Matt Bruenig is the founder of People’s Policy Project.
Twenty-five Republican-led states have cut unemployment benefits, doing enormous damage to millions of workers. And in 40 days, 20 million more workers will lose their unemployment if Democrats don’t act.
With the new Child Tax Credit, two-thirds of people in the US now receive monthly benefit checks. That’s a very good thing — it means delivering poor, working-class, and middle-class people clear material gains while also destigmatizing the welfare state.
Joe Biden’s Child Tax Credit is an important lifeline for poor and working-class families. But his administration has bungled the rollout: 90 percent of eligible children still haven’t been reached, consigning them to brutal poverty.
Picking a health care plan isn’t an exercise in freedom — it’s an impossibly complicated, mind-numbing task seemingly designed to drive you insane. Can’t we just have Medicare for All already?
The power of big business needs to be confronted. But the solution to big business isn’t small business — it’s democratic socialism.
The frenzied warnings of impending mass inflation are completely overblown. The inflation we’ve seen has been limited to a few specific items — and putting the brakes on the economy now would hammer the working class.
There’s a lot of talk these days about labor shortages and workers unwilling to work because unemployment benefits are too high. Ignore the hand-wringing: it’s a very good thing if workers have the freedom to say no to low-paying, dehumanizing jobs.
The House just passed a stimulus bill that breaks the 25-year bipartisan consensus that the very poor shouldn’t be eligible for cash benefits. It’s a watershed moment — and we should build on it by turning the US welfare state into a poverty-fighting machine.
Despite branding himself as a fresh “pro-worker” conservative, former Mitt Romney adviser Oren Cass believes that excluding poor children from key social welfare benefits is good and we should do more of it. It’s conservative, all right — but the furthest thing from “pro-worker.”
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.