My three top policy priorities for restoring the middle class would be:

1. National health insurance (lower Medicare age to 0)

2. Cheaper housing (various policies)

3. Sectoral wage bargaining

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
@jdcmedlock what u think?
With health security, cheaper health care, cheap housing, and higher wages, Americans wouldn't have ALL their economic problems solved, but they'd breathe a hell of a lot easier.
And another cool thing about these high-impact policies is that the only one that requires higher taxes is Medicare, and that one is self-funding via lower payroll deductions (as Warren showed). So we could sidestep the big debates over taxes vs. deficit spending.

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More from @Noahpinion

17 Dec
1/@tculpan and I wrote a @bopinion post about supply chains!

Basically, Trump really screwed the pooch on this one, but we still need to do something about the fact that our supply chains are highly dependent on China.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/Joe Biden has also vowed to reshore our supply chains. For stuff we need in an emergency, that makes sense. But for a lot of stuff, it doesn't. We're not going back to the days when countries made most things in-house.

joebiden.com/build-back-bet…
3/The U.S. is still going to be good at the things it's good at. Capital-intensive businesses with lots of innovation (plus farming). We're not going back to an economy based on low-skilled assembly work -- nor should we.
Read 11 tweets
16 Dec
1/Someone on Twitter asked me what my top three priorities to boost American material prosperity would be.

So I wrote a @bopinion post about it.

They are:
1. National health insurance
2. Cheap housing
3. Sectoral bargaining for stronger unions

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/There are a lot of big policy ideas floating around this country. All of them on the political left, I should note.

Universal basic income, a federal $15 minimum wage, a job guarantee, child benefits, free college...

So why did I pick these three?
3/Let's start with national health insurance.

Our health care system is just a total mess. It's a source of terror, of catastrophe, of massive expense. It's hideously inefficient. It lags behind all the other rich countries.

commonwealthfund.org/publications/i…
Read 15 tweets
15 Dec
Me: Countries should all lay down their arms and live in peace. Arms races will destroy us all.

Also me: Why can't we have a gigantic supersonic nuclear bomber like the Russians have?
And stop telling me the B-1 is our version of this plane...the B-1 is much smaller and slower.

news.yahoo.com/bomber-deathma…
The real awesome superbomber was the XB-70, which we didn't put into mass production, but which was much awesomer and better than any of the bombers that ever did get used, including the TU-160 which came out much later.

wired.com/2010/12/meet-t…
Read 4 tweets
14 Dec
In which Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton claims that there has never been an experiment on either gravity or aspirin.
Pubmed results for "aspirin challenge:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=aspirin+…
Read 5 tweets
12 Dec
1/OK, so here's a thread about why I'm so excited about the revolution in solar+storage technology!

Energy tech might be uniquely capable of boosting PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH -- something other recent innovations haven't always been able to do!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-im-so-ex…
2/Remember when "the future" looked like this?
3/Around 1973, "the future" changed. We stopped innovating in physical technology ("atoms"), and started innovating in digital technology ("bits").

medium.com/@skanda_shastr…
Read 22 tweets
11 Dec
Overly literal translations of Tokyo loop line train station names:

East Capital
Godfield
Autumn Leaf Prairie
O Useless Neighborhood
Overfield
Nightingale Valley
Sunset Village
West Sunset Village
Field's Edge
Chess Piece Mixture
Nest Duck
Big Mound
Pond Bag
White Eye
More overly literal translations of Tokyo loop line train station names:

High Field Horse-Riding Ground
New Hotel
Trees for Generations
Original Hotel
Eyeblack
50 Meter Field
Large Promontory
Quality River
Have Fun Town
Newbridge
Beach Tree Town
Field Town
And the train line itself is overly literally translated as Hand-of-the-Mountain (which sounds way cooler than "foothills")...
Read 5 tweets

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