The Trump Crazy is getting worse by the hour, a great time to talk about restructuring Section 230 deanbaker22.substack.com/p/the-right-...

This is sort of a big deal because this is Trump endorsing, and explicitly extending, Vought's hostage taking strategy. Not just about firing people, but also cutting safety net benefits.

Well done summary of the potentially enormous financial impact losing Fed independence (and what would happen if Humphrey's executor isn't maintained as the Supreme Court reviews it in Dec).

As states around the country are mandated by HR1 to rush to implement Medicaid work requirements by HR 1 the risk for waste of taxpayer $$ to corporate vendors is huge. Federal watchdog report on Georgia's Medicaid program raises concerns about administrative costs apnews.com/article/geor...

Starting at 8:30 EST, @immcouncil.org’s own @naynagupta.bsky.social will be testifying at a shadow hearing held by Congressional Democrats on the impact of Trump’s mass deportation policies. Check it out! www.youtube.com/live/m47GZMk...

"As we know, vaccines don't save lives; vaccinations do. Vaccines sitting on shelves don't protect anyone." Read the #OpEd from @hlanthorn.bsky.social Heather Mercer, and @aradultimmdoc.medsky.social#OpEd at: https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/117447?trw=no

A worker making $50,000 a year contributes to Social Security with 100% of their income. A CEO making $20 million a year contributes to Social Security with less than 1% of their income. Who agrees it’s time to scrap the cap?

I was going to tweet this last year but somehow I was impeded… “When [economic] growth does, and does not, reduce poverty” www.bii.co.uk/en/news-insi... — A great literature review by a team including @paddycarter.bsky.social and @paulsegal.bsky.social

Lessons in what not to do from France's recent government collapse. "This showdown was entirely avoidable. In fact, a solution to France’s fiscal and political stalemate has been hiding in plain sight: a tax on the ultrawealthy...." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/o...

Mass deportation under President Obama *reduced* the number of jobs available to US natives, primarily by slashing new business formation. doi.org/10.1086/721152 We can expect similar results from the current mass purge of US immigrants.

Ben Sommers and I have a new piece up at @jamahealthforum.com on how to think about generalizing lessons from unwinding to looming new Medicaid red tape requirements. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... We appreciate support from the @commonwealthfund.org for this work!

DRC declares an Ebola outbreak. Hopefully the country can contain it soon, even without US funds that have been so helpful in the past. www.afro.who.int/countries/de....

🚨🚨🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Full-price 2026 #ACA premium rate hikes to average 23.4% nationally (semi-final): acasignups.net/25/09/02/exc...

@georgetownccf.bsky.social will be releasing a new report on Thursday assessing state readiness to implement Medicaid work reporting requirements. We will be sharing key metrics that we will continue to monitor as the clock continues to tick down towards implementation in 2027..

Really important new study on the tax rate of billionaires from @gabrielzucman.bsky.social et al Upshot: The top 400 ultrabillionaires: 23.8% Avg Americans: 30.2% Yes, the superrich pay far less in taxes than the rest of us. www.nber.org/papers/w34170

"Out-of-pocket expenses have soared. Complex plans in the lightly regulated marketplaces featured rising premiums, high deductibles and requirements that patients pay a significant portion of the cost of care, often 20 percent — a charge known as coinsurance." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/09/h...

(1/3) Kudos to @gabrielzucman.bsky.social, Danny Yagan, Emmanuel Saez, and Akcan Balkir; this paper makes excellent points about taxing top incomes. ** The corporate tax is an important (if now smaller) part of taxing the top; it is a ready-to-go way to reach unrealized capital gains.

If you haven't heard Governor Pritzker's speech, it's worth listening to every word. We need more of this from our leaders - a clear delineation of the fascism we are facing, and a call to action for how we must all respond: youtu.be/Q04p3OJdhpU?...

For example, we've recently learned that virtually all state-level DiD's are probably incredibly underpowered.

Trump proposes to rescind AIDS funds. Congress rejects the proposal. So Trump and his henchman Russ Vought just refuse to spend the money and try to hide that decision from Congress and the public. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/h...

🚨 New paper 🚨 In the latter half of the 20th c, states in the US passed massive suites of “tough-on-crime” sentencing policies. In this paper, we investigated how (& why) these policies shaped pop health, esp racialized patterns of birth outcomes in the US. track.smtpsendmail.com/9032119/c?p=...

Since Trump took office, immigration officials have more than quadrupled the number of 287(g) agreements with law enforcement agencies across 40 states, giving local officers authority to function as deportation agents in jails and the streets. (Published June w/ @azluminaria.org)

NEW: The president, who has framed mental health as a national crisis, paused rules to hold insurers accountable for unlawfully denying coverage. And Congress cut funding to the agency that enforces insurers’ equal treatment of mental and physical health.

"Roger Alford, formerly the antitrust division’s second-in-command, on Monday said two senior aides to Attorney General Pam Bondi had corrupted the department’s typical law-enforcement process for dealing with antitrust lawsuits."

A fun thing to watch today: TIPS yields! TIPS interest rates are tied to CPI, like social security COLAs. You can’t escape socaec cuts if these guys mess with inflation data. Bond holders can, and TBH I would. A thing to watch and one senators should be asked about before confirmation votes

Is anyone going to link the steep decline in fast food consumption by lower income households to inflation (particularly food inflation) and a signal of increasingly tight budgets among already constrained households? stocks.apple.com/AjRHQyXzCRra...

US deindustrialization was not result of trade deficits. It can no longer be reversed. Tariffs/investment promises will not do much for manufacturing. Bretton Woods was a global agreement not an extortion racket. Other than that, nothing wrong with this piece. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/o...

reviving a post from the old site:

You wanna read a paper called "The Political Economy of Shitcoins"? Of course you do. @mcopelov.bsky.social and I are at your service. Full paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... Blog post: tompepinsky.com/2025/08/08/c... More below 1/

1. This week, the FBI released its comprehensive crime report for 2024, which revealed that both VIOLENT CRIME and PROPERTY CRIME reached their LOWEST LEVELS SINCE THE 1960s This a massive story. But you might not have heard about it, even if you follow the news closely. Here's why.

👀In the name of “protecting vulnerable Americans” the Trump Administration will rip away Medicaid coverage from babies and toddlers👀 CMS announces Medicaid demos that 8 states are implementing to cover babies and young children continuously w/o gaps due to red tape will no longer be allowed.

More and more evidence that the 1980s were an inflection point for the US that I can't stop thinking about

Important to remember that because of the incredible work of government statisticians, initial BLS employment estimates have become MORE accurate. Its revisions are now smaller than those from years past excellent figure from @ernietedeschi.bsky.social

Thread on today's Congressional Budget Office finally released cost estimates of the budget reconciliation law and its draconian #Medicaid cuts. But we are still waiting on detailed coverage estimates (1/x): www.cbo.gov/publication/...

College students may face exacerbated burdens complying with Medicaid work reporting requirements if they're meeting them through a combination of activities, increasing the documentation needed About one in five college students in expansion states rely on Medicaid www.forbes.com/sites/fionar...

What are the characteristics of successful state pro-housing land use legislation? In new research @urbaninstitute.bsky.social, we investigate! We develop a database of recent bills & compare those that passed & didn’t. We interviewed 31 legislators to understand their perspectives on what worked.

Who is Arrested by ICE under Trump 2.0? A 🧵 New from me & @elizabethacox.bsky.social! Piece: immresearch.org/publications... 1. ICE arrests spike in Jan & May 2025; when arrests increase, percent of those arrested who are convicted of a crime falls Majority arrested have no criminal conviction

The Trump administration just awarded Virginia-based Acquisition Logistics a $1.26 billion contract to operate a 5,000-bed tent camp on Fort Bliss in El Paso. The company previously got just $29 million in DOD logistics contracts over 5 years; now it'll run the largest detention camp in the US.

I will be brief. If you care about the quality of news we get, this clip is the most disturbing and important 20 minutes I have for you. If you have only 5 minutes to watch then do that. Via @michaelsocolow.bsky.social Did you watch the clip? Now go to this link. www.cnbc.com/2025/07/01/c...

Work requirements are simply yet another bureaucratic indignity we impose on hardworking Americans. Great link out from @pamherd.bsky.social and @jbarofsky.bsky.social’s piece yesterday. www.wabe.org/he-became-th...

New from me and @pamherd.bsky.social on the newly-passed budget bill. 17 million projected to lose health coverage and 20% cuts to fight hunger through SNAP. We put the bill in context of the already-poor performance of the U.S. health system. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-trumps...

If you had a sense that kicking people off of Medicaid would be bad for their health, that is only scratching the surface of how bad Trump's policies will be for public health in America. @jbarofsky.bsky.social‬ & @pamherd.bsky.social do a deep dive. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-trumps...

ICE Arrest Surge in May and June Driven by Immigrants with No Criminal History In Part 3 of my series on ICE arrest data, I use new data to find (1) a surge in non-criminal ICE arrests and (2) an overall decline in daily arrests in June. austinkocher.substack.com/p/ice-arrest...

Reminder that this is illegal. The IRS has statutory rules that forbid them-except under very specific conditions-from sharing data. The reason is very practical-if people don't trust the IRS they will avoid 'voluntarily' paying taxes. The tax system falls apart otherwise.

🚨🚨 Trump's deportations could destroy millions of jobs for immigrants and US-born workers 🚨🚨 New report from me @epi.org

New, from me: Elon Musk talks about saving our species. But the greatest legacy of his time in government will be to condemn millions to death because he could not discern reality from a paranoid fantasy. How Musk and Trump killed USAID. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-death-...

Gotta love a medieval story. Interesting thread on the concept the "able-bodied" and how it stretches back to England's response to labor shortages after the Plague. As @povertyscholar.bsky.social and @joanalker1.bsky.social note in a recent piece: Medicaid is health insurance, not welfare....

If you have been attacked by an alien, ICE is on it.

The Senate version of OBBB has made the Medicaid work requirement even worse. Parents are no longer exempt - the bill includes parents 14+. Most states that got Medicaid waivers to do work req. including parents of kids 6+ so when R's need more savings expect them to come back and lower this. 1/2

There is consistent evidence that immigrant families are less likely to access safety net benefits they are legally eligible for and which would allow them to prosper because they are fearful about family members being deported, e.g. www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10....