As we work toward a durable democratic future, a commitment to legislative primacy can serve as an orienting north star. Reaching that goal, however, will require using both legislative and executive tools, especially while we are working with an imperfect, hobbled, and significantly co-opted legislature.
For over a century, fixed prices have made markets more transparent. Surveillance pricing threatens to reverse that progress by allowing corporations to secretly tailor prices using personal data. While states are beginning to respond to these practices, their efforts face growing First Amendment headwinds.
At the core of the U.S. banking system is the public’s choice to delegate money-creation privileges to private actors. But what is the public getting in exchange? An ever-swelling suite of predatory credit products and few basic services. It’s time to reset the terms of the bargain.
While student loan repayment has resumed, stability is an illusion. Beneath the surface, mounting delinquency, administrative chaos, and the potential dismantling of federal loan management point to a deeper crisis in the governance of higher education finance.
While many industries excel at not paying U.S. corporate taxes, the pharmaceutical industry takes the cake – despite $400 billion in prescription drug sales in 2022, Big Pharma claimed to have close to zero taxable income. One of their principal methods for maintaining this charade is the constant threat of exit, moving their headquarters abroad to avoid U.S. taxes altogether. In order to collect more much needed tax revenue from corporations, policymakers must first constrain Big Pharma’s ability to simply abandon ship.
As Republicans tightened work requirements and eligibility rules for Medicaid and SNAP last year, Equifax’s CEO openly celebrated the profits to be made from administering this deprivation. Means-testing and administrative complexity have turned America’s safety net into a lucrative revenue stream for monopolistic private contractors, underscoring the need for public data infrastructure and simpler eligibility rules.
Federal courts have overwhelmingly rejected the Trump Administration’s radical expansion of mandatory detention. Despite this, ICE continues to arrest and detain tens of thousands of people each month, effectively nullifying judicial oversight through sheer scale.
From legislative paralysis to regulatory fragmentation to strategic incoherence, Democrats have spent the past five years squandering opportunities to assert control over the future of digital currencies. To reverse course, progressives need to embrace a coordinated approach that balances innovation, privacy, and systemic risk.
The story of crypto’s transformation from cypherpunk experiment to Wall Street darling is bleak, but it was not preordained. Where did the left go wrong, and how can it reassert itself in shaping the future of money?
Throughout U.S. history, oligarchs have fettered the tax power of the state to ensure that the government would be too feeble to rein in their power. The Trump Administration’s capricious tariffs and mass firings at the Internal Revenue Service are the latest iteration of this long, anti-tax, anti-democratic tradition.
The Trump Administration’s use of individualized, firm-level waivers and exemptions marks a new frontier in presidential control of the administrative state. This strategy allows the administration to bypass the formal process for repealing regulations while turning deregulation itself into a tool for distributing political favors.
Law and Economics scholars argue that if income redistribution is to happen at all, it should occur exclusively through the tax system, rather than through supposedly less efficient methods, such as the minimum wage, collective bargaining, or housing regulation. Yet even by their own lights, these arguments fail: in many cases, predistributive policies are actually more efficient than the tax and transfer system. More fundamentally, to address economic inequality, we must move beyond narrow issues of distribution and transform the mode of production itself.
In the ruins of the administrative state after Trump, many on the left see an opportunity to design a New Deal-type reconstruction agenda. But building state capacity requires a government that is seen as legitimate, and it is precisely the erosion of legitimacy in the eyes of the public that has enabled Trump to carry out his deconstructive agenda.
Recent authoritarian attacks on higher education mark a significant shift from the neoliberal era, which celebrated institutional independence from the state, the role of education in boosting worker productivity, and the value of research in driving profitable innovation. However, there are key continuities between the two periods. The neoliberal era laid the groundwork for today’s authoritarian turn by making public institutions increasingly reliant on federal funding, dismantling independent state planning boards, and deepening inequality within the higher education system.
In the United States and elsewhere, the forces of monopoly, antitrust, and corporate power tend to follow a certain historical pattern, with long-term swings between strong anti-monopoly policies and pro-business policies. To anticipate the future of anti-monopoly politics, we need to understand the dynamic forces that drive these recurring large-scale shifts between monopoly and competition.
