Only Teslas exempt from new auto tariffs thanks to 85% domestic content rule

>1) not the point, that list of criticisms was a bad list of criticisms

My claim was merely that the situation was analogous. So yes, it is the point, in my view.

There is a grey area where you can do things that the electorate may want, which also happen to benefit your cronies. This overall issue is more severe for big government types, since more largesse is getting handed out.

I'd additionally highlight your use of the term "relevant electorate". Which underscores that "cronies" and "voters" may be the same people.

Direct Tesla subsidies would probably be quite popular with Tesla workers. That's a relevant electorate. Would that therefore make direct Tesla subsidies defensible? That's what your argument seems to imply.

>2) whether anything that happened in the last month is going to promote more domestic manifacturing is quite dubious at best.

I suspect some of the items from the FEE list won't be particularly effective at their stated goal either. In general, people will disagree about the likely effectiveness of government programs. So I'm not sure "likely effectiveness" is a great way to check for favoritism.

According to many other comments the title is misleading, everyone has to pay tariffs on the portion of the vehicle that is not US or a NAFTA member source. Besides all Tesla's sold in the US are manufactured in the US. There would be zero reason for Tesla to pay a tariff on anything but parts.

I think comparing the wrongs of one administration vs another is not really viable. This is in large part because of partisanship but another issue is that we all value different things, and have different worldviews. For instance gerrymandering is an interesting thing, but I think it's entirely political theater, because there's a simple completely self-serving solution.

First off imagine an ostensibly completely fair system where each district was somehow made up of a random person within a state. Contrary to intuition, you would have actually just created the most gerrymandered system imaginable, where a party with only 51% of approval within a state would end up with 100% of representative seats, winning each and every district by 51%.

So counter-intuitively you do intentionally want to pack voters of a similar type into certain districts to create a fair system, which leads to all sorts of weird things, including the "solution"! It turns out the most fair system is to intentionally gerrymander! If you let each party with at least e.g. 1% of the vote take their turn creating an intentionally gerrymandered district for themselves (you can only 'district' your own voters), the self-maximizing solution is to create a 51% district in your favor. But if you mathematically work this out, this actually creates a perfectly fair (as close as possible to x% voters = x% of seats) result in the end! I can give an example if you find this unbelievable.

So all the rhetoric about trying to solve gerrymandering is mostly just theater and gesturing. The solution I gave is not some huge secret, even if most people are not aware of it. The only argument against it is that x% voters = x% seats is not desirable, but I think that's a rather fringe view. Geographic stuff doesn't mean what it used to, especially when there's millions of voters per district.

> I think comparing the wrongs of one administration vs another is not really viable.

Yet this is what we do at every election.

It is true that lies are about different things and have different impacts. People value different things. Lies are difficult to enumerate. Yet if person A says he ate 99 jellybeans when he only ate 98 and person B says he ate 99 jellybeans when he actually ate your mother, we can safely say that person A's falsehood is sufficiently different from person B's that we would rather put A in charge than B.

You can make this abstract argument, but imagine you have two politicians, call them T(rump) and H(arris). You ask advocates for T and H to make lists of the others' politician's lies ranked from most to least egregious and present them for judgement to a third party who will make an effort, showing their work, to evaluate their truth. Neither party may be fully satisfied by this process, but one is going to look ridiculous much faster than the other. When the argument is particular, not abstract, it becomes much harder to sustain.

Throwing your hands in the air and giving up because we cannot calculate a numerical measure of honesty like we can digits of pi is silly, because we still have to make decisions based on imperfect information. Claiming one must do this -- give up on evaluating honesty -- while still advocating for a particular candidate or policy is itself dishonest: you clearly do not believe your own argument but propound it in the hopes that others will and will then withdraw from the debate.

First of all, I do know the difference between Singapore and the US. But my statement is true anyway. I wasn't drawing a direct equivalence of housing policy.

The person above pointed out that Singpore, is #1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom" and the rank high in other such indexes.

Housing policy in regards to ownership maybe a counterpoint to that, but we are not looking at individual policy but the at everything.

If you want to dispute the claim that Singpore is not 'free market' at all, then please direct me to an index with better methodology in that regard.

> Sure, from a financial perspective, particularly around mortgages.

That to, but that's not primary what I am talking about.

No I'm talking about zoning and many, many, many other types of regulation. Plus of course, tax code and many other things.

Typically new land for a city is rezoned, then a developer comes in, build there and often inherits the infrastructure to the city to maintain. Then the city collects some property tax from that.

That is different then the Singapore model but its also a gigantic intervention in pretty much every aspect of the housing market.

Not to mention the government hold many plots of lands that could be developed. The government owns quite a lot of land.

The direct ownership is only one aspect, what you can do is another.

And as I said, I'm not disputing that in such a ranking, their land and housing policy could be considered as a negative compared to the US.