Author: Matt Bruenig

Another post over at Policy Shop. An excerpt: With that said, there is something really bizarre about keeping student interest rates so high. The whole point of the Federal Reserve’s zero interest-rate policy is to drive the cost of debt down. That is the channel through which it is meant to be stimulative. Among other… Continue reading Policy Shop: Why Congress Should Cut Student Loan Interest Rates

New post at Policy Shop. It is about the way in which state funding of higher education is actually not nearly as good as federal funding. The easiest way to counteract the regressivity on the revenue side is to take states out of the funding mix and replace them with the federal government. Federal taxes… Continue reading Policy Shop: The Problem With State-Funded Higher Education

I have a new post over at Policy Shop. It concludes thusly: On average, SAT scores in all subjects track household income very closely: the poorer you are the lower you score, the richer you are the higher you score. Ultimately, it is only by changing that disparity that we can hope to make a… Continue reading Policy Shop: Why Poor Kids Really Don’t Go to College

I am not a fan of Teach for America, as regular readers probably know by now. I don’t think they have properly diagnosed the cause of the gap between rich and poor students, and I wish they’d rename their organization Give Poor People Money for America, and go from there. For the most part, TFA… Continue reading Teach for America’s poverty safari