The Adolescents Have Taken Over Policymaking

Democrats increasingly match Republicans' emotionally immature approach to policy — a problem for the party that's supposed to be invested in making government work.

Dear readers,

I keep going back and forth about whether policy debates have been getting dumber over the years, or whether I’m just getting older and experiencing the completely standard set of feelings about how things were better when I was younger.

I’m pretty sure it’s the former, and that Donald Trump has set off a race to the bottom that has made other elected officials — Democrats and other Republicans alike — wonder why they should have to think about policy like grown-ups when he clearly has no intention of doing so.

An example of this degradation is the 2025 tax law compared to the 2017 tax law. I had some serious ideological objections to 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which set the overall level of federal tax collections too low and collected those taxes in a way that was not weighted enough toward higher earners. But the law at least reflected a coherent effort to pursue certain conservative policy objectives: that taxes should have lower rates applied to a broader base of income, with tax treatment of businesses designed to encourage more investment and growth. Many of the law’s structural changes to the tax code, like the curtailment of many deductions, were good even if the rates were set wrong.

The 2025 law, on the other hand, was pure slop. You could feel the absence of Paul Ryan acutely in this more stupid tax law. Instead of continuing the positive structural changes of the 2017 law, it unwound some of them — creating new tax exemptions based on whatever seemed to come to Donald Trump’s head, like “no tax on tips” and a new deduction for auto loan interest. It was also enacted in a different interest rate and inflation environment than the last time around: while deficit-financed tax cuts were already uncalled for in 2017, they were considerably more destructive in 2025 when both interest rates and inflation were undesirably elevated. (Tax cuts will tend to push both up rather than down.)

Most alarmingly, the all-candy mentality that fueled the 2025 tax law has spread from the Republican Party to infect the Democrats, too. When Trump announced “No Tax on Tips” as part of his 2024 campaign agenda, Kamala Harris responded with her own copycat policy for tax-free tips. Since then, Democrats around the country are announcing their own plans to exempt whole swathes of politically favored income from taxation. Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor and Biden White House official who is now running for governor of Georgia, says teachers shouldn’t have to pay income tax. Former Rep. Katie Porter says she’ll exempt everyone making less than $100,000 a year from paying income tax if she becomes governor of California. Senators Chris Van Hollen and Cory Booker have announced plans for trillions of dollars in income tax cuts, also designed to exempt huge swathes of the middle class from the taxes that finance our government.¹

These are all examples of slopulism: Policies that are pitched as making life more affordable for everyday Americans but likely to produce negative consequences for ordinary people if enacted. Slopulism is bad when it comes from either party. But it’s especially a problem when Democrats engage in it because Democrats’ core pitch to voters is that they’re the party that will get government to do more and better things.

In the case of the middle class tax cut proposals, they come within the context of an already-yawning federal budget gap that puts upward pressure on interest rates and inflation. Bringing inflation and interest rates down will require deficit reduction, not more tax cuts the government can’t afford. Tax cut proposals are especially puzzling from Democrats — at least Republicans want to shrink and degrade the functionality of the government, but Democrats purport to want not only to defend existing programs like Social Security and Medicare but to create new ones, like childcare benefits and subsidies for clean energy. Van Hollen, Booker and Porter all say they’ll finance their huge middle class tax cuts by raising taxes on corporations and/or the wealthy — thus using up fiscal capacity that won’t be available to finance new government programs or reduce unsustainable budget deficits. Exhaustion of the Social Security Trust Fund looms in the early 2030s, and the Van Hollen and Booker plans would both make it harder to find the funds needed to backfill the program and stave off benefit cuts. That all seems bad for the party that’s supposed to care about New Deal entitlement programs.

But these tax missteps are just part of a broader trend that is both worrying and annoying: the increasingly adolescent approach that both parties take to politics. Politicians swear and make up childish nicknames for each other. They propose simplistic nonsense like “abolish the IRS.” Some of them spent much of 2020 and 2021 saying it didn’t matter very much whether children attend school or not. And both parties’ tax proposals are a reflection of increasingly widespread sentiment that the financing of an effective government is somebody else’s problem. These phenomena are bad but they are also, more specifically, immature. They reflect a lack of responsibility and of the shared civic spirit that we’re supposed to try to achieve before adulthood.²

There are counterexamples. In New York, I’ve been pleased to see Gov. Kathy Hochul not just talking about “affordability” but making politically hard choices to make New York more affordable. She annoyed environmentalists by approving a new gas pipeline to Long Island, because a new pipeline will help moderate electricity costs and actually make living there more affordable. She’s pushing to delay emissions regulations that would make energy more expensive, and she’s urging a relaxation of our state’s environmental review law that perversely can make it more difficult to build infrastructure that makes New York greener, like dense housing. Hochul is not immune to gimmicks — like Trump and Harris, she has become a booster of “no tax on tips” — but she’s shown an understanding that life involves tradeoffs and making New York less expensive sometimes involves saying “no” to interest groups within her coalition.

At the federal level, there are politicians working earnestly toward policy changes that could unlock more energy and more housing that this country needs to grow and remain affordable to ordinary people. They are doing worthy, grown-up work. I wrote last September about watching some of them at work, trying very hard to be smart at a time when Donald Trump continues to make everything stupid.

But at the same time, we’re in an environment where the ROAD to Housing Act — a bill full of small-but-worthy tweaks to promote housing production — faced a last-minute slop attack: a provision to discourage new home production by making it effectively illegal to build single-family home subdivisions for the rental market by imposing an unworkable provision that any rental house development has to be sold off to individual owners within seven years.³ When this provision came out of nowhere to be added to the bill — threatening to undermine all its benefits in terms of promoting new home production — Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz took to the Senate floor to ask why the body was making this inexplicable bipartisan mistake. For his trouble he faced dishonest attacks for being a handmaiden of private equity, never mind that (as Schatz pointed out) the provision isn’t even about private equity — it prohibits any kind of long-term institutional ownership of rental houses, whether by a publicly traded firm or a pension fund or one rich guy or any other possible owner.

You can tell that “houses are for people” is an idiotic slogan for the prohibition of rental houses if you bother to think about it for even five seconds. I lived my entire 30s in a home owned by AvalonBay Communities, and I certainly felt like a person with a home. Maybe my tenancy was oppressive and I should have been forced to buy an apartment if I wanted to live in one? Whatever this sentiment entails, it’s obviously not very progressive. But as Matt Yglesias notes, the proponents of the no-build-to-rent-houses rule don’t even bother trying to justify their position — it’s just all neener-neener, which is definitely an adolescent sentiment.

I like to think voters will tire of this approach to governance and want to be ruled by grown-ups again. But I am increasingly pessimistic — and especially pessimistic as a Democrat, since we’re the party that has more responsibility to make government work, as we want more of it than the other side does.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. Republicans of course have their own versions of this: Steve Hilton, a Republican running for governor of California, says veterans shouldn’t have to pay income tax, while Republicans around the country are increasingly trying to exempt seniors from property tax, as though local government services matter only for people who currently have school-age children.

2. The immaturity of course goes far beyond fiscal policy. In particular, there is something deeply adolescent about the mania over the Epstein Files. There’s a reason the FBI doesn’t ordinarily just dump out the contents of its investigative files for all to see — these files are routinely full of rumors, false allegations, references to people with no connection to any crime, and embarrassing personal information that doesn’t amount to criminal activity. But Donald Trump loves a conspiracy theory, and Democrats decided if he was going to spread rumors about what was in the files he might as well get what he wants good and hard. So the files were released by near-unanimous vote in Congress, and both politicians and members of the public have been going hog-wild, reading emails out of context to make wild-eyed insinuations without bothering to figure out what the truth is.

Last month, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna went to the House floor to read the names of “six wealthy, powerful men” associated with Epstein whose names he said were wrongly redacted from the Epstein files. It turned out that four of the six men weren’t wealthy or powerful and weren’t Epstein associates at all — they were random people whose photos were included in a photo array shown to a witness. Instead of apologizing, Khanna blamed the DOJ, as though they had cornered him into shooting first and asking questions later. The lack of any pretense that we need to wait for information before flinging wild allegations is a fitting form of childishness for our political era.

3. Imagine making a similar kind of rule about apartments: if you build them, you have to sell them off as condos within seven years. Anyone can see that would be a stupid idea: it would discourage investment in new apartments and therefore make housing less affordable and less available. But suddenly, when the homes at issue are separate physical structures, emotionality takes over — we hear that “homes are built for people, NOT for corporations,” and policymakers rush to ban a whole financing model without even bothering to do the analysis of what policy actually makes more homes available to families.