United Kingdom 2024 recap

Part 3 of my series on the latest United Kingdom election.

Now, I will go through some historical analysis of this election and why Labour won last night.

The election is over, and Keir Starmer is Prime Minister.

Turnout dropped over 7 points versus the 2024 election.

This is Labour’s first victory since the 2005 election and the third-largest Labour majority in history by pure number of seats.

The Conservatives won the lowest number of seats since electoral reform in 1832.

This was the best performance for the Liberal Democrats/Whigs since 1923.

Labour did not win this election because they had a strong platform and a leader who inspired the United Kingdom. Quite the opposite. Labour won this election because the Tories lost 4 million votes to Reform, who feel that Brexit didn’t go far enough. This did not happen in 2019 because the Reform Party (then known as the Brexit Party) refused to run directly against sitting Conservative MPs, postponing the spoiler effect and ensuring maximum Brexit. The big issue now was opposing lockdowns during the COVID pandemic and a spattering of right-wing policies, each one crazier than the last. By moving towards the far right, the far right has only become more emboldened, as always happens in history.

To understand this election, you need to understand Reform.

Response to David Cameron

When David Cameron saw a small group of right-wing crazies in the 2010s, the appropriate thing to do would be to ignore and work with his LibDem coalition to create a stable and moderate government. However, David Cameron is sly, and we know that he agrees with Brexit/Reform on many issues. David Cameron is not the only reason the UK has Brexit. Liberal Democrat leadership gave him legitimacy as PM, and Jeremy Corbyn is himself a Euroskeptic, similar to Reform, and that perfect storm led Britain to the mess they are in now.

David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn’s ideological movement towards the politicians who would later form the Brexit party significantly moved the Overton Window in the United Kingdom to the right.

David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn are weak leaders, and the Liberal Democrats were widely discredited for forming a coalition with David Cameron. No major party leader had both the moral fiber and enough political capital to respond appropriately to Brexit. It was the perfect storm.

Now, if a country like St. Kitts elected a right-wing government that left CARICOM,  you probably would not even know about it since it is a small country with a small economy and under a million people. CARICOM is primarily made up of small countries and does not have global influence. It would not reverberate across the world.

However, the United Kingdom has the ninth-largest economy in the world, is a UN Security Council member, a G7 member, a NATO member, and has a significant military in its own right. It is the second-largest economy in Europe, behind only Germany (excluding Russia), has a highly advanced economy, the 21st largest population (3rd highest in Europe, excluding Russia), and has global cultural influence. What happens in Britain does not stay in Britain.

I expect the increasing isolationism in the United Kingdom is probably a major cause of the global move towards isolationism, with more tariffs and visa restrictions popping up worldwide.

Brexit impacts everyone on Earth.

This election is not so much a victory for Labour but a direct effect of the Conservative Party’s failure to contain its fringe element, which has now become a major political force in the United Kingdom because, at the core, they are cowards.

Voter apathy in Britain is up. This “victory” is the smallest number of votes Labour has received since 2015.

This is way older than Brexit

Honestly, why wouldn’t they be apathetic? There have been 33 elections now since 1900, inclusive. The Tories have only won a majority of the vote three times since the beginning of the 20th century, in 1900, 1931, and 1955. That should have given them control of government for only 14 years. But the Tories have formed a government for 72 of the last 124 years.

Without proportional representation, as they continue to elect absolute clowns like Arthur Balfour, Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas-Home, John Major, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, one would be concerned for their mental health if they did not feel disillusioned by their political system.

Not to say all British Prime Ministers have been utter shit, though many of them have been. Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, and George were fantastic Liberal prime ministers in the early 20th century. Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill were good Prime Ministers for their era. Clement Attlee created the modern British economy. Harold Macmillan was a liberal prime minister despite being a Tory. He led Britain through economic prosperity in the late fifties and early sixties and supported decolonization. Gordon Brown correctly responded to the recession with counter-cyclical policies.

There have been good times, but there have also been prime ministers who have significantly damaged the United Kingdom.

This was the stage Britain entered into this election. Most Tory prime ministers have been bad for Britain, and the people know it, but since the Labour and Liberal Democratic parties have not merged, getting even a centrist government in the United Kingdom remains elusive under their first-past-the-post election system.

Solution

The solution to this quagmire is simple. Britain needs proportional representation, and the Tories will finally have to earn the vote of Britons instead of relying on a spoiler effect between the Liberal Democrats and Labour.

It’s fitting however, before the Labour Party, there were only four spoilt elections in British history. Since the Labour Party became a major political force in World War I, all but two conservative victories have been spoilt.

Most Labour Party voters support proportional representation.

But Keir Starmer does not.

Labour voters need to switch to the Liberal Democrats, the only left-wing party in England.

If Labour does not fix Britain’s inherently broken election system, the United Kingdom will likely have another Conservative government in 5 or 10 years.

References:

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/how-the-2024-election-could-have-looked-with-proportional-representation/

https://labourlist.org/2024/06/first-past-the-post-labour-proportional-representation/

 

Prime Minister Rayner

Keir Starmer is to the right of Maggie Thatcher on many issues. He is socially aligned with JK Rowling. He will be incapable of keeping his caucus in line because most of Labour is center-left. The UK is looking at a very unstable government while he is prime minister. I think Angela Rayner will be Prime Minister sooner than most people expect. Unlike Starmer, she is a Europhile, pro-trans rights, not a habitual liar, and supports basic international human rights law.

Once Rayner is Prime Minister, the UK will finally return to the good policies it abandoned in 2010.

This is not a crazy idea…

Labour is a big tent party ranging from Euroskeptics like Starmer, who support Netanyahu, to politicians like Rayner, who support a real two state solution and rejoining the European Union. This is not a stable alliance.

We are going to see fierce debates in parliament between Labour MPs who differ fundamentally on the most pressing issues in British politics today.

If the average Labour MP is more like Rayner than Starmer, and at least on Brexit, most Labour voters are closer to Rayner than Starmer, we are going to see some unprecedented changes in the UK parliament.

Starmer’s selection of Rayner is similar to Obama’s selection of Biden as Vice President. When building a cabinet from a big tent party, which is what Labour is, you need to have members of your cabinet from across your party’s spectrum. That is what Starmer is doing. He ran on a platform similar to Rayner, which he abandoned. He had to select a Labour MP similar to most Labour voters to postpone the inevitable backlash from his party against his center-right policies.

Just as how Obama, who was almost progressive, had Joe Biden as his Vice President, Keir Starmer, who is more like the Tories than Liberal Democrats on just about everything, selected Angela Rayner, who is closer to the Lib Dems than Starmer.

This is why even though Starmer’s policies are generally abhorrent, the possibility of Angela Rayner as Prime Minister soon is a cause for celebration.

Broken Apple Pay fix

I have an iPhone, and I use it to pay for Subway.

An Apple update occurred a few weeks ago, and since then, I have been unable to use Apple Pay without Face ID.

The problem was that the update made my default card to pay for transit go to None and I needed to change it back to a card.

Settings -> Wallet & Apple Pay -> Express Transit Card

Select the credit card you want to use to pay for your transit.

Prime Minister Starmer

Congratulations, Britain, on defeating the Tories. They are genuinely the worst party of the bunch.

Now you can have Labour, a party whose leader:

  • Supports Brexit, despite 65% of Labour voters voting to Remain back in 2015.
  • Opposes proportional representation
  • Supports the Israeli military’s operations in Gaza
  • He equivocates criticism of policies of Netanyahu as support of the Holocaust.
  • He does not support trans rights. Blair did.
  • He supports tough-on-crime approaches; don’t be surprised when they increase police budgets.
  • He wants to continue to clamp down on immigration, one of the main reasons Britain’s economy cannot recover from the COVID recession.
  • He praises Margaret Thatcher.

While Starmer differs from the Tories in terms of public services on many important issues, he is no different from Sunak. Clearly, we are entering a new period of history for the Labour Party, distinct from New Labour, which was significantly to the left of Starmer’s time in office.

Let’s hope and pray that enough Labour MPs are not aligned with Keir Starmer’s center-right positions and will force him to negotiate with the Liberal Democrats on issues, particularly Brexit, which will solve most of Starmer’s right-wing positions.

Modern Labour has not been center-left since the 1970s. Britain will soon wake up and realize that it have traded a far-right party for a center-right party. The party of Clement Attlee has been dead for at least a decade. Labour is as much the party of Clement Attlee as the Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln.

If Britain did not already have universal health care, it is clear to me that Starmer would not support it, no matter how much money and how many lives it would save.

That is my analysis of this election.

But moving from far right to center right is a cause of celebration.

The fact that Labour had Russophile Comrade Corbyn followed by center-right anti-trans Starmer only further demonstrates why I believe presidential democracies are inherently better than parliamentary democracies. Starmer would never have won if Britain had a competitive ranked-voting presidential election.

Neither Starmer nor Sunak deserved to win. Both of them are terrible candidates.

Starmer is more conservative than Joe Biden in terms of social rights and immigration issues.

Let’s hope the average Labour MP’s positions are closer to the center-left Liberal Democrats than the far-right Tories. We should know within a month or two.

This is a lesser-of-two-evils situation. Neither Starmer nor Sunak is fit to be a parliamentarian, let alone a prime minister. Ed Davey would have been a far better PM than who they got, but of the two terrible choices, Starmer is the lesser evil.

I voted for Elizabeth Warren, and if I had a ranked ballot from the last Presidential election and Starmer was running, I would have voted 1. Warren, 2. Sanders, 3. Biden, 4. Starmer.

Congratulations, Britain, on moving back to the center-right.

One way this issue could be resolved is for more centrist Labour MPs to jump ship and join the Liberal Democrats over Starmer’s positions on Brexit, immigration, and trans rights. Another way it could be resolved is for Labour to amend their Party Constitution at the next general conference so they can remove their leader, like any other party in the United Kingdom.

However it happens, I do not believe Keir Starmer will be able to keep enough MPs in line to be Prime Minister for a full five years.

Given how Tories lost a lot of votes to Reform this year, Tories might be more willing to discuss implementing ranked-choice voting. Maybe enough center-left Labour MPs will join Liberal Democrats, Tories, and Reform to finally make this a reality in the United Kingdom. Who knows? There are a lot of unknowns right now.

Hopefully, with the Tories destroyed, this will lead to most Labour voters moving to the Liberal Democrats in the next election. Liberal Democrats need to stick to their guns. Their policies are correct. I hope the Liberal Democrats will win in 2029 so the UK can rejoin the European Union and implement proportional representation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Keir_Starmer

America is rich, why talk about civil war?

The discussion of civil war primarily comes from groups like Project 2025, which has received considerable press attention over the last couple of years. The issue is, does Project 2025 exist because America is a failed state or because Project 2025 is a profoundly anti-American psyops operation?

State of The United States of America

The United States has never been richer. We have some of the world’s highest household incomes, one of the best-educated populations, and a life expectancy in line with other developed countries. We haven’t missed any elections, and our military is by far the strongest in the world. We are the only global superpower.

There are some challenges: housing is ridiculously expensive, the government doesn’t fund higher education like it used to, 10% of Americans lack health insurance, and our gun laws and inequality lead to a higher homicide rate than one would expect from a highly developed democracy. These are solvable problems.

Our quality of life, on average, is among the best in the world. America is the opposite of a failed state; we are a highly developed country, not only that but the only global superpower today.

So why do people feel like we are behind? Why do people talk about revolution?

The first thing is that our rapidly growing economy has caused massive social shifts over the last 20 years. Gay marriage is legal, people are talking about police brutality in national media, and our country is fundamentally better off than we were 30 years ago.

If the United States were to deepen ties with our allies, we would be unstoppable.

Response to Obama

President Obama was one of the most significant presidents in our history, not just because he was our first African American president. Major civil rights advances were made regarding LGBT rights, and the stimulus package successfully avoided a long recession that occurred in Europe over the 2010s.

Through a combination of poor leadership at the DNC and pure racism directed against President Obama, we saw significant gains by the Republican Party.

But I do not believe Obama alone is enough of a reason to explain the sudden turn of the Republican Party into the party of Donald Trump. In four years, Mitt Romney went from saying Russia was our biggest threat, and he was correct, to Donald Trump doing Russia’s bidding, according to the Mueller Report. Mitt Romney won the primary in 2012 with over 50% of the vote in a four-horse race.

While Romney and McCain were Republicans, when someone in McCain’s audience claimed Obama was a Muslim, code in their mind for terrorist, McCain responded by saying, “No, he’s a good family man.” While Romney is a Mormon and shares their beliefs regarding gender, he did not attack Obama in the way we saw Trump attack Obama. McCain and Romney did not attack Obama with the same racist attacks we see from the modern Republican Party. Their policies had racism in them, such as the war on drugs and police brutality, but they did not do the crude, blatantly racist behavior that has now become the norm in the Republican Party. Both Romney and McCain won the primaries. McCain was 24 points ahead of his closest opponent, and Romney won a majority of the popular vote in the primary.

Obama does not explain what has happened to the Republican Party by himself. If he did, Romney would not have won the 2012 primary. Racism alone does not explain the swing of the Republican Party over the last ten years into a Russophile party.

Russian propaganda

This is where Russia enters the picture.

Russia is in a very different situation. Oligarchs run its economy while average Russians live in poverty. Their life expectancy is on par with Syria. Their population is shrinking rapidly. Russia is a country in crisis, and there is no way out under its current system.

Putin believes that the way to help Russia survive, at least in the short term, is to conquer Ukraine and other former colonies of Russia, but the United States stands in their way. If the United States kept allowing sovereign states who apply to join NATO, Russia would have nowhere to conquer. The solution to Russia’s problem is to make the United States feel like we are in crisis when we really are not.

Vladimir Putin is using every avenue he can to erode trust in our institutions and create distrust between democracies. The tools are deeply intertwined across both domestic policy and international relations. These tools include:

  • Convince right-wing politicians that supporting Ukraine is against an “America first” ideology.
  • Manipulating politicians on the left and right to pursue non-solutions to our issues will turn small issues into real problems.
  • Manipulate politicians of both stripes that America must embrace protectionism, which weakens our economy and distances us from our allies.
  • Support state sponsors of terrorism, such as the Taliban, Syria, and Iran.
  • Manipulating Americans into believing China is our biggest enemy while Russia is the one spreading weapons to terrorist groups and dictatorships. We see this in Donald Trump’s rhetoric.
  • Convince China to support Russia as relations with America decline as a result of Russian propaganda. China supported Ukrainian territorial integrity in 2014, but now they are arming Russia.
  • Support politicians across NATO, such as Viktor Orban and Boris Johnson, who oppose NATO and the European Union.
  • Convince states like Serbia that Russia is their protector against a hostile United States. This is, of course, a lie.
  • Have their pundits tell Americans how our country is failing daily but never look at the complete picture.

This has been happening ever since Gerard Schröder was in office 20 years ago. https://www.dw.com/en/putin-and-schr%C3%B6der-a-special-german-russian-friendship/a-55219973

The United States of America is a free democracy with one of the strongest economies in the world. We have seen immense progress in civil rights over the last 15 years, and we were one of the only developed countries not to do austerity after 2008, and our economy shows it.

Again, we have a few issues that need to be dealt with. We need to build housing units to keep up with population growth, deal with climate change, and increase gun control. We also need a public option for health insurance to get our uninsured rate as close to 0 as possible.

But do not be fooled into believing populists who push us away from our friends, which means they are moving us toward corrupt dictators who want to harm our country. They have no real solutions to the problems we face.

Remember that the fundamentals of the American economy are strong. The inflation episode we saw over the last two years was global and focused on the oil market, which was a nice bonus for Putin when he invaded Ukraine. Inflation is almost down to 2% again today. We will hit our target by the end of the year. We also have not fallen into recession over this period, which is remarkable. If America elects a progressive who would reduce tariffs and visa restrictions with NATO allies, Russia would lose significant leverage, and Russians would start to wonder if the propaganda they are being spoonfed is realistic.

Project 2025 is the American wing of Russia’s propaganda machine. Why else would their book Mandate for Leadership include the following:

  • Another school of conservative thought denies that U.S. Ukrainian supports in the national security interest of America at all. Ukraine is not a member of the NATO alliance and is one of the most corrupt nations in the region. European nations directly affected by the conflict should aid in the defense of Ukraine, but the U.S. should not continue its involvement. This viewpoint desires a swift end to the conflict through a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia.
  • Thus, with respect to Ukraine, continued U.S. involvement must be fully paid for; limited to military aid (while European allies address Ukraine’s economic needs); and have a clearly defined national security strategy that does not risk American lives.

Project 2025 and the rest of the Russian machine have taken over the Republican Party, which is why they support abandoning Afghanistan and Ukraine. They want to continue supporting Israel for purely religious reasons to prepare for the second coming of Jesus. Aside from that, the Republican Party has followed its desire to become an isolationist party.

Parts of the Republican Party will claim Russia is a threat to keep votes, all the meanwhile advocating for reduced support for our allies.

The Heritage Foundation, which was so hawkish in the 2000s, and part of Project 2025, is a dove regarding supporting Ukraine.

This is why Project 2025 exists.

We must understand that Putin’s attempts to undermine democracy and strengthen his authoritarian rule in Russia are larger than any one piece, and one must understand both the domestic and international aspects of the Russian propaganda machine to see the complete picture.

Russia has proven itself to be the most significant threat to democracy in the world time and time again for over 16 years. Project 2025 is their most nefarious project yet, as they have continuously refined their propaganda.

Conclusion

The most effective way to defend our country is to vote in every election for politicians who are not allies with Putin. We need clear-spoken defenders of democracy who, when interviewed by the media, will directly counter Putin’s lies.

As America becomes more prosperous and more free, the ability to roll back progress and go back to a country where civil rights are restricted will disappear.

We must ensure Project 2025 and their support of Donald Trump fail this year as badly as possible. It is a profoundly anti-American organization and must be defeated.

The goal of Russia is to undermine democracies around the world through covert operations. Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation are obvious covert operations of the Russians to undermine American democracy.

The most impactful way to ensure they fail is to vote for Democrats.

Donald Trump does not offer solutions, only more problems.

Biden is far from a perfect president; his Israeli policy is foolish, and his Ukrainian policy is half-assed (fitting for a Democrat), but he can be convinced of better policies.

Biden is highly flawed and bad at public speaking.

Trump is an evil sexual predator.

America is better off with a Democratic trifecta so we can solve the three problems facing our federal government, which are the war in Ukraine, the crisis in Palestine, and our uninsured rate.

Only Democrats support abortion rights and gay marriage.

Three years into Trump’s presidency, we had a pandemic.

Three years into Biden’s presidency, inflation is coming back under control.

Trump will play right into Putin’s hands.

Biden will do his best to protect our friends and allies, even if I wish he had more qualified advisors.

The choice is obvious.

Happy Independence Day. Let freedom ring.

Slava Ukraine.

References

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/20/1246134779/the-reality-behind-civil-war-and-the-possibility-of-a-real-second-civil-war

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

Allen Lichtman’s research

Allen Lichtman’s 13 Keys to the White House is a monumental study that correctly predicts the electoral college in every election since 1984 except 2000. He predicts Biden will win the election this year, with only 2-4 false keys. How can we use this research to dictate policy, both internal party politics and national policy, over the next 4 years in order to win in 2028?

Key 1: Party Mandate

Democrats need to pick up 6 seats in the House of Representatives this year and keep a majority through 2028. This both allows Biden to pass policy and is a key to the White House.

Key 2: No Primary Contest/Key 12: Charismatic Incumbent

Democrats need a clear candidate in 2028 who will carry the party with no serious challenger. It needs to be a challenger who can carry progressives and almost half of the New Democrats.

Key 3: Incumbent Seeking re-election

We will not have this key in 2028.

Key 4: No third party

Sticking to the platform will ensure third party candidates have a bad year. Our candidate must not be opposed to popular planks in our party platform.

Key 5/6: Strong economy

If Biden is like every other Democrat in the last century, we will have a strong economy.

Key 7: Major policy change

A trifecta can deliver a federal public option which will give Biden this key.

Key 8: No social unrest

Solving the crisis in Gaza and defeating Russia in Ukraine will ensure there is no social unrest on foreign issues. Passing a public option will reduce our uninsured rate, increasing the feelings of a strong economy for average Americans. These three policies will keep this key true.

Key 9: No scandal

It’s Biden. He is not scandal-prone.

Key 10/11: No major foreign/military failure and Major foreign/military success

Defeat Russia in Ukraine and solve the crisis in Palestine with a major treaty. These two accomplishments are worth two keys.

Key 13: Uncharismatic challenger

We have no control over this.

 

If Biden does those three policies:

  1. Peace treaty with Palestine and Israel followed by legitimate elections in Palestine.
  2. Arm Ukraine so they can defeat Russia and then have Ukraine join NATO.
  3. Pass a health insurance public option.

These three policies will guarantee Democrats will win in 2028 more than anything else we can do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_to_the_White_House

Trends in economic data

I gathered some data on US states. This is not longitudinal yet, but I still think it has some interesting trends.

To start, states which vote more democratically have the following trends:

  • more bachelor’s degrees
  • higher incomes both before and after taxes
  • live longer
  • more people have health insurance.
  • Fewer people smoke tobacco.

The one downside is that the cost of living is higher, and housing is more expensive on average.

If you are trying to minimize your taxes, random forest regressors fail to give a robust predictive model for the total tax rate, with an R squared of only 1%, which is no explanation. This includes presidential results for the last three elections and the partisan voting index! Still, tax rates are fairly uniform and not explained by partisan affiliation, no matter how I try to torture my data.

The biggest correlate of living longer is higher home prices, and vice versa. Increasing longevity reduces house turnover, reducing available housing stock and increasing prices. So, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, if you want lower housing prices, kill grandma!

Or you can build more housing…

Long lives, higher incomes, high home prices, and bachelor’s degrees are strongly correlated.

Life expectancy Median household income Bachelor’s degree Biden vote 2020
Life expectancy 1.000000 0.752675 0.598726 0.541611
Median household income 0.752675 1.000000 0.848154 0.727764
Bachelor’s degree 0.598726 0.848154 1.000000 0.826395
Biden vote 2020 0.541611 0.727764 0.826395 1.000000


The relationship between bachelor’s degrees and incomes is the strongest correlation in my dataset.


An interesting finding is that increasing school funding does not lead to better SAT Math scores. The strongest correlate is a slower population growth rate as education funding increases. Neither does school funding correlate to tax rates as strongly as it correlates to lower population growth. This is worth further exploration. It also does not correlate with partisan affiliation.



States with more smokers lean Republican and have lower incomes.

Nothing in my dataset strongly correlates with SAT math scores.

In conclusion…

  • Simply increasing funding for a program will not necessarily lead to better results. Emphasize quality of government more than increasing funding, at least most of the time. Pumping more money into an inefficient system will not lead to better results.
  • Throwing more money at a problem like police or increasing border restrictions haphazardly works as well as spending money on education or fighting climate change without considering the efficiency of how the money will be spent.
  • Tax rates in the ranges we see in the US today have a minimal impact on quality of life.
  • Higher education matters.
  • Smoking kills.
  • Keep people in school, which leads to lower poverty and higher incomes, which leads to less smoking, which leads to longer lives.

Sources:

Housing cost https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/housing-costs-by-state
other data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_socioeconomic_factors
Education https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-spending-by-state
State tax levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_tax_levels_in_the_United_States
tobacco https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/smoking-rates-by-state

How to crash your society, or not

Here are policies that are most likely to destroy your country:

  • Nationalized agriculture will quickly cure overpopulation.
  • Concentrate your economy in the hands of a handful of mega-corporations. The rich and powerful get significant benefits paid for by the working class.
  • Increase the cost of housing. If a condo is less than 20 times the annual income, are you even trying to kill your country?
  • Increase the cost of child care. If women can work and have children, you are just a feminist.
  • Privatize education. Only the wealthy can afford to get the best jobs. This kills social mobility, which kills your population growth rate.
  • Long-term economic depression. People have children based on relative terms, not absolute terms.

This is Korea. These are the policies of both North Korea and South Korea in one list that have destroyed the Korean nation.

If you instead want to build a society with stable growth and economic opportunity, do the opposite of these.

How to reduce the price of oil

You can reduce the price of a good or service in two ways:

  • Reduce demand
  • Increase supply

Now, from the perspective of the United States, while we have one of the largest oil reserves, most of those reserves are shale. Shale oil is expensive to refine and particularly dirty compared to other sources of oil. If the price of oil drops far enough, America’s shale oil will no longer be profitable, and we will again force the owners of shale wells into bankruptcy. Setting up wells is expensive, and they must stay running for a while to recoup their cost. For this reason, it takes time to move wells successfully online and offline. It takes time to build, and it takes time to stop drilling. For this reason, America cannot drill baby drill our way to $1 per gallon of gasoline.

If you decide to give people cash to offset the increased cost of gasoline, demand will increase, pushing the price up. While government subsidies are helpful when there are long-term benefits from a good or service, such as education or health care, and a single player in an insurance market can reduce prices substantially, like with prescription drugs, the oil market is not one of those monopolistic markets. I am not opposed to all government regulation or even taking over entire sectors in the case of natural monopolies, but the oil market is not one of those sectors. It is not a natural monopoly, and it is not an insurance situation. The government should stay out of it. Sorry, Governor Newsom, gas cards are a bad policy.

It also is a strange situation where the government taxes and subsidizes a good. Pick a lane!

Suppose the US government decides to subsidize oil prices to a lower level while still having a gas tax (which is a bizarre combination of policies), that will either take tax revenue to subsidize a private good or print money to boost demand for a particular good, increasing the price overall. There is a point where printing money will cause inflation. It’s hard to know exactly where that will be; we don’t want to mess around with it. Printing money makes sense to pull ourselves out of recession, which is usually paired with deflation, but we don’t want to overheat the economy when GDP growth is up.

We need policies that raise people out of poverty, such as debt-free college, food stamps, and guaranteed health care. Subsidizing gasoline is not the way to do it.

The US cannot subsidize its way out of high oil prices.

Reducing demand can be done in several ways:

  • Tax gasoline. Some of the tax will be paid by the producer, some by the consumer. You get a double dividend as well. You also don’t have to deal with the substitution effect.
  • Upzone areas to increase tax revenue and lower the cost of housing. This makes transit more profitable to run.
  • Implement mixed-use zoning so people don’t have to drive everywhere.
  • Expanding transit, which is convenient and fast, will, through the substitution effect, pull people away from cars, reducing demand for gasoline. Transit needs to be built as a network, and larger cities should not operate out of a central hub. There are several ways to do this:
    • Reduce restrictive regulations (not regarding safety, however) to lower the cost of building transit so we can have more transit and less driving via the substitution effect.
    • Eliminate tariffs on foreign-built transit vehicles so transit agencies have lower costs and can expand.
    • Designate main arterials as transit only to make transit run faster. This one is free!

Simply making driving more expensive without upzoning, expanding transit, and mixed-use zoning will be a revenue source for the government. People need alternatives and have access to amenities near their houses. When you do both at the same time, you have a sustainable situation.

We can now implement many policies to reduce the cost of building transit and the need to drive, reducing financial strain on American families.

Zoning reforms are almost free to implement, reduce the need to drive, and increase city tax revenue per square kilometer, which can be used to expand transit.

Biden report card

This is a summary of everything I have written over the last 3 and a half years

Domestic Social: A

He supports the progress that was made under the Obama administration, abortion rights, gay marriage, trans rights, etc. Biden is a fantastic president on domestic social policy. He has not eroded American civil liberties; his court appointees are strong liberals.

He is among the best presidents we have ever had on domestic social policy. Only LBJ and Obama compare.

Solid A.

Economic: C

Biden is not to blame directly for the increase in oil prices since the invasion of Ukraine. That is the fault of Putin. He could have done a lot more to prevent the war, however, and that would have kept prices more under control.

Biden is a protectionist and his love of tariffs will cost America over the long term.

He supports the Affordable Care Cat.

I wish he would support a carbon tax.

But overall, while he is far worse than Obama on economics, he is not the worst president we have ever had on the economy by a long shot.

Solid C. Some good things, some bad things.

Foreign policy: F

He surrendered to terrorists in Afghanistan, supports Netanyahu, and has not done enough to ensure Ukraine wins the war. We would still have had a major inflation problem if he had done more, but the inflation would not have been as severe.

Social liberalism needs to be a bigger part of his foreign policy, and we must stop supplying Likud.

 

Trump receives an F on all three. He appointed justices who oppose gay marriage and abortion. His handling of COVID made it worse than it needed to be, which devastated our economy and many people died because of his choices. His foreign policy was to set in motion the crisis in Afghanistan with our surrender, did not support our allies, and did whatever Netanyahu told him to do. The only way Trump could have been worse is if he got more laws signed into law.

 

Neither President is perfect, both fail on foreign policy, but on domestic social policy, one of these men is clearly better than the other.