The Abundance Agenda – People's Policy Project

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/03/24/the-abundance-agenda/

> The Nordic countries don’t use means-tested tax credits to provide cash benefits to children. They just send all of the kids a check each month...the authors miss a chance to see how the inefficiency and administrative burdens they loathe in construction actually plague the welfare state too, something liberals are very much to blame for but also have no desire to fix. - #mattbruenig

"Blood Bag" Billionaire SILENCING His Employees and Getting Sued (w/ #MattBruenig)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuOVitjwhys

Excellent, from #MattBruenig, on “Abundance”. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/03/24/the-abundance-agenda/ ht @ryanlcooper

do most American workers live “paycheck to paycheck”?

maybe. it depends what that means.

see #MattBruenig https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/03/19/how-many-people-live-paycheck-to-paycheck

“if you install egalitarian economic institutions that result in a compressed distribution of income and wealth, the precise regional and sectoral composition of the economy becomes much less important.” #MattBruenig https://mattbruenig.com/2025/03/11/yglesias-on-the-politics-of-nafta/

“the penalty for not complying is simply that you are ordered to comply.” #MattBruenig https://www.nlrbedge.com/p/the-futility-of-the-nlrb

"the Supreme Court ruled that the NLRB needs three members to have a quorum. Thus, until Trump appoints a third NLRB member, the NLRB will not be able to issue decisions. Trump could opt not to fill any NLRB vacancies and prevent the agency from issuing decisions for his entire term." #MattBruenig https://www.nlrbedge.com/p/trump-fires-democratic-nlrb-member

i hate to link over there, but #MattBruenig is so good on this stuff. https://x.com/mattbruenig/status/1866915041154568279

this #MattBruenig piece on health care economics is a work of art.

1) administrative costs associated with health insurance are HUGE, not a rounding error next to inflated provider costs;

2) the only justification for those costs would be to rein in provider rents, but not only do private insurers fail to, they have structural incentives to let them grow.

read this one.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2024/12/10/health-care-administration-wastes-half-a-trillion-dollars-every-year/

from #MattBruenig https://www.nlrbedge.com/p/update-on-constitutional-challenges ht @ryanlcooper

“It is often alleged that means-testing proponents actually like the fact that the administrative burdens of the tests exclude some poor people because that saves money. But rarely do you ever see it laid out this explicitly.” #MattBruenig on the now means-tested UK “Winter Fuel Payment” https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2024/09/13/the-comedy-of-the-winter-fuel-payment-means-test/

#MattBruenig points out that the current union certification process amounts to a kind of bureaucratic trench warfare that the National Labor Relations Board lacks the resources to adjudicate. We could massively expand its funding, or better yet, streamline the process of certifying a union with card-check, an Obama campaign promise abandoned due to Congressional resistance. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/opinion/starbucks-union-government.html

"upper class people, broadly defined, do not simply get married. Rather, they get married to other upper class people. People like Wilcox, Kearney, and Douthat do not, in fact, marry the kinds of people they are imploring others to marry! The elites, in general, have made it very clear that they personally do not find these individuals to be marriageable." #MattBruenig https://mattbruenig.com/2024/02/21/brad-wilcoxs-wife/

For most people, the wind-down of the COVID welfare state has hurt more than the genuinely good employment economy and increasing real wage incomes have helped. Improved household balance sheets are mostly in rising home and used car values, wealth nonrich families can't actually tap, since they need their one home and one-to-two cars.

See #MattBruenig https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/11/20/how-has-wealth-changed-under-biden/

"The center-left is very good at spinning up stories about how the wacky left is acting in a wacky way, but very bad at seeing how their approach to working with the left is repulsive and wacky in its own way." #MattBruenig https://mattbruenig.com/2023/10/26/dysfunctional-coalition-politics/

@admitsWrongIfProven it's all part of this very longstanding debate about whether the poor should marry before having kids because that's what the rich do and it works for the rich. #MattBruenig is doing god's work of pointing out whether marriage will be good for your kids depends on whom you marry, the resources they can bring, and the quality of the marriage. rich and poor might face some different opportunity sets there.

"Douthat’s point…is that upper class people should 'preach what they practice,' with proponents of that phrase seemingly thinking that it means that upper class people should tell lower class people to marry. But what upper class people practice is not 'marriage.' It’s 'marriage to upper class people.'" #MattBruenig https://mattbruenig.com/2023/09/30/response-to-douthat-on-two-parent-families/

// we can all agree, children of the poor would be better off if a parent had married an Ivy League grad. surely the poor shld delay childbearing until then.

“The assumption that the missing parents in [one parent] families are average parents who would contribute an average amount of earnings and an average amount of child care is obviously ridiculous.” #MattBruenig https://mattbruenig.com/2023/09/20/doing-the-marriage-thing-again/