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Matt Bruenig
Born
Matthew Bruenig

(1988-11-22) November 22, 1988 (age 36)
EducationUniversity of Oklahoma (BA)
Boston University (JD)
Occupations
  • Lawyer
  • policy analyst
  • commentator
EmployerPeople's Policy Project
Spouse
​
(m. 2014)​
Children2
Websitemattbruenig.com

Matthew Bruenig (born November 22, 1988) is an American lawyer, blogger, policy analyst, commentator, and founder of the left-leaning think tank People's Policy Project. He was a blogger for the American think tank Demos covering politics and public policy, and has written on issues including income distribution, taxation, welfare, elections, the Nordic model, and funds socialism. Bruenig advocates for mass unionization and socialization of wealth within an universalist welfare state.

Early life and education

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Bruenig was born on November 22, 1988,[1] in Texas,[2] where he also grew up.[3] His father was an active shop steward, while his mother worked low-paid jobs, which motivated his support for workers' rights.[3] He graduated in law at the University of Oklahoma (BA), where he was a National Merit Scholar and McNair Scholar, and Boston University (JD), and worked as a lawyer at the National Labor Relations Board.[4][5] In 2013, Bruenig was awarded a Peggy Browning Fellowship for the 2014 academic year, when he graduation at Boston University. During his time at the University of Oklahoma, where he graduated summa cum laude in philosophy and Black studies, Bruening founded and ran a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and led a living wage campaign on campus.[3] He also worked as an intern at Jobs with Justice and for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers as part of the AFL-CIO Law Student Union Summer.[3]

Career

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Bruenig researches poverty,[6][7] inequality,[8] and welfare systems,[9][10] and is considered a welfare policy expert.[11][12] Alongside Jonathan Chait, he is a proponent of a larger welfare state, and considers Social Security to be part of the welfare state, which is in line with most researchers, including welfare-state skeptics like Robert J. Samuelson.[13] In response to the conservative argument put forward by the likes of Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher who "accused liberals [e.g. left-wingers] of preferring to make the poor poorer if it made the rich less rich", Bruenig writes that "[t]he obvious problem with the statement is that it simply assumes left-wing policies can't improve the incomes of the poor. The cross-country data that we have generally suggest that they can and do."[14] He also writes "there's substantial evidence that suggests inequality, in and of itself, generates a whole slew of social problems that are harmful to individual and collective wellbeing. It is therefore conceivable that policies that reduce inequality could be worth pursuing even if they leave everyone, the poor included, with less income than they would otherwise have."[14]

Bruenig is the author of numerous articles, including "Rethinking Noncombatant Immunity",[15] "Fertility Rates and Government Intervention",[16] "How Reform Conservatives Like Reihan Salam and Paul Ryan Misunderstand Poverty",[17] "Nordic Zombie Arguments",[18] "People Aren't Better Off Than Income Trends Show",[19] "The Success Sequence Is About Cultural Beefs Not Poverty",[20][21] "The Success Sequence Is Extremely Misleading and Impossible to Code",[22] "Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty",[23] and "Identitarian Deference Continues to Roil Liberalism", where he criticized "identitarian deference", which he defines as the concept that "privileged individuals should defer to the opinions and views of oppressed individuals, especially on topics relevant to those individuals' oppression".[24] Bruenig was among the critics of Nima Sanandaji, who argued that the economic success of Sweden and other Nordic countries preceded their establishment of the welfare state.[25]

Bruenig's writings have appeared in a wide range of publications, including among others The Atlantic, The American Prospect, BuzzFeed News, Common Dreams, Dissent, Current Affairs, The Guardian, In These Times, Jacobin, The New Republic, The New York Times, Salon, and The Washington Post.[26][27] Daniel Denvir of Jacobin described Bruenig as "one of the most incisive analysts of poverty, inequality, and welfare systems and the political conflicts that surround them".[28] Bruenig's writing about politics, the economy, and political theory is, in his own words, "primarily with a focus on the set of interlocking issues that affect poor and working people", and is "informed by a leftist political perspective that draws upon a diverse set of historical and contemporary leftist intellectuals".[29] Among his influences, he cites "the various theories of egalitarian distributive justice that began with John Rawls", with "Amartya Sen's capability approach to distributive justice being perhaps the most influential".[29] In his December 2013 review for Demos, Bruenig praised Lane Kenworthy's Social Democratic America (2013).[30][31] In January 2015, Bruenig also praised Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014). He wrote in the American edition of The Week, titled "America Should Jack Up Its Top Tax Rate to 70 Percent", that it "painstakingly details the dynamics of wealth and income inequality throughout the last two centuries, and offers a somewhat grim picture of the future of economic inequality. Along the way, Piketty also offers his theory of the cause of exploding executive pay and how we can successfully combat this destructive trend."[32][33]

In 2016, Bruenig was fired from his part-time job blogging for Demos after he posted a series of tweets targeting first Joan Walsh and later Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden.[34][35][36] Demos stated that he was let go due to a pattern of "online harassment of people with whom he disagrees";[37] some journalists nevertheless speculated that there may have been outside pressure on behalf of Tanden.[38][39][40] In February 2017, Bruening was among other figures of the American Left, such as Corey Robin and Nathan J. Robinson, to lament the loss of Keith Ellison to Thomas Perez for the chair of the Democratic National Committee and that the leadership of the Democratic Party was resisting acknowledging the failures of the Obama administration. Bruenig wrote: "The left should focus its energies on organizing under alternative institutions that, if they engage with the Democratic party at all, only do so in order to attempt hostile takeovers of various power positions. Only a sucker would do more than that, given what the party has just shown itself to be about at this time."[41]

In 2017, Bruenig founded the People's Policy Project, a left-leaning or socialist-leaning think tank.[42][43][44] The think tank, of which Bruenig serves as its president, raises money through crowdfunding,[45] and analyzes politics and produces socialist/social democratic policy proposals tailored to the United States context.[46] It soon attracted attention in liberal policy circles.[47] At the People's Policy Project, Bruenig repeatedly criticized jobs guarantee plans as "muddled", especially on the critical question of "coming up with suitable jobs".[48] In February 2019, the People's Policy Project released its Family Fun Pack platform,[49] which is loosely based on the Finnish welfare state model. A YouGov poll commissioned by the People's Policy Project in October 2019 found the free public childcare and pre-kindergarden advocated policy to be popular and supported by a majority of Americans.[50] In a series of analysis that attracted attention,[51] including from Eleanor Mueller of Politico,[52] Bruenig was critical of the child care proposal by Democrats as part of the Build Back Better Act,[53][54][55] which he said would increase prices for the middle class by $13,000,[56][57][58] and how in 2023 it kept work requirements.[59] In The Atlantic, he wrote the article "How the Democratic Child-Care Proposal Hurts Families", arguing that it would "dramatically increase demand for child-care services as newly subsidized users pour into the sector".[60][61][62] Alongside Rebecca Traister, Bruenig was an early critic of Melissa Kearney's book The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind (2023).[63][64]

Political views and commentary

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Socialism, democratic socialism, and social democracy

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Bruenig is a democratic socialist in the tradition of market socialism,[65] as well as an advocate of Nordic socialism,[66] and has been described by Matthew Yglesias as an "eccentric socialist".[67] He argues that democratic ownership is "a crucial step on the road to a democratic socialist future", and describes his brand of socialism, "the development of the idea from Rudolf Hilferding to the Meidner Plan",[68] as follows: "Socialism is the idea that capital (the means of production) should be owned collectively. There are divergent ideas about how to achieve this in reality. One approach is to have the government hold it collectively in social wealth funds. This is (more or less) the socialism of Yanis Varoufakis, Rudolf Meidner, and John E. Roemer. It is also my brand of socialism, at least for the time."[69] He also stated that "in ideal liberal theory, citizens themselves are the source of all governmental action",[70] and argued alongside William A. Edmundson et al. that "political philosophy can and ought to make use of the concept of the means of production".[71]

In a 2018 debate on Jacobin with Democratic Socialists of America member Neal Meyer and sociologists Mathieu Desan and Michael A. McCarthy about where Nordic social democracies fit into the vision for democratic socialism, Bruenig argued that while the Soviet Union was not a democracy because the state was unaccountable to the people, this type of criticism does not apply to Nordic countries because they are parliamentary democracies, and that to draw a hard line between democratic socialism and actually existing social democracies is not accurate.[72][73][74] According to Bruenig, this is further complicated by the fact that democratic socialism is often discussed in ideal rather than practical terms, and that this misses the many socialist aspects of actually existing social democracies.[75] For example, Bruenig cites as examples the socialist aspects of Norway and Singapore, among others, to show that "it is quite possible to collectively own the means of production while also using price systems to assist in the allocation of productive factors", and that this is "what market socialists have been saying for a hundred years".[76]

Nordic model and socialism

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Bruenig is a supporter of the Nordic model,[77] and has written several articles about it.[78][79] According to Bruenig, "Nordic economies do not provide any support for the idea that relatively high levels of state ownership are incompatible with stable and successful economies".[80][81] He argues that while they are not fully socialist,[82] Nordic economies include "an efficient single-payer health care system, free college, long parental leave, heavily subsidized child care, and many other social benefits too numerous to list here", and their socialist credentials have been dismissed "to deny that there are leftist success stories in the world". In contrast to the likes of Jonathan Chait who think that the Nordic economies feature an "amped-up version of ... neoliberalism" and a large number of American conservative and libertarian writers, such as Will Wilkinson at the Niskanen Center, who state that the Nordic economies are "quasi-libertarian", Bruenig argues that "this is not true" as "Nordic economies are also home to large public sectors, strong job protections, and labor markets governed by centralized union contracts".[83] In this vein, he argues that Norway, which owned 58.6 percent of the country's wealth (the double of Communist China) as of 2018 and described it as "by far the most socialist country in the developed world",[84][85] is more socialist than Bolivarian Venezuela,[86][87] concluding that if "government spending of around 40 percent of GDP, a minimum wage, and a small coop sector equals socialism [as argued by some pundits in the case of Bolivarian Venezuela], then Americans live in socialism every single day".[88]

Funds socialism

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Bruenig shares the socialist argument that the golden age of capitalism was simply a temporary deviation from the inexorable logic of capitalism, and that its neoliberal turn showed the true nature of capitalism reasserting itself. He argues that the postwar decades were "quite anomalous" as the Great Depression and World War II had created historically unique conditions that could not last forever, and adds: "True, inequality goes down. But excepting that, we're right back on the trail. Marx would tell you: Capital accumulates. It's a natural tendency."[11] Among other socialist intellectuals, including his wife Elizabeth Bruenig who generally rejected the binary choice between socialism and capitalism, he echoed the idea of Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara to "not merely tame but overcome capitalism".[11] Bruenig says that his answer to "the capital problem" is to "socialize capital as much as you can into these social wealth funds, which are like endowments that the country runs. The social wealth funds will deliver capital returns just like endowments do and take those returns and pay them out to everyone as part of a social dividend. That has been a sort of market socialist idea for, I don't know, maybe a hundred years now."[28]

Bruenig's plan, which involves the creation of an American Solidary Fund, is similar to that of Alaska,[89] Norway,[90] and many state public employee pension funds.[91][92][93] He proposed it in a New York Times op-ed, titled "A Simple Fix for Our Massive Inequality Problem",[94][95] as one way to reduce income inequality in the United States,[96][97] with Noah Smith writing that it "seems extremely promising and woefully overlooked".[98] Smith suggested that Bruenig's plan would not only fix inequality but also find "a way to insure the American middle and working class against technological change".[99] In Democracy, sociologist Dalton Conley also called, back in 2009 and within the context of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, for the establishment of an American sovereign wealth fund.[97] In addition to his concept of social wealth funds, Bruenig published a paper authored by The Week writer Ryan Cooper and Dublin-based researcher Peter Gowan arguing that the best response to the issue of housing affordability would be a massive social housing project, in which the government would pay to build ten million homes over ten years, pointing to the success of such a program in European countries like Austria and Sweden.[11]

Universal basic income

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Bruenig writes that an universal basic income is "a way of dealing with the capital problem" but that for the "Silicon Valley types and the libertarian types" is "a remedy to the problems their innovation is causing or that they think their innovation will cause", and describes the possible implementation by them as a "terrible ... very dystopian idea".[28] Bruenig also says that passive income already exists in capitalist societies. He writes: "[C]apitalist societies already dedicate a large portion of their economic outputs to paying out money to people who have not worked for it. The UBI does not invent passive income. It merely doles it out evenly to everyone in society, rather than in very concentrated amounts to the richest people in society."[100] Bruenig thus argues in favor of a basic income for all,[101] and provides a list of taxation possibilities for creating a Social Wealth Fund capable of paying an universal income.[102] He further states, in response to Amazon's raise of wages at least $15 per hour, that "[w]age levels are determined as much by social forces as they are by market forces", and that "wage-setting is driven not by invisible hands, but by the decisions of real people who can be affected by collective-pressure tactics and other forms of social power".[103] He argues that simply increasing unemployment benefits rather than using stimulus checks would be insufficient in helping the poorest Americans.[104]

Healthcare, education, and other policies

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Bruenig is an advocate of single-payer healthcare,[105] and has argued extensively in favor of its feasibility.[106] He says that "Medicaid was the most effective and most popular part of Obamacare" and that it "kept the [Obamacare] afloat", showing that "this simple public-health insurance program ends up creating far better constituencies and support bases than these complicated Rube Goldberg machines like Obamacare".[28] He wrote an article making the case that liberal critics of single-payer healthcare are "moral monsters" on par with proponents of Trumpcare.[28] Bruenig later explained: "Moving from Obamacare to Trumpcare, twenty-four million people would lose their insurance. By the same token, keeping Obamacare instead of single-payer will keep twenty-eight million people from being insured. They're similar magnitudes. In fact, the Obamacare to single-payer magnitude is higher."[28] As an advocate Medicare for All,[107] he argues that it would cut poverty by over 20 percent, lifting 8 million people out of poverty and at the same time generating economic growth as individuals invest more into the economy by spending on consumer goods.[105][108]

Bruenig was skeptical of free higher education, later commenting: "My issue was not Clinton's issue, which is that it supports rich students when it should support poor students. My position is that providing benefits to students ignores non-students."[28] He supports the education system in Finland and Sweden, where "benefits paid to students are paid out from the same welfare agency that you would go to if you were a single mother and didn't have a job".[28] As a solution to the problem of two-tier system of disability benefits, Bruenig suggests guaranteeing a minimum Social Security Disability Insurance benefit to all people with disabilities that is equal to the federal poverty line regardless of work history, earnings, or assets.[109] He also wrote an article about school reform,[110] arguing that "we should do what tons of other countries do and make it easier to be a lawyer" rather than "creating massive barriers to entering the job of reading and writing arguments and following made up procedures".[111]

Although commitment to an universal welfare state and competition policy are not mutually exclusive, Bruenig has been a critic of the anti-monopoly movement, such as the anti-trust New Brandeis movement. Critics like Bruenig and Matthew Yglesias refer to it as the anti-bigness movement.[112] In 2018, Bruenig told Gilad Edelman that competition policy was for him "way down on the list of priorities".[11] According to Edelman, among the American socialist left, with the exception of Ryan Cooper, "there seems to be a reluctance among the socialist left to engage with an agenda that promotes competition. What is the socialist answer to the dominance of Amazon, Facebook, and Google?"[11] In a 2024 debate on The Nation, Bruenig argued that the government should buy the big corporations, citing the example of the Tennessee Valley Authority, contra Zephyr Teachout arguing that they should be broken up rather than nationalized.[113][114]

Personal life

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Since 2014, Bruenig is married to Elizabeth Bruenig, a staff writer for The Atlantic and formerly an opinion writer and editor at The Washington Post and The New York Times, whom he met in their high school debate team in Arlington.[11] They have two children,[67] and also host together The Bruenigs Podcast. In 2020, Bloomberg News reported that Bruenig was producing a podcast, alongside his wife, that generated about $9,000 per month from listeners.[115] Bruenig was diagnosed as autistic in adulthood.[116]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Hoxie, Josh (August 25, 2017). "Getting Ready for the Day the Power Structure Shifts". Inequality.org. Institute for Policy Studies. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  2. ^ "Matt Bruenig". The Week. January 11, 2015. ISSN 1533-8304. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  3. ^ a b c d "Matthew Bruenig ('14) Awarded Prestigious Peggy Browning Fellowship". Boston University. 2013. Archived from the original on June 15, 2013. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  4. ^ "About". People's Policy Project. August 2017. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  5. ^ "Matt Bruenig". The Guardian. 2018. ISSN 1756-3224. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  6. ^ Gould, Elise; Kimball, Will (May 29, 2015). "Strong Wage Growth Would Complement the Safety Net in Reducing Poverty". Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  7. ^ Brady, David (2023). "Poverty, not the poor: How recent research changes our understanding of the causes of and policies for reducing systemically high poverty in the U.S." (PDF). Working Paper Series (867). Luxembourg Income Study. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  8. ^ Reed, Adolphe; Michaels, Walter Benn (2021). "La disparité contre l'égalité". Recherches Internationales (in French). 120 (1): 73–94. doi:10.3406/rint.2021.1798. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  9. ^ Bruenig, Matt (October 5, 2015). "The Case Against Free College". Dissent. No. Fall 2015. ISSN 1946-0910. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  10. ^ Wright, James D.; Donley, Amy M.; Gualtieri, Marie C.; Strickhouser, Sara M. (April 1, 2016). "Food Deserts: What is the Problem? What is the Solution?". Society. 53 (2): 171–181. doi:10.1007/s12115-016-9993-8. ISSN 1936-4725. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  11. ^ a b c d e f g Edelman, Gilad (July 15, 2018). "What the New Socialists Really Want". Washington Monthly. Vol. 50, no. 7/8. p. 10. ISSN 0043-0633. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  12. ^ Romm, Tony; Stein, Jeff; Sotomayor, Marianna (March 10, 2023). "House conservatives issue new spending demands in debt ceiling debate". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  13. ^ Nowrasteh, Alex (May 24, 2018). "Immigrant Welfare Consumption: A Response to Richwine". Cato Institute. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  14. ^ a b Bruenig, Matt (April 13, 2013). "What Thatcher Didn't Understand: Inequality Hurts the Rich and Poor Alike". The Atlantic. ISSN 2151-9463. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  15. ^ Kahn, Leonard (2010). "Just War Theory, Political Liberalism, and Non-Combatant Immunity". Theoretical and Applied Ethics. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  16. ^ DeLong, Brad (June 12, 2014). "Morning Must-Read: Matt Bruenig: Fertility Rates and Government Intervention". Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  17. ^ DeLong, Brad (July 26, 2014). "Morning Must-Read: Matt Bruenig: How Reform Conservatives Like Reihan Salam and Paul Ryan Misunderstand Poverty". Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  18. ^ DeLong, Brad (June 11, 2015). "Must-Read: Matt Bruenig: Nordic Zombie Arguments". Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  19. ^ DeLong, Brad (June 19, 2015). "Must-Read: Matt Bruenig: People Aren't Better Off Than Income Trends Show". Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  20. ^ Smith, Yves (August 2, 2017). "Matt Bruenig: The 'Success Sequence' Is About Cultural Beefs Not Poverty". Naked Capitalism. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  21. ^ DeLong, Brad (August 19, 2015). "Must-Read: Matt Bruenig: The Success Sequence Is Extremely Misleading and Impossible to Code". Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  22. ^ DeLong, Brad (August 19, 2015). "Must-Read: Matt Bruenig: The Success Sequence Is Extremely Misleading and Impossible to Code". Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  23. ^ DeLong, Brad (December 11, 2015). "Must-Read: Matt Bruenig: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty". Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  24. ^ Liu, Cory R.; Pericolo, Anthony (April 30, 2024). "Individual Dignity as the Foundation of an Inclusive Society" (PDF). SMU Law Review. 77 (1). SSRN 4801060. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  25. ^ Czarny, Bogusław (December 31, 2021). "Disputes over the reasons for Sweden's economic success: Nima Sanandaji and his critics". International Journal of Management and Economics (in Polish). 57 (4): 360–372. doi:10.2478/ijme-2021-0026. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  26. ^ "Matt Bruenig". Common Dreams. 2013. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  27. ^ "Building a Moral Economy: Elizabeth & Matt Bruenig". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Law School. March 2017. Archived from the original on December 21, 2019. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  28. ^ a b c d e f g h Bruenig, Matt (April 13, 2017). "Welfare for Everyone". Jacobin (Interview). Interviewed by Denvir, Daniel. ISSN 2158-2602. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  29. ^ a b Campos, Paul (April 22, 2014). "Leftist writer discovers major social injustice: new law grads get paid way too much". Lawyers Guns & Money. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  30. ^ Bruenig, Matt (December 24, 2013). "Lane Kenworthy's 'Social Democratic America'". Demos. Archived from the original on November 6, 2014. Retrieved January 10, 2025. In addition to providing his optimistic theory of history and his program, Kenworthy details, using his exhaustive empirical approach, the full extent of our economic justice problems. He also spends a considerable amount of time ably responding to dozens of objections and alternatives to his particular policy agenda. As with all Kenworthy products, this is a book worth buying and reading if you are interested in a very accessible, but highly rigorous, treatment of the state of economic well-being in America and how it can be dramatically improved. In the world of left-liberal wonkery, Lane Kenworthy has no equal.
  31. ^ Matthews, Dylan (January 9, 2014). "This sociologist has a plan to make America more like Sweden". The Washington Post. ISSN 2641-9599. Retrieved January 10, 2025. His latest book, 'Social Democratic America,' was released earlier this month. It argues for an expansion of the U.S. safety net amounting to 10 percent of GDP, which would be financed by a value-added tax, higher income and payroll taxes, a carbon tax and a financial transactions tax, and include measures such as universal health insurance, universal year-long paid parental leave, universal early childhood education, insurance against drops in wages, increases to the child and earned-income tax credits, increased paid vacation time, direct government hiring of the unemployed and government-administered automatic enrollment retirement accounts, among other things. See Matt Bruenig, Matt Yglesias or the book itself for more details.
  32. ^ Bruenig, Matt (March 20, 2014). "America should jack up its top tax rate to 70 percent". The Week. ISSN 1533-8304. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  33. ^ "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". De Gruyter. 2014. doi:10.4159/9780674369542/html. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  34. ^ Trotter, J. K. (May 20, 2016). "Liberal Think Tank Fires Blogger for Rude Tweets". Gawker. Archived from the original on May 22, 2016. Retrieved January 9, 2025. Later on in the same announcement, the organization clarified, 'We are not taking issue with our blogger's political opinions or with him challenging prominent, powerful people. What troubles us is a pattern of tone and conduct, not his chosen targets or the content of his ideas.'
  35. ^ Goldberg, Michelle (May 23, 2016). "Is Matt Bruenig a Populist Martyr?". Slate. ISSN 1091-2339. Retrieved January 9, 2025. As the feminist writer Sady Doyle wrote in an email to Demos, 'Bruenig is not only directly aggressive, he is a ringleader who inspires people to be aggressive and commit harassment in his name. Reports of being stormed after Bruenig points his followers at people are ubiquitous, and they most often come from women and people of color.'
  36. ^ Edelman, Gilad (July 15, 2018). "What the New Socialists Really Want". Washington Monthly. Vol. 50, no. 7/8. p. 10. ISSN 0043-0633. Retrieved January 9, 2025. Matt gained some notoriety in 2016 when he was fired from his part-time blogging gig at Demos, a liberal think tank, after directing a stream of Twitter insults at the head of a different liberal think tank. At the time, Liz was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with their daughter, Jane. I asked what happened after the kerfuffle. 'We went to Twitter boot camp,' Liz said. 'Who was the drill sergeant?' 'Me.'
  37. ^ "Reflections on Social Media and Our Responsibility" (Press release). Demos. May 20, 2016. Archived from the original on May 20, 2016. Retrieved January 9, 2025. After our tweet apologizing for Matt's personal attacks including the term 'scumbag,' we received emails from multiple individuals who made it clear that we were not aware of the extent to which Matt has been at the center of controversies surrounding online harassment of people with whom he disagrees.
  38. ^ Drum, Kevin (May 21, 2016). "The Great Matt Bruenig–Neera Tanden Kerfuffle Sort of Explained". Mother Jones. ISSN 0362-8841. Retrieved July 21, 2017.
  39. ^ East, Kristen (May 21, 2016). "Progressive Blogger Fired for Calling Hillary Clinton Ally a 'Scumbag'". Politico. ISSN 2381-1595. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  40. ^ Yglesias, Matthew (May 21, 2016). "Bruenighazi: How a Feisty Bernie Blogger's Firing Explains Democratic Politics in 2016". Vox. Retrieved January 9, 2025. Demos then responded to the ongoing Twitter thread, calling Bruenig's tweets 'unacceptable,' and apologized for his words. The organization released a lengthy statement Friday night detailing its differences with Bruenig, who has more than 270,000 Twitter followers, and his departure from the group.
  41. ^ Weigel, David (February 26, 2017). "Why did Keith Ellison lose the DNC race?". ISSN 2641-9599. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  42. ^ "Matt Bruenig". In These Times. 2017. ISSN 0160-5992. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  43. ^ Stein, Jeff (April 30, 2022). "White House officials weigh income limits for student loan forgiveness". The Washington Post. ISSN 2641-9599. Archived from the original on April 30, 2022. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  44. ^ Stein, Jeff (January 31, 2024). "Child tax credit expansion: What you need to know". ISSN 2641-9599. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  45. ^ "Do It Yourself: Matt Bruenig on Using the Internet to Build a Think Tank". Logic(s). No. 4. April 1, 2018. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  46. ^ "Matt Bruenig". The Breakthrough Institute. September 5, 2019. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  47. ^ Edelman, Gilad (July 15, 2018). "What the New Socialists Really Want". Washington Monthly. Vol. 50, no. 7/8. p. 10. ISSN 0043-0633. Retrieved January 9, 2025. In 2017, Matt launched his crowd-funded think tank, which immediately began being noticed in liberal policy circles. His work, which in its faith in winning arguments by marshaling the right facts calls to mind a socialist Ezra Klein, is often cited in places like the Atlantic and Vox, and he has been quoted as an expert by CBS News and elsewhere. Even among prominent young lefties, his Twitter presence, even post–boot camp, stands out—277,000 followers as of June.
  48. ^ Yglesias, Matthew (April 27, 2018). "Why politicians should promise every American a job". Vox. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  49. ^ Bruenig, Matthew (February 26, 2019). "A serious plan to solve poverty". Current Affairs. ISSN 2471-2647. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  50. ^ Bruenig, Matt (February 24, 2020). "Free Public Childcare and Pre-K Is Popular and Affordable". Jacobin. ISSN 2158-2602. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  51. ^ Bruenig, Matt (October 21, 2021). "Responses to the Child Care Piece". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  52. ^ Bruenig, Matt (October 29, 2021). "Dem Child Care Proposal Uses Welfare Reform Tactics to Exclude the Poor". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  53. ^ Bruenig, Matt (October 29, 2021). "Dem Child Care Proposal Uses Welfare Reform Tactics to Exclude the Poor". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  54. ^ Yglesias, Matthew (April 22, 2021). "Rigorous, accurate policy analysis is underrated". Slow Boring. Retrieved January 10, 2025. One particularly striking example of this is the child care subsidy proposal that was part of the Build Back Better package. The genesis of this legislation was a 2015 proposal from the Center for American Progress to create sliding-scale tax credits to defray the cost of child care. Over time, the proposal became more generous (capping costs at 7 percent of income rather than 12 percent) and accrued various pro-labor provisions, as well as a plan for a multi-year transition from the current unsubsidized system to the new permanent vision. The problem, as Matt Bruenig pointed out (see more here and here), is that the transition plan was very poorly structured and would have pushed the cost structure of child care up before the subsidies kicked in, leaving tons of middle-class families worse off. Democrats eventually scrambled to tweak the proposal, but BBB's family provisions became a tangled mess of phase-ins and phase-outs, and eventually the whole thing died on the vine.
  55. ^ Bruenig, Matt (April 19, 2022). "The Dem Policy Apparatus Is Very Dysfunctional". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  56. ^ Bruenig, Matt (October 20, 2021). "Democratic Child Care Plan Will Spike Prices for the Middle Class by $13,000". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  57. ^ Yglesias, Matthew (October 21, 2021). "Cash benefits are the best family policy". Slow Boring. Retrieved January 10, 2025. The proposal addressed cash assistance, parental leave, preschool, and child care. But while my idea is modeled on Matt Bruenig's Family Fun Pack, which in turn is loosely modeled on the design of the Finnish welfare state, Biden bundled together several separate ideas that reflect different philosophical approaches to the welfare state[.] ... Bruenig raises the concern that for more affluent families, the program will actually raise costs by mandating pay increases at child care centers.
  58. ^ Mueller, Eleanor (October 21, 2021). "Democrats defend their child care plan against unexpected attack". Politico. ISSN 2381-1595. Retrieved January 10, 2025. But a left-leaning think tank, People's Policy Project, jeopardized that goodwill this week when its founder, Matt Bruenig, penned an analysis making the case that the proposal could allow states to shift the costs of raising child care workers' wages and more onto the middle-class families not immediately eligible for the subsidies. Parents making more than about $67,000 a year could see their costs spike by more than $13,000, he argued, in the first year of the program. The report, which garnered so much attention that Bruenig published another post Thursday responding to the criticism, even won an unlikely ally: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. ... The People's Policy Project report makes the case that if the wage and other requirements went into effect the first year, instead of the fourth, it could increase child care costs for any family making more than 100 percent of their state's median income, who would not yet be eligible for the subsidies. 'The bill says that states have an option to implement the wage increases within three years,' Bruenig said in an interview. 'It doesn't say it will happen after, in the fourth year. It could happen before then.' 'I'm just looking for a number that could be justified based on how the bill is written,' he added. 'It could be $10,000, but it's not going to be zero. It's going to be a pretty big hike.' ... Advocates and Democratic aides say Bruenig's argument is illogical because the cash to providers would cover the higher wages — and on top of that, the pay and other requirements would not formally kick in until the fourth year. In fact, they say, the child care sector is not robust enough right now to even support salaries like those Bruenig laid out. ... Increased costs for parents could be avoided by making all families eligible for subsidies upon enactment, Bruenig said. Democrats' decision to phase in eligibility was 'just to bring down the score.' ... Boteach said Bruenig is comparing President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan 'to an idealized policy with unlimited funds.' ... Democratic aides say it's important to counter Bruenig's argument so that the public is not confused about what they are proposing, particularly as progressive lawmakers make the case that their party should be spending as much as possible on child care, paid leave and other family-centric policies.
  59. ^ Dayen, David (April 25, 2023). "Democratic Child Care Bill Keeps Work Requirements". The American Prospect. ISSN 1049-7285. Retrieved January 10, 2025. 'It does look like they are being responsive to criticism, which is interesting, but for some reason remain stubbornly committed to an increasingly pointless activity test,' said Matt Bruenig of the People's Policy Project, when presented with the new bill. ... While in theory, the bill says that families need only be eligible for WIC, SNAP, or TANF to receive child care subsidies, in reality only those enrolled in those programs will get the allowance, Bruenig explained. 'The child care subsidy agency or whatever is not going to be able to independently run the eligibility requirements for those programs, which are quite complicated,' he said. 'So it will have to be that you are actually on those programs. And of course, not everyone who is eligible manages to sign up.' ... While the categorical eligibility would reduce the numbers excluded from child care subsidies, that raises the question of why the work requirement exists at all. 'Once you are making all of these exceptions for the activity test, who exactly is left, outside of people who will fail to prove that their situation falls into an exception?' Bruenig asked. In other words, the busywork to prove eligibility will remain, even though most families would be eligible anyway. This pointless bureaucracy appears designed to achieve savings only by tripping up families.
  60. ^ Bruenig, Matt (November 19, 2021). "How the Democratic Child-Care Proposal Hurts Families". The Atlantic. ISSN 2151-9463. Retrieved January 10, 2025. The Democratic child-care proposal now working its way through Congress combines bad ideas from the Affordable Care Act with even worse ideas from the 1990s' welfare reform. Despite worthy intentions, it will drive up costs for many middle-class families while providing no benefit at all to the poorest and most vulnerable children. If lawmakers do not fix these design problems, they could wreak havoc on many of the families they are trying to help. Unlike most other developed countries, the U.S. provides virtually no help for parents who need child-care services. Parents pay more than $15,000 a year on average for a spot in a licensed day-care center. And those who can't afford such a steep price are forced to patch together care from a variety of informal child-care providers or to drop out of the labor force just to avoid child-care bills.
  61. ^ Prokop, Andrew (November 22, 2021). "Democrats' child care plan could help millions — or it could be a big mess". Vox. Retrieved January 10, 2025. The plan would 'dramatically increase demand for child-care services as newly subsidized users pour into the sector,' Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project, a left-leaning think tank, writes at the Atlantic. ... In all that time, the proposal received little scrutiny outside the community of advocates and providers that crafted it. But that changed last month when liberal wonkworld was set aflame by a series of critiques from Matt Bruenig of the People's Policy Project, who argued that the bill would, in practice, sharply raise child care costs for middle-class families over the next few years.
  62. ^ Bruenig, Matt (November 29, 2021). "The Democrats' Childcare Plan Is Disastrous. These Graphs Explain Why". Jacobin. ISSN 2158-2602. Retrieved January 10, 2025. The House passed its version of the Build Back Better (BBB) legislation a couple of weeks ago. Among other things, the bill sets aside grant money for states that want to set up the system of childcare subsidies laid out in the bill. I've discussed this childcare provision, and its problems, extensively already [in The Atlantic]. In this post, I attempt to explain and visualize what these childcare subsidies actually look like in concrete dollar terms.
  63. ^ Douthat, Ross (September 29, 2023). "How many Americans are marriage material?". The New York Times. ISSN 1553-8095. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  64. ^ Cohen, Philip N. (May 1, 2024). "Turning the Tide: A Value-Laden Proposition". Contemporary Sociology. 53 (3): 212–218. doi:10.1177/00943061241240874d. ISSN 0094-3061. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  65. ^ Bruenig, Matt (June 30, 2018). "Musings on the Meaning of Democratic Socialism". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 9, 2025. Generally speaking, 'democratic socialism' refers to a branch of socialist thought that wants to use prevailing electoral systems and other representative institutions to evolve the economy into a socialist order through incremental reform. This is contrasted with revolutionary branches of socialism that seek to overthrow the government from the outside. Traditionally, this strategy for achieving socialism has also been referred to as 'social democracy,' making the two terms basically interchangeable. ... Democratic socialism is not, in the majority of its historical uses, welfare-state capitalism. These days, the phrase 'social democracy' is often used to mean a particular type of welfare-state capitalism that emphasizes universal public welfare programs as opposed to means-tested or employer-based programs. And so democratic socialism is also not 'social democracy' under this modern usage. ... Instead, the end state of democratic socialism is a political economic form that combines liberal democracy with social ownership of the means of production. What social ownership should look like is an open question with various competing ideas. Probably the three most common approaches are worker coops (Richard Wolff), social wealth funds (Rudolf Meidner, James Meade), and snap nationalizations of especially major industries.
  66. ^ Dragsted, Pelle (2021). Nordisk socialisme: På vej mod en demokratisk økonomi (in Danish). Gyldendal A/S. p. 3. ISBN 978-87-02-29486-6. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  67. ^ a b Yglesias, Matthew (August 31, 2020). "The Case for Adding 672 Million More Americans". New York. ISSN 0028-7369. Retrieved January 9, 2025. The current debate in the U.S. is so far off the mark in terms of really living up to society's obligation to parents that the most serious plan for dealing with it comes not from any of Washington's many mainstream think tanks but from the People's Policy Project — essentially a one-man show run by Matt Bruenig, an eccentric socialist who, along with his wife, New York Times columnist Elizabeth Bruenig, is a parent of two young kids. They whimsically call their proposal the Family Fun Pack, and while it's rigorous in its details, it's also strikingly simple in concept.
  68. ^ Bruenig, Matt (September 28, 2018). "Common Wealth: workers' ownership in the history of socialism". Verso Books. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  69. ^ Bruenig, Matt (February 11, 2017). "Nickel-and-Dime Socialism". Medium. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  70. ^ Bruenig Stoker, Elizabeth (March 22, 2017). "The devil we know". The Hedgehog Review. 19 (1). Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture: 32–40. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  71. ^ Edmundson, William A. et al. (2020). "What Are 'The Means of Production'?". Journal of Political Philosophy. 28 (4): 421–437. doi:10.1111/jopp.12211. ISSN 1467-9760. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  72. ^ Bruenig, Matt (July 22, 2018). "Nordic State Ownership of Enterprise Is a Real Thing". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 9, 2025. In addition to correcting the record, I think it is important for socialists to reckon with Norway for two reasons. First, the most powerful argument for a particular system or program is that it has been tried and works. This is why Bernie Sanders sells Medicare for All by pointing to other countries with single-payer systems. If another country has it, and it works, then it is hard for someone to say it is ridiculous on its face, which is how both conservatives and moderate liberals want to treat basically any proposals that come out of the left. Along these same lines, pointing out that we have successful countries like Norway where the state owns the vast majority of the national wealth and a lot of major corporations provides an easy way to argue for those things here. Second, starting with an appropriate understanding of Norway or Finland (or any country for that matter) is necessary for articulating where those countries fall short of the ideal and how we would do it differently. Meyer's basic approach of saying 'Nordic countries plus X' is a good one, but only if X is actually something that isn't present in Nordic countries. 'Nordic countries plus public ownership of major corporations' is just to say 'Nordic countries, Norway and Finland in particular.'
  73. ^ Bruenig, Matt (August 1, 2018). "Are State Officials in Nordic Countries Unaccountable?". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 9, 2025. The authors finish out the quote above with a classic socialist mad lib. The way the mad lib works is you go '____ is not socialism; socialism is when the masses are in control.' The blank can then be filled in with literally any proposed socialist institution ever. Normally people who go this rhetorical route remain vague about what 'the masses are in control' would mean in detailed terms. ... Of course, my natural reaction to these alternatives is: grassroots state planning agencies, workers' cooperatives, and participatory boards are not socialism; socialism is when the masses are in control. A 'state planning agency' is not the masses. It's a relatively small group of people, whether you call them grassroots or not. A workers' cooperative is not the masses: it requires the election of officers and leaders who make day-to-day decisions from above. And don't even get me started on how few of the masses are on the participatory boards! Somewhat more seriously, what's bizarre about all of these Real Socialist Institutions is that they are representative institutions not unlike an elected government. We are not talking about direct democracy here where every single decision is voted on by every single person. And we certainly are not talking about a consensus arrangement where every thing requires the approval of 100 percent of the people. Instead we are talking about institutions that supposedly channel the will of a broader constituency through a group of representatives accountable to that constituency. Sound familiar? Not only are these Real Socialist Institutions basically the same thing as a democratically-elected state owner in their structure, but one of them is literally just a rewording of 'state ownership.' If you take the phrase 'state ownership' and then make it a little bit more specific, you get 'state planning agencies,' since that is how state ownership works: ministers of various sorts reside in agencies and do the 'planning' of ownership. From there, all you have to do is slap the aspirational word 'grassroots' in the front of it, and you get 'grassroots state planning agencies,' a Real Socialist Institution! It's perfectly fine for people to have preferences for one representative-democratic institution over another when it comes to how to implement social/collective/worker ownership and control. ... But it is silly in my view to take your personal preferences for representative-democratic institution X over representative-democratic institution Y and then declare that therefore Y is not socialist. A democratically-elected state that is accountable to its people is at least as legitimate a social owner as any other kind of representative institution.
  74. ^ McCarthy, Michael A. (August 7, 2018). "Democratic Socialism Isn't Social Democracy". Jacobin. ISSN 2158-2602. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  75. ^ Bruenig, Matt (June 30, 2018). "Musings on the Meaning of Democratic Socialism". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 9, 2025. When thinking about these five forms [laissez-faire capitalism, welfare-state capitalism, state socialism, property-owning democracy, and liberal or democratic socialism], it is important to emphasize that they are ideal forms, meaning that we are talking about them in their purest form. In reality, especially in a democratic system where power often changes hands, you can wind up with system hybrids and it is not entirely clear what to call those. For instance, Norway collectively owns 59 percent of the country's national wealth and 76 percent of the nation's non-home wealth. That's a pretty impressive tilt in the direction of the ideal form of liberal/democratic socialism, but obviously it is not perfectly complete and, when conservative parties get in power in Norway, they usually turn the dial in the opposite direction away from such high levels of collective ownership. So what does all of this theory look like in practice? How does one go about the work of using prevailing electoral processes and incremental reform to move us gradually into a system of liberal democracy and social ownership of the means of production? That, as you might imagine, is a matter of much dispute. The question is complicated further by the fact that being a politician means addressing a lot of issues that are not necessarily related to the fundamental reform of the economic system.
  76. ^ Bruenig, Matt (March 9, 2018). "How Capitalist Is Singapore Really?". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 9, 2025. It is true of course that Singapore has a market economy. But it's also true that, in Singapore, the state owns a huge amount of the means of production. In fact, depending on how you count it, the Singaporean government probably owns more capital than any other developed country in the world after Norway. ... Call me old-fashioned, but I don't generally associate state ownership of the means of production with capitalism. ... In this campaign [in the US aimed at bringing the country up to the Singaporean ideal], the candidate would say that the state should expropriate nearly all of the land in the country, build virtually all of the housing in the country, move almost everyone into public housing leaseholds, become the largest shareholder of more than a third of the country's publicly-traded companies (weighted by market capitalization), and build out a sovereign wealth fund that holds tens of trillions of dollars of corporate assets. Would this campaign meet with a warm libertarian embrace or perhaps be derided as a bit socialistic? The case of Singapore is more than just a funny gotcha to use against right-wingers. It actually raises an interesting question about what it is people care about when it comes to 'capitalism' and 'socialism.' Is capitalism primarily about markets or private ownership? Relatedly, is socialism primarily about ending markets or promoting collective ownership? Often these things are bundled together, but they are logically and practically separable.
  77. ^ Pareene, Alex (2019). "Consolation Prizes: The right's bid to short-circuit inequality with cheap gizmos". The Baffler (43): 6–15. ISSN 1059-9789. JSTOR 26564952. Retrieved January 9, 2025. This mounting disquiet reveals itself in periodic attempts like these to tell the American masses, in essence: Look how great you have it. Don't you know there are people starving in Venezuela? The problem with this argument is that there are places in the world where the economic arrangements are a bit closer to Marx's vision of utopia than they are to Milton Friedman's, but where almost no one at all is starving. Faced, for example, with the irksome track records of the Nordic countries—with their high taxes-and-transfers and happy populations—the CEA offers the parable of the pickup truck. Figure 6, 'Weekly Cost of Owning and Operating a Pickup Truck, by Country,' shows that an American has earned enough to 'cover the cost' of a truck after a mere 4.4 hours of work per week. Meanwhile, at the other drudgery-laden extreme of things, your poor average Finn will need to put in 11.9 hours at the office to enjoy the best-in-class torque, towing, and payload of a mid-sized Ford Ranger—a model selected, the report helpfully notes, 'because the larger pickups are difficult to obtain, park, and so on in a Nordic country.' (Another point for capitalism!) As critics like Matt Bruenig quickly pointed out, the analysis relies on ignoring the benefits Nordic residents receive in exchange for paying the higher taxes that make truck ownership seem less 'affordable.' But such mere empirical concerns are beside the actual point of the comparison, which is, of course, not economic but cultural: Who wants freedom from economic precarity if there's nowhere to park your truck?
  78. ^ Edelman, Gilad (July 15, 2018). "What the New Socialists Really Want". Washington Monthly. Vol. 50, no. 7/8. p. 10. ISSN 0043-0633. Retrieved January 9, 2025. The Bruenigs argue, as Liz has written in [The Washington Post], that 'it makes sense to think of socialism on a spectrum, with countries and policies being more or less socialist, rather than either/or.' Much of Matt's work revolves around making the case that real socialist policies have been implemented successfully in other countries, particularly Nordic nations like Norway and Sweden. The question of how to describe the governance of these places has become quite contentious, because if these healthy, happy, rich nations are meaningfully socialist in some way, it's hard to argue that socialism always ends in disaster. ... The socialist wonks are out to prove that moving toward a more collective, equitable ownership of the economy doesn't require tearing up the American way of life—that, as [Matt] Bruenig wrote in [The New York Times], there are socialistic policies that could 'work within the system we now have.'
  79. ^ Robinson, Nathan J. (2019). "Socialism, Democracy, Social Democracy". Why You Should Be a Socialist. Macmillan + ORM. ISBN 978-1-250-20087-7. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  80. ^ Bruenig, Matthew (July 9, 2018). "There Is Nothing Inherently Wrong With State Ownership". Current Affairs. ISSN 2471-2647. Retrieved January 9, 2025. Sweden has 48 state-owned enterprises, Finland has 67, and Norway has 74. The level of state ownership in Norway in particular is staggering, even after two successive conservative governments have chipped away at it. The Norwegian state owns the country's largest oil company Equinor (previously called Statoil), the country's largest telecommunications company Telenor, and the country's largest financial services group DNB. This would be like if the U.S. government owned Exxon Mobil, Verizon, and JP Morgan Chase. Finland's state ownership portfolio is somewhat less impressive but includes in it the airliner Finnair, the infrastructure engineering company VR, and the energy company Gasum. Finland's state also owns a few oddball enterprises like the public relations company Nordic Morning and, until earlier this year, the wine and spirits company Altia.
  81. ^ Edelman, Gilad (July 15, 2018). "What the New Socialists Really Want". Washington Monthly. Vol. 50, no. 7/8. p. 10. ISSN 0043-0633. Retrieved January 9, 2025. Conservatives protest the most loudly, but liberals, too, deny that socialism is afoot in Scandinavia. These countries are, we're told, 'mixed economies' or 'social democracies'—bigger welfare states, sure, but fundamentally capitalist systems. But in a post last summer, Matt used data from the OECD library and the International Labour Organization to show that a strong welfare state is only one part of the story. Most strikingly, at least some of the Nordics come out ahead on that textbook aspect of socialism, state ownership. In Norway and Finland, he wrote, the government owns 'financial assets equal to 330 percent and 130 percent of each country's respective GDP,' compared to 26 percent in the U.S. Norway's government owns around 60 percent of the nation's wealth—nearly double the level for the Chinese government—including a third of its domestic stock market. 'There is little doubt that, in terms of state ownership at least, Norway is the most socialist country in the developed world,' Bruenig wrote a few months later—'and, not coincidentally, the happiest country in the world according to the UN's 2017 World Happiness Report.'
  82. ^ Bruenig, Matt (August 5, 2017). "Nordic Socialism Is Realer Than You Think". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 9, 2025. No one would argue that the Nordic countries are full-blown socialist countries, whatever that might mean. But it is also folly to pretend the only thing they have proven is that high taxes and large welfare states can work. Even on the narrow understanding of socialism as public ownership of enterprise, the Nordic countries are far more socialistic than most commentators seem to realize. American socialists who draw inspiration from their successes do so rightly.
  83. ^ Bruenig, Matt (August 5, 2017). "Nordic Socialism Is Realer Than You Think". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 9, 2025. Around 1 in 3 workers in Denmark and Norway are employed by the government. Protections against termination by employers are much stronger in the Nordic countries. Centrally-bargained union contracts establish the work rules and pay scales for the vast majority of Nordic workers. These labor market characteristics are hardly neoliberal or quasi-libertarian, at least if we stick to typical definitions of those terms. The neoliberal tendency, as exemplified most recently by France's Emmanuel Macron, is to cut public sector jobs, reduce job protections, and push for local rather than centralized labor agreements. For the US labor market to become more like the Nordics, it would have to move in the opposite direction on all of those fronts. Even more interesting than Nordic labor market institutions is Nordic state ownership. Collective ownership over capital is the hallmark of that old-school socialism that is supposed to have been entirely discredited. And yet, such public ownership figures prominently in present-day Norway and Finland and has had a role in the other two Nordic countries as well, especially in Sweden where the government embarked upon a now-defunct plan to socialize the whole of Swedish industry into wage-earner funds just a few decades ago.
  84. ^ Bruenig, Matt (January 18, 2018). "The Norwegian State Owns Most Of The Country's Wealth". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 9, 2025. ... I argued that Nordic socialism is realer than many people seem to think. Add to that case this statistic from the recently released World Inequality Report: the government of Norway owns around 60 percent of the nation's wealth. In fact, state ownership in Norway is now nearly double what it is in China. Casual observers of Norway might tell you that this is primarily the result of their $1 trillion social wealth fund, which was seeded by oil revenue from the North Sea. But that fund was not established until 1990 and did not receive its first inflow of cash until 1996. As you can see in the graph above, the Norwegian government already owned 40 percent of the national wealth prior to the creation of the oil fund. In addition to its oil fund, which is exclusively invested outside of the country, the Norwegian government owns around one-third of the domestic stock market and 70 state-owned enterprises, which were valued at 88 percent of the country's annual GDP in 2012. There is little doubt that, in terms of state ownership at least, Norway is the most socialist country in the developed world and, not coincidentally, the happiest country in the world according to the UN's 2017 World Happiness Report.
  85. ^ Bruenig, Matt (March 14, 2018). "The State Owns 76% of Norway's Non-Home Wealth". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 9, 2025. The socialist umbrella contains within it diverse viewpoints about what socialism is, what its core elements are, and how to achieve it. Some emphasize firm-level worker ownership (i.e. cooperatives), others industry-level worker ownership (i.e. syndicalists), and still others society-wide ownership (i.e. social wealth fund advocates). Some think wages and salaries are problematic (e.g. mutualists), others think product prices are problematic (i.e[.] decommodifiers), and still others think both are problematic and that society should be organized into small units that consume what they produce directly (e.g. in a Fourier commune). The one thing almost all strands have in common is the idea that collective ownership of capital within a relevant economic unit is a key socialist principle. So to the extent that a country is a relevant economic unit and Norwegians own 76% of their non-home wealth collectively through a democratically-elected state, it would be fair, I think, to describe it as the most socialist country in the developed world. But regardless of what label you apply to it, Norway at minimum proves that it is possible to mix high levels of state ownership with a high degree of prosperity. And no, this is not just about its oil: high levels of state ownership prevailed even before the oil fund began in 1996. ... I think Singapore also proves this point. In Singapore, the state owns 90 percent of the land and over 80 percent of the homes while posting high levels of income and growth. In Norway, the state owns 76 percent of the non-home wealth while also remaining very productive. Now imagine if you combined them.
  86. ^ Bruenig, Matt (January 27, 2019). "Norway Is Far More Socialist Than Venezuela". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 9, 2025. Venezuela helps illuminate this question [what is socialism?] because many pundits commit to the claim that Venezuela is socialist before committing to a specific definition of socialism. This unfortunate order of events then requires them to retroactively identify specific things that they say make Venezuela socialist, but then those things exist in other countries that they refuse to call socialist. ... Venezuela and Norway both have abnormally large oil sectors, nationalized oil reserves, and nationalized oil companies. In Norway, the surplus from the oil boom has been used to build a $1 trillion collectively-owned capital fund with the return on that capital going to finance general government spending, including the country's large welfare state. This capital fund is even colorfully described by the Norwegian government as 'the people's money, owned by everyone, divided equally and for generations to come.' In Venezuela, the government appears to have used the surplus primarily to finance current social spending. This means that, on the thing most remarkable about the two countries, Norway comes away as more socialist. Norway uses its oil sector to build an enormous stock of collectively-owned capital, which then goes to fund social spending while Venezuela skips the middle step. Insofar as socialism is about collective ownership of the means of production, an objective observer would have to declare Norway the more socialist of the two. Norway's edge on Venezuela goes beyond the different ways the two countries have handled their nationalized oil sectors. Although Venezuelan data is a bit hard to come by, it is hard to imagine based on what information we do have that the Venezuelan government owns one-third of the country's domestic corporate equity like Norway does. And the Venezuelan government for sure does not own 60 percent of the national wealth like Norway does. Even on indicators that are not strictly socialist but that people often conflate with socialism — such as government taxes, revenue and expenditure — Norway dominates.
  87. ^ Robinson, Nathan J. (2019). Why You Should Be a Socialist. Macmillan + ORM. p. 180, citing Bruenig's articles. ISBN 978-1-250-20087-7. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  88. ^ Bruenig, Matt (January 27, 2019). "Norway Is Far More Socialist Than Venezuela". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 9, 2025. The first claim here is that Venezuela is socialist because its government spends 40 percent of GDP. By this measure, almost every country in Western and Northern Europe is socialist, including Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Even the US government spends 37.7 percent of GDP. On Stephens' view, the US is apparently just 2.3 points shy of socialism! The second claim here is that Venezuela is socialist because the government raised the minimum wage six times in the last year in the face of high inflation. This is initially confusing of course because presumably Stephens believes it was a socialist country before last year. But it is also more fundamentally confusing because lots of countries have minimum wages and adjust them over time based on inflation. The US established a minimum wage under FDR and has adjusted it upwards more than a dozen times since. Some US states even have minimum wages that are indexed to inflation, meaning they get adjusted every year. The last claim is that Venezuela is socialist because it has worker cooperatives, specifically 100,000 cooperatives employing more than 700,000 workers. The first thing to note here is that 700,000 workers in cooperatives is not that impressive up against a country with a population over 30 million people. But more importantly, the US also has worker cooperatives, most prominently ESOPs. In 2015, there were 14 million US workers in ESOP companies and ESOPs are directly encouraged by the US government via tax breaks.
  89. ^ Macdonald, Lindsey (2018). "We are All Housewives: Universal Basic Income as Wages for Housework". Lateral. 7 (2). doi:10.25158/L7.2.13. ISSN 2469-4053. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  90. ^ Edelman, Gilad (July 15, 2018). "What the New Socialists Really Want". Washington Monthly. Vol. 50, no. 7/8. p. 10. ISSN 0043-0633. Retrieved January 9, 2025. The Norwegian example figures prominently in what is probably Matt's most interesting policy proposal. In a New York Times op-ed last November, he argued that the easiest way to combat American inequality would be a 'social wealth fund,' which he described as akin to an index or mutual fund, 'but one owned collectively by society as a whole.' Norway has such a fund, he pointed out, which is valued at over $1 trillion and is used to pay for its generous welfare state. Alaska has one, too, paying its citizens cash dividends from the proceeds of a diversified investment fund that, like Norway's, started with oil money. Under Bruenig's idea, the federal government would create an investment portfolio—perhaps by selling federal assets, or through 'taxes on capital that affect mostly the wealthy,' or by redirecting recession spending by the Federal Reserve—and distribute a regular cash dividend to every American, or every American adult, each of whom would have one equal share in the fund. If the fund came to own a third of the nation's wealth, he calculated, that would have meant an $8,000 payout to everyone between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four in 2016.
  91. ^ Yglesias, Matthew (August 28, 2018). "The big idea that could make democratic socialism a reality". Vox. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  92. ^ Hockema, Robert (October 10, 2018). "The United States needs a Permanent Fund Dividend". UWIRE Text. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  93. ^ West, Caroline (2019). "UBI as a Tool for Solidarity: A Response to Richard Todd Stafford". Lateral. 8 (2). ISSN 2469-4053. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  94. ^ Forsyth, Randall W. (December 2, 2017). "A major risk of tax reform: rising inflation". Barron's. ISSN 1077-8039. Retrieved January 10, 2025. In a New York Times op-ed piece ... Matt Bruenig ... suggested a 'tried and tested way' of 'giving everyone a share of the investment returns now hoarded by the wealthy.' The federal government would create an investment fund and issue every adult citizen one share. 'The fund would gradually come to own a substantial and diverse portfolio of stocks, bonds, and real estate. Investment returns that the fund generates would be paid out to each citizen in the form of a universal basic dividend,' he writes. Bruenig compares this to Norway's sovereign wealth fund or Alaska's Permanent Fund, both of which began with public oil revenue. ... [W]here to get the money[?] Simple, he declares, just tap 'the enormous wealth ...which now flows into just a few pockets.' Existing federal assets like land, buildings, and parts of the wireless spectrum could be transferred to the new fund. ... Bruenig would increase 'taxes on capital that affect mostly the wealthy, such as estate, dividend, and financial-transaction taxes, and the creation of a new type of corporate tax that requires companies to directly issue new shares to the social wealth fund on an annual basis and during certain corporate moves, such as initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions.' ... He would also have the Fed purchase stocks, which would be deposited in the social wealth fund, instead of Treasury securities. These purchases could be ramped up during recessions 'to acquire significant portions of the national wealth relatively cheaply while also stabilizing the economy.' ... Bruenig acknowledges that his scheme isn't the only way to correct wealth inequality, but argues that 'it is one of the few ways that we know works well and is able to work within the system we now have.'
  95. ^ Franklin, Peter (January 18, 2018). "If governments do raise taxes on wealth, what should be done with the revenues?". UnHerd. Retrieved January 10, 2025. Are the rich getting richer? They certainly are in America, according to Matt Bruenig in the New York Times: 'The wealth of the top 1 percent increased by an average of $4.9 million over the past decade, while the average holdings of the bottom 99 percent declined by about $4,500. Wealth inequality is now the highest it has been since the Federal Reserve began collecting this kind of data in 1983.' [Bruenig], however, has a solution – a sort of sovereign wealth fund that he calls a 'social wealth fund': 'Here's how it could work. The federal government would create and run a new investment fund, and issue every adult citizen one share of ownership. The fund would gradually come to own a substantial and diverse portfolio of stocks, bonds and real estate. The investment return that the fund generates would be paid out to each citizen in the form of a universal basic dividend, and the shares would be nontransferable to preserve the institution's egalitarian purpose.' ... 'If, over time, the social wealth fund came to own one-third of the country's wealth, that would allow it to distribute an annual dividend equivalent to about a third of the total returns on invested capital each year, which represents about a tenth of net national income. In 2016, based on the latest available census population figures, that would have meant around $6,400 paid to all adults or $8,000 paid to every person between the ages of 18 and 64.' ... Breunig notes that the 'key challenge in building a social wealth fund is not how to run it once it has been created, but how to bring assets into the fund in the first place.' ... His ideas for capitalising the fund include the following: '...the transfer of existing federal assets like land, buildings and portions of the wireless spectrum into the new fund... increases in taxes on capital that affect mostly the wealthy such as estate, dividend and financial transaction taxes and the creation of a new type of corporate tax that requires companies to directly issue new shares to the social wealth fund on an annual basis and during certain corporate moves such as initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions.'
  96. ^ Bruenig, Matt (November 30, 2017). "A Simple Fix for Our Massive Inequality Problem". The New York Times. ISSN 1553-8095. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  97. ^ a b Yglesias, Matthew (December 14, 2017). "Collective ownership of the means of production". Vox. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  98. ^ Smith, Noah (December 5, 2017). "Robot Takeover Matters Less If We're All Shareholders". Bloomberg News. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  99. ^ Dumitriu, Sam (December 6, 2024). "Where Paul Ryan and Matt Bruenig agree". Adam Smith Institute. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  100. ^ McFarland, Kate (February 26, 2017). "Matt Bruenig on 'Passive Income': Viral Article and Video Interview". Basic Income Earth Network. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  101. ^ Worstall, Tim (January 4, 2017). "Matt Bruenig Says the 1% Already Gets a Universal Basic Income – So Why Not One for All?". Forbes. ISSN 0015-6914. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  102. ^ Stafford, Richard Todd (2019). "Response to Caroline West's 'From Company Town to Post-Industrial: Inquiry on the Redistribution of Space and Capital with a Universal Basic Income'". Lateral. 8 (1). ISSN 2469-4053. JSTOR 48671446. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  103. ^ Bruenig, Matt (October 4, 2018). "Democrats, take note: If you want to raise wages, put pressure on employers". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  104. ^ Page, Amanda (March 9, 2021). "Why Passing Stimulus Checks is Critical to the Democratic Party's Future". Brown Political Review. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  105. ^ a b Scott, Dylan (March 4, 2019). "A single-payer advocate answers the big question: How do we pay for it?". Vox. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  106. ^ Bruenig, Matt. "Don't Believe the Hype: Paying for Medicare for All Is Simple". Jacobin. ISSN 2158-2602. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  107. ^ Gaffney, Adam (2018). "The Two Souls of U.S. Healthcare". Dissent. Vol. 65, no. 2. pp. 59–68. ISSN 1946-0910. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  108. ^ Bruenig, Matt (September 12, 2019). "Medicare for All Would Cut Poverty by Over 20 Percent". People's Policy Project. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  109. ^ Saxena, Akhil (April 7, 2022). "Ending the Two-Tier System of Disability Benefits". Brown Political Review. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  110. ^ Campos, Paul (April 23, 2014). "Matt Bruenig Discovers Secret Motivation for Criticisms of His Insights". Lawyers Guns & Money. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  111. ^ Bruenig, Matt (April 21, 2014). "The case for killing law school". The Week. ISSN 1533-8304. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
  112. ^ Bruenig, Matt; Teachout, Zephyr (September 27, 2014). "Should the Government Break Up Big Corporations or Buy Them?". The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378. Retrieved January 10, 2025. In recent years, there has been a resurgent anti-bigness movement on the American left, with more and more people claiming that the central problem with our economy is not that it is too capitalistic, that it lacks unions, or that it offers too little security in the form of the welfare state. Rather, according to anti-bigness campaigners, the economic problem of our time is that production is spread out across too few firms. ... Most anti-bigness advocates will not find this approach satisfactory, in part because they have certain goals that the public ownership of large enterprises does not accomplish. For instance, the foundational texts of the modern anti-bigness movement often argue that we should consider the ability to successfully operate a small business to be an important tentpole of individual liberty. But if you don't subscribe to some of these more boutique elements of anti-bigness and are mostly concerned about market power, selective public ownership does everything that breaking up big companies does, except better and faster.
  113. ^ Bruenig, Matt; Teachout, Zephyr (September 27, 2014). "Should the Government Break Up Big Corporations or Buy Them?". The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378. Retrieved January 10, 2025. I don't think this is the correct diagnosis. I believe that rather than attempt to indirectly alter a company's behavior by trying to construct some kind of perfectly balanced market of private competitors, the government should, in most cases, just buy the company, keep its productive capacity intact, and then use its ownership rights to change its behaviors. ... A much better approach would be to simply purchase one of the big four meatpacking companies and run it as a federally owned enterprise like the TVA. The publicly traded Tyson Foods has a market capitalization of less than $25 billion. For that relatively small sum, which would not be lost to the federal government but rather invested in Tyson stock, the government could instantly direct one of the biggest meatpacking companies to stop using its market power to squeeze ranchers and customers. This, in turn, would force the other meat-packers to do the same or risk losing share to the now federally owned Tyson Foods.
  114. ^ "The Nation: Prof. Zephyr Teachout Argues that Freedom Requires Decentralized Power". Fordham Law News. September 27, 2024. Retrieved January 10, 2025.
  115. ^ Newcomer, Eric (May 26, 2020). "Left-Wing Podcasters Are Charting A Future Without Bernie Sanders". Bloomberg News. Retrieved January 9, 2025. 'Left leaning podcasts have been listener funded,' says Matt Bruenig who hosts a podcast with his wife. ... 'With the podcast there are no costs so it's up to basically $100,000 a year. That's pretty good money.'
  116. ^ Goodman, Lawrence (2021). "The Examined Life". Brandeis Magazine. No. Fall 2021. Retrieved January 9, 2025.
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