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1/Today's @bopinion post is about how poverty imposes impossible demands on poor people, making it harder for them to escape poverty.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/Poverty in the U.S. is all about PRECARITY - not knowing where your kids' next meal will come from, or whether your job will give you hours this week, or whether cops will pull you over, or whether disease or injury will bankrupt you.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
3/The constant, neverending stress of precarity causes an unbearable cognitive load that makes it impossible for poor people to "bootstrap" themselves out of poverty, as conservatives are constantly demanding they do.

harvardmagazine.com/2015/05/the-sc…
4/So how can we break people out of this cycle of precarity and stress?

Conservatives, who believe that poverty is caused by laziness and bad values, think we should CUT welfare benefits to force people to work.

This is nuts. We should be doing the exact opposite!!
5/The first tool to break the cycle is BASIC INCOME. A check that reliably, dependably arrives each month (or two weeks).

Think how much less precarious and frightening it would make poor people's lives!

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
6/Next: Stop employers from forcing workers to be on call or have irregular schedules.

Regular schedules and guaranteed hours for all workers.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
7/Next: National health insurance.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
8/Next: Abolish cash bail for nonviolent crimes.

nypost.com/2019/12/03/blo…
9/Next: Reduce traffic stops in poor neighborhoods.

And for God's sake, make it illegal for cops to just steal people's stuff.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
10/Next: Legalize marijuana.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
11/Next: Limit evictions.

12/These changes would go a long way toward making the lives of the poor less precarious and anxiety-inducing. Which would give them a chance to escape from poverty.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
Yes. Just because you disagree with Saez and Zucman's numbers doesn't mean you're a corrupt shill for the rich. This is nonsense.
He basically accused Michael Batty, Jesse Bricker, Joseph Briggs, Elizabeth Holmquist, Susan McIntosh, Kevin Moore, Eric Nielsen, Sarah Reber, Molly Shatto, Kamila Sommer, Tom Sweeney, and Alice Henriques Volz of the Federal Reserve Board of corruption.

federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/f…
Also Gerald Auten of the U.S. Treasury Department and David Splinter of the Joint Committee on Taxation.
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
What are young people spending more on, relative to 1984?

Health, housing, and retirement saving. And to a lesser extent, education and child care.

(via @ernietedeschi)
A little surprised to see education and child care taking up only a slightly larger share here.
I guess only a relatively few young people go to grad school, and fewer have kids these days.
Read 3 tweets
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
Our unfortunate and sloppy habit of referring to health insurance as "health care" means that lots of people conflate nationalization of health INSURANCE with nationalization of health care SERVICE PROVISION. They're not at all the same thing.
Yes there are some people who think health care SERVICES should be government-provided, as in the British NHS. But "Medicare for All" isn't this. It's just nationalization of health INSURANCE.
Furthermore, there is no slippery slope here, where nationalization of insurance leads to nationalization of service provision.

Most rich nations have national health insurance but lots of private service provision. Britain is an outlier.
Read 3 tweets

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David Fickling
@davidfickling
Today I wrote about the relationship between the Wuhan #coronovirus
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The article is at the link. Here's the thread version:

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Roscoe B Davis🎖⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Poor @RepJerryNadler starts out right off the bat with a lie.

He claimed after witnesses came forward to testify he said Trump threatened them saying

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@RepJerryNadler Here is the video clip for all the libs saying that's not what he said.

Roll the tape
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BenTallmadge
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U.S. blacklisting threatens to derail $1 billion china tech IPO backed by NBA Joe Tsai’s Ponzi Alibaba -

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David Fickling
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Here's a quick thread about how the travails of Cathay Pacific could be just the tip of the iceberg for Swire Group, as it tries to reconcile its British colonial legacy and Beijing's creeping control over Hong Kong:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
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Marc Goldwein
@MarcGoldwein
People have asked what I think about #SocialSecurity2100, the most popular bill in Congress to save #SocialSecurity.

Short THREAD 1/

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First, let me STRONGLY commend @RepJohnLarson for putting forward this bill and holding hearings on it. @JohnLarsonCT understands Social Security is only 16 years from insolvency, and he is fight to save it!

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David Fickling
@davidfickling
People might have missed this among the excitement about Saudi Aramco's bond prospectus, but it's potentially a big deal:

Saudi Arabia has only about a third of the natural gas we thought it did. #oott

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
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