Dan Bowen

the thing everyone is going to have to accept is that the post-trump period, whenever it comes, will not and cannot be a project of national unity, it must be a project of partisan project of renewal, in the same way that reconstruction and the new deal were partisan projects of renewal.

America is having a housing crisis because it chooses to have a housing crisis. Americans are being displaced because we want them to be displaced. Our cities are world capitals of homelessness because we invest resources in making them so.

I've seen versions of this take for years and I still don't get it. There really were real wage declines post-COVID. People's quality of life, especially non-homeowners, really did decline, and we haven't grown out of it yet.

You have the best view at the Bank with the Phila skyline in the background!

Yes! The palace is the Capitol, where the people rule, not the White House.

The economy is on the precipice of recession. That’s the clear takeaway from last week’s economic data dump. Consumer spending has flatlined, construction and manufacturing are contracting, and employment is set to fall. And with inflation on the rise, it is tough for the Fed to come to the rescue. Unemployment remains low, but that’s only because labor force growth has gone sideways. The foreign-born workforce is shrinking, and labor force participation is declining. Telling is the economy-wide hiring freeze, particularly for recent graduates, and the decline in hours worked. It’s no mystery why the economy is struggling; blame increasing U.S. tariffs and highly restrictive immigration policy. The tariffs are cutting increasingly deeply into the profits of American companies and the purchasing power of American households. Fewer immigrant workers means a smaller economy. Any notion that the economic data misrepresents the reality of how the economy is performing is way off base. There are revisions to the data, even big revisions, but they universally say the economy is doing worse. That’s because it is. BTW, the DOGE cuts are a key factor in the revisions—not because BLS has cut staff, although that can’t help, but because the government often reports payrolls to BLS late. It didn’t matter when government employment was stable, but now that it’s declining, the cuts are picked up in the revisions.

Trump is panicking because the economic numbers are giving a recession vibe.
From the Chief Economist at Moody's.

Why have elite institutions behaved so cowardly in this moment when they have resources that could be marshalled in their defense?

Is it because they're filled with prestige-seeking people who devoted their lives to rising to the top and cannot fathom losing their wealth, power, and privilege?

No kidding. We had groundhogs set up shop under the shed. And then the skunks moved in. It was... an ordeal

Looks like a groundhog. But be careful! Skunks like to take over groundhog dens.

The Phillie Phanatic gets caught in a ColdPlay Kiss Cam moment.

It instead ties self-interest and career progression in all three branches (yes even the courts) to public opinion and party fortunes. This is more democratic. But it also destroys what Madison saw as the central institutional design features protecting the republic from a return to monarchy.

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" Madison wrote in the Federalist 51. But the ambition of political elites in the current system - the system transformed over two plus centuries, not the one created by the Framers, does not produce much inter-branch jealousy and conflict.

Direct election of senators came in with 17th amnd b/c demand for input on the Senate was destroying state legislative elections and driving state politics. Most states were happy to give up power over the Senate for more independence from national politics.

Generations of Americans found the original system too anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian. The Electoral College never worked as intended and now exists only as a residual rump institution.

Elites found it impossible to change policy without better mechanisms for collective action so they developed political parties.

We often wonder why the system of separated powers established by the Constitution doesn't appear to work in the Trump era. But we need to remember that the US system we experience is not the system set up in the Constitution or defended in the Federalist Papers.

🐅 While the main focus of tigris is getting data in your hands, it also includes utility functions to solve common thematic mapping problems.

Try out `erase_water()` to auto-remove water areas from Census shapes, and `shift_geometry()` to re-position AK/HI/PR!

The newspaper that told the truth about Watergate and the Pentagon Papers will now “communicate with optimism about this country” in its time of rising fascism

Can't wait to read this!

Three big takeaways from that “One Big Beautiful Bill” Republican tactics seem likely to weaken the Senate – and make fiscal crisis more likely.

Must read from @sarahbinder.bsky.social on the implications of Republicans nuclear event to pass the big bill. They stripped a major guardrail in reconciliation, which has implications for appropriations and future fiscal decisions. goodauthority.substack.com/p/three-big-...

They’ve destroyed American medical research, the American education system, the American university research system, and the aid system that protected millions of lives, and they’ve given our anti-immigrant masked paramilitary police force a budget the size of a nation

When backsliding a country with a long democratic tradition into authoritarianism, the move is to shower populist supporters with benefits as cover for consolidating power, screwing over the public only after you have it.

It sucks that we got fascists. But at least we didn't get smarter ones.

Descartes gave us all the tools we need to survive in an era of misinformation. Simply begin with the understanding that you are real but everything else is fairly likely to be the cruel games of a demon sent to torment you specifically.

They'll never take any responsibility though, all these NIMBY narcissists. They all think that their town is its own special little bubble and people should just go live Somewhere Else. All the problems in New Jersey are caused by Somebody Else.

Newsom and Legislature tangle with construction unions over minimum wage California lawmakers are weighing a provision in the budget that would allow developers to pay a lower wage for some construction.

For those who don't understand the California Building Trades, they are a construction union whose primary position on housing is that it is better that California builds less and more expensive housing if their members can earn a higher wage per hour on these projects. Everyone loses except them!

I'm in person at House Appropriations Committee's markup of the FY 26 Legislative branch appropriations bill. The legislation makes a 50% cut to Congress's watchdog, the GAO, as well as prevents it from fulfilling statutory duties on impoundment. It also cuts the Library by 10%.

It's gonna be lit

Tariffs.
Stock market down.
Medicaid slashed
Secret police throwing anyone who looks Latino in unmarked vans.
National guard and marines deployed in LA.
No end to the wars in Gaza or Ukraine
Bombing Iran

This is the worst first six months of any presidential term in my lifetime.

the destruction of chattel slavery is one of the great accomplishments in our nation's history and the reason conservatives hate celebrating it is because doing so legitimizes the black counter-narrative of the united states

Republicans Add New Barriers to Oklahoma's Dizzyingly Fast Process for Citizen Initiatives - Bolts A new Oklahoma law adds to a string of GOP-run states that have undercut direct democracy by piling on onerous new regulations and raising the threshold for signatures.

NEW: Oklahoma Republicans have been frustrated at a bunch of citizen initiatives—to expand Medicaid, hike the minimum wage, & more.

And they just passed a wide-ranging law that cracks down on direct democracy, and will make it a lot tougher to qualify measures going forward.

I wrote about it all: