Josh McCabe
@JoshuaTMcCabe
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Director of Social Policy at @NiskanenCenter | Sociologist | Always on the lookout for a worthwhile Canadian initiative | Views are mine
Lowell, MA
Joined January 2013
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🚨New Report: We calculate the cumulative impact of six major benefit programs on two types of families and how their benefits change as they move into the labor market and climb the ladder of upward mobility.
What did we find? 🧵
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Boomers who spent decades prohibiting construction of everything except large single family houses in their communities lament that they can’t find anything but large single family houses in their communities as they try to downsize now.
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Was it that you can’t learn anything by sampling on the dependent variable?
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Unbelievable: There is a ship named the *Jones Act Enforcer* off the coast of Massachusetts right now prowling around wind power projects in progress to make sure no foreign ships move an inch while working to get more zero emission energy online.
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For every graduate student with imposter syndrome, there is a professor like this gaslighting them rather than acknowledge that some trendy theoretical concepts are just poorly defined in the literature.
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These new units aren’t particularly fancy in terms of expensive amenities. They’re expensive because zoning keeps their supply artificially low in the face of high demand. You’re competing against lots of other boomers/zoomers for very small number of new homes in the community!
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Harvard alum explaining difference between Harvard College and Harvard Extension School.
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I recently learned that 60% of Massachusetts towns with inclusionary zoning ordinances haven’t built a single affordable unit under their ordinances.
Despite this, I still talk to lots of activists who think we should focus on increasing the required percentages.
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Getting your property tax bill after watching your wealth grow in a housing crisis.
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I have good news.
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|￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣|
WE NEED MORE
COMPARATIVE STUDIES
OF THE US AND CANADA
IN SOCIOLOGY
|＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿|
(\__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ づ
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Sociology would be vastly improved by throwing one right-leaning social scientist in every seminar room just to say “you sure about that?” whenever everyone else nods their head in agreement.
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If you hear someone talk about stagnating wages at the bottom of the income distribution and they attribute it to some uniquely American policy, do them a favor and remind them we see the same trend across pretty much every OECD country.
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“People are pollution created by corporations and we should penalize them for needing places to live” is some galaxy brain level thinking in the NYT.
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TIL Massachusetts suburbs are approving fewer new homes than the notoriously NIMBY suburbs around San Francisco.
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Why hasn’t anyone proposed zoning reforms that would allow multi-family housing by-right on any parcel adjacent to a public park and called them Swanson Overlay Districts?
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You actually just proved their point that New Deal spending was really wasteful.
When do I let my new right-wing friends, who've just discovered the NYT paywall, learn that Ayn Rand's play, The Night of January 16th, was given an extended life (and gave her a nice income) by the Federal Theatre Project of Roosevelt's New Deal?
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The Walz pick means we're going to hear more about Minnesota's new child tax credit so let's break down exactly what we're talking about here. 🧵
Before 2023, MN had the Working Family Credit, which was an in-work tax credit not based on the federal EITC.
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Congressional salary put you in like the top 3-4%. Please stop with this nonsense that it doesn’t count as rich.
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MTA calling for mandatory mask requirements for students while continuing to oppose mandatory vaccinations for teacher is something.
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I regret to inform you that subsidizing demand while restricting supply is a terrible idea in Canada as well.
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If there’s one thing I love more than participating in low salience, off cycle local elections, it’s skipping dinner with my family to attend dozens of public meetings on everything imaginable, so as to try to make the public officials I voted on in those elections irrelevant.
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I think about this figure showing California is bleeding low and middle income households a lot. The state can brag about its progressive income tax and policies all day long but its housing policies ensure the families who could benefit most are excluded.
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The bleak employment picture for PhDs isn't "especially for academic jobs", it's *only for academic jobs*.
Finding a job with a PhD outside of academia is quite easy.
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It’s annoying when random internet celebrities can’t distinguish between UI top-ups and one-time relief checks.
It’s downright embarrassing when a sitting member of Congress *who voted for the bill* that gave the US a larger UI top-off than Canada can’t distinguish between them.
Canada did $2,000/monthly. The US is the richest nation on earth and a 2nd stimulus check is getting blocked bc GOP want corporate bailouts & austerity in “exchange” for it.
Maybe if everyone in the US incorporated as an LLC, Mitch McConnell would actually do something for them.
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I’m pretty sure “restricting low skilled immigration while letting the country to the south do the dirty work required to enforce it” has actually been Canada’s policy for decades.
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Killing apartments that would provide homes for 312 families because they prefer a failing golf course - all in the name of environmentalism.
These people should be ashamed of themselves.
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It seems that the Achilles' heel of every sociologist's new book is that they propose pairing Scandinavian-style "universal" social spending with American-style "soak the rich" taxation, which is simply not how it works in reality.
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This is *huge news*: Mitt Romney and Michael Bennet have the first ever bipartisan proposal to make the child tax credit fully refundable as part of a TCJA fix.
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Let’s be clear: Both of these are examples of people pushing their ideological agendas rather than appropriately responding to a crisis. Let’s not pretend they’re different.
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The answer to most “Why is the US the only rich democracy without [insert big social program here]?” questions boil down to “Why is the US the only rich democracy without a VAT?” but few people bother to ask it.
The value-added tax brings in billions for other countries, but the U.S. doesn't have one
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Are there structural reasons why Democrats seem to choose radical frames over resonant frames when they really shouldn’t for electoral reasons? I don’t understand why more don’t strategically adopt the Sherrod Brown approach of walking left while talking moderate or right.
Spanberger on the Dem caucus call: We lost races we shouldn’t have lost.
Defund police almost cost me my race bc of an attack ad.
Don’t say socialism ever again.
Need to get back to basics.
(Is yelling.)
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These Danish MFers out here trying to reduce our energy costs and carbon emissions more efficiently and affordable than Aaron Smith’s boys and he is NOT having it.
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"middle class"
Probably nothing in the Trump-Republican tax law has done more to hurt middle-class and suburban families in New York and across the country than the cap on deductions for state and local taxes.
We must continue aggressively fighting to remove this cap.
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Well well well look at Mr. Market Fundamentalism over here judging whether a book is good according to market logic.
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It’s quite clear that people who say this sort of stuff haven’t thought through the racial implications of pushing for Mississippi to get less federal funds so Vermont can get more.
Not much different than if Trump tweeted “How about red suburbs stop subsidizing blue cities?”
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Housing policy is absolutely infuriating because the best way to tackle affordability (deregulation) is free but folks insist on coming up with all sorts of harebrained schemes to spend money either unnecessarily (best case scenario) or counterproductively (worst case scenario).
Does no one in the California legislature know enough economics and math to understand that “the state will pay for 45% of the price of a home” means “the price of a home will increase 82%” and this will be a giant wealth transfer to current home owners?
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This headline warms my heart.🥰
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"Raise taxes on the wealthy/repeal the SALT deduction cap" is the tax policy equivalent of people with a pair of "All are welcome/Stop overdevelopment" yard signs.
.
@NYGovCuomo
: calls for increasing federal income taxes on the wealthy to raise needed aid for the states; calls for repeal of SALT cap, which has cost homeowners $2,600 in property taxes on average; NYS faces $15b deficit.
@Newsday
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On the importance of making sure your data is seasonal adjusted.
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Housing will test white support for Black lives:
“People with privilege are comfortable signing a statement, are comfortable calling someone else racist, but that’s different than the long hard work of transforming a policy”
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Vermont is the latest state to introduce a bipartisan fully refundable child tax credit!
It's worth $1,000 per child under 5 years old. Every eligible family making less than $125K gets the full $1,000. It begins phasing out thereafter until $175K.
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Shout out to the gentleman who walked by me in the hallway after I spoke in favor of Lowell’s ADU ordinance at a city council meeting and loudly told his friend that renters are “leeches” before turning to me to say “Here comes one of them now. Fuck your housing!”
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I’ve compiled a comprehensive list of countries that currently have a state and local tax deduction.
1. United States
2.
3.
4.
5.
...
195.
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┻┳| •.•) Rand Paul
┳┻|⊂ﾉ is correct.
┻┳|
Rand Paul just said "most people [making] below $50,000 don't pay any income tax" and that "the top 1% in our country pay 40% of the income tax." Raise your hand if you know this is not true.
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Lots of brutal truths in here: “The moratorium is no longer protecting needy renters. It is protecting the government agencies that are failing to connect those needy renters with available resources to assist them.”
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@XmasIsComing63
@asymmetricinfo
Normally, I would not but the people interviewed in the piece are all from some of the wealthiest and most exclusionary towns in the state.
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Imagine you’re a father with a wife and three kids in West Virginia. You work fulltime as an EMT, where you make about $30,000/year while your wife cares for your young children.
You worked hard and played by the rules. 🧵
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The reason I'll never understand why some anti-poverty advocates insist on referring to all social assistance as "welfare" in one chart.
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I've been thinking about this famous exchange from housing twitter as I read some of the more radical criticisms of the Family Security Act 2.0 on social policy twitter.
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@jdcmedlock
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┻┳| •.•) Housing prices are high
┳┻|⊂ﾉ because of regulation.
┻┳|
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I’m sorry, what did you think was the goal of our new industrial policy (which is definitely different from the old industrial policy)?
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The quiet progression from "no tax cuts for households making more than $250K" to "no tax cuts for households making more than $400K" to "fine, let's actively cut taxes for millionaires but not billionaires" is absurd.
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"[W]e find that work requirements reduce SNAP participation by 52 percent [!]. Very low-income and homeless adults are disproportionately screened out. We statistically rule out employment increases of more than 2 percentage points."
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Good news: Massachusetts joins every other rich democracy in 2022 with the introduction of our first ever fully refundable CTC.
It's a universal benefit worth $180 per child under 12 for the first two children. 👨👩👧👦
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The NYT editorial board just endorsed doubling the federal minimum wage. This might be fine for NY but it would be a disaster for states like AL and MS where the proposed minimum wage would approach the level of the median wages in many place.
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Yes, if you ignore the $462 billion worth of unemployment benefits passed by Congress, Guy Fieri has definitely done more.
Guy Fieri has raised $21.5 million for unemployed restaurant workers, which means Guy Fieri has done more for unemployed restaurant workers than Congress has in the last 8 months.
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In this time of hyper-partisanship and extreme political polarization, let's take a moment to appreciate the solidarity among people across the political spectrum who are joining together to dump on Sanders' Stop BEZOS bill.
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I’m sorry but the idea of having a child spend the first 17 years of their life in poverty then dropping $46K in their bank account when they turn 18 might be the silliest economic mobility policy proposal out there right now.
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If you think Kludgeocracy - incoherent complexity in the proliferation of distinct programs with similar goals - is a real problem, you should be horrified by this figure and excited about the simplification Romney's Family Security Act would bring to it.
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👉🏻 “Single-family zoning is just one arrow in the quiver for apartment-averse communities; other exclusionary rules, such as minimum lot sizes, setbacks, and parking requirements, yield similar results by different means.”
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Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana) says he doesn’t want to expand the SALT deduction at all in Build Back Better.
He says he’s “not a big fan” of the idea. “Because I think it gives tax breaks to the wrong people.”
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What kind of message are we sending to families in this situation?
Because, from my perspective, knowingly using this rhetoric to score some cheap political points sends an awful message to parents about trying to do everything right for their families.
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Professional update: Happy to announce that I'll be joining the
@NiskanenCenter
social policy team as Senior Family Economic Security Analyst next week.
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My popular opinion is that triple deckers should be allowed by-right statewide in Massachusetts. 🫡
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If you think red states using work requirements to exclude poor people from Medicaid are bad, wait until you hear about blue states using zoning regulations to exclude poor people from even living there.
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I know this is a popular idea but it's still a bad idea. If someone could find a way to turn "Raise the minimum wage to 50% of local median wages because it's better grounded in the existing literature!" into a pithy slogan, that'd be great.
It’s long past time to raise the minimum wage, so hardworking people earn at least $15 an hour.
I hope that Democratic control of the House and Senate will ensure prompt action to get it done.
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Your regular reminder that the FDA is working just as it was designed to work and that’s the problem.
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I just read a letter to the editor from someone living in $750K houses complaining that the rundown house on their street may potentially be replaced with a duplex selling for for $400K per unit and that this doesn't actually do anything about affordability.🤔
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When I hear blue state politicians and pundits talk about the $10K cap on SALT deduction as having raised taxes on the “middle class”.
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New analysis of Senator Romney's Family Security Act 2.0 from
@Robert_t_Orr
and I find that it would reduce child poverty (SPM) from 12.4% to 10.8%, reduce marriage penalties, and consolidate a maze of five distinct benefits into just two benefits.
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Why everyone wants to primary Dianne Feinstein vs why Dianne Feinstein should be primaried.
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Me, sobbing: you can't just say everything is welfare!
Heritage, pointing at full-time worker with spouse and two children filing taxes: welfare.
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I'm so tired of these garbage memes from folks who call themselves progressive. "Ending redistribution to states that are disproportionately poor and black to own the cons." is dumb and not funny.
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Massachusetts is a good example of what happens if you subsidize clean energy production without removing barriers to transmission.
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There is an entire congressional caucus dedicated to restoring this man’s special tax break.
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The idea that a single parent with two children receiving a $7,200 annual benefit ($13,620 if you include maximum SNAP) and a trust fund kid have the same incentive to avoid working altogether is so divorced from reality that it's hard to fathom how someone could write it.
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Legislators in Vermont are considering eliminating the state’s new fully refundable $1,000 young child tax credit to pay for expanded childcare programs.
This is an breathtakingly bad idea and indicative of Democrats’ confused priorities on family policy.
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This piece treats amenity effects as a phenomenon with strong empirical backing and filtering effects as a largely theoretical phenomenon but this gets it backwards. My understanding of the literature is that filtering effects > amenity effects.
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Oregon's legislature just passed HB 3235, which will introduce a fully refundable $1,000 CTC for children under six. Full refundability is good but everything else about this is a hot mess. 🧵
👎🏼Fulltime minimum wage workers earn too much to receive full credit. $0 in Portland.
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Should we eliminate barriers to building multi-family housing?
Last month,
@MassGovernor
signed a bill injecting $85 million into the state’s overwhelmed emergency shelter system. But that infusion is only likely to cover little more than half a year of costs, according to a
@samanthajgross
and
@mjdamiano
review.
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Fun fact: Sweden has 3.2 policy failures per million residents while the US only has 1.8 policy failures per million residents.
Some surprising results! (Well, surprising to some)
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Telling a family you’re providing them with $4,250 for their newborn but also that they cannot touch that money for another 18 years is absolutely not “divorc[ing] children from the financial inequities experienced by their families”
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The best part is there really is a tax deduction that benefits the rich and is totally unique to the United States - the SALT deduction - and ProPublica went out of their way to *defend it* when Republicans capped it in 2017.
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The bulk of savings for this hypothetical family come from hearing aid deregulation, which is *not* covered by Medicare.
Without realizing it, they’re making the case for prioritizing removing supply-side barriers over the same old (expensive) pitch for expanding coverage.
Because of the Biden-Harris Administration’s actions to lower costs, families like the Drews – an elderly couple with a variety of needs from medicine to home improvements – can save thousands of dollars every year.
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Why is it so much easier to believe explanations backed by evidence and not weird conspiracy theories?
Why is it so much easier to believe prices are going up because of inflation and not because there are 2-4 companies that control every industry?
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