I was initially lukewarm on Steyer, but I’ve come around to the idea that it’s actively good to have a billionaire help lead the charge to tax billionaires.

It’s all well and good for tech leaders to endorse UBI. But it feels convenient to only focus on a distant political prospect. The GOP, right now, is doing reverse-UBI (work requirements on SNAP). It’d be nice to hear more objections to that.

Many other examples (eg, the Philippines pictured).

In Sweden, speeding cameras don't just catch speeders, they also enter drivers going the proper speed into a lottery to win cash prizes funded by the traffic tickets. We should do the same with timely tax filers.

Nepal has 16 categories of taxpayer awards. Shoutout to Nepal Telecommunications Authority for paying the most taxes in the public institutions category 🫡

Finland has a website where they celebrate all the things taxes pay for

The South Korean national tax agency gives out a "model taxpayer" award every year, often to k-pop stars and actors, and the recipients serve as a PR ambassadors for the agency for the following year.

Tax law scholar Lawrence Zelenak observes, “April 15 can and should be as important a civic holiday as the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Together, the two days celebrate the fulfillment of the two great responsibilities of citizenship.” The filing of the income tax return offers an opportunity to mark this achievement. Riffing on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s famous quip, “I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization,” Zelenak calls for greater recognition of how filing an income tax return constitutes a “Purchase-of-Civilization Ceremony.”

Happy tax day! This should be a civic holiday, we should have a parade and give out taxpayer awards.
ruthbraunstein.substack.com/p/what-does-...

I think on a individual level, it can absolutely be nice, but on a political-legal level there's good reason for skepticism as implemented. Eg excluding a whole class of workers from social insurance is really bad, and leaves them vulnerable now that disruption is coming.

I think progressives were right to be skeptical of the gig work labor model, so I’m happy to see it automated away as quickly as possible.

DOGE turbocharged the deficit.

budgetlab.yale.edu/research/wea...

I’ve seen enough. God is 1) real 2) nonbinary 3) primarily motivated by a deep hatred of JD Vance

Full text of Nancy Mace's post: Boating is not a luxury in South Carolina. It’s a way of life. Our state is home to more than 350,000 registered recreational boats and a marine industry supporting over 27,000 jobs and generating a $6.5 billion economic impact. Our No Tax on Boat Loan Interest Act extends the above-the-line loan interest deduction for cars to boats, allowing American families to deduct up to $10,000 annually in boat loan interest on American-made boats. More affordable boats mean more families recreating on the water, more marine manufacturing jobs in South Carolina, and more investment in an industry already generating billions in economic impact. South Carolina STRONG.

I am going to become the joker

I couldn't get the formatting right with them on the map, but added them to the source section

Their unwinding process seems to have been a mess, but a key thing saving them is also having a high means-testing threshold (300% FPL) for CHIP, so there's a broader tier above Medicaid that can catch people.

bsky.app/profile/jdcm...

An effectively implemented Medicaid expansion. Ironically, the high poverty rate helps make more people eligible for it.

Map showing the following data: Children's uninsured rate by state, 2024 (ACS, under 19): Alabama 4.3%, Alaska 8.8%, Arizona 9.3%, Arkansas 7.7%, California 3.1%, Colorado 6.0%, Connecticut 2.6%, Delaware 5.8%, Florida 8.5%, Georgia 7.9%, Hawaii 2.9%, Idaho 8.1%, Illinois 3.6%, Indiana 6.1%, Iowa 3.8%, Kansas 7.0%, Kentucky 5.0%, Louisiana 4.1%, Maine 4.5%, Maryland 4.6%, Massachusetts 2.1%, Michigan 3.5%, Minnesota 3.7%, Mississippi 5.8%, Missouri 6.6%, Montana 7.7%, Nebraska 5.3%, Nevada 8.0%, New Hampshire 2.3%, New Jersey 4.7%, New Mexico 6.1%, New York 2.7%, North Carolina 5.5%, North Dakota 6.7%, Ohio 5.6%, Oklahoma 8.5%, Oregon 2.7%, Pennsylvania 5.4%, Rhode Island 3.7%, South Carolina 5.9%, South Dakota 8.0%, Tennessee 6.5%, Texas 13.6%, Utah 6.6%, Vermont 2.6%, Virginia 5.2%, Washington 3.9%, West Virginia 2.8%, Wisconsin 4.2%, Wyoming 9.0%. National average: 6.0%.

Uninsured rate for children, by state. Texas accounts for a quarter of all children without health insurance in America.

Shot / chaser

Between medicaid cuts and restricting the immigrant doctors who actually serve rural areas, I've never seen a political movement so laser focused on killing their most loyal voters.

The view of Mount Diablo from Briones regional park

Beyond Who Pays More: How Taxes Form the Foundation of Our Economy and Democracy In order to understand how to evaluate the coming deluge of tax policy proposals, we must engage in a deeper question: how our tax code structures the very foundations of our economy and democracy.

I whole-heartedly endorse this piece by our president, @elizabethwwilkins.bsky.social

Chock full of @jdcmedlock.bsky.social thought if I do say so myself

rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/beyond-...

Good job dems 👍

They’re cutting your healthcare to pay for a war that’s raising your gas prices.

Need Nithya to win so bad...

Inject it into my veins.

Pre-ACA, the health insurance system didn't do a bad job; private health insurance did a very good job at something most people think is deeply unfair. Once you remove what is normally the main social benefit of private insurance --pricing risk to make things die-- you are left with health insurance companies with only three other functions: spreading risk, negotiating with providers, and customer service. The problem is, the industry is terrible at two of these. Private health insurance companies openly admit they can't effectively spread risk on their own since some individuals have very high cost health care problems, and these individuals can no longer be priced out. The private health insurance lobby (AHIP) has actively been calling for the government to recreate a government reinsurance program -- government insurance for the insurers that spreads the risk for them. The private health insurance lobby also admits they are terrible at negotiating with hospital and drug makers. For most procedures, they have negotiated rates much higher than what the government did for Medicare. We now have a weird health insurance system where the private insurance companies can't do their main job because we consider it immoral, they are asking the government to step in to perform their second most important function for them, and they admit they are really bad at their third most important job.

Reminds me of this classic post from @jonwalkerpdx.bsky.social . We regulated away the one thing insurance was good at because it was immoral, and left it with all the things the government is simply better at.
www.pendinghorizon.com/2017/09/priv...

So funny to see conservatives accidentally make the case for single payer health insurance...
www.aei.org/articles/the...

In a world where many democrats have embraced pie-in-the-sky middle class tax cuts, leave it to a democratic socialist like Mamdani to seriously engage with budgeting tradeoffs and embrace an efficient broad based property tax increase

I love this analogy. Regulatory reform is vitally important to expand capacity. But we need to pair it with federal investment policy to actually fill that capacity.

We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.