Sam Thorpe

This elitist view that only rich/Ivy/private school kids should study/have access the liberal arts is so deeply ingrained in so many highly educated Democrats’ views (including tons who majored in the lib arts themselves) that they don’t even realize they hold it, let alone how ugly & elitist it is

IRS improperly disclosed confidential immigrant tax data to DHS The tax agency only recently discovered it improperly disclosed tax information on thousands of the wrong people to immigration enforcement.

🚨 SCOOP: The IRS improperly disclosed confidential immigrant tax information to DHS, per sources.

It opens up HUGE liability for the US government.

Trump is suing the IRS over substantially the same disclosures -- for $10 billion.

🎁 Gift link:

1/x Really delighted to say that my coauthored piece with @jedshug.bsky.social, “Quasi-Judicial: A History and Tradition” just landed with the Columbia Law Review. We really appreciate the editors’ hard work! This is a piece that retells the story of American admin law and Humphrey’s Executor.

This was to be expected - after cutting support to pro-democracy civil society last year, the US state is now looking to actively support far-right affiliated think tanks and charities in Europe.

Senator Chuck Schumer conducts a news conference in the U.S. Capitol in May 2025. Image: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images FORUM How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism Moderation used to help Democrats win, but its advantages now have been greatly exaggerated. Adam Bonica, Jake Grumbach With responses from → Cori Bush, Amanda Litman, Matthew Yglesias, G. Elliott Morris, Julia Serano, Eric Rauchway, Suzanne Mettler & Trevor E. Brown, Thomas Ferguson, Timothy Shenk, Jared Abbott & Milan Loewer, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Lily Geismer, Danielle Wiggins, William A. Galston, and Henry Burke

We have a Boston Review Forum out today on the Democratic Party in a time of authoritarianism

www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...

Bar chart showing lifetime cost of the Republican megabill by income quintile for those born in 2025, including effects of higher federal debt. Four red bars show losses: Bottom 20% loses $17,200, second quintile loses $9,600, middle quintile loses $9,800, fourth quintile loses $4,300. One yellow bar shows the top 20% gains $2,600. Title states "Only households with the highest incomes will gain" and "Households with the lowest incomes lose the most." Source: Penn-Wharton Budget Model, July 8, 2025. Chart by Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

A @budgetmodel.bsky.social analysis of the megabill's combination of tax cuts, cuts to programs, and higher deficits will make the bottom 80 percent of kids born today worse off in the long run.

Republican Megabill Trades Essential Support to Low-Income People for Skewed Tax Cuts The sprawling megabill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Trump in July 2025 will redistribute trillions of dollars upward over the next decade, making it harder for ...

New 25-page @centeronbudget.bsky.social paper from me summarizing the distributional, fiscal, and economic effects of One Big Beautiful Bill's tax cuts and cuts to health care, food assistance, student loans, and climate investments. 🧵

www.cbpp.org/research/fed...

📢now forthcoming in ECMA!

The Class Gap in Career Progression: Evidence from US Academia

Class is rarely a focus of research or DEI in elite US occupations.

Evidence suggests it should be: we find a large class gap in at least one occupation - tenure-track academia...🧵

rather than assuming that those mechanisms somehow operate by default.

I don't have any conclusions about this yet. But it seems like we need to be spending more time on the question of *how* we can effectively mobilize nonviolence in the face of violence to shape public opinion, and *how* we can use state repression to bring more and more people into the movement,

So we're in a tough place. Nonviolence is necessary, both morally and tactically. But the usual 'levers' that nonviolence would pull - the moral conscience of the opposition - are arguably less effective than they've been since the Civil War.

And yet at the same time, nonviolence only works when your opponent can be moved to change. Vollmann: "Satyagraha is correct only if the sacrifice is *for* something, and only if the oppressor will eventually be moved to cease his aggression should the sacrifice become of sufficient magnitude."

As @opinionhaver.bsky.social and many others have noted, what's happening in Minneapolis is clearly intended to incur violence against CBP and ICE and use that as a pretext to further repress domestic dissent. This is a state of affairs where nonviolence is absolutely necessary for the movement.

But in the aftermath of the right-wing response to the last two shootings - circling the wagons around a demonstrably false narrative of 'domestic terrorism' and attempting to repress protest - I worry about how long this state of affairs will last.

Thinking a lot about this excerpt from Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down. It feels like for most of American history - and likely still today - we've lived in a society where force alternates with forbearance, and nonviolence is therefore an incredibly effective tactic for winning change.

Lifting this up again. A huge problem now is that there’s a giant slush fund for ICE & CBP separate from annual funding — that Trump can continue to use even during a shutdown.

Ds *must* make rescinding those pots of money the price of any future funding deals, as Rs did w/ IRS money from the IRA.

Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.

If you haven’t joined your local anti-ICE organization, now is the time. If you‘ve joined, step up and help get people onboarded. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors. Show them the video, tell them the truth about what’s happening. Every single one of us is going to be needed to stop this.

I’m normally on here to talk about policy, and I would love nothing more than to live in a world where that’s useful. But I don’t want to argue about top marginal tax rates while brownshirts murder people on the street. This is fucked and I’m angry and scared and I hope you are too.

The full video of this shooting is one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever seen. ICE just murdered another American in cold blood. I’m terrified to think about what’s going to happen to our country if this isn’t stopped.

Financial war in response to trade war and territorial threats? More and more people appear to be calling for it. So I updated my post on U.S. Treasuries holdings—now with the latest data.
benjaminbraun.org/posts/treasu...

Loved this - thank you for sharing. Excerpt attached was especially compelling. I think one of the biggest issues in academic economics is exactly this class of problems: so many of the most important insights are unquantifiable and therefore ignored. It's a disservice to the profession + the world!

Airing my grievances with wellbeing science We have a streetlight problem

if i could make you read ONE (1) single post to improve your understanding of the challenges of social science in general it would be this one from @markfabian.bsky.social about wellbeing science specifically

profmarkfabian.substack.com/p/airing-my-...

Loved this - thank you for sharing. Excerpt attached was especially compelling. I think one of the biggest issues in academic economics is exactly this class of problems: so many of the most important insights are unquantifiable and therefore ignored. It's a disservice to the profession + the world!

Everyone talks about the "credibility revolution", but I think one of the most valuable shifts in econ over the last decade has been the rise of rigorous descriptive historical work like this in top journals:

I’ll be in london that week - would love to attend! Let me know the location and i’ll be there

Who's Afraid of the Minimum Wage? Measuring the Impacts on Independent Businesses Using Matched U.S. Tax Returns* Nirupama L Rao, Max Risch The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 141, Issue 1, February 2026, Pages 373-427, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaf053 Published: 10 December 2025 Article history V PDF • Split View 66 Cite P Permissions < Share V Abstract A common concern surrounding minimum wage policies is their impact on independent businesses, which are often feared to be less able to bear or pass on cost increases. We examine how these typically small and medium-size firms accommodate minimum wage increases along product and labor market margins using a matched owner-firm-worker panel data set drawn from the universe of U.S. tax records over a 10-year period, and using state minimum wage changes as identifying variation. We find that on average, firms in highly exposed industries do not substantially reduce employment-they do not lay off workers but moderately reduce part-time hiring. Instead, these firms are able to fully finance the new labor costs with new revenues, leaving average owner profits unchanged. Higher wage floors, however, forestall entry, particularly for less productive firms, reducing the number of independent firms operating in these industries by roughly 2%. Yet these industries do not shrink; instead, incumbent responses and strong positive selection among entrants reshape industries that rely heavily on low-wage workers, yielding fewer but more productive firms after the cost shock. We also take a worker-level perspective to examine how potentially vulnerable individuals are affected by minimum wage increases. Using panels of low-earning and young workers, we find that their average earnings rise substantially with the minimum wage, while they are no less likely to be employed. Worker transitions indicate that minimum wage increases boost retention and that worker reallocation from independent firms toward corporations buffers dis…

New QJE for the minimum wage literature uses IRS data to study effects on small and medium size businesses. The effects seem…very good

academic.oup.com/qje/article/...

America, JD Vance tells us, is merely a nation like many others ⁠– a “homeland”, he said upon accepting his nomination to the vice-presidency, for “people with a shared history and a common future”. That’s a vision of American identity that would have described bands of cavepeople in skins just as well or better. Stephen Miller’s proleptic defense of seizing Greenland last week suggests the Trumpists themselves know this. “We live in a world, in the real world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he declared. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Miller’s laws are the laws of animals. It is true, obviously, that high ideals have long been deployed to obscure or justify predation, here and elsewhere. But Miller’s stance and the stance of the administration is that there aren’t, actually, any high ideals worth pursuing or even pretending to – that the human being, in itself, is nothing so much ⁠and that we are, fundamentally and forever, primitives. Against the demands and best aspirations of civilization – western or any kind – they tell us the human being is a creature that yearns for nothing more than blood and soil, which is, of course, just mud. The lust for mud has taken up many guises in our history and has been many given names of late – neo-reaction, post-liberalism, fascism. But the name familiar to most is evil.

It was evil – the standpoint that only might matters, that human morality, and our sense of reality itself, must yield to the turfism of the primates with the biggest clubs – that ginned up the propaganda that provoked an act of terrorism against our legislature and the policemen defending it five years ago. It is evil that undergirds pronouncements from the same voices responsible for that attack, in defense of the man who shot Renee Nicole Good, that those who disobey the commands of law enforcement, however unsound or unjust, deserve summary execution – that implies, as Fox’s Jesse Watters and others have, that Good’s killing was of trivial significance because she was a lesbian “with pronouns in her bio”. It is evil that sends innocent men to foreign gulags, evil that condemns hundreds of thousands of destitute people abroad to death without a moment’s discussion or debate about what the country they had depended on might owe them, or the furnishing of alternative arrangements for their wellbeing. The gutting of USAID remains this administration’s worst and least surprising offense against the human conscience – a president who rejects the idea that we might have obligations to all within our society can’t be expected to wonder or worry about whether we have obligations to those outside of it. This is also why, after all the noise and nonsense about the need to depose the Maduro regime, the Venezuelan people are now being told that regime will be left in mostly in place for as long as it takes to secure and extract the country’s resources on our terms – that Venezuela will not see democracy unless and until it is profitable for the United States.

Democracy has always been a useless abstraction to those who deny we have basic human entitlements – for those who believe, instead, that the idea of human liberty is a luxury for those wealthy and powerful enough to consider themselves our betters rather than the birthright of all. As many who’ve taken to the streets in protest have noted, the Trump administration’s assaults on liberty here at home are the kinds of abuses that spurred the revolution we will commemorate this year. But no grand revolution is in the offing this time around. The only just and plausible recourse for our situation is politics – understood not merely as the contest to win any given set of elections but as the broader fight to forge a republic that honors and strengthens our humanity. The American project must and will succeed. Its enemies stand for too little. Our lives are worth too much.

I wrote about Renee Good, Venezuela, Greenland, and what it means to be a human being. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I get this question a lot (not always in such polite language), so worth addressing directly. (Short thread)