Director of Social Policy at @NiskanenCenter | Sociologist | Always on the lookout for a worthwhile Canadian initiative | Views are mine
Lowell, MA
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🚨New report out today🚨
There's a lot of discussion about when young children should be home with their parents. @BahalSanya and I make the case for reviving a successful but forgotten program from Minnesota and Montana that helped new parents stay home with their infants. 🧵
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Your group texts are full of election predictions and bloviating.
My groups texts of full of school bake sale logistic planning.
We are not the same.
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The catch: growth has up-front costs for schools, infrastructure, and public safety, and the state’s one-time $35M fund is small by comparison.
We recommend more state support, including per-unit “reverse impact fee” grants to cities. Read the report: niskanencenter.org/linking-h…
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Colorado’s Transit Oriented Communities law requires upzoning near transit starting in 2027.
Our new report models 5-15% buildout of new zoned capacity. Rail ridership could grow significantly, while adding housing in a region where home prices are nearly 6x income.
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Denver built a rail system but can’t fill it. FasTracks ran lines along cheap railroad and highway rights of way, not where people live.
Density within walking distance of stations is about 5,400 people per square mile. Light rail needs closer to 10,000. 🧵
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"Mothers of newborns account for about one-third of all new TANF entrants. But traditional TANF was never meant to be a program for supporting new parents"
familyfrontier.substack.com/…
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Josh McCabe retweeted
Father Informs Daughter Of New Tax On Unrealized Halloween Candy Gains buff.ly/JSfjbXb
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There's a lot I agree with in @ZLiscow's piece--I mostly worry that elected Democrats will not read it carefully enough and try to use "growth" as hopium to avoid raising the taxes necessary to pay for their agenda.
So let me put in emphasis for a few areas 🧵
So much discourse spurred by @ZLiscow's piece in @TheArgumentMag that we decided to unpaywall it.
cc: @MarcGoldwein @jasonfurman @Brendan_Duke @JessicaBRiedl
theargumentmag.com/p/how-to-…
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Josh McCabe retweeted
There are two things growth can do to a policy agenda:
1.) Change your policy agenda to be more growth-oriented.
2.) Say growth with will reduce the fiscal cost of your policy, which is either not true or dramatically overstated.
Budget wonks are hostile since 90%+ of lawmakers talking about growth do #2.
Re: Growth and fiscal policy.
I agree with all my favorite budget nerds that it is foolish to count on growth to solve America’s fiscal problems.
But from where I sit, a lot of institutional progressives underrate economic growth. When Democrats debate BAAJA they are largely weighing emissions goals vs conservation goals and not talking about growth impacts. The Hewlett Foundation’s economy and society program adopted grantmaking strategy on the explicit premise that policymakers had been overrating economic growth. Immigration gets discussed largely as a humanitarian issue without consideration of growth impacts. Even my beloved YIMBY movement operates largely within a “is it good for low-end affordability” social justice paradigm.
Relative to that status quo, I think it would be good for progressive institutions to be more cognizant of the fact that incremental improvements in economic growth have progressive implications because they make the existing safety net more sustainable and somewhat ameliorate the need to dedicate all new marginal revenue to sustaining existing programs.
This is not an alternative to being serious about first-order fiscal issues, but I do think it is an underrated lens on a wide range of regulatory questions.
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Your definitive Massachusetts 2026 ballot question guide:
Yes on 1️⃣7️⃣
No on 2️⃣3️⃣4️⃣5️⃣6️⃣8️⃣9️⃣
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The Editorial Boards of the @BostonGlobe and @bostonherald have both endorsed a YES vote on Question 7.
Legalize Starter Homes would cap min lot size requirements at 5,000sf anywhere in Massachusetts with water & sewer, making it easier to build smaller, more affordable homes.
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Josh McCabe retweeted
Know Nothing Party absolutely mogged
Pope Leo XIV has submitted a mail-in ballot for the US midterms, becoming the first pope to vote in a US election and likely the first to vote in a secular democratic election. cnn.it/48oMrTh
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Preparing to take a portion of my kids' halloween candy after promising them it was a "one-time" wealth tax last year.
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One of my 🌶️hottest takes🌶️ is that there's an analogy here with state spending: Some critics often point to "low effort" in red states but, like "low effort" households, both need to pay for basics first before they can spend more on family investments.
The gap isn’t just in dollars. More affluent families also direct an increasingly larger share of their total spending on parental investments. And we see this across each category of spending.
ALT The figure shows widening income gaps in the share of household spending on parental investments. We see the pattern across each category: total, childcare, extracurriculars, and education.
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Families in the top 10% spend 13x more on developmental activities than those in the bottom 25%, compared to 3x in 1980.
"Even More Unequal Childhoods: 45 years of Widening Income Gaps in Parental Investments in the United States" just published in Sociological Science.
ALT Parental investment spending by income group from 1980-2024. The income gap has widened substantially throughout the period.
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@Tim_Groseclose and I have an old paper on this. The gist is that it would be far better to make him veto moderate proposals
Make him veto Medicare for All
Make him veto a $25 living wage
Make him veto free childcare
Make him veto Block the Bombs to Israel
Make him veto zero aid to Israel
Make him veto free college
Make him veto erasing student loans
Make him veto taxes on billionaires
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👉🏼 “The only route to doing durable, important housing legislation is going to be in a bipartisan fashion,” said Rep. Josh Harder (D-Calif.), chair of the bipartisan Build America caucus that recently released a set of housing affordability proposals. 💯
politico.com/news/2026/10/30…
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Josh McCabe retweeted
At-Home Infant Care Programs are a promising method for helping more parents of infants have time to care for them; I did a Q&A with @BahalSanya about the recent @NiskanenCenter report she and @JoshuaTMcCabe wrote on how AHICs can be brought back today (including by creatively tapping an existing pay-for!).
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Josh McCabe retweeted
If we want to fix the primary care shortage, we need to pay like it.
This will require both financial investment and structural changes to how doctors get paid.
Thankfully, legislation from @SenWhitehouse + @SenBillCassidy does both.
.@caitgallamore and Marko Gajic explain:
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