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I hate all of these "one weird trick to make housing affordable" policies. New build private housing isn't ever going to be cheap. If you want cheap new build you either let people build like crazy and subsidize demand or you build public housing. Those cost money, though

Truly the worst legacy of the Obama era. Those guys were obsessed with cute little tricks to get the market to do things instead of the obvious solution of just doing shit. Some of that was born of obstructionism from Rs, but some of it was terminal consultant brain within the admin

I think one of the things about Biden that ended up throwing people, myself included, is that while he wasn't that left wing he was old enough to remember an era where instead of hiring 75 consultants to figure out how to nudge a market into fixing a problem we just fixed the problem

Being a mess is kind of my point. The Obama people were obsessed with tying everything together with a nice little bow, precision targeted to those that needed it, and they struggled to get stuff done. The IRA was a mess because it was basically a policy shotgun.

I am constantly trying to figure out how to make my policy ideas simpler and more universal to avoid the โ€œPell grant recipients who operate a business in a low income communityโ€ trap. You can make a policy that is so targeted that it does not do anything at all.

Much like I don't care about baseball records with more than about 2 qualifiers, if you elevator pitch for a policy has more qualifier words than "what we're doing" words it should be shot into the sun