Linkage

In the US, housing policy distinctively subsidizes homeownership. Most notably in the form of the Mortgage Interest Tax Deduction, federal policy benefits owners much more than tenants. Climate policy is no different. In public or cooperative housing models, the government or cooperative serves as the landlord or property manager, and therefore has more direct influence over the fate of property conditions. In much of the private market, by contrast—which is where the vast majority of tenants find housing—the federal government sees its role as less direct. Tenants in many multifamily properties have no direct method of contracting for services; many do not know who owns the real estate. The IRA’s focus on incentives and credits for landlords maintains this property relationship.

The fact that about one in three housing units are occupied by tenants raises questions about the effects such climate tax incentives will have on owners of rental property. The Biden Administration has emphasized the importance of channeling these funds to “disadvantaged communities,” maintaining that about 40 percent of funds should go toward low-income households, 10 percent of which should go toward multi-family households. However, the facts of ownership leave open a stubborn question: will landlord spending on climate retrofits—a condition for receiving public funds—alter existing financial terms between tenants and landlords?

In this report we propose the creation of a national construction fund to help expand the stock of new multifamily housing, particularly during high interest rate environments. The multifamily housing sector finds itself trapped in a vicious cycle: rising rent and housing costs induce the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, thereby shrinking the supply of financing for housing, in turn contributing to higher housing prices. Financing bottlenecks cause otherwise economically viable units to sit unbuilt or delayed, contributing to our national housing shortage and affordability crisis. 

A national construction fund would provide enough lower-cost construction financing to allow multi-family developers to clear upfront equity investment hurdles and continue developing projects in higher interest rate environments. Thousands of permitted, ready-to-build units that are stuck in limbo would nally enter construction, ensuring that housing supply becomes available as the economy picks up steam and preventing housing costs from continuing to spiral upward.

This report highlights:

• the connection between the business cycle, housing supply, and housing costs;
• the financing gaps that developers face in high-rate environments; and
• considerations and options for policymakers in designing and implementing a national construction fund that can ll those gaps, including the proper instrumentalities to host the fund, eligible lenders, risk management, fund sizing, and further incentives to increase affordability.

The federal government has not made a large scale investment to address affordable housing shortages since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which created public housing for civilians. Now, we need action beyond that scale. The country’s housing crisis is untenable, and it must end. We need a Homes Guarantee that will:

• Build 12 million social housing units and eradicate homelessness;
• Reinvest in existing public housing;
• Protect renters and bank tenants;
• Pay reparations for centuries of racist housing policies; and,
• End land/real estate speculation and de-commodify housing.

Fully realized, this proposal will guarantee homes for all. Rents will be set based on tenants’ needs and real costs to
local government, rather than speculative market prices. Land will be stewarded by and on behalf of everyday people
instead of financialized by developers and landlords. A Homes Guarantee will offer both reparative and proactive
approaches, including restorative justice to communities impacted by decades of discriminatory housing policy, as
well as investments that slash carbon emissions and support resiliency from ongoing climate breakdown.

Offering a plan to eradicate housing insecurity and homelessness in America is a gigantic undertaking. It is also a
moral and political responsibility. This briefing book is our detailed proposal for a Homes Guarantee

There is no way either of these two could sit still for long enough to dictate this. The style is uncannily like that of Kevin Roberts or Russ Vought. As Cory Doctorow says, they "are pursuing policy-based evidence" as "a prelude to transforming the nation into a land of epistemological chaos".

DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission. This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.

When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress. The president owes lawmaking deference to Congress, not to bureaucrats deep within federal agencies. The use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking by adding burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront, but the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent mandates. And after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.

A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy. DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions. The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited.

I noticed some years ago that the new far right was obsessed with fantasy scenarios of imaginary and extreme evil. FEMA death camps, “great replacement theory,” the “Great Reset,” fifteen-minute cities, 5G towers being beacons of mind control, and microchips installed in people through vaccines. In India, they have this theory called the Romeo jihad: that Muslim men are seducing Hindu girls and converting them to Islam, thus waging a sort of demographic war. Or take QAnon’s fantasies of satanist, communist pedophiles running the world. They are really enthralled and obsessed by hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster.

Why is this? There’s no shortage of real disasters: wildfires, floods, wars, recessions, and pandemics. Yet quite often they have denialist relationships with these disasters. Many say COVID-19 was just an excuse for the Fourth Reich, or that climate change is an excuse for a liberal totalitarian regime, a new form of communism, etc.

Right-wingers are really enthralled and obsessed by hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster.

I often take the example of the wildfires in Oregon. The fires ripped across the plains and through the forest and burned at 800 degrees Celsius. They were a real threat to people’s lives. But a lot of people refused to leave because they heard that it was actually Antifa setting the blazes and that it was part of a seditious conspiracy to wipe out white conservative Christians. So, rather than flee for their lives, they set up armed checkpoints and pointed their guns at people, claiming that they were on the lookout for Antifa.

Why do they go for this mass apocalyptic fantasy? Because it processes disaster in a way that is actually quite enlivening. Most of the time, when people go through disasters, it results in depression and withdrawing a bit from life and the public sphere. But the far right offers you a different way out. It says “those demons in your head that you’ve been wrestling with, they’re actually real and you can kill them. The problem is not anything difficult, or abstract or systemic, it’s just bad people, and we’re going to get them.” It takes all the difficult emotions that people deal with in the face of economic shocks and climate change and gives them an outlet that feels valid and validating.

The boom in private markets since the 2007-2009 financial crisis has been huge, mainly relying on very low interest rates to rack up debt on the companies purchased. After central banks around the world slashed interest rates to near zero in response to the 2008- 009 financial crisis, private equity embarked on its longest and most powerful boom. In 2021, the market’s zenith, a record $1.2tn in deals were struck, according to PitchBook data.

Economic slumps provide fresh blood for these vampires as small companies struggle in recessions. In 2008-9 slump and in the pandemic slump, private equity firms announced ‘approaches’ to more than twice as many listed companies as they had ever done previously. And private equity company, Bain Capital’s managing partner John Connaughton commented: ‘One of the most productive periods for us was after the global financial crisis.”

But now a series of rapid interest rate rises since 2022 has dried up much of the fresh blood that vampire PE funds need and many private-equity-backed companies are saddled with large debts and face much higher interest costs. Default rates are picking up and lenders are increasingly taking control of creditor companies at the expense of equity owners. 

[…]

Over the last two decades, the vampires of private equity have gorged themselves on the profits of labour in the companies they have sweated, while avoiding sharing those profits with their investors or with governments through taxation. They engage in various forms of ‘financial engineering’ to increase their gains. And in doing so, they have leveraged key sectors of the economy into huge debt, at the expense of productive investment. Now rising debt servicing costs are adding to the risk of a major financial crash, acting as a stake through the heart of many of these vampires.

Using chaos and fear to enforce conformity:

Some bathroom bills cover all K-12 schools, colleges, and government-owned buildings or spaces. Some cover just K-12 schools, while others cover some government buildings but not others, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Proposed drag bans are similarly haphazard: North Dakota’s proposed ban characterized all drag shows as “adult-oriented,” making them equivalent to strip clubs, while West Virginia lawmakers floated a ban that appeared to criminalize transgender people being around minors, period. The net effect is that it is impossible to know for sure what is permitted and what is prohibited.

This is a feature, not a bug. Just as the earlier “cross-dressing” laws were vague enough to make any non-conformity treacherous, modern-day analogs do the same. Anyone who falls outside the mainstream of traditional gender presentations, regardless of whether they happen to also be queer, now faces heightened scrutiny thanks to a patchwork of laws across the country.

All of these laws and proposals have one goal: making LGBTQ+ people—or anyone else not wedded to traditional gender roles—feel uncomfortable and unsafe. If people feel unsafe in this fashion, they will retreat from public life or radically change their self-presentation to conform better. Conservatives are likely thrilled with either result, as in both cases, they will have robbed queer people of their ability to fully and authentically participate in society. And that’s exactly the point.

A new poll from Gallup about Americans’ attitudes around transgender rights reveals a growing distaste for far-right efforts to ban gender-affirming care.

According to the poll, six in 10 U.S. adults oppose laws banning gender-affirming care for minors.

At the same time, a slim majority – 51% – of Americans think transitioning is morally wrong. Just forty-four percent call it “morally acceptable.”

The morality of transitioning – which the survey called “changing one’s gender” – falls along partisan and generational lines.

Those who consider it morally acceptable include political liberals (81%), Democrats (72%), those who don’t identify with a religion (67%), those who don’t attend religious services regularly (59%), young adults aged 18 to 29 (56%) and college graduates (53%).

Some of the people in this market segment are merely military cosplayers and keyboard warriors who want to act cool and nothing further. But there are the true militants, those who see the variety of full metal jacket, hollow-points, hydra-shoks, fluted rounds, segmented rounds, and fragmenting rounds, and hoard each for the variety of tactical situations they see coming.

Those who traverse the booths featuring body armor, night-vision optics, tactical vests, handguns, assault-style rifles, bullpups, and .50 caliber sniper rifles see all of it as essential provisions for what will transpire. Those who fervently believe the last election was stolen, and that voting from the rooftops is the only option left. Those who listen to Abbott and Trump rant about inner cities, courthouses, leftist students, and asylum seekers, and hear a target list. Those who heard “Stand back and stand by” in 2020 as orders.

It doesn’t take many. Even if only 1% of those in attendance held this worldview (which would be a considerable underestimate based on what I saw), that would mean anywhere from 500-700 of the people in attendance (whether one believes the NRA’s attendance estimate of 72,000, or a more likely 50,000). That’s 500-700 high casualty events waiting to happen.

And the folks with these beliefs would likely be underrepresented at the NRA convention, given that in many pro-gun circles the organization is seen as corrupt liberal sell-outs.

Just mind-blowing.

Let’s be blunt. The United States has become two nations occupying the same country. When pressed, or in private, many would now agree. Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.

I don’t just mean the millions of illegal immigrants. Obviously, those foreigners who have bypassed the regular process for entering our country, and probably will never assimilate to our language and culture, are—politically as well as legally—aliens. I’m really referring to the many native-born people—some of whose families have been here since the Mayflower—who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans. They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.

What about those who do consider themselves Americans? By and large, I am referring to the 75 million people who voted in the last election against the senile figurehead of a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship, and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism. Regardless of Trump’s obvious flaws, preferring his re-election was not a difficult choice for these voters. In fact—leaving aside the Republican never-Trumpers and some squeamish centrists—it was not a difficult choice for either side. Both Right and Left know where they stand today… and it is not together. Not anymore.

[…]

Practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve. What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.

This recognition that the original America is more or less gone sets the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy apart from almost everyone else on the Right. Paradoxically, the organization that has been uniquely devoted to understanding and teaching the principles of the American founding now sees with special clarity why “conserving” that legacy is a dead end. Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counter-revolution, and the only road forward.

[…] 

America, as an identity or political movement, might need to carry on without the United States. […] In the meantime, give up on the idea that “conservatives” have anything useful to say. Accept the fact that what we need is a counter-revolution.