#Matt Bruenig

[curatorofthisdigitalmorass]

Overall Inequality

Overall, wealth inequality remains quite high. The top 10 percent of households own 73 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent of households own just 2 percent of the nation’s wealth.

[themightyacilius]

Tweets of the Week: 26 March- 1 April 2023

Cranky Federalist reminds us of the Golden Rule: As Jesus said, the most important thing in any crisis is to be the first to use it to own people on the internet— Cranky Federalist (@CrankyFed) March 28, 2023 Mind of Marisa tells a sad story: My sister became a vegetarian about 5 years ago and she’s really changed. It’s like I’ve never seen herbivore— Marisa! (@mindofmarisa) February 11,…

[bimboficationblues]

the arguing about whether “the economy” is “good” (dumb metric, dumb object) is so stupid. which makes sense because it’s just a lib proxy war about why the unwashed masses deserve 10000000 years of agony because they’re not voting for Biden or whatever

[goodhorse413]

D) The welfare state should be viewed in conjunction with the tax system which funds it. The driving motivation behind people who say things like "well why should even rich kids deserve free lunch?" is that of progressivity, the principle that the welfare state should distribute wealth away from those who have a lot, and towards those who have little. Viewed in full context, there is no benefit towards splitting the progressivity of the welfare state into two pieces. Why go to all the trouble to prevent rich people from receiving 100 dollars, when you could just simply tax them 100 dollars more? The final distributional result is the same, but the latter system requires far less bureaucracy, and is far less likely to incorrectly exclude those who should be included. Let the tax system be progressive, and the transfer system be flat. Misguided attempts to outsource the progressivity to the transfer system often result in hidden regressive taxes, like the fact that disabled people effectively pay a tax to get married.

[grfn-btbtas]

[racefortheironthrone]

Any thoughts/opinions on the idea of Universal Basic Income?

So I come out of MMT-adjacent circles that tend to focus on Job Guarantees over Universal Basic Income(s).

There is a certain amount of rivalry and bad blood between these two camps, as they see their projects as competing for the same policy "space" as solutions to poverty and unemployment. For example, back when I was on twitter I got into quite a few arguments with Matt Bruenig, who is a UBI advocate and quite hostile to Job Guarantees, and I was not the only MMTer/job guarantee advocate who mixed it up with Bruening and his supporters.

For my own part, I am not opposed to incomes policies in general. Certainly, I think we saw from COVID-era initiatives around Unemployment Insurance and the Child Tax Credit that incomes policies can be tremendously effective in stabilizing consumer demand, preventing eviction and homelessness, and especially in cutting poverty rates. Likewise, I think there is now pretty solid empirical evidence that the concerns about employment effects that were the bane of UBIs and Negative Income Tax (NIT) proposals from the 1970s onwards are baseless.

That being said, I think there are other critiques of UBI from the left that were raised by Hyman Minsky in the late 1960s and 1970s that (instead of focusing on employment effects and the ideological question of "dependency") center on the fiscal capacity of the state, the problem of inflation, and the inability of UBIs to solve the problem of lost labor-time, which remain open questions.

This is why I am skeptical of the more Georgist approach to UBI as panacea. To my mind, incomes policies are a partial solution to some socioeconomic problems that have some side effects; they need to be buttressed by complementary policies (including job guarantees) that can do things UBIs can't, while also dealing with UBI's side effects. In some sense, it shouldn't be very surprising that a belt-and-braces strategy is best, because that was the intended vision for a comprehensive New Deal order proposed by the National Resources Planning Board in 1942.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

Radfems are strangely enamoured of an empirically baseless theory of birthrate decline in wealthy nations. According to this theory, women as a class are catching on that having kids (at least with the available “moids”) is a scam and accordingly dropping out of the heterosexual rat race. This leads to the much discussed birth rate decline, which is thus to be celebrated as a brave assertion of female class interests. This typically goes along with allegations that worries about a lack of population growth/stability (the bedrock of all extant systems in developed countries for sustaining the elderly) are patriarchal propaganda designed to exploit womens reproductive capacity collectively for the sake of men (whom, you may recall, are drastically underrepresented among the elderly). (Yea yea there’s immigration, yes, we should have more of it. But like, even stipulating you can do arbitrarily large amounts of immigration starting instantaneously, you do eventually run into the problem that if national economic development means lower birth rates, the only way to maintain this system in the long run is sustained international inequality. Not good!)

There is, afaict, little reason to believe this theory. Matt bruenig pointed out a few months back that the lions share of the birth rate decline comes from mothers having fewer children rather than childfree women having no children. And it is easy to find survey data indicating that preferred/planned numbers of children in wealthy nations (both for women and for men) consistently outstrip by a large margin the actual numbers of children born to the average family. So the explanation is not women successfully pressing their preferences wrt childlessness or family sizes, bc the former does not contribute much to the decline and the latter goes in the opposite direction. If women in rich countries had the numbers of children they actually explicitly prefer, there would be no birth rate decline

What makes this all strange to me is that this should be good news for the childfree radfems, yes? It’s bad news for women not being made into brood mares against their wills if that’s the cause of birth rate decline, bc it means freedom from reproductive exploitation comes with this uncomfortable price tag. Maybe worth paying! But still, a price tag. So they should be happy this is not the case? They should be correcting ppls hallucination of an unfortunate tradeoff? Yes? And yet the opposite prevails!! Very peculiar

Idk mb I am just missing smth obvious. But so far the way I see ppl talk about this just seems topsy turvy

[moleshow]

ALSO if we're talking socialism ☝️🤓 in volume iii of carl mark's Capital☝️🤓 his discussion of the joint-stock company emphasizes how that structure separated management (executives, managers) and the production process as a whole from ownership, i.e. capital (the shareholders)--making it possible to remove capital from the equation altogether and transfer ownership to the workers.

so it can go from this sort of thing ->->->->->->->-> to this sort of thing

(does not necessarily mean worker co-ops, you could have a state-owned enterprise or what have you)

note however that this does not replace the executive stratum. Charles Marcus-style socialist entities would still have CEOs, because executives are high-level managers.

a CEO aint nothing but a big manager accountable to a bigger manager i.e. the board of directors, who in turn are accountable to The Boss, the shareholders, which are like... retirement funds, among other things.

there are no shadowy cabals, no conspiracies. there are institutions, systems, practices, incentives, and a lot of individuals. but you are never going to find The Guy In Charge because no such person exists.

[azspot]

But the simplest and most effective strategy, as Matt Bruenig argues, would be to levy a variety of taxes and use the proceeds to build up a social wealth fund. Eventually, the government would own most of the country’s stock, and pay out the returns as a citizen dividend to every American equally. Alaska has a similar fund (built up with oil revenues rather than ordinary taxes, but the principle is the same), and it is both immensely popular and greatly reduces inequality. A rapidly growing share of American wealth is already held by index funds, where investors simply own a representative slice of the stock market. Morally, there is every reason to spread out the capital income resulting from wealth ownership, and practically, the institutions are already there and functioning.

The Case for Pragmatic Socialism

[senatortedcruz]

Matt Bruenig and his hag wife are pro-lifers I never want to hear them reeee-ing about child poverty ever

[goodhorse413]

Tell me comrade. Did your faith ever waver?

Top aides to President Joe Biden have been crafting a proposal to create a sovereign wealth fund that would allow the US to invest in national security interests including technology, energy, and critical links in the supply chain, according to a person familiar with the effort.

[sarkos]

On life expectancy, the U.S. ranks somewhere in the 60s among the world’s countries, according to data from the United Nations, falling in between Panama and Estonia. Among the wealthy subset of countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we rate 32nd out of 38. The U.S. also spends far more on health care than any other country in the world: around $12,000 per person each year, thousands of dollars more than the next-highest spenders. The discrepancy between the staggering amount of health care spending and our relatively short lives has been perennial fodder for commentary and political debate: Where is all that money going? The answer, to a significant degree, is that it’s being skimmed off by the private health insurance industry. “The largest component of higher U.S. medical spending is the cost of health care administration,” according to an analysis by Harvard health economist David Cutler. “About one-third of health care dollars spent in the United States pays for administration.” Peer countries, even those that have similar systems with multiple private insurers, pay just a fraction as much. “Whole occupations exist in U.S. medical care that are found nowhere else in the world, from medical-record coding to claim-submission specialists,” Cutler writes. That excess spending adds up to something like half a trillion dollars each year, according to a recent analysis of Congressional Budget Office data by Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project. For every $100 spent on health care, $16 goes directly to private insurance companies and another $16 goes to hospitals to cover the cost of administering care. Only about $68 goes toward actually paying for medical services.Under a single-payer system, on the other hand, the CBO estimates that the public insurer would need just $1.60 of that hundred bucks to cover its costs, while the hospitals would only need $11.80 to cover administration, because they no longer have to deal with the hassle of multiple private health insurers.

Radicalized by statistics: Report fact-checks figures in CEO shooting suspect's manifesto - Raw Story

[stephanurban]

Huge Administrative Waste Makes Clear For-Profit Insurance Is 'Actually Very Bad': Analysis | Common Dreams

[fadingsunsjvj]

Social wealth funds as vehicles of economic empowerment

[moleshow]

if matt bruenig has one million readers i am one of them. if matt bruenig has 5 readers i am one of them. if matt bruenig has one reader it is me. if matt bruenig has 0 readers i am dead.