#matt bruenig
Text
Overall Inequality
Overall, wealth inequality remains quite high. The top 10 percent of households own 73 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent of households own just 2 percent of the nation’s wealth.
#Matt Bruenig#people's policy project#wealth inequality#income inequality#us politics#eat the rich#capitalism
0 notes
Text
Tweets of the Week: 26 March- 1 April 2023
Cranky Federalist reminds us of the Golden Rule:
As Jesus said, the most important thing in any crisis is to be the first to use it to own people on the internet— Cranky Federalist (@CrankyFed) March 28, 2023
Mind of Marisa tells a sad story:
My sister became a vegetarian about 5 years ago and she’s really changed. It’s like I’ve never seen herbivore— Marisa! (@mindofmarisa) February 11,…
View On WordPress
#abby denton#alice from queens#ari lamm#cranky federalist#matt bruenig#mind of marisa#monica hesse#puns#religion#the bible in hebrew
0 notes
Text
the arguing about whether “the economy” is “good” (dumb metric, dumb object) is so stupid. which makes sense because it’s just a lib proxy war about why the unwashed masses deserve 10000000 years of agony because they’re not voting for Biden or whatever
84 notes
·
View notes
Note
Any thoughts/opinions on the idea of Universal Basic Income?
So I come out of MMT-adjacent circles that tend to focus on Job Guarantees over Universal Basic Income(s).
There is a certain amount of rivalry and bad blood between these two camps, as they see their projects as competing for the same policy "space" as solutions to poverty and unemployment. For example, back when I was on twitter I got into quite a few arguments with Matt Bruenig, who is a UBI advocate and quite hostile to Job Guarantees, and I was not the only MMTer/job guarantee advocate who mixed it up with Bruening and his supporters.
For my own part, I am not opposed to incomes policies in general. Certainly, I think we saw from COVID-era initiatives around Unemployment Insurance and the Child Tax Credit that incomes policies can be tremendously effective in stabilizing consumer demand, preventing eviction and homelessness, and especially in cutting poverty rates. Likewise, I think there is now pretty solid empirical evidence that the concerns about employment effects that were the bane of UBIs and Negative Income Tax (NIT) proposals from the 1970s onwards are baseless.
That being said, I think there are other critiques of UBI from the left that were raised by Hyman Minsky in the late 1960s and 1970s that (instead of focusing on employment effects and the ideological question of "dependency") center on the fiscal capacity of the state, the problem of inflation, and the inability of UBIs to solve the problem of lost labor-time, which remain open questions.
This is why I am skeptical of the more Georgist approach to UBI as panacea. To my mind, incomes policies are a partial solution to some socioeconomic problems that have some side effects; they need to be buttressed by complementary policies (including job guarantees) that can do things UBIs can't, while also dealing with UBI's side effects. In some sense, it shouldn't be very surprising that a belt-and-braces strategy is best, because that was the intended vision for a comprehensive New Deal order proposed by the National Resources Planning Board in 1942.
#public policy#economic policy#social policy#universal basic income#negative income tax#job guarantee#job guarantees#my day job#mmt#political economy#ubi#people must live by work#policy history
80 notes
·
View notes
Text
Radfems are strangely enamoured of an empirically baseless theory of birthrate decline in wealthy nations. According to this theory, women as a class are catching on that having kids (at least with the available “moids”) is a scam and accordingly dropping out of the heterosexual rat race. This leads to the much discussed birth rate decline, which is thus to be celebrated as a brave assertion of female class interests. This typically goes along with allegations that worries about a lack of population growth/stability (the bedrock of all extant systems in developed countries for sustaining the elderly) are patriarchal propaganda designed to exploit womens reproductive capacity collectively for the sake of men (whom, you may recall, are drastically underrepresented among the elderly). (Yea yea there’s immigration, yes, we should have more of it. But like, even stipulating you can do arbitrarily large amounts of immigration starting instantaneously, you do eventually run into the problem that if national economic development means lower birth rates, the only way to maintain this system in the long run is sustained international inequality. Not good!)
There is, afaict, little reason to believe this theory. Matt bruenig pointed out a few months back that the lions share of the birth rate decline comes from mothers having fewer children rather than childfree women having no children. And it is easy to find survey data indicating that preferred/planned numbers of children in wealthy nations (both for women and for men) consistently outstrip by a large margin the actual numbers of children born to the average family. So the explanation is not women successfully pressing their preferences wrt childlessness or family sizes, bc the former does not contribute much to the decline and the latter goes in the opposite direction. If women in rich countries had the numbers of children they actually explicitly prefer, there would be no birth rate decline
What makes this all strange to me is that this should be good news for the childfree radfems, yes? It’s bad news for women not being made into brood mares against their wills if that’s the cause of birth rate decline, bc it means freedom from reproductive exploitation comes with this uncomfortable price tag. Maybe worth paying! But still, a price tag. So they should be happy this is not the case? They should be correcting ppls hallucination of an unfortunate tradeoff? Yes? And yet the opposite prevails!! Very peculiar
Idk mb I am just missing smth obvious. But so far the way I see ppl talk about this just seems topsy turvy
143 notes
·
View notes
Text
Progressives Condemn Biden-GOP Debt Ceiling Deal as 'Cruel and Shortsighted'
By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams
May 28, 2023
Update:
The text of the legislation, titled the , is now available here.
Earlier:
Progressive economists and advocates warned that the tentative debt ceiling agreement reached Saturday by the White House and Republican leaders would needlessly gash nutrition aid, rental assistance, education programs, and more—all while making it easier for the wealthy to avoid taxes.
The deal, which now must win the support of both chambers of Congress, reportedly includes two years of caps on non-military federal spending, sparing a Pentagon budget replete with staggering waste and abuse.
The Associated Pressreported that the deal "would hold spending flat for 2024 and increase it by 1% for 2025," not keeping pace with inflation.
The agreement would also impose new work requirements on some recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) while scaling back recently approved IRS funding, a gift to rich tax cheats.
In exchange for the spending cuts and work requirements, Republican leaders have agreed to lift the debt ceiling until January 1, 2025—a tradeoff that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is pitching as a victory to his caucus, which includes far-right members who have demanded more aggressive austerity.
President Joe Biden, for his part, called the deal "a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want."
"After inflation eats its share, flat funding will result in fewer households accessing rental assistance, fewer kids in Head Start, and fewer services for seniors."
Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement Saturday night that "this is a punishing deal made worse only by the fact that there was no reason for President Biden to negotiate with Speaker McCarthy over whether or not the United States government should pay its bills," alluding to the president's executive authority.
"After inflation eats its share, flat funding will result in fewer households accessing rental assistance, fewer kids in Head Start, and fewer services for seniors," said Owens. "The deal represents the worst of conservative budget ideology; it cuts investments in workers and families, adds onerous and wasteful new hurdles for families in need of support, and protects the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations from paying their fair share in taxes."
The agreement comes days before the U.S. is, according to the Treasury Department, set to run out of money to pay its obligations, imperiling Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments and potentially hurling the entire global economy into chaos.
House Republicans have leveraged those alarming possibilities to secure painful federal spending cuts and aid program changes that could leave more people hungry, sick, and unable to afford housing, critics said.
"For no real reason at all, hungry people are set to lose food while tax cheats get a free pass," wrote Angela Hanks, chief of programs at Demos.
While legislative text has not yet been released, the deal would reportedly impose work requirements on adult SNAP recipients without dependents up to the age of 54, increasing the current age limit of 49. Policy analysts and anti-hunger activists have long decried SNAP time limits and work requirements as immoral and ineffective at boosting employment. (Most adult SNAP recipients already work.)
"The SNAP changes are nominally extending work requirements to ages 50 to 54. In reality, especially as the new rule is implemented, this is just an indiscriminate cull of a bunch of 50- to 54-year-olds from SNAP who won't realize there are new forms they need to fill out," said Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project.
Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, wrote on Twitter that the agreement is "cruel and shortsighted," pointing to the work requirements and real-term cuts to rental assistance "during an already worsening homelessness crisis."
"House Rs held our nation's lowest-income people hostage in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling," Yentel continued. "The debt ceiling 'deal' could lead to tens of thousands of families losing rental assistance... Expanding ineffective work requirements and putting time limits on food assistance adds salt to the wound, further harming some of the lowest-income and most marginalized people in our country."
Read more.
#joe biden#kevin mccarthy#debt ceiling negotiations#SNAP#snap work requirements#social safety net#u.s. economy#global economy#Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023
16 notes
·
View notes
Text
Progressive economists and advocates warned that the tentative debt ceiling agreement reached Saturday by the White House and Republican leaders would needlessly gash nutrition aid, rental assistance, education programs, and more—all while making it easier for the wealthy to avoid taxes.
The deal, which now must win the support of both chambers of Congress, reportedly includes two years of caps on non-military federal spending, sparing a Pentagon budget replete with staggering waste and abuse.
The Associated Press reported that the deal "would hold spending flat for 2024 and increase it by 1% for 2025," not keeping pace with inflation.
The agreement would also impose new work requirements on some recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) while scaling back recently approved IRS funding, a gift to rich tax cheats.
In exchange for the spending cuts and work requirements, Republican leaders have agreed to lift the debt ceiling until January 1, 2025—a tradeoff that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is pitching as a victory to his caucus, which includes far-right members who have demanded more aggressive austerity.
President Joe Biden, for his part, called the deal "a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want."
Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement Saturday night that "this is a punishing deal made worse only by the fact that there was no reason for President Biden to negotiate with Speaker McCarthy over whether or not the United States government should pay its bills," alluding to the President's executive authority.
"After inflation eats its share, flat funding will result in fewer households accessing rental assistance, fewer kids in Head Start, and fewer services for seniors," said Owens. "The deal represents the worst of conservative budget ideology; it cuts investments in workers and families, adds onerous and wasteful new hurdles for families in need of support, and protects the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations from paying their fair share in taxes."
The agreement comes days before the U.S. is, according to the Treasury Department, set to run out of money to pay its obligations, imperiling Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments and potentially hurling the entire global economy into chaos.
House Republicans have leveraged those alarming possibilities to secure painful federal spending cuts and aid program changes that could leave more people hungry, sick, and unable to afford housing, critics said.
"For no real reason at all, hungry people are set to lose food while tax cheats get a free pass," wrote Angela Hanks, chief of programs at Demos.
While legislative text has not yet been released, the deal would reportedly impose work requirements on adult SNAP recipients without dependents up to the age of 54, increasing the current age limit of 49. Policy analysts and anti-hunger activists have long decried SNAP time limits and work requirements as cruel and ineffective at boosting employment. (Most adult SNAP recipients already work.)
"The SNAP changes are nominally extending work requirements to ages 50 to 54. In reality, especially as the new rule is implemented, this is just an indiscriminate cull of a bunch of 50- to 54-year-olds from SNAP who won't realize there are new forms they need to fill out," said Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project.
Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, wrote on Twitter that the agreement is "cruel and shortsighted," pointing to the work requirements and real-term cuts to rental assistance "during an already worsening homelessness crisis."
"House Rs held our nation's lowest-income people hostage in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling," Yentel continued. "The debt ceiling 'deal' could lead to tens of thousands of families losing rental assistance... Expanding ineffective work requirements and putting time limits on food assistance adds salt to the wound, further harming some of the lowest-income and most marginalized people in our country."
The White House and Republican leaders also reportedly agreed to some permitting reforms that climate groups have slammed as a boon for the fossil fuel industry. According to The New York Times, the agreement "includes measures meant to speed environmental reviews of certain energy projects," though the scope of the changes is not yet clear.
And while the deal doesn't appear to include a repeal of Biden's student debt cancellation plan—which is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court—it does contain a provision that would cement the end of the student loan repayment pause, drawing fury from debt relief campaigners.
The deal must now get through Congress, a difficult task given likely opposition from progressive lawmakers who oppose attacks on aid programs and Republicans who want steeper cuts.
As the Times reported, "Lawmakers in the House Freedom Caucus were privately pillorying the deal on Saturday night, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus had already begun to fume about it even before negotiators finalized the agreement."
Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said Sunday that "it's a relief to see that congressional leaders and the President have come to an agreement to raise the debt limit and avert an economic disaster."
"But by instituting work requirements for critical assistance programs and rescinding important funding to crack down on wealthy tax cheats, this deal will rig the economy even more in favor of the most well-off Americans while failing to fix the real structural problems that led to the current debt crisis in the first place," said Hanauer. "The deal avoids the elephant in the room: it includes no new revenues even though tax cuts of the past few decades were a primary driver of deficit growth."
"And next up, many Republican lawmakers want to double down on tax cuts by pushing through many more tax cuts that would most help wealthy families and corporations," Hanauer added. "They should do the opposite."
#us politics#news#republicans#conservatives#Democrats#progressives#congressional progressive caucus#house freedom caucus#2023#president joe biden#biden administration#national debt#debt ceiling#raise the debt ceiling#the associated press#work requirements#snap benefits#Temporary Assistance for Needy Families#Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program#irs funding#irs#department of treasury#rental assistance#fossil fuel industry#common dreams#student debt cancellation#student debt#student debt forgiveness#tax cuts#tax the 1%
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
Matt Bruenig and his hag wife are pro-lifers I never want to hear them reeee-ing about child poverty ever
13 notes
·
View notes
Text
objectively funny in a very stupid way that liz bruenig has been like ‘my position on abortion is perfectly clear! go read what my husband said about it!’ - already off to a bad start. but then if you go and read what matt bruenig said about it he’s like ‘i don’t actually care. but my wife thinks abortion is bad. however, you should not be mad at her about this, because although she thinks it is bad, and although she thinks the government should do something about it, she’d prefer if what they did was create welfare policies. so you should stop being mad at her.’
30 notes
·
View notes
Text
“My One-Night Stand with Matt Bruenig and What It Says About America Today”
4 notes
·
View notes
Text
Crowder's Problems GET WORSE With NLRB Complaint | Matt Bruenig | TMR
youtube
0 notes
Text
Believe Republicans when they say they want to ban abortion and cut Social Security. And don't neglect to remind others about these plans – as frequently as possible.
(emphasis added)
On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) — a caucus that represents 80 percent of House Republicans, including the party’s entire leadership — unveiled a budget that calls for cutting Social Security benefits and establishing that human life begins at conception.
The RSC tried to obscure the implications of its Social Security policy by describing its proposal as an increase in “the retirement age,” and declining to specify what the new age should be.
But that is just an opaque way of describing a large cut in benefits. As Matt Bruenig notes, Social Security does not have a single retirement age: It has 96 different retirement ages, each associated with a different level of benefits.
When lawmakers talk about “raising the retirement age,” they are really calling for an increase in the “full retirement age” — a variable in a formula that determines benefit levels at all 96 retirement ages. Raising the full retirement age to 69 — as the RSC proposed last fall — would translate into a roughly 14 percent cut to Social Security benefits, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Republicans claim that they need to cut benefits and raise the retirement age to keep Social Security from becoming insolvent. Democrats have a much better idea: Raise taxes on the filthy rich while allowing for legal immigration to increase the number of younger workers who pay social security taxes.
Biden, on the other hand, has called for substantially raising payroll taxes on Americans earning over $400,000 a year in order to sustain Social Security in its current form.
It is true that this by itself would not be enough to preserve benefits indefinitely; as boomers continue retiring and America’s ratio of retirees-to-workers rises, larger tax increases would be required to sustain today’s benefit levels through the 2040s. But there is a simple way to alleviate this problem: We could allow more prime-age adults to come to the United States and contribute to its economy. Alas, Trump and his party would like to do the opposite.
In any case, the RSC’s budget clarifies the parties’ respective positions on Social Security: Biden wants to preserve existing benefits through higher taxes on the rich, most House Republicans want to cut future benefits by 14 percent, and Trump wants to avoid taking any coherent position while starving the government of revenue, thereby engineering a 23 percent benefit cut by default.
Republicans are never going to stop trying to control reproductive freedom in the United States. It's in their political DNA. Trump boasts about killing Roe v. Wade.
Meanwhile, the RSC’s budget also calls for the passage of the Life at Conception Act, which would establish that “the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization.” This would make abortion illegal in all cases, including for patients who were impregnated through rape or incest. What’s more, the budget would also cut Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program by $4.5 trillion over 10 years, a proposal that might increase the salience of health care policy, which remains a source of Democratic strength.
Democrats didn’t wait long before unwrapping this political gift. Biden decried the RSC budget as “extreme” Thursday, noting that it “shows what Republicans value.” The White House then circulated a rundown of the plan’s most unpopular provisions while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced it from the Senate floor.
The GOP MAGA dystopia involves protecting the filthy rich with their lavish lifestyles while removing healthcare from the rest of the population and having the elderly work til they drop dead on the job.
There are certainly other important issues this year, but the ones likely to hurt Republicans the most are abortion and healthcare/Social Security. Any voter with even the slightest interest in these issues should be regularly reminded of the Trump Republican positions on them.
#republicans#republican study committee#rsc#social security#maga#donald trump#republicans favor cuts in social security#republicans want to raise the retirement age#abortion#reproductive freedom#life at conception act#republicans want to micromanage americans' reproductive activities#roe v. wade#a woman's right to choose#raise taxes on the filthy rich#biden-harris 2024#election 2024#vote blue no matter who
1 note
·
View note
Text
this is how we win (with normal people, which is most of em). I’m a utopian in the sheets but I’m a person who wants human beings to have flourishing lives in the streets. Those two arent incompatible. Matt Bruenig and Peoples Policy Project are doin the goodass work of breakin down concretely exactly how we can gobble up the capital wealth and socialize as much of the economy as politically conceivable at the moment. But I am also eager to entertain the utopianism and radical humanism of Marxists like Bloch, Lefebvre, CLR James, Dunayevskaya, Geras, Federici, Marx, Karl Marx, Marcuse; and indeed learn a good deal from the more serious anarchists and anarchist adjacent people like Rocker, Malatesta, Mattick.
21st century globalized capital with its wrought iron lattice network of global production centers and supply chains — no socialist has The Answer. Socialism is a big laboratory, and fidelity to Marxian insight means socialists must be creative, inventive, experimental, and committed to finding what works towards the emancipation of human beings and mercilessly shredding what doesn’t. Also it means securing “the realm of necessity” before, as a prereq to, the “realm of freedom.” That means a lot of unsexy strategic mass politics, and it doesn’t mean saying “revolution” like a spell until some brave heroes go and get themselves turned into juice by the global western arsenal archipelago. Nothin about welfare and redistribution thru politics cuts against a disalienated future of collective social ownership and democratic management of production. On the contrary, it’s a big part of a scaffolding. We are climbing that at a glacial pace if at all rn, let’s not delude ourselves. But we can do, and every horizon for effacing the iron law of value in monopoly imperial capitalism is one we should not hesitate, out of fashionable idiotic fear of being Not Marxist Leninist enough (for 2024), to pursue
0 notes
Photo
Wealth Inequality Permeates US Society, No Matter How You Slice It by Matt Bruenig
0 notes
Text
133 notes
·
View notes
Quote
information about what to do if you want an abortion in a restrictive state will become more widespread, further blunting the effectiveness of the restrictions.
Abortion Down By Less Than 3 Percent – Matt Bruenig Dot Com
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
lrco
LRCO Platform Luxury Royal Coin
sweetdreams25
Sans titre
two-aliens-in-a-suit
‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾ Alien ☽༓･*˚⁺‧͙
infohub2official
Untitled