Jeff Gordon
@jeffgordon.bsky.social
Tax law, industrial policy, decarbonization, between state and market in American law. Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt Law School.
Reposted by Jeff Gordon
I'll continue to make the case that policy resilience doesn't mean invincibility, and we shouldn't overinterpret when an otherwise effective policy succumbs to American Maosim.
bsky.app/profile/ilmi...
bsky.app/profile/ilmi...
This is a logical fallacy. A resilient strategy is not an invincible one. IRA may fail but note it's over the shocked objections of the market. One cannot ignore the decades of tax credit extension, for example, and then cherry pick a black swan data point.
Sadly both the theories behind IRA have mostly failed
1. Deliverism: deliver jobs and investments to consolidate democratic voters -> win 2024 election
2. Poltiical Lock-In: deliver jobs and investments to red states & districts so that a IRA caucus inside the GOP would protect the clean economy
1. Deliverism: deliver jobs and investments to consolidate democratic voters -> win 2024 election
2. Poltiical Lock-In: deliver jobs and investments to red states & districts so that a IRA caucus inside the GOP would protect the clean economy
May 23, 2025 at 9:35 PM
I'll continue to make the case that policy resilience doesn't mean invincibility, and we shouldn't overinterpret when an otherwise effective policy succumbs to American Maosim.
bsky.app/profile/ilmi...
bsky.app/profile/ilmi...
Reposted by Jeff Gordon
This is a logical fallacy. A resilient strategy is not an invincible one. IRA may fail but note it's over the shocked objections of the market. One cannot ignore the decades of tax credit extension, for example, and then cherry pick a black swan data point.
Sadly both the theories behind IRA have mostly failed
1. Deliverism: deliver jobs and investments to consolidate democratic voters -> win 2024 election
2. Poltiical Lock-In: deliver jobs and investments to red states & districts so that a IRA caucus inside the GOP would protect the clean economy
1. Deliverism: deliver jobs and investments to consolidate democratic voters -> win 2024 election
2. Poltiical Lock-In: deliver jobs and investments to red states & districts so that a IRA caucus inside the GOP would protect the clean economy
May 23, 2025 at 3:37 PM
This is a logical fallacy. A resilient strategy is not an invincible one. IRA may fail but note it's over the shocked objections of the market. One cannot ignore the decades of tax credit extension, for example, and then cherry pick a black swan data point.
Awesome stuff in here. Turns out a lot of my favorite people are “LPE-adjacent”
With summer just around the corner, are you looking to indulge in some juicy, page-turning scholarship?
Today, the Blog highlights some of the hottest new forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. 🔥🔥
Today, the Blog highlights some of the hottest new forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. 🔥🔥
Some of the Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship
With summer just around the corner, are you looking to indulge in some juicy, page-turning scholarship? As always, the Blog has you covered with our biannual roundup of some of our favorite…
lpeproject.org
May 23, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Awesome stuff in here. Turns out a lot of my favorite people are “LPE-adjacent”
Reposted by Jeff Gordon
Also, learning from this list that @jeffgordon.bsky.social and I are issue-mates for the second time in a row.
With summer just around the corner, are you looking to indulge in some juicy, page-turning scholarship?
Today, the Blog highlights some of the hottest new forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. 🔥🔥
Today, the Blog highlights some of the hottest new forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. 🔥🔥
Some of the Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship
With summer just around the corner, are you looking to indulge in some juicy, page-turning scholarship? As always, the Blog has you covered with our biannual roundup of some of our favorite…
lpeproject.org
May 22, 2025 at 6:57 PM
Also, learning from this list that @jeffgordon.bsky.social and I are issue-mates for the second time in a row.
Great reporting. For more detail on the public-private electricity generation structures available under new Mexican laws, I found this helpful: www.projectfinance.law/publications...
May 6, 2025 at 4:50 PM
Great reporting. For more detail on the public-private electricity generation structures available under new Mexican laws, I found this helpful: www.projectfinance.law/publications...
I like a number of the people involved in this, but it's amusing to see the Tax Foundation folks (who are ideologically aligned) ripping apart the tax policy chapter (by Oren Cass) over on Twitter for a number of basic factual and conceptual errors. Cass is reminding us all the value of expertise...
The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook
Policies for kickstarting America’s techno-industrial renaissance
www.rebuilding.tech
May 6, 2025 at 4:14 PM
I like a number of the people involved in this, but it's amusing to see the Tax Foundation folks (who are ideologically aligned) ripping apart the tax policy chapter (by Oren Cass) over on Twitter for a number of basic factual and conceptual errors. Cass is reminding us all the value of expertise...
Very DC, even the grocery stores getting in on abundance discourse
April 29, 2025 at 8:52 PM
Very DC, even the grocery stores getting in on abundance discourse
Excellent essay by @joeldodge07.bsky.social. "Everything bagel liberalism" might be a useful critique in theory but the examples critics have relied on (like childcare in CHIPS) are super weak. The firms got a good deal and the public got basic protections. washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/24/i...
In Defense of Everything-Bagel Liberalism | Washington Monthly
Critics warned that the Biden administration put so many conditions on the grants it offered to semiconductor manufacturers that the centerpiece of its industrial policy would fail. Those conditions t...
washingtonmonthly.com
April 24, 2025 at 1:30 PM
Excellent essay by @joeldodge07.bsky.social. "Everything bagel liberalism" might be a useful critique in theory but the examples critics have relied on (like childcare in CHIPS) are super weak. The firms got a good deal and the public got basic protections. washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/24/i...
Remarkable graph from Berkeley Lab's annual report on solar deployment (through 2023). PPA prices have closely tracked the cost of electricity, suggesting very low profit margins for merchant generators. Tempting to call it cost of service regulation.
April 23, 2025 at 2:08 PM
Remarkable graph from Berkeley Lab's annual report on solar deployment (through 2023). PPA prices have closely tracked the cost of electricity, suggesting very low profit margins for merchant generators. Tempting to call it cost of service regulation.
@lingchenscholar.bsky.social chatgpt is absolutely convinced that you have published an article about the local politics and regional rivalries of China's semiconductor industry. While this seems totally hallucinatory, I'm sure many of us would be grateful for such an article!
April 10, 2025 at 9:23 PM
@lingchenscholar.bsky.social chatgpt is absolutely convinced that you have published an article about the local politics and regional rivalries of China's semiconductor industry. While this seems totally hallucinatory, I'm sure many of us would be grateful for such an article!
Amazing opportunity for a creative litigator with interests in private law to break into legal academia and work with one of the smartest and most generous mentors imaginable (Daniel Markovits)
April 4, 2025 at 2:27 AM
Amazing opportunity for a creative litigator with interests in private law to break into legal academia and work with one of the smartest and most generous mentors imaginable (Daniel Markovits)
Reposted by Jeff Gordon
Wow this is wild.
James: "The Trump team didn't actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country's exports to us."
James: "The Trump team didn't actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country's exports to us."
April 2, 2025 at 10:46 PM
Wow this is wild.
James: "The Trump team didn't actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country's exports to us."
James: "The Trump team didn't actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country's exports to us."
Happy to see commentary on industrial policy from people who were in the room. Sam rightly argues that Congress should allow agencies more iterative processes rather than linear waterfalls.This complements Bharat Ramamurti's point that incumbents lobbied for a slower process in the first place.
That viral clip from Ezra Klein on John Stewart about the 14 steps it takes to get rural broadband funding out the door? My guest author Sam Marullo worked at Commerce and has some perspective on this. Take a read: www.eatingpolicy.com/p/planning-i...
Planning isn’t progress
Rethinking how government builds in a world that can’t wait
www.eatingpolicy.com
March 31, 2025 at 11:04 AM
Happy to see commentary on industrial policy from people who were in the room. Sam rightly argues that Congress should allow agencies more iterative processes rather than linear waterfalls.This complements Bharat Ramamurti's point that incumbents lobbied for a slower process in the first place.
Reposted by Jeff Gordon
Using the arm of the state to punish people for writing op-eds the government disagrees with is tyranny.
March 27, 2025 at 9:33 PM
Using the arm of the state to punish people for writing op-eds the government disagrees with is tyranny.
Obviously “current policy” is incoherent…but if it means you don’t need to cut the IRA and Medicaid…
NEW: Senate braces for high-stakes ruling that will decide the fate of Trump's tax cuts
Republicans want to switch traditional "current law" baseline (TCJA permanence costs $4.6 trillion) to "current policy" (costs $0).
Parliamentarian expected to rule NEXT WEEK.
www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...
Republicans want to switch traditional "current law" baseline (TCJA permanence costs $4.6 trillion) to "current policy" (costs $0).
Parliamentarian expected to rule NEXT WEEK.
www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...
Senate braces for high-stakes ruling that will decide the fate of Trump's tax cuts
The parliamentarian may rule next week whether Republicans can use a novel accounting method to make Trump tax cuts permanent. Democrats call the idea "magic math."
www.nbcnews.com
March 27, 2025 at 9:27 PM
Obviously “current policy” is incoherent…but if it means you don’t need to cut the IRA and Medicaid…
Extremely @nathantankus.bsky.social / @lookheron.bsky.social style report on the administrative complexity of lithium pricing. There is supply and demand if you zoom out far enough, but not sufficient to describe what's going on in the details. www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-con...
March 26, 2025 at 8:43 PM
Extremely @nathantankus.bsky.social / @lookheron.bsky.social style report on the administrative complexity of lithium pricing. There is supply and demand if you zoom out far enough, but not sufficient to describe what's going on in the details. www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-con...
Why do we need to derisk investment in renewables? Because moving to renewables (here, exploiting variation in RPS) raises electric price volatility, which widens credit spreads. Better storage will mitigate the volatility, but price-smoothing policy can help too. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
March 26, 2025 at 7:26 PM
Why do we need to derisk investment in renewables? Because moving to renewables (here, exploiting variation in RPS) raises electric price volatility, which widens credit spreads. Better storage will mitigate the volatility, but price-smoothing policy can help too. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Reposted by Jeff Gordon
Figuring out how to reshape governance incentives towards high-output, low-margin strategies strikes me as a key desideratum, undoing perhaps the elimination of what shareholders take to be managerial agency costs. 19/
March 26, 2025 at 1:00 AM
Figuring out how to reshape governance incentives towards high-output, low-margin strategies strikes me as a key desideratum, undoing perhaps the elimination of what shareholders take to be managerial agency costs. 19/
Just one example from this thread where @interfluidity.com annotates @donibloomfield.bsky.social and my "Law and Economics of Resilience" paper with observations that we should obviously borrow
Resilience failures, under these circumstances, can be understood as times when circumstances force what would otherwise be forbidden, restraining supply as a monopolist to benefit from high prices. 3/
March 26, 2025 at 1:14 PM
Just one example from this thread where @interfluidity.com annotates @donibloomfield.bsky.social and my "Law and Economics of Resilience" paper with observations that we should obviously borrow
I had missed this excellent post from @interfluidity.com
"The core of an abundance agenda, I posit, would be to reshape American capitalism so that overcapacity, rather than capacity nearly fully employed, becomes the norm."
drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/17/a...
"The core of an abundance agenda, I posit, would be to reshape American capitalism so that overcapacity, rather than capacity nearly fully employed, becomes the norm."
drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/17/a...
Abundance is overcapacity
drafts @ interfluidity
drafts.interfluidity.com
March 24, 2025 at 2:19 PM
I had missed this excellent post from @interfluidity.com
"The core of an abundance agenda, I posit, would be to reshape American capitalism so that overcapacity, rather than capacity nearly fully employed, becomes the norm."
drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/17/a...
"The core of an abundance agenda, I posit, would be to reshape American capitalism so that overcapacity, rather than capacity nearly fully employed, becomes the norm."
drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/17/a...
Reposted by Jeff Gordon
Jeff Gordon, Fellow @ Yale Law School, presenting on universal vs. selective “carrots” / “sticks” deployed in tax frameworks via credits for fuel, hydrogen, electricity. Complex Qs of tech neutrality, counting emissions, carbon accounting, carbon “shelters.” Need for anti-abuse rules. #ecotaxlaw25
March 22, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Jeff Gordon, Fellow @ Yale Law School, presenting on universal vs. selective “carrots” / “sticks” deployed in tax frameworks via credits for fuel, hydrogen, electricity. Complex Qs of tech neutrality, counting emissions, carbon accounting, carbon “shelters.” Need for anti-abuse rules. #ecotaxlaw25
It is really striking how most panelists so far remain committed to a carbon price as the One True Path. Even after recent rollback in Canada. Do you think 20+ House Rs would be signing a letter against cutting the carbon tax? I'll be over here in the world of the second best...
Excited to be at Pace NYC the next two days for the Tax Law and Climate Change Symposium. I’ll be presenting on carbon shelters, the unintended consequences of the IRA’s green credits: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Carbon Shelters: Carbon Accounting as Tax Law
This Article provides the first comprehensive account of the reconstruction of energy tax law that occurred under the Biden administration. In the past, federal
papers.ssrn.com
March 21, 2025 at 2:02 PM
It is really striking how most panelists so far remain committed to a carbon price as the One True Path. Even after recent rollback in Canada. Do you think 20+ House Rs would be signing a letter against cutting the carbon tax? I'll be over here in the world of the second best...
Excited to be at Pace NYC the next two days for the Tax Law and Climate Change Symposium. I’ll be presenting on carbon shelters, the unintended consequences of the IRA’s green credits: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Carbon Shelters: Carbon Accounting as Tax Law
This Article provides the first comprehensive account of the reconstruction of energy tax law that occurred under the Biden administration. In the past, federal
papers.ssrn.com
March 21, 2025 at 12:32 PM
Excited to be at Pace NYC the next two days for the Tax Law and Climate Change Symposium. I’ll be presenting on carbon shelters, the unintended consequences of the IRA’s green credits: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Powerful slides from NextEra, via @zeitlin.bsky.social. New solar + storage is just beating new gas.
March 20, 2025 at 2:41 PM
Powerful slides from NextEra, via @zeitlin.bsky.social. New solar + storage is just beating new gas.
My view on abundance as conceived by Klein/Thompson: (1) good normative ideal, (2) much better politics than even its supporters seem to think, but (3) underbaked as policy because the links between corporate power and scarcity have been poorly theorized
We’ve all been there: you come up with a fun theory, then find one great example (zoning), one ok example (permitting), and one bad example (CHIPS)
This is a good point. If the CHIPS Act is a test of 'everything bagel liberalism,' I'd say everything bagel liberalism comes out looking as good as the bagels it was named for (which is not to say there aren't legit critiques of that mindset)
March 20, 2025 at 11:49 AM
My view on abundance as conceived by Klein/Thompson: (1) good normative ideal, (2) much better politics than even its supporters seem to think, but (3) underbaked as policy because the links between corporate power and scarcity have been poorly theorized