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David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

Oh this bit is funnier.
www.politico.eu/article/nato...

Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin, who is plugged into the new Labour government’s top tier, wrote in the Observer that Morgan McSweeney, the mastermind behind Labour’s election win, is handing out a paper titled “The Death of Deliverism” to party officials as they already look toward the 2029 election.

November 18, 2025 at 10:41 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

CMS received hundreds of thousands of complaints from people enrolled in ACA plans *without their knowledge.* It's an indictment of red-state consumer protection failures, but also the jury-rigging of a universal health care system through private companies. prospect.org/2025/11/18/o...

Democrats have all but ignored stories like the Fiorella Insurance tale, because right-wing think tanks have amplified them to justify ending the subsidies in mendacious screeds like this City Journal essay, which absurdly contends that scamming people into high-deductible Obamacare plans has “dwarfed prior opportunities for fraud.” Uh, no: Medicare and its evil neoliberal doppelganger Medicare Advantage decisively dwarf even the artificially inflated, grift-fortified post-2021 Obamacare subsidies by a factor of eight. And practically since the passage of the updated False Claims Act in 1986, Republicans not named “Chuck Grassley” have labored to legally institutionalize that fraud in our health care system, starting with Bill Barr’s 1988 memo arguing that rewarding whistleblowers who reveal fraud against taxpayers defies the Constitution, accelerating with Rick Scott’s political career, and manifesting most recently in the lengthy list of Florida Medicare fraudsters, from Miami Beach elder abuse kingpin-turned-domestic abuser Philip Esformes to Miami “patient recruiter” Lawrence Duran, who have been granted some form of clemency by President Trump himself.

But the fact is, for the majority of Democrats who support Medicare for All, and who suspected back in 2009 that just as “blanketing a bunch of big companies in government cash” isn’t a particularly logical way to build affordable housing, nor was it a sensible (or moral) way to create affordable health care. As serious Dems ponder the task of rebuilding the institutions Trump fed into the woodchipper, the harrowing subsidy cliff, and the orgy of grift that preceded it, should serve to remind them that the legacy of Obamacare is little more than an object lesson in how not to do it.

November 18, 2025 at 2:48 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

WaPo confirms our scoop about Summers and CAP's Project 2029 from Friday, but doesn't say "The American Prospect first reported this," as usual.
What they don't say is the housing paper CAP released today was supposed to have Summers' name on it.
www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

The housing paper is the first in a series of proposals that CAP hopes will become a playbook if Democrats win the White House. Bernstein and Lawrence H. Summers, who served in senior roles in the Clinton and Obama administrations, were set to lead the economic component of the project. Democratic operatives are calling it “Project 2029,” a play on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term. (Other liberal operatives are using the same title for similar projects.)

The formal launch of that working group is on hold, though.

Summers’s involvement is drawing scrutiny, as well, after records from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate revealed he was in regular contact with the disgraced financier.

In a statement Friday, a CAP spokesperson said, “Summers is a non-resident, uncompensated fellow at CAP. We are reviewing this week’s disclosures to determine appropriate next steps.”

November 17, 2025 at 3:37 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

@prospect.org, September: crypto ATMs are just predatory terminals to swindle people
@nytimes.com, November: crypto ATMs are just predatory terminals to swindle people
Read @prospect.org, get the news first.

Crypto Bank Machine Operators Swindle Seniors, The American Prospect, Sept. 11, 2025

How Fraudsters Use Cryptocurrency A.T.M.s to Target Victims, NYT, November 16, 2025

November 17, 2025 at 7:23 AM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

The other bit I love here: Kevin Hassett insisting that tariffs didn't increase coffee and fruit prices, there was also weather and disease.
Yes, true, but those are both a function of a warming planet, which Hassett's boss thinks is a hoax!

What they're saying: "The prices for those goods weren't necessarily going up just because of tariffs," National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett said on ABC's "This Week."

Hassett, like other administration officials in recent days, pointed to a range of external factors — including weather and disease — driving most of the price increases for things like beef, coffee and cocoa.
After removing duties, "the prices will go down, of course," Hassett said.

November 17, 2025 at 12:03 AM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

After getting battered on beef prices and battered by ranchers after he tried to increase imports, Trump demanded an antitrust investigation into the meatpacker middlemen. This happened right after his DOJ *closed an investigation* into meatpackers, lmao

Bloomberg headline: DOJ Closed Meat Probe Just Before Trump's Investigation Demand

November 15, 2025 at 2:12 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

We have an all SNAP day today: stories about the food assistance program, how it was damaged in the shutdown, and where it goes from here. Here's the lineup at prospect.org:

November 14, 2025 at 2:33 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

oh
www.nber.org/papers/w33576

Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities.

The standard view of housing markets holds that differences in the flexibility of local housing supply—shaped by factors like geography and regulation—explain differences in how house price and quantity growth respond to rising demand across U.S. cities. However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth predicts the same growth in house prices, housing quantity, and population regardless of a city’s estimated housing supply elasticity. We find the same results when we examine rents, expand the sample to 1980 to 2020, use different elasticity measures, use per capita income or population growth instead of total income growth, and when exploiting a variety of plausibly exogenous variation in local housing demand. Using a general demand-and-supply framework, we show that these results imply that estimated housing supply constraints are unimportant in explaining differences in rising house prices among U.S. cities. Our conclusions challenge the prevailing view of local housing and labor markets and suggest that relaxing regulatory housing supply constraints may not materially affect housing affordability.

November 13, 2025 at 5:44 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

This will not be the last one of these

Revolving Door Project Calls On OpenAI, Harvard, and Other Organizations To Cut Ties With Larry Summers.

The call comes in light of recently released email correspondence between Summers and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, showing the close relationship the two shared long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction.

November 13, 2025 at 2:35 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

The best Epstein email is where he's forwarding around No Labels third-party presidential nonsense

Epstein forwards some third party craziness #1

Epstein forwards third-party No Labels BS #2

November 12, 2025 at 10:51 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

Epstein doc, randomly chosen: "Stephen Hawking, photographed in March 2006 aboard an Atlantis submarine that was custom-fitted by Epstein to accommodate his wheelchair."

Stephen Hawking, photographed
in March 2006 aboard an Atlantis
submarine that was custom-fitted
by Epstein to accommodate his
wheelchair. Hawking was attending
•.4 the conference "Confronting Gravity.
"a workshop to explore fundamental
questions in physics and cosmoloo"
sponsored by the J. EpSteiti VI
Foundation and the Center for
Education and Research in Costnolop
and Astrophysics (CERCA) at Case
Western Reserve University,

November 12, 2025 at 10:41 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

So CFPB can't fire anyone, yet claims it can't get any money, and that Congress set up a system where you can only protect consumers when the Fed is profitable.
The court's going to eviscerate this. prospect.org/2025/11/12/r...

That puts Vought’s team in a tricky situation. They cannot fire any CFPB staff, yet they claim they will run out of money in early 2026. Even if they could take money from the Fed, the halving of the statutory cap means that the agency can’t fund the current staff levels. Yet it can’t fire anyone either.

Attorneys and former CFPB employees suggest that the court that’s hearing the case is unlikely to buy the argument that a Fed that fails to turn a profit cannot fund CFPB, and that they read the Vought/OLC effort as an attempt to get around the injunction on firing staff that is currently in place. In response, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents CFPB staffers, could file a motion to force CFPB to request funds from the Fed as emergency relief.

November 12, 2025 at 2:45 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

We asked every Senate Democrat if they would bring such a motion or support it if someone else brought the motion. None of them responded.
But they have the power to do it.
prospect.org/2025/11/11/o...

Such a motion would probably prompt Schumer to leave before it came to a vote, Schuman added. “If you had a bunch of members who signed on to something like this, you’d probably see people step aside rather than be kicked out.”

The Prospect asked every senator, except for those who negotiated and voted for the continuing resolution, if they would bring a motion to remove Schumer or support one brought by a colleague. None responded. The silence reflects what Schuman calls a “very clubby” body of electeds; he noted that no one has ever tried to use caucus rules to oust a leader.

November 11, 2025 at 5:38 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

Going all shutdown on our homepage right now at prospect.org. Understand what's happening, check it out!

November 10, 2025 at 6:03 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

When I'm right, I'm right. From October 6:
prospect.org/2025/10/06/t...

Now that Democrats have gone down the health care path, an endgame is not hard to predict. Republicans have expressed themselves open to a “conversation” about health care, and that might evolve into an “assurance” of negotiations, but only if government funding is passed on a short-term basis to give space for those negotiations. And you can see enough Democrats deciding that this assurance is something real to take that deal. Already, three senators who caucus with Democrats—John Fetterman (D-PA), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), and Angus King (I-ME)—have supported a continuing resolution to fund the government, and Republicans only need at most five more.

November 10, 2025 at 3:22 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

Rule by deal=ad hoc agreements with domestic companies & foreign nations that benefit the president & businesses he favors. Each deal is individually negotiated, unpredictable, & unconnected. They often fall apart. The only benefit is bringing powerful men to heel. prospect.org/2025/11/10/t...

Rule by deal picks winners and losers—the exact fear that so many free-market voices wielded incorrectly at the Biden administration. In all of these deals, there is no industry-wide analysis, credit facility available to all companies in a sector, or equitable offering of investment capital. It’s also not clear what legal authority they are relying on to make direct investments. This selective approach risks trapping the government in a cycle of doubling down, investing more public money to prop up struggling, politically favored companies rather than letting them fail. Promising firms in the same sector may lose access to private funding, as investors gravitate toward firms with governmental support.

WHILE RULE BY DEAL MAY BE CHAOTIC, it is effective in consolidating political power in the office of the presidency. In no domain is this more apparent than in the response of corporate leaders in the second Trump administration. The transformation from Trump’s first term is dramatic. In August 2017, after a white supremacist ran a car through a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a 32-year-old woman, Trump declared that there were “very fine people on both sides.” Immediately, the CEOs of Merck, Intel, and Under Armour resigned from Trump’s manufacturing council. Dozens of other CEOs followed—including Disney’s Bob Iger and Tesla’s Elon Musk—in what became a mass exodus from White House advisory positions; Gary Cohn, the chair of the National Economic Council, left as well. In the wake of the January 6th, 2021, insurrection attempt, the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers quickly condemned the administration, a rare moment of elite business leaders breaking from conservatives.

November 10, 2025 at 2:46 PM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

Surprisingly Sen. Warner (D-VA) is a no, splitting with Kaine after the Cave Caucus dangled the RIF prohibition.

November 10, 2025 at 1:29 AM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

At least the widows of the dead Democratic Reps. will get their cash. (priorities, sigh)

November 10, 2025 at 12:04 AM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

The only exception to that is with respect to reductions in force (RIFs). The bill appears to both roll back RIFs announced during the shutdown and prevent any further RIFs between now and Jan 30.

November 10, 2025 at 12:00 AM

David Dayen

@ddayen.bsky.social

One thing from our piece on Saturday: Sen. Shaheen is leading the Senate cave caucus. She's on the appropriations committee and wants whatever little goodies she got in her appropriations bill passed into law. As we wrote:
prospect.org/2025/11/08/w...