Matt Bruenig is the founder of People’s Policy Project.
Our child benefit system is bizarre and overcomplicated, Matt Bruenig argues. The US government should eliminate the Earned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, and Additional Child Tax Credit — and replace those programs with a $374 check sent out to every family every month for every child they are taking care of.
Opponents of the $2,000 survival checks claim they’re poorly targeted. That’s nonsense. They would help the working class and poor far more than the rich.
The most exhaustive study on Medicare for All just came out. Its conclusion: a single-payer system would guarantee health insurance to all people while reducing overall health spending by hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
A modest sum of money would ensure that everyone could participate in holiday traditions without breaking the bank. Let’s have the federal government pay out a universal holiday bonus.
Capitalism systemically concentrates wealth at the top of society, as the latest US figures confirm yet again. The solution: massive wealth redistribution that attacks disparities across the board.
Means-testing makes social programs to help average people highly vulnerable to cuts and a bureaucratic nightmare to sign up for. We have to reject means-testing.
The Supreme Court is way too powerful — and its power shouldn’t be wielded for good, it should be permanently undermined. Many liberals are close to coming around to this position, but few articulate it clearly.
Here’s an idea: we should redistribute wealth from the largely white 1 percent to the poor and working class of all races — tackling both racial and class inequality simultaneously.
The Earned Income Tax Credit was supposed to substantially reduce poverty and efficiently increase employment. It’s failed. It’s time for Democrats to abandon the EITC and turn toward much more effective universal social welfare programs instead.
Coronavirus has had a devastating economic impact in the United States. Yet the richest country in the world has so far passed paltry relief measures.
The Federalist‘s top manager Ben Domenech is deeply upset that Matt Bruenig filed charges at the National Labor Relations Board for Domenech’s “joking” anti-union threats against employees. If Domenech didn’t want to get dragged to court, maybe he shouldn’t have broken labor law.
In the wake of the end of Bernie Sanders’s campaign, many pundits are asking: Should Bernie have campaigned like Elizabeth Warren? The answer is no, since she lost very badly.
Just about everything Fareed Zakaria says about Bernie Sanders, the Nordics, and social democracy is incorrect. He’s faked his way through another column on something he knows nothing about.
Good news: the vast majority of Americans support a policy to have the government provide free public childcare for all children too young to attend school. And now Bernie Sanders is on board with the idea.
Michael Bloomberg is so rich it’s hard to comprehend. So here’s a comparison: the bottom 38 percent of US households have a collective net worth of $11 billion. Bloomberg alone has $64 billion.
Pete Buttigieg can’t stop attacking Medicare for All. But his own health care plan is so bad it borders on the comical.
This presidential campaign, the Center for American Progress has been put in the comical position of having to promote policies that they just a few months ago claimed were insane and politically suicidal. But one constant remains — they can’t stand Bernie Sanders.
In Finland, the government owns nearly one-third of the nation’s wealth, and 90 percent of workers are covered by a union contract. That may not be socialism, but it’s also not a “capitalist paradise,” as the New York Times ridiculously claimed over the weekend.
Somehow, the least progressive Medicare-for-All funding proposal I have ever seen is being championed by many in the media as our best and only choice.
Elizabeth Warren’s proposed head tax to finance Medicare for All is regressive and far inferior to alternative income- and payroll-tax funding proposals.