Last fall I was horrified to hear from a Roosevelt Network alum and Detroit public servant about the fight Detroit is putting up against RealToken to protect its tenants from crypto-fueled greed. Now @wsj.com has investigated the full scope of the harm.

Roosevelt Institute@rooseveltinstitute.org · last wk.

Today, @wsj.com released its months-long investigation into RealToken, a private-equity crypto business that has put tenants in Detroit through hell—selling fractional ownership to foreign investors and collecting rent but failing to maintain properties.

We've been running an unprecedented natural experiment running for a decade and half. 30 states have raised their minimum wages. 20 have not. What happened to pay? What happened to jobs? The good news is that it's pretty easy to figure out now. substack.com/home/post/p-...

A Minimum Wage Natural Experiment Has Been Running for Over a Decade

When 30 States Raised Minimum Wages, What Happened to Pay and Jobs?

substack.com

Very excited for this new essay at "Can We Still Govern?": The key claim is that planning for a progressive future cannot just focus on new policies. It also has to include - to start with - political power. What does a power-shifting perspective look like? 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/rebuilding...

Rebuilding Democracy Requires Rebalancing Power

What does a power-shifting agenda look like?

donmoynihan.substack.com

We’re starving millions of Americans so musk and bezos can get tax cuts and trump can collect bribes www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

The Coming Food-Stamp Crisis

A looming deadline may force some states to end SNAP next year.

theatlantic.com

(1/3) The IMF finds “China is backing strategic businesses, like green tech, while the west props up old sectors with political clout, like agriculture.” In the West, capital disciplines the state to prop up high profits in old industries.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Medicare and Medicaid! 61 years ago President Johnson signed the Medicare/Medicaid legislation in Independence, MO, the hometown of President Harry Truman. For decades Medicare and Medicaid has provided crucial access to affordable coverage to those needing it.

Other people have made this point, but it's crazy that universities haven't been supporting development of open-weight LLMs and forking over cash to the big players. I would trust LLMs way, way more if there was something that had the decentralized, open-source and repository-based structure of R.

When journalists asked me about where we would see the effects of DOGE, my answer was a) during crises and b) for the big services that interact with the public like SSA, VA and IRS. So lets check in on the IRS: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

The IRS is imploding.

The CEO says the agency is proving it's possible to have “less people and better results.”

motherjones.com

TPS for Haitians officially expires tomorrow. ICE is planning big operations, with Springfield, Ohio among the targets www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-hai...

ICE plans to target Haitians as Temporary Protected Status is set to end, sources say

The plans include arresting migrants in Ohio and quickly putting them on deportation flights to crisis-stricken Haiti, the internal documents indicate.

cbsnews.com

Ethnic cleansing of 100s of 1000s of people who have lived in the USA as legal, productive neighbors for over a decade Will harm them & the communities they've helped keep vital White supremacist ideologues want white Americans to believe this will help us It's a dirty, harmful lie

Catherine Rampell@crampell.bsky.social · last wk.

TPS for Haitians officially expires tomorrow. ICE is planning big operations, with Springfield, Ohio among the targets www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-hai...

Some interesting provocations here...

Tim Chambers @timothychambers.net · 2w ago

"The Next Information War Is Already Here" - check out this article I co-wrote with @willrobinson1776.bsky.social ... we work to frame very big changes coming to the political digital landscape faster than most think. Up for any thoughts, notes, and appreciate all... substack.com/@willrobinso...

The Trump administration’s cuts to the largest global HIV program last year resulted in sharp drops in both prevention efforts and treatment for the people most at risk from the disease. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/h...

1,700 H.I.V. Treatment Sites Closed After Trump Aid Cuts, a Study Finds (Gift Article)

New research also shows that children and high-risk adult populations have been particularly affected.

nytimes.com

Why has DSA grown? One argument from this research: not just ideology, but organization. Strong membership plus ongoing and continuous participation in social movements creates credibility, committed volunteers, political skills, and durable electoral capacity. www.niskanencenter.org/inside-the-d...

Inside the Democratic Socialist uprising - Niskanen Center

Candidates affiliated with (or sympathetic to) the Democratic Socialists of America (the DSA) have recently won several Democratic primaries.

niskanencenter.org

We know that hot days lead to worsening health outcomes. Surprisingly, we have very little info on the fiscal impact these hot days have on government programs like Medicaid. In this new paper, we match over a million Medicaid records across nearly 16,000 U.S. ZIP codes to daily temperature data (🧵)

Why? Scrubs Scene

ALT: Why? Scrubs Scene

static.klipy.com

New working paper from Ritikaa Khanna, @rourkeobrien.bsky.social, @astokespop.bsky.social, @atheendar.bsky.social, & me We apply a new lens to the great (non-Covid) debate of US mortality studies: What's up w the 2010s? It emphasizes that US longevity worsened against a background of increasing $$

The U.S. Mortality Crisis as a Preston Curve Reversal

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

nber.org

This is really, really, really bad. I spoke to two mothers who lost food stamps who are eating less in order to feed their kids and still struggling to give their kids enough nutritious food www.thenation.com/article/econ...

The Trump Administration Is Making It Nearly Impossible to Get Food Stamps

New work requirements and restrictions on SNAP have kicked millions off the benefit rolls, with more reductions to come.

thenation.com

Katie Bergh@katiebergh.bsky.social · 2w ago

🚨NEW: In the 9 months after last year’s reconciliation law enacted unprecedented SNAP cuts, the number of people receiving SNAP fell by more than 4.5 million. Based on available data, we estimate that at least 1.5 million fewer kids are receiving SNAP. www.cbpp.org/research/foo...

Andy Kim suggests a new health care policy: -Enroll every child in Medicaid until the age of 26 www.notus.org/healthcare/a...

Andy Kim’s Big Health Care Pitch: Enroll Every Kid in Medicaid

The New Jersey senator takes a unique, long-game approach to a top Democratic goal.

notus.org

Two weeks ago today, after Nasdaq willingly rigged the rules, somewhere btw $7-10 bil of passive money was forced to buy SpaceX at $160.42 Today, 10 trading days later, it closed at $119.85 It’s an unprecedented forced loss (at least $2b) for passive investors and our financial media is 🦗

DOGE axed the CDC team that tracks cyclospora. Now 1000s are sick, restaurants & hospitals scrambling. What's next? “Cyclospora is just one piece. It's making the news right now, but there are other, more dangerous pathogens.” By @emilymullin.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/cdc-cy...

The CDC Has a Cyclospora Lab. DOGE Downsized It Last Year

“Based on simple math, these outbreak responses—which require rapid, timely responses—are going to be greatly diminished,” the former CDC lab director tells WIRED.

wired.com

Public charge regulations have been backward and eugenicist from the start. (And yes, eugenicist is the term here--the archives make no secret of that.) And the Trump administration's new public charge rule is pure cruelty, designed to scare immigrant families away from vital safety net programs.

We’ve got big plans for NYC! Mayor Mamdani is serious about delivering on affordability and the PIT Crew is the team that will help get it done 🏎️🏁

The #DiD page has been updated after two years! The site has been substantially cleaned up: code is now better documented, resources have been expanded, list of Stata/Python/R/Julia packages updated, and all Stata code has been revalidated. Check it out: asjadnaqvi.github.io/DiD/

This news must somehow reach Trump voters, though I very much doubt it will.

Dean Baker@deanbaker13.bsky.social · last mo.

Employment rate for native-born men is down 1.6 percentage points from two years ago.

As a new Fed Chair casts doubt on offical statistics after the Aministration drastically cut their funding, it is worth remembering how and why we created federal statistics agencies in the first place...they reduce scope for gaslighting the public www.aeaweb.org/articles/pdf...

Not surprising that the Federal was exempted from the Supreme Court's ruling yesterday that allowed the firing of FTC member, Rebecca Slaughter. That's because independence for the Federal Reserve in its current form, has been a key driver of increased economic inequality over the last 40 years.

Don Moynihan@donmoyn.bsky.social · last mo.

Chief Justice Roberts: “We exempt the Federal Reserve from the Slaughter decision due to its unique historical relationship with my stock portfolio.”

About 4.7M fewer people received SNAP in March 2026 than the average month in 2025 — already far exceeding the CBO's projection for 2026. Congress should delay H.R. 1's SNAP cost shift before even more families lose assistance. www.cbpp.org/blog/congres...

Congress Should Staunch SNAP Participation Losses, Which Exceed CBO’s Estimates

More people are losing SNAP, and faster, than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted, making it crucial that Congress delay an enormous cost shift to states.

cbpp.org

ICYMI: We've updated @hamiltonproject.org's SNAP Payment Error Rate tracker with FY2025 data. It shows that 35 states are in danger of having to pay 5, 10, or 15 percent of SNAP benefits in FY2027 unless Congress acts. www.hamiltonproject.org/data/snap-pa...

SNAP payment error rates by state, FY 2003–25 - The Hamilton Project

This data interactive shows SNAP payment error rates for the U.S. and for each state from fiscal year 2003 through fiscal year 2025.

hamiltonproject.org

PEPFAR was a historic Conservative Republican triumph of the GW Bush administration. It has saved tens of millions of lives. It is one of the best things America ever did. Destroying it stains all of us, further. Every Conservative, every Liberal, every American. Numb vandalism.

Dr. Tom Frieden@drtomfrieden.bsky.social · last mo.

The State Department’s plan will basically destroy PEPFAR and lead to the closure of many CDC country offices—a scenario that would jeopardize the health of millions and make Americans less safe.

(Bloomberg) - SpaceX’s blockbuster bond sale is weakening so quickly in the secondary market that traders say they can’t recall another recent deal that widened this sharply. @bloomberg.com $SPCX www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Bond Traders Stunned as Losses on SpaceX’s New Debt Keep Growing

SpaceX’s blockbuster bond sale is weakening so quickly in the secondary market that traders say they can’t recall another recent deal that widened this sharply.

bloomberg.com