the wrong thing in order to procure that cushy life and now they are looking at Medicare in the Senate. Anything but allow their keepers to have to pony up for all that money they make off of other people's labor.
And, if Trump really wants to screw over Musk, he'll allow BYD access to the US Market. Bye Elon!
The Bayesian perspective on the prospects of a new party should be strongly modified by the unprecedented success that new parties are having across much of the rest of the Western world. In France the top three parties, including the incumbent government, are all new. In Britain a new party is currently leading the polls. In countries like Italy and the Netherlands a new party is in power. Even in Germany a new party is second in the polls. Trump himself is evidence of the new party effect in America. So we are clearly in a transitional era of some kind.
Where the analogy breaks down is that the new parties that have been successful have mostly, with the partial exception of France, been right-populist; again, Trump is himself an example of this. Meanwhile, Musk is proposing an elite centrist party that is out of touch with the prevailing counter-elite sentiment. Like Bloomberg et al before him, there just isn't much of a popular constituency for elite centrism, least of all now.
The notion of “centrists” being attracted to Musk is grotesque given his support of racist terrorism in the UK and the nazi-adjacent AfD party in Germany, his delight in ruining the careers and lives of ordinary workers etc etc etc. A drug addled fantasy.
Yes, it's a nonsense. The centre-left will never forgive his apostasy. Musk is surrounded by too many Yes Men, including his Xitter groupies, to understand this, though.
The Labour government has had a disastrous year, and the Conservatives are still hated after their disastrous several years. So the current poll leader is a new populist-right party, Reform UK, led by the man who masterminded Brexit, Nigel Farage. They absolutely crushed the local elections a month ago, proving they can translate polling into votes.
They were still in single digits early 2024 though. Looks like they shot up in the polls a lot in the last few months - anything in particular cause that?
Why did Reform jump in the polls? Where to begin?! It's mostly a question of what the Conservatives and Labour have done to put voters off rather than anything Reform have done to attract them.
1. Conservative PM Rishi Sunak, an Indian who had been forced on the party despite members explicitly voting against him, decided in the election campaign not to bother going to the full 80th D-Day memorial celebrations in France so that he could record a TV interview. This devastated the Conservatives among traditional conservative voters.
2. There was a major corruption scandal during the campaign in which several senior Conservative officials were revealed to have placed large bets on various political outcomes that they knew about because of their privileged position. They are currently being prosecuted. This naturally put off many voters.
3. After the election, the Conservatives then elected as their new leader a lady called Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch. She is a Nigerian immigrant who wouldn't be allowed to hold British citizenship if she were born today (the loophole that existed when she was born has since been closed). Whether one sympathises or not, a lot of traditional conservative voters were naturally unhappy about their party being led by a black woman.
4. Onto Labour. In July 2024, a black second-generation immigrant called Axel Muganwa Rudakubana murdered three little white girls in Southport in the north of England. The police and government refused to release his details for a long time. Eventually, they released the photo on the left in this link to make him look like a cute little boy, when actually his mugshot was the photo on the right: https://static.toiimg.com/thumb/msid-117424182,width-1280,height-720,resizemode-4/117424182.jpg. When local people protested against the murders, Labour PM Keir Starmer sent in the riot police to attack the protesters. Even more notoriously, he had thousands of people arrested for simply saying online that they were sympathetic to the protests, including elderly grandads and, in the worst case, a suburban mother who had lost her own children previously and said that she didn't care what happened to immigrants any more. Meanwhile, armed Muslim gangs marched through the streets and the police did nothing to stop them. Within a month of the attack, Labour had lost a quarter of its support and never recovered.
5. In October 2024, Starmer was exposed as having received large gifts from his leading donor and “close personal friend”, Waheed Alli (Lord Alli). Lord Alli is a gay Muslim multi-millionaire who spends a lot of private time one-on-one with Starmer, and was given an exclusive all-access pass to the PM's official residence and offices. Lord Alli had also given lots of gifts to other Labour politicians. This naked corruption and the unusual personal circumstances involved alienated many people, especially traditional voters.
6. Staying on Starmer's personal idiosyncrasies, his former houses and even a car he sold have recently been firebombed by three disgruntled Ukrainian rentboys who are said to have a “personal vendetta“ against the PM. What “personal vendetta” three Ukrainian rentboys might have against Starmer, a vendetta that would involve them knowing where he used to live and what his old car looked like, is left to the reader's imagination. Naturally, voters with traditional values are put off by this sort of thing.
7. On policy, Labour has also not done what it had said it would, especially on fiscal matters. They claimed they wouldn't increase income tax or national insurance (a secondary income tax in the UK), only to increase national insurance after all. They cut the winter fuel allowance, a payment for the elderly to keep their heating on in winter, before having to go back on it following the local election disaster. They cut the welfare payments for the disabled. Though the latter two are probably good fiscal policy, politically the winter fuel allowance cuts in particular are electorally suicidal, especially given his personal wealth and record of corruption.
8. Labour's foreign policy has also been disastrous. Starmer, a Jewish convert (his wife and children are Jewish) leading a party with a large Muslim voter base, has not known how to respond to the Gaza situation, flip-flopping back and forth. He has likewise prevaricated over how to respond to the provocations of Trump and China. Worst of all, he has bafflingly paid Mauritius tens of billions of pounds for them to take ownership of one of our island bases. All of this has similarly undermined his authority.
9. On cultural issues, Labour has been ardently in favour of trans rights, despite their immense unpopularity. Labour has pushed for one of the most extreme Net Zero plans in the world, even though Britain has some of the world's lowest emissions. Labour has introduced legislation to allow state-funded euthanasia (like Canada's notorious MAiD programme). Labour has signed a trade deal with India that allows Indian immigrants to Britain to avoid paying some of their taxes—yes, the taxes he has put up for British people. Labour has declared that small farms would be subject to the full rate of inheritance tax: previously, they have had a higher threshold to preserve family farms. All of this is almost purpose-designed to alienate the kind of traditional small-c conservative working-class voters who formed the bedrock of the twentieth-century Labour coalition.
10. This is all happening against the backdrop of increasing revelations about the historical “grooming gang” scandals, in which gangs of Pakistani men raped and often murdered white children (one was turned into kebab meat). Many Pakistani Labour councillors and activists have been implicated in membership of the rape gangs. Starmer in his former role of Director of Public Prosecutions had worked hard to protect the Pakistani rapists from prosecution, and as PM he personally vetoed a public inquiry into the rape gangs.
11. Starmer also alienated the left-populist wing of the party by suspending former party leader Jeremy Corbyn before the election (he won as an independent) and, following the election, suspending 7 left-populist MPs for voting against his welfare cuts. This has left populists in general with no political home outside of Reform.
So, take your pick! There's no shortage of reasons why Reform has boomed in the polls, and I'm sure I've forgotten some. If anything, their success is epistemically over-determined.
I believe your analogy breaks down with the American “First Past The Post” electoral system and the Presidential Election’s Electoral College. The examples you cite are mostly Parliaments. France is not, but the Presidential vote is by direct popular vote. So in effect, a third party winning a congressional seat becomes either irrelevant in legislative action or caucuses with a party. The caucusing effectively becomes a de facto part of the party they caucus with. The third party would have to win a majority of an entire state to win any presidential electoral votes. Having just a single state’s electoral votes is still miles away from likely having any real influence.
We have third parties, already. They sometimes back some seemingly popular positions. They are still largely ineffectual, at least in terms of gaining enough support to win elections.
It seems to me that the idea of third political parties in the US is mostly just wishful thinking from partisans hoping to attract significant members of the other political party without having to compromise any of their own political positions.
Britain is FPTP too. Don't be so certain of American exceptionalism. The real reason the analogy doesn't work is as I stated, that this is a right-populist moment and Trump is already satisfying that demand.
Minor point, but Britain may be FPTP, but it is also a Parliament. A third party can gain a few seats in Parliament and wield that to influence who forms the government. That is not the case in the US.
So whether Trump is right/populist or another figure emerges on either the right or the left is immaterial in this specific contention. A third party has to very quickly win massive vote support to have any meaningful impact on national politics in the US based on both FPTP and the Electoral College
Yes, but a US third party could do the same at the Congressional level though. The US is not a Presidential dictatorship, no matter how much the media's coverage might make it appear to be. Congress is still important and is a vector for a third party to make gains.
For example, if Trump had not been successful in hijacking the Republican Party, it would not have been at all implausible for a dissident populist right party to emerge. This would be the British model of Faragist parties (UKIP-Brexit-Reform) snowballing as the establishment conservative party resists takeover attempts only to be eventually superseded and supplanted.
Watching Trump and Musk fight is like going to the movies to see Godzilla v. King Kong — to dreadfully hideous monsters battling for no apparent reason than that they are both sociopaths and egomaniacs. Oh, that they destroy each other. As my beloved Aunt would say of two battling siblings, “a pox on both their houses….”
Elon Musk clearly does not understand Trump's flavor of Corruption. Why didn't he just stuff a little more into the unmarked envelope for Trump? Musk could of just bought some Trump Family meme coins. What is a little more surprising is his lack of faith in the power of money to stir the general Stew of Corruption that is Congress. As it is, the Chinese will probably be enjoying a fire-sale soon enough of the Musk Empire EV assets foolishly built within their domain. But no, Mr. Impulsive is scaring the feces out of his backers and shareholders with the now verbalized threat from Trump that he could, with a few strokes of a Sharpie, could crush Elon's Empire, or at least tangle it up in knots so badly it would take years to unravel. Elon better not mention anything about certain popular Mexican dishes. Would three and half years be long enough to send Musk into bankruptcy? Probably. If it gave the Dems an opportunity to rectify the stupid mistake of allowing NASA and the Military to become overly dependent on one erratic man, would the Dems save Musk? Probably not. I have zero doubts Trump and his gangsters would figure ways to profit from Musk's corporate-butchering. Not that cutting the cord to an excessive dependence on a single drug addled unstable pseudo-genius (from today's vantage point) business-personality wouldn't be best for the country in the short, medium, and long run. We shouldn't forget that the Democrats where right there with the Republicans when the United States put so many of their eggs in a "crazy" (according to a recent Trump tweet) man's basket. A "crazy" man utterly beholding to China at the time and still so today. Space-X is unique, but, the engineers could go to new companies and quickly pick up where they left off after the Musk Empire's unplanned disassembly and the Trumpian feeding frenzy on the parts.
The thing that kills third parties is the lack of attention(oxygen) from the press. Musk has not only $$$$ for Advertising but a large social media presence he controls. If able to recruit several good communicators from both sides it could take off.
Third parties are a fever dream of those who think that another party will somehow better represent the moderate voter and thereby the interest of a "real America". The problem is that "moderate voters" want different things. In particular, the so called moderate voter may be a social liberal and an economic conservative. Others may be a social conservative and an economic liberal. And many may be less driven by issues and more motivated by style or personality. In addition, many moderate voters say they want change, but when changes are made the frequently say, "no not that". Witness the phenomena of voting for a party in the general election and then tossing them out in the next congressional election. So I am not at all sure that a third party will be any more successful in representing the middle of American politics. Having said that one of the problems of the Democratic Party is that it is attempting to represent a very broad spectrum of interests.
I have a hard time believing that Musk is the person to start the 3rd party, but I could see one of his new media pals like Joe Rogan pulling it off. I could see a party that takes the best of both parties (pro business and pro law and order on the right, pro personal rights like abortion and THC on the left) doing well if it got enough buy-in from new media. Maybe Musk could be the sprinkle of futurism on top.
David Hogg, Ro Kahanna, Tom Cotton, Elise Stefink, JD. Vance ,AOC types. Whether your left or right these individuals are great speakers. Great communicators to make this Swamp vs non Swamp, Oligarchy vs Non Oligarchy, Freedom vs loss of freedom etc...
To points 16 and 17, I think we can all look at Ross Perot to see the likelihood of one man starting a new political force. And that's the problem - if a single person is the sole face of a political movement, then it dies once that person exits the political arena.
Trump doesnt want the stock market to dip so he is doing more government spending to make his tenure easier since he doesn't care what happens thereafter
Musk is an autistic libertarian who sees this as bad for the future to keep doing this as it will catch up to us one day with dire consequences.
I’m more amused than anything. I have some sympathy for Musk because he’s 100% right on the bill on the merits so breaking people on principle is always a plus in my book.
That being said: Musk fucked up. Supporting Trump was a stupid idea and he got nothing out of this; Trump used Musk and then dumped him. Shocking I know (narrator: it was not shocking), but this was a hilariously short marriage of convenience.
I have zero sympathy for Musk. His aim was never efficiency. It was to kill any accountability to which he would be subject. He targeted any agency that would have oversight over his businesses to cripple them, and then helped himself to our personal, financial and health data.
His fake aping of fiscal responsibility is an act that I am tired of hearing lap dogs cheer.
This is mostly true. However, Elon is many things but he's not stupid. I think he knew it would end this way. His support of Trump was a revenge tour against the slights from the state of CA and the the Biden admin. I think he felt that Trump was the only politician transactional enough to allow him to buy access and start a process of reducing the federal bureaucracy. Elon is not motivated by money at all. His ego, which is unfathomably massive, is fed by hacking problems and that's mostly what motivates him.
He can be smart in some things and dumb in others
Not motivated by money at all…. Hilarious comment.
That is quite clearly the ONLY thing he actually does care about. His ‘businesses’ are all 100% long term grift plays, extracting market value off reselling carbon credits, Mars settlements, bitcoin, and other alleged investments in our collective future.
Who is John Galt? He’s a Joker and a Thief.
Grift knows grift which is why they had such a beautiful weekend together at Couples Resort. It was never meant to last.
I'm not a fan of Elon, but I have worked with him a bit, and this is just my observation. What I mean is that he is not motivated by money in the way that most people are motivated by money. He is interested in money primarily for its utility to solve problems. I don't think he solves problems altruistically in the purest sense, I think he solves problems to feed his ego, which is insatiable. In his defense, I don't think he is self aware about this. I think he truly believes he is trying to save mankind from itself.
Don't think that's quite fair - he obviously threw himself into Tesla with or without government subsidies. Much of Tesla's history has been under Democratic presidents eager to bribe people into switching to EVs, of which Musk's products were just the most obvious choice for a long period.
And then abandoned the charging network and keeping the models current. He also allowed his dumb ego to put the Cybertruck into production.
Oh don't get me wrong. I bought a Hyundai Ioniq instead.
Leasing an EV9. So much nicer than any Tesla. And real controls.
I know John Galt, and Elon, you're no John Galt.
The Bulwark is garbage, but broken clocks and all that. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/elon-musk-thinks-he-is-an-ayn-rand-hero-nope-one-of-her-villains-silicon-valley-thiel-andreessen
And his revenge tour against the Democratic Party would be exhibit A of petty slights
I get that both-sidesism has become a big part of your brand, but the repeated suggestion that the parties are equally hypocritical about deficit reduction is downright disingenuous. We've now lived through multiple cycles of GOP leadership tanking the economy while exacerbating deficits with tax cuts and increased military spending. The succeeding Democratic administrations have had to embrace aggressive stimulus to stave off recessions, and then have endeavored to moderate spending while raising taxes on higher earners and businesses. The filibuster has rendered increasing revenues nigh impossible, so it becomes a one-way door. Democratic spending priorities are also more inherently stimulating, given the programs and beneficiaries they target, and thus exacerbate deficits less than GOP actions.
You don't think Biden's administration over-corrected and over-spent dragging the U.S. out of COVID lockdowns? I thought that had been well established.
Do agree that it's not a 50/50 contribution. Obama had deficits coming down, and Clinton ran surpluses.
Biden couldn't roll back the Trump tax cuts. Not during the Covid recovery, and not after the D's lost the House.
If you look at the graph of deficit as a % GDP, the trend before and after Covid is pretty clear.
Biden may have spent more than necessary, but how much more is up for debate. The US certainly recovered better and faster than places that went on austerity diets.
The report of 2.5% inflation today is bull shit just go shopping. I called out Biden on bull shit inflation #'s, I will call out Trump just the same
Believe what you want. If is is not sourced it is just you making stuff up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Jtbb
My sources say that every president has been crap on the budget deficit since Clinton.
They also say that Obama improved things from disastrous to merely terrible, then got worse again.
It’s astonishing how much I look back at the Clinton/Gingrich era now as an era of good government when at the time I disliked both of them and would have happily seen them both replaced. At least they could come together and solve problems despite their differences.
At the end of the day, who cares if it is a 50/50 problem? Both parties have been terrible on the deficit. Debating who is worse is pointless in my mind when both parties have been so obviously bad.
Sorry, but no. One party cuts taxes and tries to defund services for the poor and middle class. The other is not nearly as bad. You're as guilty as Nate for the transparent both-sidesing of the difference between the economic policies of the parties.
Motives and methods matter.
Whether you agree or disagree with the policies (or methods or motives) of either party is entirely orthogonal to the question of how they have managed the deficit.
That's just an argument to ignore the leading source of the deficit increases, the constant drumbeat of tax cuts, biased to the wealthy, that have gutted revenue for decades.
When people want to ignore nuance and context, there are reasons.
I’m afraid that your belief does not reflect reality.
Since 1960, taxes have generally stayed in the 15% to 18% of GDP range, with a maximum below 20%. This seems to be the range that the US public (and therefore politicians) find acceptable.
Spending since 2001 has been above 18% of GDP and since 2008 has been above 20% of GDP.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JuYA
Yes. The Bush and Trump tax cuts would need to be reversed to clean up the cash flow.
Of course we now have to pay the interest on those debts and the Bush and Trump fiascos.
Raising revenue is hard without a filibuster proof majority. The R's are the roadblock.
we need more people like you that want to be happy not right.
The suggestion that Silver is writing from the point of view of a brand is unfair. It implies insincerity. His voice has been consistent going back to Prospectus. If he were building a “brand,” I think his voice would have changed more. The fact that there is a market for nuanced writing does not mean the writer crafted a voice for that market.
I'm surprised Nate made this a free post. These gems of wisdom are worth millions.
There’s nothing really insightful in here. It’s a litany of obvious stuff that is probably 80% kinder than it should be to both of the egotistical, sociopathic man-babies.
Nate even ignores the history of fascist governments where the powerful initial supporters are the first against the wall.
Yes. I thought my comment was sufficiently dripping wet with sarcasm. But perhaps not.
Nope, not in this overconfident techbro adjacent echo chamber.
Fair enough. Respect.
Omg please elon start a party to compete for the idiot vote this solves all our problems
Careful what you wish for. I’m on the left and there are plenty of idiots to go around. An idiot focused party might win.
An idiot focused party very much did win last year and now we are suffering the consequences. My wish is for the idiot constituency to be split and allow the center (Democrats) to regain power
I hear you. My point is, if the idiots in the democrats and republicans united, the democrats wouldn’t win, the idiots would.
I think there are just as much on the center as on the fringes. Ideology and idiocy know no bounds.
I still think what you are describing already happened. A bunch of people like Musk, Rogan, RFK etc. who used to like Democrats more flipped to Trump last year and brought over millions of idiots into this coalition. The idiots have won. They came from both “sides”. We are living in their world now. If there could be a way to split them or just siphon off a few votes, we could maybe avoid being dragged down by them
Camacho for President!
The odds of Elon successfully forming a third party seem absurd to me, so tiny they should be rounded down to zero. What's his constituency? His approval was already down to -14% with 80+% of Republicans supporting him; what's that going to look like after today's tirade, especially if Trump really starts hammering him?
I'm not really sure what his platform would be other than Not-R/D and some techno utopianism. He sure as heck can't claim to be a savvy manager of the government. There are some pockets of people who deeply admire his work and love the futurism stuff, but even within tech and other nerdy communities his haters greatly out number his supporters at this point. To the rest of the country he looks like an awkward and annoying rich guy who posts like their racist uncle on twitter. His recent history of gleefully wrecking the lives of a few million people isn't going to endear him to the masses.
I do agree with Nate that it would be interesting to see the natural experiment of just how far he could get with money and twitter, but I think even Elon will realize what a ridiculous idea his own party would be when he wakes up sober tomorrow.
Splitting the asshole vote between MAGA and Musk would basically give a supermajority to Dems.
Kennedy third party run went no where but his endorsement to Trump was impactful.
“To the rest of the country he looks like an awkward and annoying rich guy who posts like their racist uncle on twitter.”
Hey, that sounds a lot like Ross Perot!
"You can’t take either party’s commitment to deficit reduction seriously"
Unless of course you actually look at the data...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1G3FM&height=490
The only surprise for me is that it took this long to happen. Both protagonists are used to being the capo di tutti capi. Trump's patience with Musk more than likely had more to do with Musk's wealth than anything else.
DOGE was an abysmal failure, falling way short of a trillion with something close to 1% of that figure. I can't imagine why. Who wouldn't want someone with the sobriquet "Big Balls" poring over their Social Security records, or stumbling into a high security network that deals with US nuclear defense?
Ultimately, Musk met the same fate as others who tied themselves to the Trump wagon. Just ask Rudy Guiliani how well that worked out for him.
Besides, the notion of a "friendship" between a narcissistic sociopath and anything made up of atoms is absurd on the face of it.
And now we get to enjoy a shit throwing chimp fight between Musk and Trump in real time. Where's the popcorn?
Musk isn't wrong about the BBB being an "abomination". It's that and more. Besides its ideologically driven economic stupidity its got some gems buried in it, like the one that is intended to strangle the authority of that pesky Judiciary to interfere with Trump's edicts and almost any governmental action.
But Musk's reasons for hating it are only partially aligned with mine. We agree that deficit spending needs to stop, and Moody's agrees with us. But I want taxes increased for the richest Americans, who may want a cut but don't need it, nor deserve it, and I want tax loopholes, like carried interest and "invest, borrow, and die" closed, AND I want the Tax Gap addressed, unpaid taxes that amount to close to half a trillion dollars a year, year after year. Musk wants all entitlements cut, Medicaid, Medicare, and that Ponzi scheme, Social Security.
Republicans want cushy jobs on corporate boards after they retire or get kicked out, so they want to protect the interests of their keepers, like the good little lackeys that they are. I'm not saying that Democrats aren't up for that as well, but they have a limit, at least, so far. They aren't going to kick Grandma out into the snow to get run over by a Lamborghini. And if that were to happen they would at least send a sympathy card to General Delivery.
What I am sure of is that the GOP will do the wrong thing in order to procure that cushy life and now they are looking at Medicare in the Senate. Anything but allow their keepers to have to pony up for all that money they make off of other people's labor.
And, if Trump really wants to screw over Musk, he'll allow BYD access to the US Market. Bye Elon!
The Bayesian perspective on the prospects of a new party should be strongly modified by the unprecedented success that new parties are having across much of the rest of the Western world. In France the top three parties, including the incumbent government, are all new. In Britain a new party is currently leading the polls. In countries like Italy and the Netherlands a new party is in power. Even in Germany a new party is second in the polls. Trump himself is evidence of the new party effect in America. So we are clearly in a transitional era of some kind.
Where the analogy breaks down is that the new parties that have been successful have mostly, with the partial exception of France, been right-populist; again, Trump is himself an example of this. Meanwhile, Musk is proposing an elite centrist party that is out of touch with the prevailing counter-elite sentiment. Like Bloomberg et al before him, there just isn't much of a popular constituency for elite centrism, least of all now.
The notion of “centrists” being attracted to Musk is grotesque given his support of racist terrorism in the UK and the nazi-adjacent AfD party in Germany, his delight in ruining the careers and lives of ordinary workers etc etc etc. A drug addled fantasy.
Yes, it's a nonsense. The centre-left will never forgive his apostasy. Musk is surrounded by too many Yes Men, including his Xitter groupies, to understand this, though.
> In Britain a new party is currently leading the polls.
Wait, what? When did this happen?
The Labour government has had a disastrous year, and the Conservatives are still hated after their disastrous several years. So the current poll leader is a new populist-right party, Reform UK, led by the man who masterminded Brexit, Nigel Farage. They absolutely crushed the local elections a month ago, proving they can translate polling into votes.
Holy shit, really? I was hoping it was Reform but last I heard when I was following UK politics last year or whenever it was, they were at 1% or so.
That is amazing, and I'm happy to hear that... they are great.
I think it's longer since you looked at UK polling than you think: the last time Reform UK got just 1% in a poll they were included in was nearly three years ago in September 2022! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2024_United_Kingdom_general_election].
They've been consistently vying for the polling lead since the beginning of January this year, and have been consistently the poll leader since April. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election]
Wow crazy, yeah! Thanks!!
They were still in single digits early 2024 though. Looks like they shot up in the polls a lot in the last few months - anything in particular cause that?
Why did Reform jump in the polls? Where to begin?! It's mostly a question of what the Conservatives and Labour have done to put voters off rather than anything Reform have done to attract them.
1. Conservative PM Rishi Sunak, an Indian who had been forced on the party despite members explicitly voting against him, decided in the election campaign not to bother going to the full 80th D-Day memorial celebrations in France so that he could record a TV interview. This devastated the Conservatives among traditional conservative voters.
2. There was a major corruption scandal during the campaign in which several senior Conservative officials were revealed to have placed large bets on various political outcomes that they knew about because of their privileged position. They are currently being prosecuted. This naturally put off many voters.
3. After the election, the Conservatives then elected as their new leader a lady called Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch. She is a Nigerian immigrant who wouldn't be allowed to hold British citizenship if she were born today (the loophole that existed when she was born has since been closed). Whether one sympathises or not, a lot of traditional conservative voters were naturally unhappy about their party being led by a black woman.
4. Onto Labour. In July 2024, a black second-generation immigrant called Axel Muganwa Rudakubana murdered three little white girls in Southport in the north of England. The police and government refused to release his details for a long time. Eventually, they released the photo on the left in this link to make him look like a cute little boy, when actually his mugshot was the photo on the right: https://static.toiimg.com/thumb/msid-117424182,width-1280,height-720,resizemode-4/117424182.jpg. When local people protested against the murders, Labour PM Keir Starmer sent in the riot police to attack the protesters. Even more notoriously, he had thousands of people arrested for simply saying online that they were sympathetic to the protests, including elderly grandads and, in the worst case, a suburban mother who had lost her own children previously and said that she didn't care what happened to immigrants any more. Meanwhile, armed Muslim gangs marched through the streets and the police did nothing to stop them. Within a month of the attack, Labour had lost a quarter of its support and never recovered.
5. In October 2024, Starmer was exposed as having received large gifts from his leading donor and “close personal friend”, Waheed Alli (Lord Alli). Lord Alli is a gay Muslim multi-millionaire who spends a lot of private time one-on-one with Starmer, and was given an exclusive all-access pass to the PM's official residence and offices. Lord Alli had also given lots of gifts to other Labour politicians. This naked corruption and the unusual personal circumstances involved alienated many people, especially traditional voters.
6. Staying on Starmer's personal idiosyncrasies, his former houses and even a car he sold have recently been firebombed by three disgruntled Ukrainian rentboys who are said to have a “personal vendetta“ against the PM. What “personal vendetta” three Ukrainian rentboys might have against Starmer, a vendetta that would involve them knowing where he used to live and what his old car looked like, is left to the reader's imagination. Naturally, voters with traditional values are put off by this sort of thing.
7. On policy, Labour has also not done what it had said it would, especially on fiscal matters. They claimed they wouldn't increase income tax or national insurance (a secondary income tax in the UK), only to increase national insurance after all. They cut the winter fuel allowance, a payment for the elderly to keep their heating on in winter, before having to go back on it following the local election disaster. They cut the welfare payments for the disabled. Though the latter two are probably good fiscal policy, politically the winter fuel allowance cuts in particular are electorally suicidal, especially given his personal wealth and record of corruption.
8. Labour's foreign policy has also been disastrous. Starmer, a Jewish convert (his wife and children are Jewish) leading a party with a large Muslim voter base, has not known how to respond to the Gaza situation, flip-flopping back and forth. He has likewise prevaricated over how to respond to the provocations of Trump and China. Worst of all, he has bafflingly paid Mauritius tens of billions of pounds for them to take ownership of one of our island bases. All of this has similarly undermined his authority.
9. On cultural issues, Labour has been ardently in favour of trans rights, despite their immense unpopularity. Labour has pushed for one of the most extreme Net Zero plans in the world, even though Britain has some of the world's lowest emissions. Labour has introduced legislation to allow state-funded euthanasia (like Canada's notorious MAiD programme). Labour has signed a trade deal with India that allows Indian immigrants to Britain to avoid paying some of their taxes—yes, the taxes he has put up for British people. Labour has declared that small farms would be subject to the full rate of inheritance tax: previously, they have had a higher threshold to preserve family farms. All of this is almost purpose-designed to alienate the kind of traditional small-c conservative working-class voters who formed the bedrock of the twentieth-century Labour coalition.
10. This is all happening against the backdrop of increasing revelations about the historical “grooming gang” scandals, in which gangs of Pakistani men raped and often murdered white children (one was turned into kebab meat). Many Pakistani Labour councillors and activists have been implicated in membership of the rape gangs. Starmer in his former role of Director of Public Prosecutions had worked hard to protect the Pakistani rapists from prosecution, and as PM he personally vetoed a public inquiry into the rape gangs.
11. Starmer also alienated the left-populist wing of the party by suspending former party leader Jeremy Corbyn before the election (he won as an independent) and, following the election, suspending 7 left-populist MPs for voting against his welfare cuts. This has left populists in general with no political home outside of Reform.
So, take your pick! There's no shortage of reasons why Reform has boomed in the polls, and I'm sure I've forgotten some. If anything, their success is epistemically over-determined.
I believe your analogy breaks down with the American “First Past The Post” electoral system and the Presidential Election’s Electoral College. The examples you cite are mostly Parliaments. France is not, but the Presidential vote is by direct popular vote. So in effect, a third party winning a congressional seat becomes either irrelevant in legislative action or caucuses with a party. The caucusing effectively becomes a de facto part of the party they caucus with. The third party would have to win a majority of an entire state to win any presidential electoral votes. Having just a single state’s electoral votes is still miles away from likely having any real influence.
We have third parties, already. They sometimes back some seemingly popular positions. They are still largely ineffectual, at least in terms of gaining enough support to win elections.
It seems to me that the idea of third political parties in the US is mostly just wishful thinking from partisans hoping to attract significant members of the other political party without having to compromise any of their own political positions.
Britain is FPTP too. Don't be so certain of American exceptionalism. The real reason the analogy doesn't work is as I stated, that this is a right-populist moment and Trump is already satisfying that demand.
Minor point, but Britain may be FPTP, but it is also a Parliament. A third party can gain a few seats in Parliament and wield that to influence who forms the government. That is not the case in the US.
So whether Trump is right/populist or another figure emerges on either the right or the left is immaterial in this specific contention. A third party has to very quickly win massive vote support to have any meaningful impact on national politics in the US based on both FPTP and the Electoral College
Yes, but a US third party could do the same at the Congressional level though. The US is not a Presidential dictatorship, no matter how much the media's coverage might make it appear to be. Congress is still important and is a vector for a third party to make gains.
For example, if Trump had not been successful in hijacking the Republican Party, it would not have been at all implausible for a dissident populist right party to emerge. This would be the British model of Faragist parties (UKIP-Brexit-Reform) snowballing as the establishment conservative party resists takeover attempts only to be eventually superseded and supplanted.
Watching Trump and Musk fight is like going to the movies to see Godzilla v. King Kong — to dreadfully hideous monsters battling for no apparent reason than that they are both sociopaths and egomaniacs. Oh, that they destroy each other. As my beloved Aunt would say of two battling siblings, “a pox on both their houses….”
It's a DOGE eat DOGE world and TSLA stockholders are wearing Musk scented underwear.
(Apologies to Cheers writers)
Elon Musk clearly does not understand Trump's flavor of Corruption. Why didn't he just stuff a little more into the unmarked envelope for Trump? Musk could of just bought some Trump Family meme coins. What is a little more surprising is his lack of faith in the power of money to stir the general Stew of Corruption that is Congress. As it is, the Chinese will probably be enjoying a fire-sale soon enough of the Musk Empire EV assets foolishly built within their domain. But no, Mr. Impulsive is scaring the feces out of his backers and shareholders with the now verbalized threat from Trump that he could, with a few strokes of a Sharpie, could crush Elon's Empire, or at least tangle it up in knots so badly it would take years to unravel. Elon better not mention anything about certain popular Mexican dishes. Would three and half years be long enough to send Musk into bankruptcy? Probably. If it gave the Dems an opportunity to rectify the stupid mistake of allowing NASA and the Military to become overly dependent on one erratic man, would the Dems save Musk? Probably not. I have zero doubts Trump and his gangsters would figure ways to profit from Musk's corporate-butchering. Not that cutting the cord to an excessive dependence on a single drug addled unstable pseudo-genius (from today's vantage point) business-personality wouldn't be best for the country in the short, medium, and long run. We shouldn't forget that the Democrats where right there with the Republicans when the United States put so many of their eggs in a "crazy" (according to a recent Trump tweet) man's basket. A "crazy" man utterly beholding to China at the time and still so today. Space-X is unique, but, the engineers could go to new companies and quickly pick up where they left off after the Musk Empire's unplanned disassembly and the Trumpian feeding frenzy on the parts.
The thing that kills third parties is the lack of attention(oxygen) from the press. Musk has not only $$$$ for Advertising but a large social media presence he controls. If able to recruit several good communicators from both sides it could take off.
Third parties are a fever dream of those who think that another party will somehow better represent the moderate voter and thereby the interest of a "real America". The problem is that "moderate voters" want different things. In particular, the so called moderate voter may be a social liberal and an economic conservative. Others may be a social conservative and an economic liberal. And many may be less driven by issues and more motivated by style or personality. In addition, many moderate voters say they want change, but when changes are made the frequently say, "no not that". Witness the phenomena of voting for a party in the general election and then tossing them out in the next congressional election. So I am not at all sure that a third party will be any more successful in representing the middle of American politics. Having said that one of the problems of the Democratic Party is that it is attempting to represent a very broad spectrum of interests.
I have a hard time believing that Musk is the person to start the 3rd party, but I could see one of his new media pals like Joe Rogan pulling it off. I could see a party that takes the best of both parties (pro business and pro law and order on the right, pro personal rights like abortion and THC on the left) doing well if it got enough buy-in from new media. Maybe Musk could be the sprinkle of futurism on top.
Musk needs best of breed communicators like
David Hogg, Ro Kahanna, Tom Cotton, Elise Stefink, JD. Vance ,AOC types. Whether your left or right these individuals are great speakers. Great communicators to make this Swamp vs non Swamp, Oligarchy vs Non Oligarchy, Freedom vs loss of freedom etc...
To points 16 and 17, I think we can all look at Ross Perot to see the likelihood of one man starting a new political force. And that's the problem - if a single person is the sole face of a political movement, then it dies once that person exits the political arena.
Nah, Ross Perot killed his own party because his ego wouldn't let Ventura take the reigns.
https://youtu.be/NqqaW1LrMTY?si=x6Hi1epmwV1OSZA-
Is there merit to the idea that when Musk says Trump doesn't win the election without him he's referring to something beyond the money he donated?
Exactly
Trump doesnt want the stock market to dip so he is doing more government spending to make his tenure easier since he doesn't care what happens thereafter
Musk is an autistic libertarian who sees this as bad for the future to keep doing this as it will catch up to us one day with dire consequences.
So what's up with the Luka trade? Did we ever find out what was wrong with him or why they made that trade?