Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Utah. @jainfamilyinst Senior Fellow, Higher Education Finance. RIP Aaron Bushnell. Free Palestine.
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May 30 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Even on the most generous possible interpretation, namely that the Biden admin has enacted a wildly progressive and successful economic policy agenda and is getting no support for having done that from the left, it's quite clear why... [thread]
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There's no organization or coalition of organizations that represents the constituencies ostensibly served by that agenda, hence no agency able to martial support for it from the electorate. And the reason there's no such agency is that Democrats didn't want there to be.
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Jul 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This thread is extremely telling, because the IDR programs responsible for declining repayment were the policy of a higher ed establishment desperate to avoid facing the music for their false promises and flagrant self-dealing.
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For the last half decade, that same establishment has said that IDR means that student debt doesn’t exist if you don’t have to make payments on it. That was the Gates Foundation line about why we don’t need to cancel debt.
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Jul 13, 2023 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
Overjoyed to have this piece in @nytimes w/ my @jainfamilyinst colleague @laura_bmw:
“America’s Student Loans Were Never Going to Be Repaid”
/1 nytimes.com/interactive/20…
We use our latest report to show how the “crisis of non-repayment” got going long before the pause. In fact, the repayment pause partly reversed it, by halting the pileup of accumulating interest.
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Jun 15, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
I'll take this opportunity to vent a little political spleen in a separate thread.
1. I've heard political people say that the Dems shouldn't prioritize student debt because that alienates blue collar workers, and don't we all know it's a big problem they've left the party.
First of all, plenty of blue collar workers have student debt. Remember how the neolibs told us to defund public colleges b/c "a college degree pays off" and so any amount of student debt can easily be repaid? State legislators heard that loud and clear.
Jun 15, 2023 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
Very glad to have coauthored this @jainfamilyinst report "The Repayment Pause and the Continuing Crisis of Non-repayment" with my colleagues @laura_bmw, @sergiotpinto, & @Edi_Nilaj jainfamilyinstitute.org/the-repayment-…
/1@jainfamilyinst@laura_bmw@sergiotpinto@Edi_Nilaj We find
--The repayment pause actually caused more student debt to be repaid than would have been the case in its absence.
--The distributional effect is egalitarian on the basis of race & gender
--Borrowers whose payments were paused enjoyed greater financial wellbeing.
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Alright, there's something that needs to be addressed: the flagrant dissemination of misleading anti-small-business agitprop on the latest episode of @MichaelandUs, covering the movie "Empire Records."
/1@MichaelandUs 1. @meagankday read from one of Bruenig's @jacobin articles arguing that the large firm pay premium means small businesses are more exploitative than large businesses. This well-trodden argument is false & misleading for several reasons....
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