Author: Matt Bruenig

It seems like everyone in the country is talking about this song from Oliver Anthony. The song contains a few lines about the distribution of income that most of the commentary has focused on. I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day Overtime hours for bullshit pay … ‘Cause your dollar ain’t shit and it’s… Continue reading Oliver Anthony and Distributive Justice

Late last year, I laid out in a very clear way why universal benefits cost less than means-tested benefits and why people who think otherwise are simply getting mixed up in accounting definitions rather than dealing with economic realities. In the first part of this argument, I iterate through three successive policies that go like… Continue reading Winship’s Mental Block on Taxes

When I was in middle school, the United States invaded Iraq. For reasons that are not clear to me now, but probably having to do with my father’s anti-war politics, I decided I was against the invasion and that I should vocalize this in school and elsewhere when the topic came up. This was an… Continue reading Dropping a Subscript

We’ve got more inflation writing these days that is worth reading (Levitz, DeBoer). I want to keep on this theme for a bit here with a couple of brief notes. In my last piece on inflation, I wrote at one point that: The same inflation could result in very different revenue distributions depending on the… Continue reading Two Examples of Capturing Inflation-Driven Revenue

Between June 2020 and and January 2022, used car prices, which had been stable or declining for 25 years, increased by nearly 60 percent. Since then, they have come down a bit, but remain quite elevated relative to June 2020. I remember when this spike occurred in part because there were so many stories published… Continue reading Why Did Used Car Prices Go Up So Much?