Jack Landry

This isn't definitive, but my guess would be that surveys have just gotten worse at measuring this, and the trends are ~flat

Funny that this is discussed largely as an aside in a paper about migration responses to Medicaid expansion—pinning down this descriptive fact is arguably more important than the underlying causal question

I don't think declining mobility is a real trend---likely all measurement error in the CPS (which itself shows way lower migration rates than the ACS) carlmcpherson.github.io/files/mcpher...

New analysis from @budgetlab.bsky.social: if you combine the distributional impact of tariffs so far with CBO's new OBBBA distribution, the bottom 80% of households see a decline in income, and the 9th decile is close to neutral. Only the top 10% see a clear net benefit.
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Again, this is a defensible choice but a new one for the CBO (they previously assumed 100% of the cost of Medicaid accrued on recipients) and one that makes OBBB look significantly less bad for low income households

Here's the footnote with the details www.cbo.gov/system/files...

Want to re-up this not that the official CBO distributional analysis is out--they are assuming people who lose Medicaid get uncompensated care that is over half the value of the insurance they lost.

The Value of Medicaid: Interpreting Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment | Journal of Political Economy: Vol 127, No 6 We develop frameworks for welfare analysis of Medicaid and apply them to the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment. Across different approaches, we estimate low-income uninsured adults’ willingness to pa...

And finally the paper they cite for allocating 60% of the cost of Medicaid to providers (I'm assuming it's 60%---they don't give a number but that's the number in the paper) www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Preliminary Analysis of the Distributional Effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act CBO provides a preliminary analysis of the distributional effects of the 2025 reconciliation bill.

Links to distributional analysis
www.cbo.gov/publication/...
Links to CBO previously saying they allocated full cost of Medicaid to beneficiaries
www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
www.cbo.gov/system/files...

Important context here is the CBO is currently being baselessly attacked by the right as biased towards Democrats, while this analytical choice is important to making OBBB look way less bad.

I think this is the first time CBO didn’t allocate the cost of providing Medicaid to Medicaid recipients in its distributional analysis—as late as 2024 their methodology allocated the full cost of Medicaid to beneficiaries.

I think this is a defensible choice but one that makes OBBB look a lot less bad for the poor, given the bulk of the cuts are to Medicaid. If CBO is using the figures in the paper they cite, $480 of the $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid are allocated to higher income groups

In the distributional analysis of OBBB, CBO assumes that a lot of the cost of losing Medicaid is felt by higher-income health care providers who will provide health care for free, not Medicaid recipients themselves

Will be posting a lot more about this more tomorrow, but for now, know that all the new tax cuts in OBBB exclude lower-income families. The typical family with kids needs $36k to get any benefit.

H/t @danielkayhertz.bsky.social for pointing to the new cook county policy.

Even though HACC are trying not to evict people currently getting vouchers by stopping subsidies, forcing people to move to cheaper places will have the same effect.

39% of people issued vouchers do not find a landlord willing to lease to them. So when people are forced to move, there’s a big risk that they will lose their voucher all-together.  www.huduser.gov/portal//port...

Other changes are to virtually stop all rent increases (another thing that will force people to move), and not let a family move into places that cost more than where they currently live, even if the new place is under the new subsidy standard.

Some families might have cheaper units and can keep their “extra” bedroom under the new rules, and others may be allowed to pay above the standard 30% for rent, but some families will certainly be forced to move due to this change.

Under the old rules, a single parent with one kid would get two bedrooms, and two parents with opposite sex teenagers would get three bedrooms.
thehacc.org/app/uploads/...

In my reading, the biggest move is to set payment standards to two people per bedroom. A single parent with one kid now needs to make do with a one bedroom unit, or two parents with opposite sex teenagers will have to make-do with two bedrooms.

Link to new policy here: thehacc.org/app/uploads/...

Cook county housing authority is making big budget cuts because of expected Congressional funding shortfalls. While not explicitly evicting current voucher holders, they are making changes that will force people to move, some of whom won’t be able to find a new place that will accept a voucher.

Love to find these super old CBPP reports when researching something

Nonpartisan Tax Report Withdrawn After G.O.P. Protest (Published 2012) The Congressional Research Service withdrew a report that found no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth after senators raised concerns.

I do feel a bit trepidatious drawing attention to it, as Republicans don’t like to hear their ideas might be wrong www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/b...

Overall really great report. CRS is always a great resource, but this one goes above and beyond with the detailed commentary of empirical papers (plus macro models).

The specific criticisms are not really my area of expertise. However, they make a really compelling an intuitive point that the Chodorow-Reich et al. estimates imply that if TCJA had not passed, investment growth would be negative. That doesn’t seem plausible given consistent growth pre-TCJA

They make a number of criticisms of this study, and find after accounting for all these points, the investment effects would be far weaker.

I want to highlight its discussion of one paper that got a lot of attention, which found TCJA did cause a substantial increase in investment and a modest increase in wages (NYT called it “the most rigorous and detailed yet”). www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/u...

It has a really good and extremely detailed critical discussion of all the big papers assessing TCJA. Makes me wish this kind of thing was 100X more common