Mike Konczal dedicated his Saturday wonkblog post to the universal basic income (UBI). I’ve written about the UBI here from time to time. I am supportive of it, although I am more partial to a slight permutation on the idea that I’ve generally seen referred to as a social wage. A social wage [...]
I’ve already written my piece about the latest Fed report that showed all young people are taking out less car loans and mortgages in the wake of the recession. The report showed that youth with student debt reduced their mortgage and car debt by slightly more percentage points than youth without [...]
New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:
But, as Hacker correctly points out, my view is almost certainly an outlying one. For cultural or other reasons, Americans tend to be more supportive of equality-producing measures that get baked into paychecks than they are of equality-producing measures that go through more overt government channels. As [...]
Check out this $3,675.00 MOOC offered by a company called Barbri, complete with recorded video lectures and everything. Law graduates sign up en masse for it to study for the legal bar exam. Barbri claims to have the highest pass rate of all bar preparation services.
Someone should study its attrition rates and [...]
Let’s say I am arguing with a right-winger about implementing a universal basic income (“UBI”). They say to me “I oppose it because 1) it wont actually make the lives of the poor better and 2) I think private charity is the correct institution for this kind of thing.” The right-winger’s reasoning is clear, but [...]
Elizabeth Warren has a bill out to cut student interest rates. I am in favor of refinancing student loans, but Warren’s proposal is just downright strange, excepting its value as a public relations gimmick.
The jumping off point for Warren’s policy is an observation that the Federal Reserve operates something called the discount window. Through [...]
Earlier this week, The Heritage Foundation released a report purporting to detail the costs of granting citizenship to undocumented immigrants. This report set off a flurry of wonky debates, with both conservative and liberal commentators criticizing the methodology and assumptions used by the report’s authors.
The discussion that sprung [...]
New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:
This is not because all of the jobs being created in the wake of the recession are those that require college-degreed workers. In fact, around 44 percent of the job growth last month came in the retail and hospitality/leisure sectors, sectors traditionally open to those without a [...]
I enjoy the MOOC debates. It is one of the few topics that causes very smart people to make arguments that they would laugh away were someone to make them in other contexts. Being personally involved or affected by an issue will do that to you I guess. As I’ve written [...]
New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:
The second theory is that Medicaid is uniquely inferior among health insurance plans, and that is what causes it to be ineffectual. The right-wing has been pursuing this theory for a while, claiming that the low reimbursement rates in Medicaid basically make it inoperative as insurance because [...]
