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Matthew Yglesias
@mattyglesias
Had a fun debate last year with
@toddntucker
and
@ENPancotti
on tariffs, where one of my takes was that it's counterproductive for progressive analysis to have invested so much intellectual equity in protectionist arguments that can be easily coopted by the right.
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Matthew Yglesias
@mattyglesias
I did a debate on tariffs in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas calling on Democrats to stop indulging the premise that manipulating trade balances is the key to securing an egalitarian economy. democracyjournal.org/magazine/74/ar
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Elizabeth Pancotti
@ENPancotti
We specifically called for targeted and strategic tariffs, which is unfortunately not what Trump has coopted. Also, while I’d love to think the President took our recommendations, I think his obsession with tariffs predates all 3 of our births.
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Matthew Yglesias
@mattyglesias
Absolutely a different policy than the one you guys recommended, but I stand by my concern that we've been paying the price for a long-term trend of wildly overstating trade restriction as a tool for egalitarian ends.
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Joel Dodge
@joeldodge07
By the same token, wouldn’t it also be counterproductive to invest so much intellectual equity in abundance/de-regulatory arguments that can easily be co-opted by the right? The point being that substantive design & directional differences really matter
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