I talked to the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator’s Joel Dodge about Trump’s unique brand of authoritarian-flavored industrial policy for this week’s @washingtonmonthly.com roundup: open.substack.com/pub/washingt...

10/ The transition will happen with or without US participation. By withdrawing from these industries and blocking allies from Chinese partnerships, America risks becoming a bystander to the biggest economic transformation of our time.

The Green Marshall Plan is happening. It’s just being led by China.

The president uses government leverage to extract equity stakes, profit-sharing deals, and special voting rights from major corporations. These are familiar tools—but Trump’s unchecked dealmaking could be disastrous. washingtonmonthly.com/2025/09/03/t...

Industrial policies like public ownership of corporate equity are powerful means of aligning corporate actions with gov priorities—but they can thus also become tools for consolidating authoritarian power. Rather than rejecting policies outright, we need better discussions on democratic guardrails

I did a deep dive for the @washingtonmonthly.com taking stock of the emerging Trump II industrial policy and where it might be headed. Link below: 🧵1/8

This theory from @ryanlcooper.com is perhaps the only sensible explanation for the US whipsawing from green industrial policy to brown industrial policy. prospect.org/environment/...

The industrial policy see-saw: One party tries to use it to reduce carbon emissions, the other party switches to a version that increases them.

👀 “The deal will also give the U.S. government a “golden share” in the company, a rarely used practice through which the government takes a stake in company.” www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/b...

The IRA’s vulnerability in a nutshell: “Until we see somebody get hired, until somebody goes to Kroger’s and tells their friend in the produce section, ‘Hey, I just got a job there,’ it’s not real yet” www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/c...

I suspect this is true and if so it is just an epically, fatefully, cosmically awful decision that will condemn this country to long-term decline.

Excited to share that my new paper, The Federal Reserve’s Forgotten Credit Mandate, was just published in Harvard Law Review! 🚨It argues that we are misinterpreting the Fed’s statutory mandate. 1/22

"[P]ost-neoliberalism was a healthy correction to an economic system that was often too deferential to markets & too inattentive to the realities of politics. Abandoning it over its failures would be easy; the challenge is to find a way to build on its successes." 💯 by Roge Karma @theatlantic.com

“While a temporary reprieve from the shockingly high tariffs is cause for celebration for businesses in both countries, the repercussions will linger. Businesses will likely encounter a flood of pent-up demand, leading to soaring transport prices” www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/b...

My piece in @thehill.com: 🐓Egg companies are using avian flu as an excuse to bilk consumers 💰Those companies are making record profits 🫴And they’re getting taxpayer-funded USDA bailouts The government should outlaw price-gouging by companies getting public subsidies thehill.com/opinion/camp...

Great idea from @costasamaras.com @rooseveltinstitute.org for a "Federal Reserve for tracking decarbonization" to "analyze how well the economy is making progress toward decarbonization outcomes, identify risks to that progress & make plans to course correct." rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/buildin...

This is an interesting defense of "everything-bagel liberalism" from @joeldodge07.bsky.social. Attaching conditions to public funding has worked for the CHIPS act; whereas public funding without conditions is simply corporate welfare with little democratic legitimacy.

Really excited to dive into the new @c-hughes.bsky.social book

Wherein I take to the pages of the @washingtonmonthly.com to defend the honor of Everything-Bagel Liberalism washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/24/i...

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...

China’s trade war aces (via @gideonrachman.bsky.social) www.ft.com/content/2112...

My over-arching Abundance take is that the future of the Democratic Party will be a national figure who successfully crafts a synthesis between the supply-side liberalism of @dkthomp.bsky.social & @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social, and the industrial policy & anti-oligarchy of left populism.

"Following the Mar-a-Lago dinner, the White House reversed course on H20 chips, putting the plan for additional restrictions [on China] on hold... "The change of course ... came after Nvidia promised the Trump administration new U.S. investments in AI data centers" www.npr.org/2025/04/09/n...

Sounds like yesterday's court hearing over the EPA's attempt to steal from the IRA's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund went rather poorly for the Trump administration: www.utilitydive.com/news/epa-att...

The tariffs are clearly a play to get China et al to end their woke DEI practices and commit pro Bono hours to conservative causes.

It occurs to me that not only will Degrowth Donald’s tariffs curb emissions during his term (through a global recession), but if kept in place, will also set up the next Dem president to unwind them on the cleanest economies — leaving a de facto carbon tariff. Masterful! @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social

The Democrat who just flipped a very Trumpy seat in Pennsylvania’s Senate made opposition to Elon Musk front and center in his campaign. (lancasteronline.com/news/politic...)

An abundance of Abundance

AOC: Fox News and the right-wing would have you believe that these American values are something out of The Communist Manifesto. But let me tell you Fox News, I don’t believe in healthcare, labor, and human rights because I’m a Marxist.. I believe it because I was a waitress.

4) We also discussed a tension in Shor's polling: Voters say that Dems should be more moderate, but also, to deliver "major change" Shor argues that economic populism can appeal to such voters, and that Harris's promise to "take on landlords" was her best message www.vox.com/politics/403...

In addition to tax policy, the “borrow” part of this three-step could be addressed through credit controls (which I proposed in a different context here: cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-co...) - i.e., an upper limit on the amount any one individual may borrow.

Pleased to have Sandeep Vaheesan on the site today running through some of the themes of his new book Democracy in Power and explaining how public utilities and rural electric co-ops can save America, and the world. prospect.org/environment/...

If I were U.S. emperor, I'd spend billions and billions of dollars building solar and wind farms on federal land. Not giving grants or tax incentives, just *building them* as federally owned power sources, and building the backhaul for grid connections. Grid-tie it and make electricity stupid-cheap.

The funniest thing about all this is Joe Biden built a "bring back US manufacturing" button and Trump could have just kept pressing it but instead he insisted on smashing the "crash the stock market" button

Our first ever induced recession to own the libs www.wsj.com/economy/trum...

Despite the (many) folks decrying concentration of IRA energy deployment and manufacturing investments in red places, that very distribution of benefits will likely end up securing the program’s legacy. 🔌💡 www.politico.com/news/2025/03...

ICYMI: Weekend reading on the DPA’s past, present and future as a powerful anti-inflation tool 👇

NEW🗞️: The Defense Production Act sometimes gets narrowly cast as mainly a national security law. But as I show in a Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator paper, the DPA actually has a long history as an anti-inflation law. 🧵(1/8)

these people are hopeless. i hope they all get tea partied next year

Unskewed polls, but for GDP…

Any Democratic postmortem advising the party to be nicer to the wealthy and corporations, during a time when kleptocrats are pillaging government watchdogs and social insurance programs, is going to age like absolute milk over the next 4 years.

The most delicate snowflakes ever

Musk currently putting in the work to make that group much less small and much more vocal

Largest egg producer saw its profits jump 82 percent last fall 🤔 www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/b...

Building our critical infrastructure around the product of a private company invites extortion of the kind that, in this case, we have already seen from this same company & its CEO (Musk) against Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invasion. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice...

Democrats in Congress should propose a bill banning DOGE staff from entering any federal building. Make Republicans oppose it.

Like many of Trump's ploys to claw back or freeze Biden admin funding, this may not hold up in court. But hopefully Democrats learn the lesson that they really need to find a way to get stuff built faster to avoid this kind of rug-pull in the future. heatmap.news/electric-veh...

"If state governments can find the political will to seize his assets and destroy the basis of his wealth, they should. If foreign governments can, they should do the same." www.liberalcurrents.com/elon-musk-is...

Snipping one part of this to again note: it seems very few members of Congress realize what their lives are going to be like in the near future when Trump/Musk rip out some of these gears that run the America machine. They will face angry mobs everywhere they go, including their homes.