🧵 1/ New Cato white paper (yes, Cato) finds immigrants paid more in taxes than they received in benefits every year from 1994–2023 across federal, state, and local budgets:

@mayor.nyc.gov @governor.ny.gov NYC faces a $12B budget hole for FY26-27. Undocumented NYers contribute ~$3.1B/yr in NY state & local taxes. Trump’s cruel ICE tactics will shrink revenue by pushing immigrants into the shadows & off the books. We must #TaxTheRich now to pay their share. My op-ed:

ta-nehisi on renee good, alex pretti, and the "culture war"

Thrilled to join Roosevelt Institute’s 2026 Think Tank Fellows cohort to help build an economy that delivers shared prosperity, real power for working people, and rules that rein in extraction. Very excited to be alongside my former Treasury colleagues Chastity Murphy and @samarthgupta.bsky.social!

Congress is fast-tracking crypto — not fixing the real economy. New op-ed in Fast Company: www.fastcompany.com/91474218/cry...

Great work from @groundwork.bsky.social. what it immediately brings to mind is whether a SNAP card on an instacart account impacts prices shown and if so how

A good idea whose time has come www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

White House officials are furious with Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, who talked Trump into suggesting a 50-year mortgage plan. The White House was blindsided by the idea and is now dealing with a furious backlash from conservative allies, business leaders and lawmakers.

🧵 1/ I keep getting asked about 50-year mortgages. I worked in banking/housing finance after the 2008 crash, and what I see is a policy that markets relief while loading risk onto the very households it claims to help. Affordability comes from more homes and higher incomes, not longer debt.

We’re hiring! Our new resume portal is live, and we’re looking for top talent in NYC to help build this administration and deliver on our affordability agenda. Could that be you? Apply using the link below. transition2025.com/apply

Today @economicsecurityproject.org released its Affordability Framework by Becky Chao and myself. As affordability remains central to economic debates, it's helpful to step back to see the key drivers of the crisis and build a theory of the case. /1 economicsecurityproject.org/resource/aff...

If you read anything today, read this piece by @bedoyausa.bsky.social. It’s a sharp reminder that the real political stakes aren’t just left vs. right. They are about power vs. the people and who gets to control our economy and our lives. For immigrants, in housing, in labor, in tech, and beyond.

(1/3) Trump promised cheaper energy. But today his DOE is pulling $8B from projects that would lower costs and strengthen the grid, just as AI data center demand soars. That chills investment, slows construction, and leaves families & small businesses facing higher power bills and weaker reliability

i have said this before but when “getting rid of race in admissions” for the administration means “you can’t even try to reach out to underrepresented communities and encourage them to apply and if you do it is illegal discrimination against white people” then the actual goal here is segregation

If you want to build a bunch of AI data centers, and also pull the rug out from under the wind, solar + battery industries that contributed **94%** of all new generation last year, you're gonna end up with an energy affordability crisis. From @asteephen.bsky.social: time.com/7312151/ener...

READ: ESP Fellow @asteephen.bsky.social breaks down why families are facing higher energy bills—from the rollback of clean energy incentives to the rapid growth of AI data centers—and how these shifts are raising costs for families.

NEW PIECE: Powell and the Federal Reserve System has already failed to meet the moment and not defending Lisa Cook will seal both Powell's and the Fed's fate. www.crisesnotes.com/powell-will-...

i find this image so fascinating. it is both a literal example of authoritarianism but also a second-hand reproduction of the aesthetics of other authoritarian states. it's like a simulacra of authoritarianism whose purpose is to attempt to make the simulacra real.

Energy bills are rising nationwide, and Trump and the GOP are to blame. They rolled back clean energy incentives and greenlit an AI surge, pushing costs onto working families and deepening economic & environmental inequality. I break it down in TIME today: time.com/7312151/ener...

Dear journalists: The President has not fired Lisa Cook. The President is *trying* to illegally fire her. Your words shape people’s reality. Please be accurate in your reporting.

Trump posts a letter stating that he is removing Fed Governor Lisa Cook

so okay! first piece out from me at Common Wealth "Beyond Bidenomics: On what is living and what is dead in economic policy" the argument is that progressives should take credit for the successful parts of the pandemic policy response and build the next Thing www.common-wealth.org/perspectives...

NEW PIECE: I'm back, finally, and its a long one. Superficially this moment is a vindication for Central Bank Independence but at a deeper level, cutting the Fed off from its independent agency brethren is its death warrant. www.crisesnotes.com/trump-vs-pow...

From airfare to rent, companies are using your data to jack up prices. With your help, ESB experts @bedoyausa.bsky.social and @dohamekki.bsky.social will join @groundwork.bsky.social's @lindsayowens.bsky.social at @sxsw.com to break down these deceptive pricing practices and how to fight back.

🎧LEVER TIME: Inside the Trump-Powell fight over Federal Reserve “independence.” Matt Stoller & Nathan Tankus on how the era of insulating the Fed from democracy has coincided with financial crises, bailouts & a huge upward transfer of wealth. www.levernews.com/the-fight-fo...

The IRS said clergy and houses of worship should be allowed to make political endorsements, a potential move away from a 71-year-old policy that banned the mixing of religion and politics.

Astoundingly good article from @asteephen.bsky.social on the role of taxation in a democratic society, and what the current US Government is doing to turn the IRS into their own instrument of political control. www.crisesnotes.com/the-fiscal-s...

I have no words

NEW @crisesnotes.bsky.social PIECE: Today @asteephen.bsky.social & @iraregmi.bsky.social provide a 2nd installment in their series on DOGE at the IRS. Today's piece is on the so-called "modernization" of the IRS's legacy IT systems & the manifold dangers posed www.crisesnotes.com/inside-doges...

As Republicans push a reconciliation bill that includes significant cuts to IRS funding don’t miss what’s already underway: DOGE has laid off staff, rushed tech upgrades, and is pursuing access to + control of sensitive taxpayer data. More from me + @iraregmi.bsky.social in @crisesnotes.bsky.social

I know my colleagues already dropped this line (h/t: @brendanvduke.bsky.social ), but it bears repeating - there already exists a rural hospital fund and it is called: 🚨🚨MEDICAID🚨🚨 www.politico.com/live-updates...

Wild how the Fed chair saying that *entire regions of the United States* won’t be able to get a mortgage in the next decade barely registered as a news event

Now that we’ve seen the full Senate text, we can say for certain: either the House or the Senate version would be the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in history. Each have the largest Medicaid and largest SNAP cuts ever. And each give huge tax cuts to the rich.

"This is not about eliminating bureaucracy, fraud, waste, or abuse. It’s about repurposing it to serve a new model of power and breaking the chain of democratic accountability between Congress, the law, and the public." Important, scary stuff.

Delighted to read @asteephen.bsky.social in @crisesnotes.bsky.social and unsurprisingly, completely in agreement. Read the whole thing!

🚨 Kristi Noem confirms IRS agents are in LA “to help us track how these violent protestors are funded." She names “NGOs out there, unions, other individuals” as possible targets. This is fiscal surveillance weaponized to silence dissent.📍29:15 in the video stream.

If you're following the GOP tax bill disaster, my latest in @crisesnotes.bsky.social traces how this effort builds on a longstanding campaign to weaken the IRS and consolidate fiscal power in the hands of the wealthy. This is the first in a series on DOGE, taxes, and the future of public governance.

Follow @asteephen.bsky.social who just wrote this fantastic article: "We don’t need to defend what the IRS has been. We need to fight for what it could be: a mechanism of equity, not control by the elite. And accountability, not surveillance" www.crisesnotes.com/the-fiscal-s...

Budget reconciliation ("big beautiful bill") timeline: -SNAP cuts text today, Medicaid & tax text Friday/weekend -Byrd bath next week/two -Senate voting in two/three weeks -House passage shortly after Next week is crucial week for opposition. Tell friends. Make calls. Very little time to stop this.

Nice piece by @darrickhamilton.bsky.social and @pressley.house.gov I guess we are all thinking the same thing. Trump accounts are not baby bonds as I lay out in my own piece. Any similarity is superficial at best. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

1/ We’re thrilled to announce a new cohort of fellows whose expertise in tech innovation, government, and economic policy will help us expand the ideas in our toolbox to build an economy that works for all of us. Please welcome:

(1) There’s a lot in W+Ms draft bill. We knew it'd be losing trillions of $$$ and in regressive fashion. But provisions also pick winners+losers often in unjustified ways and give us an (even more) swiss cheese tax system that’d generally be harder to administer and unfair in new ways.

the republican reconciliation bill would fundamentally rework both snap and medicaid for the worse, instituting the largest cuts to each of those programs in us history. all while giving enormous tax cuts to the richest americans. truly reprehensible.

There are many horrible things in the Ways & Means draft, but let me alert you to this underappreciated horror: They want to expand the Treasury Secretary's power to unilaterally designate nonprofits as "terrorist supporting organizations."

My colleagues @taxlawcenter.org will have analysis on the details of the W&M bill (AINS 05/12) to come. But its broad strokes are clear. taxlawcenter.org/blog/an-init... It doesn't consistently follow any sound tax principle I can think of. Seems more driven by picking winners and losers.

NEW from @emilypont.bsky.social: : How the House GOP tax proposal could amount to "a back-door full repeal" of the Inflation Reduction Act ⬇️

this is amazing!! if you're a young journalist, please apply!

Tax Day is a good time to remember Thomas Paine's observation about taxes. Paine argues that, to build a society without kings, we need to tax wealth. Still rings true to me! For more details, see my piece with @vanessawilliamson.bsky.social here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This convo was about how equity is treated as a tertiary outcome when building housing, climate infra, & growing the economy. The primary goals are to build more, faster. The equity v efficiency tradeoff is a false dichotomy used to keep wealth and power concentrated. Growth should benefit everyone