Matt Bruenig is the founder of People’s Policy Project.
When Matt Bruenig realized a Democratic childcare proposal had major flaws, he did what seemed sensible: he publicly pointed out the bill’s flaws. Doing so set in motion a chain of events that reveals how Democrats turn bad ideas into bad policies.
The Tennessee Valley Authority recently opted to invest in more fossil fuel generation, not less. Joe Biden can reverse the TVA’s decision, if he wants to.
The price of oil and the myriad horrors of climate change that oil exacerbates make it too important for us to leave in the free market’s hands. The oil companies should be nationalized.
You can redistribute income and power from capital to labor. But if you want to make sure that the final income distribution is sensitive to differences in household composition, there is no substitute for a universal welfare state.
The New York Times suggests that Modern Monetary Theory had a real moment in the sun after the pandemic-induced economic contraction. But monetary and fiscal stimulus is just the normal way of responding to recessions.
Some segments of the Republican Party have tried concocting a “working-class conservatism” lately. Marco Rubio’s new “Teamwork” bill offers more of the same: it’s a proposal supposedly designed to empower workers that is actually about busting their unions.
This week, Rashida Tlaib and Mondaire Jones introduced the End Child Poverty Act in Congress. It’s a watershed bill that would bring the US in line with social democratic countries that boast the world’s lowest child poverty rates.
The Right loves to point to inflation as some kind of proof that left-wing economic ideas don’t work. They’re wrong.
Meatpackers are colluding with each other to generate superprofits at the expense of everyone else. Nationalizing one of them isn’t particularly radical — it’s a commonsense policy solution.
We often hear that if you increase benefits for low-income parents, they’ll just squander it on drugs and alcohol. But the best research shows that’s elitist nonsense — giving money to poor people is exactly what we need to be doing.
Thanks to social democratic policies, the bottom 60 percent of Danes are better off than the bottom 60 percent of Americans. Even middle-class Danes benefit from a strong welfare state. The only group that doesn’t? The rich.
Democrats’ half-baked childcare proposal opened itself up to Republican attacks. There’s an easy solution: scrap the byzantine and expensive scheme Dems have concocted, and just give everyone universal childcare.
Universal benefits aren’t merely the morally just way to carry out welfare policies. They are also the smart way to carry out welfare policies.
Democrats are deliberately choosing to put forward a childcare plan that will be completely disastrous for millions of American families.
The ongoing strike wave in the US has little to do with vaccine mandates. Workers are striking because the labor market is relatively tight — and they smartly see that they have leverage against employers.
There’s no reason why the Dems’ paid parental leave program can’t cover everyone.
The Democratic Party’s current childcare proposal would raise costs on many moderate-earning households by $13,000. It’s not clear the party realizes the disaster it’s about to thrust these families into.
In Denmark, McDonald’s workers receive $22 per hour and 6 weeks of vacation. But it’s not because Danish capitalists are more enlightened — it’s because, when McDonald’s entered the country in the 1980s, unions launched mass strikes and boycotts.
Pandemic unemployment benefits expire today, leaving 10 percent of the US population with dramatically less household income.
There’s still time to avoid major unemployment cuts in twenty-four states. A look at the data makes it obvious: states that have already cut benefits should reinstate them, and states that haven’t should maintain them.