Mike Konczal
fellow. Economics, free stuff. , contributor. Staying off Twitter, writing a book. 🍞🌹
Last synced from Twitter 340d ago
Parents Are Giving Up Custody of Their Kids to Get Need-Based College Financial Aid
ProPublica 21d 26 tweets
First, parents turn over guardianship of their teenagers to a friend or relative. Then the student declares financial independence to qualify for tuition aid and scholarships.
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Mike Konczal The difference between the 1% and the professional class is whether you disassociate yourself into an LLC to get the full Trump tax cuts or whether you disassociate your family into shell families in order to get free college. 21d
Mueller says little, but was that the point? | Left, Right & Center
KCRW 24d 7 tweets
Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally testifies before congress but did anything new come to light?
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Mike Konczal A productive and interesting discussion (starting ~19m) around the Green New Deal and climate change in a world with sluggish demand, secular stagnation, and a need for industrial policy. Starring: 23d
There Are Too Few Companies and Their Profits Are Too High
The Nation 38d 3 tweets
As industries get more concentrated, businesses have to do less to earn more.
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Mike Konczal If you use phrases like "Fordism" or "fracture" to describe political economy, or if you just think that you could have better conditions for workers in the 1950s-70s because business was big then and it is small now, well, it's probably bigger now. 38d
The Fed’s New Message: The Economy Can Get a Lot Better for Workers
Neil Irwin - Nytimes.com 40d 5 tweets
A rejection of what had been a consensus view of the relationship between the jobless rate and inflation.
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Mike Konczal It wasn't just conservatives, or the waves of "but it's only the long-term unemployment" hand-waving. A lot of center-left people said we were at full employment in 2016 with no evidence, and they were dead wrong, and we are living with the consequences. 39d
Moderates Have the Better Story
David Brooks - Nytimes.com 49d 11 tweets
A tale of audacity and hope.
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Mike Konczal Also "the nordic countries don't have a minimum wage" is a great way to flag you don't know what you are talking about when it comes to how economies are actually regulated. 47d
IARA: Full text of the 1816 Constitution
In.gov 47d 1 tweets
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Mike Konczal It's crazy when David Brooks and others describe free college as if it is some weird, foreign import, as opposed to the lived norm of American life from the founding till the 1970s. Here's the Indiana state constitution from 1816, which has free college! 47d
Will Income-Share Agreements Be the Next Payday Loans?
The American Prospect 48d 3 tweets
Policymakers need to pay attention to the deregulation of these student loan-type products happening in Indiana.
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Mike Konczal The regulatory regime you need to enforce "income share agreements" (selling equity in yourself for college) is bananas. Private lenders need your tax returns, etc. And as et al finds, they're designed to ignore existing consumer regulations. 47d
Decarbonizing the US Economy: Pathways Toward a Green New Deal
Roosevelt Institute 66d 3 tweets
The greatest challenge of the 21st century—the climate crisis—is here: The global community has just 11 years to cut emissions by 45 percent and must achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 to prevent temperatures from rising more than 1.5oC, according to...
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Mike Konczal Given secular stagnation and looming next recession, a big debt-funded infrastructure project is exactly what we need to avert climate disaster. Debt-funding is all benefit with interest rates so low, lower than growth rates. See and 54d
Class War Over Tuition
Nytimes.com 56d 1 tweets
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Mike Konczal Editor Frederick Hechinger in 1974, predicting recent moves to introduce public college tuition, as to not benefit middle-class too much, will split support, generating bitter fights b/w working-class and poorer people over access. He was absolutely right. 56d
Speech by Chair Yellen on perspectives on inequality and opportunity from the Survey of Consumer Finances
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System 56d 1 tweets
Watch Live The distribution of income and wealth in the United States has been widening more or less steadily for several decades, to a greater extent than
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Mike Konczal For those reading the debates over student loans, here are 3 tells I use to see if the writer is conveying the problem. 1st is whether they are clear that, as a % of income, lower-income people have higher debt burdens and it's gotten worse. From Fed: /1 56d
What Kind of Socialist Is Bernie Sanders?
The Atlantic 68d 10 tweets
After his speech on Wednesday, I still don’t know.
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Mike Konczal To say that Sanders's speech, concluding we must "take up the unfinished business of the New Deal," needs to answer for 20C "leftist autocrats" is arguing the New Deal is implicated with those autocrats (i.e. liberal fascism), a bad history and argument. 67d
Beyond Neoliberalism
Democracy Journal 68d 6 tweets
As dark as our time is in so many ways, there exists one great ray of hope: that we may finally have reached the end of the line for neoliberal economics, the theories advanced by Milton Friedman and others in the 1960s and 1970s that replaced...
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Mike Konczal This is an excellent overview of how people on the left-liberal side are starting to think through what the political economy of the next economic era (yes, post-neoliberal) looks like. Some of the smartest people I know are involved here. Check it out! 68d
Navigating Freedom with Cass Sunstein
The Nation 78d 28 tweets
When nudges won’t set you free.
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Mike Konczal Great review by of Sunstein's new book on freedom. We need to understand that the old guard of technocratic liberals have learned nothing from the Obama years and the economy of the past two decades, and be prepared to move past that and them. 77d
Want to Expand Medicare? Then Answer the $5 Trillion Questions.
The Nation 116d 2 tweets
If you think the fight with insurance companies is tough, just wait until single-payer advocates have to go head-to-head with doctors.
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Mike Konczal The central Medicare for All fight is just under the surface, but it won't remain there forever: the $5 trillion dollar battle over taking on doctors, hospitals and health care providers. 70% of M4A savings comes from them, and they'll fight to stop that. 115d
Why did neoconservatives join forces with neoliberals? Irving Kristol from critic to ally of free-market economics
Taylor & Francis 119d 1 tweets
(2018). Why did neoconservatives join forces with neoliberals? Irving Kristol from critic to ally of free-market economics. Global Intellectual History. Ahead of Print.
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Mike Konczal Pump this straight into my veins: during an 1980s Michael Novak symposium trying to get conservatives to embrace a message of civil society, a paper had to be rewritten to include Exxon as an example of a mediating institution. Via this excellent paper : 119d
Title not found
Rsci.app.link 119d 2 tweets
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Mike Konczal Here's on Warren's student debt cancellation proposal. Our student debt experiment has been a disaster, with deleterious effects on generations of key life-cycle events, including homeownership, marriage, fertility, starting a business, etc. 119d
Wendell Primus, the Most Powerful Staffer in Congress, Represents a Generational Divide on the Left
The Intercept 131d 3 tweets
Wendell Primus's generation of liberals strive not to make the world a better place, but to make it less bad than Republicans want.
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Mike Konczal I think this by really gets at the generational divide among liberals. Before there was a mindset of digging in and fighting against the worst parts of the past 40 years; now we need to actually use power and provide a new vision of the economy. 131d
Civil Rights, the War on Poverty, and Black-White Convergence in Infant Mortality in the Rural South and Mississippi by Douglas Almond, Kenneth Y. Chay, Michael Greenstone :: SSRN
Papers.ssrn.com 581d 3 tweets
For the last sixty years, African-Americans have been 75% more likely to die during infancy as whites. From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, however, this raci
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Mike Konczal These graphics still floor me. Medicare administrators required absolute desegregation of hospitals, no "full deliberate speed" stuff, complete with exams informed by local civil rights groups, to get any Medicare dollars. Black infant mortality collapsed. 131d
Second Time as Farce: Should We Repeat the Strategy of Cap-and-Trade instead of a Green New Deal?
Mike Konczal - Medium 142d 3 tweets
We are always acting in light of our failures, either trying to evolve past them or break through them. The current push to address…
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Mike Konczal Of interest, building on what you wrote 142d
Tractor Hacking: Watch Our Documentary About Farmers Fighting for the Right to Repair
Motherboard 145d 1 tweets
We went to Nebraska to meet the farmers fighting John Deere's repair monopoly.
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Mike Konczal Other things, like "Right to Repair" (the subject of this documentary that feels like a future dystopia, but it is right now) are just as good. It's a way of tying regional inequality to inequality across the board, a leap we need to make ASAP. /fin 145d