No person or group is a drain on public resources without planned austerity as the background condition. If you want public resources to serve more people, you hire people to produce more robust public resources. Public resources are a factor of public employment.

This is a brilliant line that should make a lot of folks…in both parties…very uncomfortable. Yes. Good.

Very cool post from @greenbackbetter.bsky.social at @moneyontheleft.bsky.social about the politics of design.

The article by Will Beaman corresponds closely with the position I took in my review of Heather McGhee's book The Sum of Us. www.researchgate.net/publication/... Du Bois' "psychological wage" describes a host of tangible benefits to the white working class.

Yes

“If CUNY is successful in developing internally owned-and-operated substitutes for any or all of its Software As A Service (SaaS) contracts with for-profit EdTech firms (and their private equity owners), the development costs will very rapidly pay for themselves”

A key counter-argument to this trash is that money creation is the rule, not the exception. Also, if excessive so-called “money printing” has shown anything, it's that depoliticized out-of-control credit creation for private speculation & profit leads to profound political inequality & instability.

This is precisely the time for BFI…Big Fucking Ideas.

Go build a couple luxury space camps while you’re up there and feel free to invite all the rest of the oligarchs… the sooner the better

The UK economy is not like a household, it’s much more like a spaceship with a vat of potato salad instead of a fuel tank and a shark-infested Olympic-size swimming pool instead of sleeping quarters for the crew. The sooner we all wake up to this reality the better. #PotatoSaladLens

This is all parallel to the observations and analysis about the ways that Ed Tech has colonized and compromised HBCUs, as detailed in the excellent American Vandal podcast series theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/hbcus-and-...

Exciting stuff. Makes me think about the shared investments of the organizer and the historian, who both believe in this essay’s argument that the world is ours to build. Even the financial world.

Not to kink shame, but most economists are gravity pervs who disavow their own desire for the playful Looney Tunes pics they love to post in order to justify austerity. Unfortunately, this cuts across left & right orientations. Do better.

Thought-provoking critique

Wonderful that Jacobin is supporting the public banking movement. Know, however, that we can go further. Let's push to renew the national Public Banking Act. Let's also create legal conditions for Public Grant-Making Banks, which avoid trapping necessary social programs in loans. See below👇

This is very cool! Are there opportunities to connect Ithaca and Cortland to these SIOs? It would also be great to get UUP engaged.

"Value appears as a common script more than as an enduring process of collective rewriting." I'm ready to do some writing and rewriting! Time to take the next steps in denaturalizing money! The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt & the Left Monetary Imagination moneyontheleft.org/2025/11/29/t...

@greenbackbetter.bsky.social and @videotroph.bsky.social are writing among the most visionary pieces today about how we can understand public finance in order to change it, and the trajectory of their vision is one that I hope will someday (soon) win the status of "common sense" on the Left.

Let’s go all the way through the looking-glass: Employment should be designed in the image of education as a public good. Education should never be designed in the image of employment as a scarce private privilege. moneyontheleft.org/2025/10/10/d...

We need a global moratorium on data centers until AI can actually demonstrate it’s useful! It is clearly creating so many new costs and known environmental destruction. Stop saying it’s inevitable and let’s start meaningful assessment.

We also mention my talk, originally delivered at MIMA, ‘How Can Novels Help Us Think About Money… and Maybe Even Save the Planet?’ moneyontheleft.org/2024/02/26/h...

For far too many families, the cost of childcare is driving them out of the city they love. New Yorkers deserve to be able to afford to raise families here.

It's accounting gimmicks all the way down--always & forever. The political question is not 'How do we truly get our books in order?' but instead 'How do we design a system that genuinely takes care of everyone?'

“The Public Grant-Making Bank represents a critical mechanism for fiscal insurgency… a profound political act that challenges the hegemonic conception of money as a fundamentally capitalist tool.” This is excellent. Immediate resistance, in unlikely places, that clears ground to build anew.

“The first pillar of this model involves restructuring finance as direct grants, rather than as loans … On this logic, a grant is still debt; only, it is a qualitative obligation to improve social and environmental conditions, rather than a quantitative obligation to repay a financial sum.”

MotL 84 is live! 🔊 ✨Democratic Public Finance✨ moneyontheleft.org/2025/11/01/d... Billy Saas & Scott Ferguson are joined by Will Beaman to discuss Money on the Left’s framework for what we call “Democratic Public Finance." Please listen 🎧 & share 🙌 ! *Transcript forthcoming

"[A] job guarantee is the ultimate disenshittifier of work."

i'm going to use this! instead of appreciation we often get more do more with less from higher ed leadership.

I was taught that each campaign has 3 phases: preparation, execution, evaluation. Two decades in, I'm now convinced there's a 4th phase: appreciation. Appreciation is essential because hard work done, if left unappreciated, can poison its doer. That's why I make time to write personal thank-you's.

Excellent piece by Nancy Pelosi on Mamdani’s budget challenges in Jacobin this week.

Or better yet moneyontheleft.org/2025/10/10/d...

Now that the election is done, I thought it would be nice to share this clip from the field launch back in January. What eventually became a field op with 104,000 people started with about 200. For me, it's a reminder that most great things start small—and that what makes them big is organization.

Big thx to @mattseybold.bsky.social for giving us permission to re-publish this urgent piece on the @moneyontheleft.bsky.social website. It's time for big ideas & transformative projects!

Let’s goooooooo!!!!!

Democratic Public Finance redefines politics as the process of coordinating our abundant human and material resources within ecological limits, rather than as an austere and exploitative competition for scarce funds. moneyontheleft.org/2025/11/01/d...

Had a great time speaking with @modernmoneylab.org.uk about complementary currencies with my MOTL colleague @robbhawkes.bsky.social!! Some of our slides below 💛🫡

And here’s how to fund it 👇 bsky.app/profile/mone...

"Contrary to economic orthodoxy, [Democratic Public Finance] redefines politics as the process of coordinating our abundant human and material resources within ecological limits, rather than exploitative competition for scarce funds."

I've been reading Money on the Left's interview with Caroline Levine very slowly, but I liked this quote: bsky.app/profile/mone...

I wish the left would reclaim labor more sharply by de-linking it from capital and the profit motive. Paid labor is not a necessary evil to be automated away, it is also care and participation, inclusion and recognition.

This is a short intro to our project, which speaks to many of the topics you’ve been addressing on your @boldpolitics.bsky.social podcast - it’s time to tell new stories about money and ecosocial justice!

Yes! 🙌

Money is not a thing. It neither stores dead labor nor conserves mass, energy or value. Money does not conform to logics of object permanence. True fiscal disobedience creates new credit forms that take care of people now, rather than merely withholding tax dollars as if they were gold ingots.

The pinnacle of neoliberal ideology is to approach Trump like he’s a landlord who owns the state but won’t do repairs. Just put the rent in a separate account. It is easier to imagine a rebellious tax strike than rebellious spending to take care of people now www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

"[M]ultiple crediting operations can drive a planned, gradual expansion of the public sector, a revaluation of different kinds of work, a mobilization of human capacities, and a pedagogical process."

"The core of [Neoliberal Public Finance] is a legal hierarchy that prioritizes private financial institutions over public bodies, especially at the state and municipal levels."

bumping this as it came up in our Branch Meeting today: there are alternative funding & governance systems for #UKHE being pitched and developed. This blogpost offers a thoughtful discussion. What others are there out there, #SaveHE gang? Government pretends that there is no alternative, but...

Open fiscal sabotage. It’s not *if* Democrats will issue bonds and repeal balanced budget amendments to stay alive; it’s *when*. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Healthcare, childcare, care for elders and disabled people. Guaranteed jobs, incomes, homes. Mass transit. Green energy. We were taught we can't afford to provide these to everyone. But somehow we've known that's false. Let us now unlearn the old neoliberal ways by learning how to provide for all.