Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Listen To Nick Hanauer

I have previously referred to billionaire Nick Hanauer, and his clear-eyed view of what economic evidence tells us. Hanauer has, for example, explained multiple times why raising the minimum wage, not cutting taxes, creates jobs: it’s when people have enough disposable income to buy your widgets that employers hire people to make them. (When Seattle ignored the plutocrats’ warnings and raised its minimum wage, Hanauer’s position was vindicated.)

In 2023, Hanauer and a co-author wrote a book titled “Corporate Bullshit,” intended to help readers identify the “pernicious propaganda” promulgated by the wealthy. The book identified six categories of falsehoods that Hanauer says repeatedly thwart progress on issues ranging from civil rights, to wealth inequality, climate change, voting rights, and gun responsibility.

As Hanauer points out, Americans have a bad habit of giving credence to arguments made by the wealthy and powerful simply because those making the arguments are wealthy and powerful. (It always reminds me of that lyric from  Fiddler on the Roof’s “If I Were A Rich Man.”  “The most important men in town would come to call on me, asking questions that would cross a Rabbis eyes–and it won’t make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong…When you’re rich they think you really know.”)

Recently, on Facebook, Hanauer shared a letter he’d sent to one of the “movers and shakers” who spoke at Davos. Since he publicly shared it, I assume I can share it as well.

Here’s his letter:

I listened closely to your remarks at Davos, and you’re right about the core problem: capitalism is losing public trust because prosperity has left too many people behind. I warned us all about this when I wrote “The Pitchforks Are Coming for Us Plutocrats” back in 2014. You’re also correct that GDP and market caps are terrible proxies for whether an economy is actually working for working people.

But here’s the thing—this isn’t a mystery anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been having conversations—often with people who run large institutions, manage serious capital, and employ thousands—about exactly what to do next.

On Pitchfork Economics and in conversations across the ecosystem, we’ve talked with people like Joseph Stiglitz, Heather Boushey, Mariana Mazzucato, Robert Reich, Todd Tucker, Elizabeth Anderson, Mark Blyth, and many others who have laid out, in plain language, what will actually fix this problem.

They all point to a similar set of solutions:
–Tax extreme wealth and income at levels that reflect their real social cost
– Rebuild antitrust enforcement and curb monopoly power
– Strengthen labor markets and worker bargaining power
– Invest aggressively in public goods that make broad-based prosperity possible

None of this is radical. In fact, it’s how the U.S. built the most prosperous middle class in history. So when you say the answer is more “conversation,” I have to strongly disagree. We’re past the conversation phase. There are many ideas on the table, from every corner of the world. The evidence is overwhelming. And the political backlash you’re worried about is already here precisely because action hasn’t followed conversation.

On behalf of the handful of us zillionaires who have benefited from this system, we don’t need more panels or better messaging. We need the courage to support policies that will redistribute power, not just wealth—and to do so even when it’s uncomfortable or expensive for people like us.

You said that in order to solve inequality, the mountain—meaning Davos—needed to come down to earth. It’s a nice image, but it doesn’t reflect reality. What really needs to happen is the mountain needs to stop extracting from everyone else.

It’s fashionable these days to bash all billionaires, and a large number of them certainly deserve that bashing. But billionaires–like all other groups of people–are not a monolithic category. Just as all Somalis aren’t guilty of fraud in Minneapolis, all Jews do not support Israel’s activities in Gaza, and (possibly) all ICE agents aren’t thugs. We lose our grasp of reality when we fail to recognize the differences within identifiable populations.

Billionaires aren’t all like Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. There are also people like Nick Hanauer and Abigail Disney. When the people with pitchforks come for the billionaires, as Hanauer has warned, they’ll need to be selective….



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The Smell Of Hypocrisy In The Morning…

I know we Americans are facing truly horrific challenges–the White House is occupied by a man whose malevolent insanity is impossible to ignore. His ICE agents are America’s version of a (masked) Gestapo. Our “guardrails” have failed us, with feckless Congressional Republicans refusing to honor their oaths of office and a corrupt Supreme Court enabling the madman in the Oval Office.

It’s an ugly picture, and I don’t want to minimize how dire things are. But what has really incensed me–probably out of proportion to the severity of all the other threats we face–is the unbelievable hypocrisy of both Trump and MAGA.

Let’s talk about guns. Trump wouldn’t have won in 2024 without the gun lobby–his victory was thin. He sold himself to the NRA and other Second Amendment “patriots” as a defender of their ahistorical application of that Amendment. Now, he defends the murder of a peaceful protester by his ICE thugs by declaring that the protester’s lawful possession of a gun–which that protester never held and certainly never “brandished”–justified killing him, saying “You can’t bring a gun. You just can’t.”

I’m waiting for those intrepid Second Amendment protectors in Congress to call for his impeachment…

Then there’s Trump’s even more egregious lie about why he sent ICE into Minneapolis–and his rhetoric about stamping out “fraud” that he attributed to all Somali residents (they’re Black, you know, so they must all be guilty). It was immaterial that those allegations, which involved a small number of Somalis, had already been investigated and addressed by state law enforcement. That excuse was really rich, coming from a President who continues to pardon people found guilty of multiple crimes–including fraud–by juries. Of course, those pardons only issue when the fraudster or a relative pays him off, or when–like the January 6th rioters–they engaged in criminal behaviors at his request.

And don’t get me started on Trump’s excuse for bombing fishing ships out of international waters and murdering an estimated 124 people on board without any due process or evidence. His excuse was that those boats were carrying drugs. Meanwhile, he granted a full and complete pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was given due process, and who had been convicted in a court of law for conspiring to import over 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.. 

Perhaps the most blatant hypocrisy is coming from Minnesota, where Trump’s MAGA supporters are having what one pundit called a “toddler tantrum” over the fact that hundreds of Minneapolis area businesses have put “NO ICE SERVED HERE” signs in their windows. The MAGA people fulminating over this “outrage” are the very people who have spent years protecting the “religious rights” of business owners. They are the same people who’ve gone to court to protect the “First Amendment rights” of bakers to refuse to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples, and to protect web architects from having to design websites for gay folks.

And they won. Our disgraceful Supreme Court went out of its way (okay, out of the Constitution’s way) to accommodate those very “sincere” religious folks, to allow them to refuse to serve people whose very existence offended their “sincerely held” beliefs. Our home-grown theocrats celebrated the “liberty” of business owners to discriminate on the basis of principle. Their current outrage is just evidence of what the rest of us have always known: they were hypocrites. They weren’t interested in defending just any “principles” or moral beliefs upon which a given business owner might sincerely be acting–they were only interested in sending a “religious” message to particular people of whom they disapproved.

Trump’s hypocrisy is nothing new.

Back in 2022, Austin Sarat wrote in The Hill that Trump’s hypocrisy undermines democracy by eroding trust and breeding cynicism. “What Trump practices and what he preaches have little in common. He feels no compunction about doing the very things that he denounces and uses to demonize his political opponents.”

But democratic politics cannot thrive, or perhaps even survive, when hypocrisy becomes the norm. Political scientist John Keane has rightly observed that “Hypocrisy … is the soil in which antipathy towards democracy always takes root.”

Keane argues that democratic politics rests on a foundation of trust among citizens and between citizens and their representatives. Hypocrisy erodes that trust. It leads people to discount what others say in the political arena and promotes a corrosive disgust with politics.

“Corrosive distrust.” Sounds like a pretty apt description of where we are….

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I Have A Litle List…

Given the fire hose of illegality, unconstitutionality and immense stupidity coming out of the Trump administration on a daily if not hourly basis, people might be forgiven for failing to notice the effort to access and amass all kinds of data.

But control of data is important–and the nature of the information the administration is stockpiling is chilling.

As the Bulwark recently reported, the administration isn’t just compiling lists of immigrants in order to unleash ICE on them. It is busy collecting a wide variety of other information– lists of people with developmental disabilities, lists of “dissidents”—and lists of Jews.

The administration’s effort to collect such data may seem counter-intuitive; after all, it has been busy deleting and censoring any information that it finds inconsistent with its efforts to promote White Supremacy. (As a political science friend recently pointed out, the only campaign promise Trump has kept is his promise to MAGA to re-institute racism.) In addition to its ideologically-motivated elimination of statistics on climate change, hunger, trade and sexual orientation, it has methodically deleted photos of nonwhite people who have excelled in various areas, and even photographic evidence that nonwhites have served in the military from government websites. 

But now it’s becoming clearer that some of the most disturbing developments don’t involve data the administration is suppressing, but rather data it’s collecting—in some cases illegally—and the ways those data can be weaponized against perceived enemies.

It isn’t only nonwhite folks who are being targeted, it’s any group that MAGA fears and/or hates. The administration has actually sued the University of Pennsylvania because that institution has refused to hand over a list of its Jewish faculty, staff, and students. (Penn quite correctly has refused, but last year, Barnard complied with a similar demand.)

As the Bulwark article points out–and as every Jew knows–there are good historical reasons to worry when an authoritarian  leader is trying to compile a registry of Jews–especially when that leader has referred to Jews as “disloyal,” and that leader’s coalition has many outspoken Jew haters and Holocaust deniers.

It isn’t simply an effort to compile a list of individuals that MAGA considers “Other.” The administration’s war on diversity–on people and places that aren’t lily-White “Christian” enclaves–extends to entiire Blue states–states that Trump obviously considers enemy territory. The AP has recently reported that executive branch agencies have been ordered to compile a list of monies being sent to Blue states.

President Donald Trump’s budget office this week ordered most government agencies to compile data on the federal money that is sent to 14 mostly Democratic-controlled states and the District of Columbia in what it describes as a tool to “reduce the improper and fraudulent use of those funds.”

The order comes a week after Trump said he intended to cut off federal funding that goes to states that are home to “sanctuary cities” that resist his immigration policies. He said that would start Feb. 1 but hasn’t unveiled further details.

The obvious purpose of these lists–the only reason to acquire this data–is to differentiate between those MAGA considers “real Americans” (Whites, certain “Christians,” residents of Red states) and those who must be considered enemies. Other.

There are a number of recent “remakes” of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I have a little list…”  In all of them, the chorus is the same: “They never will be missed”….

Shades of Joe McCarthy.

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It’s The Structure, Stupid!

James Carville famously coined “It’s the economy, stupid!” reminding Bill Clinton to focus on economic issues. Unfortunately, given the civic illiteracy of most Americans, an exhortation to focus on the nation’s structural flaws would be met with confusion rather than recognition.

In my Law and Public Policy classes, I emphasized those underappreciated structural issues–the effect of such things as the Electoral College, gerrymandering and the filibuster on democratic deliberation and policy formation. This essay from Lincoln Square may mean that recognition of our underlying problem is spreading.

The essay calls for an honest evaluation of the incentives and disincentives built into our governing structures, and recognition of the fact that economic and social stress will reveal both the strengths and weakness of those structures.

Not all of those problems are governmental. The essay begins by describing distortions of our current information environment–distortions to which I frequently allude.

In the United States, stress is filtered through an information environment that does not clarify reality but actively distorts it. A significant share of Americans consume content labeled “news” that does not perform the function of news. Rather than explaining policy, demystifying institutions, or holding power accountable, this content is engineered to provoke emotional arousal—disgust, resentment, fear, and a sense of embattled identity. Fox News is the clearest and most consequential example, not because it is merely biased or provocative, but because it pioneered a durable model: partisan infotainment optimized for outrage, monetized confusion, and political alignment.

The effect is not simply misinformation. It is misdirection.

As the essay quite accurately notes, this misdirection is amplified by social media.

Of course, it isn’t only the Wild West of the Internet. As the essay reminds us, America has a history of excluding entire populations from our social contract–pairing a rhetoric of democracy with a practice of authoritarianism.

And governmental design decisions compound over time. Constitutional mechanisms were built to restrain the “passions of the masses”–aka democracy. So we have a Senate where equal power is exercised by  states with dramatically unequal populations, a House of Representatives that has kept 435 members despite the quadrupling of the population, gerrymandering that allows representatives to choose their voters… And a Supreme Court, “always undemocratic by design” that has become an “active amplifier of minority rule, weakening democracy’s capacity for self-defense.”

As the essay quite accurately notes, these are not incidental flaws. 

The Electoral College sits at the center of this architecture. Its defenders invoke balance and federalism, but its operational effect is to concentrate political attention on a handful of “swing states.” The very existence of swing states is evidence of democratic distortion. National policy—on climate, trade, war, and public health—is effectively decided by a narrow slice of voters in seven or eight states. Politicians are not incentivized to ask what is best for the country as a whole; they are incentivized to ask what will move a few thousand persuadable voters just enough to reach 51 percent.

And then there’s an imperial Presidency that has steadily accumulated power and a Congress “weakened by polarization and perverse incentives” that “no longer serves as an effective counterweight.” The Presidency has morphed into an executive office increasingly resembling an elected monarchy. (We the People may say “No kings,” but we’re a bit late to the dance….)

The essay goes on to document the real-world consequences of these structural flaws.

We like to believe that America is “Number One,” but compared to other democratic countries, “Americans live shorter lives, experience higher rates of preventable mortality, and endure greater levels of violence. Inequality is extreme enough that life expectancy can differ by more than a decade—and in some cases approaching two—within the same metropolitan area.” We  spend more per capita on healthcare than any other advanced democracy but produce worse outcomes– a “result of a value-extractive system that inserts intermediaries to capture profit, rationing care by price, complexity, and employment status. 

Education, childcare, and family policy follow the same logic. In peer democracies, these are treated as civic infrastructure. In the United States, they are treated as private burdens or market opportunities. Higher education is prohibitively expensive. Childcare costs rival housing. Paid family leave is not guaranteed. These choices shape long-term social cohesion—and political behavior.

Desperation is fertile ground for demagoguery.

In a paragraph that truly “says it all,” the author writes that what matters is how societies are designed: “how resources are allocated, who controls those allocations, and whose lives are deprioritized when scarcity is treated as inevitable.”

If and when we emerge from our Trumpian nightmare, we must correct the systemic flaws that got us here. It won’t be easy.

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I Told You So…

I’ve fallen into a repetitive pattern; when friends or family members express horror at some new evidence of Trump’s ignorance, vanity or lunacy, I typically note that “he’s insane.” Rinse and repeat. On this platform, I have frequently offered the same opinion: in addition to stupidity and ignorance (not the same thing), Trump is clearly and increasingly mentally ill.

There is copious evidence of both his longstanding intellectual defects and his growing lunacy. The most recent–which actually managed to be startling–was the letter he wrote to the President of Norway, expanding on his fixation with Greenland.

That letter read in its entirely:

Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.

Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.

I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

Where to begin? Perhaps by pointing out that Greenland is part of Denmark, not Norway? That the Nobel Committee is a private entity, not part of Norway’s government? That there are plenty of “written documents” memorializing both Denmark’s ownership and the U.S. recognition of that ownership?  That his obsession with the prize is flat-out nuts, and his assertions of having stopped eight wars is –to be polite, let’s just say–fanciful?

Historian Anne Applebaum’s response (among many) is on point; this pathetic missive proves beyond a doubt that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize.” As blunt and undeniably correct as her assessment is, there’s little hope that the Republicans in Congress will respond to her plea to stop Trump from “doing permanent damage to American interests.”

Applebaum says that those Republican Congressmen “owe it to the American people, and to the world.” True. Unfortunately, however, most of them have already demonstrated their spineless subservience to a MAGA cult that is equally divorced from reality.

Paul Krugman has offered what may be the most accurate description of where we are with this madman at the helm of the ship of state. He compares Trump’s late-night social media posts and letters to his father’s “sundowning.” Sundowning is a particular type of mental illness that manifests at night–after the sun goes down. (On the other hand, as Krugman concedes, “This might not exactly be sundowning, since it’s not clear that Trump is lucid and rational at any time of the day. What is incontrovertible is that he’s deeply unwell and rapidly getting sicker.”)

Krugman points out that it is unfair to blame a mentally-ill person for his illness–that it is the people around him and the cowards in Congress who are genuinely responsible for enabling behavior that may well bring on the destruction of the world order. He concludes by asking the question so many of us have asked:

How did a great, sophisticated nation, one of the world’s longest-standing republics, end up so fragile that it can be undone by one man’s dementia? That’s an important question, the answer to which I believe lies in the straight line from Bush vs Gore and the Roberts Supreme Court, to January 6th, to the execution of Renee Good. However, what’s more important is that we realize where we are right now, that we don’t try to sugarcoat and sanewash what’s happening: A petulant, violent and deranged individual is running America.

We all know it. The clowns and sycophants in his cabinet and our spineless Senators and Representatives know it. As Krugman accurately notes, It would take only eight people — four Republican senators and four Republican representatives — to “switch sides and caucus with the Democrats” to end this nightmare.

But those people would need to be actual patriots–not self-protective cowards averting their eyes from Trump’s all-too-obvious lunacy and the existential global danger he poses.

And from where I sit, today’s GOP doesn’t have any patriots.

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