Matt Bruenig is the founder of People’s Policy Project.
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.
The media breathlessly reported on labor shortages this summer, helping generate support for unemployment benefit cuts. But a new study shows such cuts didn’t do much but devastate poor people’s incomes.
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.”