Matt Yglesias has left ThinkProgress to join Slate, where he writes the “Moneybox” blog. You can check it out here.

We wish Matt continued success and thank him for nearly three years of insightful blogging here at ThinkProgress.

Well, folks, this is it for me! ThinkProgress is the team I’ve been a part of longest, and it’s really been a fantastic job and an enormous privilege to work with everyone here and at the larger CAP/AF. I’ll miss everyone! But on we go to new things.

In principle there should be shiny new Moneybox blog here come Monday. If that all goes horribly awry, I’ll be on my public twitter account come what may telling you where to find me.

I’m really looking forward to engaging in a bit less intra-progressive sniping about political tactics, but one thing I keep hearing said on behalf of Occupy Wall Street protests is that the regular electoral process has somehow “failed” progressives. I don’t think that analysis withstands the slightest bit of scrutiny. We had fairly substantial political changes in the 2006 election (Democrats take both the House in the Senate), the 2008 election (Democrats take the White House), and the 2010 election (Republicans take the House) and in every case the direction of change has been as you would predict. Better, more progressive legislation happened in 2007-2008 than happened in 2005-2006. In 2009-2010 it got even better. Then in 2011 it’s been worse. None of that is a coincidence. It’s fine—necessary and important, even—to do things other than electioneering. But who wins elections turns out to be very important to determining what happens. When we wake up the morning after Election Day 2012 are remaining incumbents going to say a bunch of people lost seats because they didn’t do enough to curb inequality? That’s a really crucial issue for whether or not anyone will do anything to curb inequality.

If you think that Democrats aren’t left-wing enough, then the exact same analysis obtains. You have to beat them. On Election Day. At winning elections. Recruit a primary challenger to Dianne Feinstein. Elect a Green Party mayor of New York.

There’s debate raging on several blogs and also sporadically on an email list that I belong to about macroeconomic conditions versus campaign effects that I think is tending to confuse a few things. In particular, I hear a lot of the detractors of fundamentals-based models throwing around terms like “determinism” and “predictable.” The question of determinism is, honestly, metaphysical in nature. Insofar as the American economy is the result of a deterministic process, then conduct of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is also the result of a deterministic process. Both the economy and the campaign are complex sets of human interactions. Similarly, the economy itself is not predictable. This is an important point. Back in November 2007 people knew that the economy was headed for a rocky period as construction slowed, but there was no way to know for sure whether things would improve or deteriorate over the next year.

Another thing I would say is that while the economy is clearly the most enduring “fundamental” out there, people should separate the possibility that non-economic fundamentals matter from the existence of campaign effects. Look at, for example, 9/11. That clearly caused a huge spike in Bush’s approval ratings. I think we can infer that had a similar-scale terrorist attack occurred in the September immediately before a presidential election that it would have had a large impact. But this is still “fundamentals” rather than “campaign.”

I would characterize the difference between the views this way. Conventional political journalism tends to take the fundamentals — the state of the economy, and the ups and downs of world affairs — as in some sense “given.” We’re supposed to believe that the political outcomes are driven by what the candidates say about the outcomes. Like if George McGovern had just been better able to relate to the hippie-averse working class the voters would have overlooked the strong economic growth and declining rate of U.S. military deaths in Vietnam. My view is the reverse. That the major party nominees we’ve seen have all been reasonably skilled politicians who’ve already advanced to a senior level in American politics and been vetted by the other elites in their parties, and that they all run well-funded campaigns staffed by veteran political operatives. It’s precisely because the politicians and the campaign operatives are all skilled and hard-working that the fundamentals make the difference. If the Republicans nominate Michele Bachmann, she’ll lose regardless of the state of the economy which is why they won’t nominate Michele Bachmann. The problem is that we tend to look at candidates who were beaten by objectively bad circumstances, and read things into them. Under different circumstances, people would have written articles about how a Midwestern war hero turned Vietnam-critic like George McGovern was exactly the right guy to bridge the hippie/hardhat divide in the Democratic Party.

So nothing is “predictable” about the 2012 campaign but what’s unpredictable about it is that we don’t know what will happen between today and election day. It’s also quite possible that the fundamentals will give us a close election, in which case we’ll all be glad the candidates hired so many people to write speeches and cut ads. To say that the campaign operatives earn their wages at the margin isn’t to knock their work. The difference between winning and losing is a big deal.

Karl Smith notes that America is primed for a record level of new starts on multi-family apartment buildings. That’s excellent news because via Alex Block it looks like the DC area, which has a relatively strong labor market, is having trouble finding enough housing slots for everyone who’d like to live here and work to do so.

Puzzlingly, the article poses this as a “vexing problem” rather than a win-win for blue collar construction workers, and white collar office drones alike. “How” they ask, “do you house those new workers in ways that are both affordable and don’t worsen the soul-crushing commutes that already plague the region’s residents?” In principle, this is easy. The DC area actually already went through the trouble of building a multi-line heavy rail subway network. There’s also the MARC commuter rail serving the Maryland suburbs and the VRE commuter rail serving the Virginia suburbs. I, personally, walk about 10 minutes to work and will probably just take the ~30 minute walk to my new job starting on Monday. Lots of people in DC bicycle or ride the bus. All we need to do is squeeze a lot of housing into those parts of the metro area that are walking distance from downtown, or for Metro/VRE/MARC stations. The only problem is that in order to do that, the buildings would need to be very tall and we’d need some kind of elevating device to get them from floor to floor.

More seriously, you see a great small example here of the very concrete economic problems that come with restrictions on tall buildings. There are lots of people around the country who’d like to come and work in DC’s vibrant service sector. And if we were building apartments for them to live in, not only would they have jobs, but so would the people working in our not-so-vibrant construction sector. We’ll see some of that, to be sure, but we’re also just going to see a lot of spiking rents as supply is restricted. I own a condo and will, personally, benefit from the increase in house prices. But the only way for me to realize those gains without leaving town would be to sell the place and then go live in an Occupy DC tent in McPherson Square. The losses to renters and the unemployed are quite real, in other words, while the gains to homeowners are hazy and illusory. But, you know, the views.

Via Joe Weisenthal, Jim Reid at Deutsche Bank says that if Angela Merkel won’t relent on ECB action to prevent the collapse of the European debt situation, you ought to “dig a hole in the ground and hide” as your best solution for avoiding economic catastrophe:

The problem for the market is whether to take these comments at face value or to see them as part of a general tactic of trying to force other leaders into line or believing that the comments will be reversed if the alternative to an aggressive ECB is the collapse of the Euro. If you don’t think Merkel’s tone will change then our investment advice is to dig a hole in the ground and hide. It’s difficult to see any other scenario than widescale Sovereign defaults without an aggressive ECB. Indeed it doesn’t seem we’re alone on this anymore. An Irish Times story overnight said that Sarkozy told his deputies yesterday that the euro would not survive unless the ECB decisively entered the fray.

Here’s the problem. For a bluffing strategy to work, people need to believe it. But a bluff that’s credible to Italians should also be credible to Finns. And if you’re in Finland and you think Merkel’s not bluffing, then, notwithstanding Finland’s lack of unsound budget practices, it makes sense to start bailing on Finnish banks. The contagion knows no bounds. If everyone’s hiding in holes in the ground, then the economy’s going to collapse no matter what the budget deficit is.

When I wrote about à la carte cable pricing yesterday, I got treated to a lot of links, rants, queries, expletives, etc. about carriage fees. The way this works is that owners of high-value cable networks (think ESPN or CNN) charge cable companies money for the right to broadcast their station. And technically, the way they organize these fees is as a per subscriber charge.

This doesn’t, however, change the basic analysis. You can just imagine pushing it back one level. If consumers buy less coffee, Starbucks loses revenue, but its costs also fall. But if some people decide they want to drop ESPN, that doesn’t do anything to reduce ESPN’s cost structure. Some of the resulting losses will be allocated in the form of lower content production budgets, some will be less profits for ESPN’s owners, and some is going to wind up being higher prices for ESPN’s remaining customers. Most of these customers will be able to afford the higher fees thanks to all the money they “saved” dropping CNN. Meanwhile, CNN faces the same problem of reduced revenue and the same need to cut costs and raise prices. What ends up happening is that everyone is paying substantially higher per channel prices for somewhat lower-quality versions of the products. But each network now has a somewhat smaller audience since its lost marginal customers, and therefore its advertising rates go down which creates further losses. Now this isn’t a pure “everyone loses” scenario. If ESPN is genuinely the only channel you watch, then you’ll come out ahead in the new fragmented dystopia. But most people will be worse off.

Now don’t get me wrong, I ditched cable television a little while back! The companies have terrible customer service and are currently offering a poor value proposition. But rather than usher in the fake utopia of à la carte, I think new digital distribution models will eventually settle on giant bundles.

The blogosphere is aflame with a new set of posts of posts about the fact that the corporate income tax doesn’t cost corporate America very much money and seems largely uncorrelated with non-residential investment, though things may be different in developing countries.

The thing about the corporate income tax, it seems to me, is that we should be leery of a tax that manages have such a high rate and yet raise so little revenue. If a tax isn’t raising much revenue, then it ought to be either that you have a very low rate or else that you’re taxing something trivial. Here in DC, they levy a five cent tax on plastic bags at the supermarket, and nobody is shocked to learn that this doesn’t raise much money. But if you’re leveling a 35 percent tax on corporate income, it ought to raise a lot of money. In fact, it raises very little because the corporate income tax code is shot through with loopholes and firms squeeze tons of activity into exempt activities. But this — the distortions — rather than the burdensomeness of handing over the money is what we should worry about. The corporate income tax induces a lot of tax-related lobbying and accounting and lawyering activities. Or consider that interest on debt is tax deductible, which encourages firms to finance through leverage rather than through equity. It’s the high rate which makes that subsidy so valuable. Or even the now-infamous accelerated depreciation schedule for corporate jets.

This is all bad stuff. We could gain lot by lowering these rates and making up the lost revenue. That could be a classic “lower rates, broader base” reform. It could be higher taxes on rich people. It could be taking grand ma’s Medicare away. The conventional wisdom is totally right about this. The problem, obviously, is that rich people don’t want to pay higher taxes and non-rich people don’t want grandma to lose her Medicare benefits. If the CEOs who wine about the corporate income tax were serious about it, they could start lobbying for the “replace it with higher taxes on rich guys like us” plan. But they prefer lower personal tax burdens and a less efficient economy.

The good people at the European Central Bank have a game on their website called €conomia that I would really encourage anyone who reports on economic policy to play around with for a while. The game embeds a number of assumptions I would disagree with, but that seem tell