Schooling in Socialist America
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Illinois and the MTA
August 25, 2020
The Municipal Lending Facility has accepted two applications: the State of Illinois and New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. I’ve been examining...
The Green MLF Strategy
August 20, 2020
The MLF strategy calls for urban and rural school districts to apply for the Federal Reserve’s Municipal Liquidity Facility loans. Poor districts should take...
Organizing the MLF Strategy
August 12, 2020
This is Part 4 of a series on school funding in the covid crisis. Part 1 is an overview of a policy proposal for the School District of Philadelphia to take...
Are School Districts Eligible Issuers for the MLF?
August 8, 2020
Oh boy.After a conversation with a policy analyst, a super important point came up that I’d completely missed: can a school district even be eligible to...
An MLF Loan for a School District: The Details
August 6, 2020
On Monday I laid out a policy proposal for school funding in the covid crisis. School districts, urban and rural, should apply to the MLF for loans. In...
School Funding in the Covid Crisis
August 3, 2020
[I’ll be discussing these ideas at an upcoming event if you’re interested in joining!]Things are bad. Really bad. It’s truly a crisis in the sense that this...
New directions: school finance
July 28, 2020
When the pandemic started my partner was eight months pregnant. I needed something to distract myself from the anxiety of having a child in a crisis. I’d...
Is there a train-wreck coming?
June 29, 2020
Scared there's a train wreck coming. I think society's basically got two parts: a state and an economy. They're inter-related. The economy is how we make our...
On the fireworks
June 24, 2020
Every night, or even in the afternoon and mid-day, we hear explosions. The explosions are sometimes a singular big boom. Other times there are multiple booms...
Big picture update
June 18, 2020
I haven’t done a finance update in a bit, but I got a chance to listen to my favorite econ podcast while changing Thisbe — have to stand and leave her on the...
Two rallies
June 10, 2020
Thinking about the word 'rally' this week. On the one hand, there have been historic marches and rallies (and successful direct actions) on police brutality...
Two demands in real estate
May 25, 2020
A communist graffiti artist is on an amazing rampage in our neighborhood. Here’s a building project happening around the corner from us that I took on a...
The US is not a failed state
May 11, 2020
Apologies for the lateness of this post. My partner gave birth last Thursday to a tiny human named Thisbe Gilbert Ronen-Backer, and I’ve been accordingly...
Finance-speak and oppression
May 5, 2020
Something else about the business news, finance, market discourses I've been thinking about. This discourse is clearly a ruling class discourse. But what...
The threat of bankruptcy
May 1, 2020
Happy May 1. What a time to celebrate international workers’ day. In honor of the day, I figured I’d continue a wonky project focusing on some numbers for...
Data confusion
April 29, 2020
Once again I have to recommend Econoday Unplugged for straight talk when it comes to the economy. It’s just a soft-spoken American guy who stutters a bit and...
Schools are not a loan
April 26, 2020
On April 23rd, the School District of Philadelphia announced that there will be a $1 billion shortfall in its budget over the next five years due to the...
Illyrian economics
April 24, 2020
Things are heating up. I got to the part in Joanna Bockman’s Markets in the Name of Socialism where she describes the basic outline of Yugoslavia’s socialist...
My sweet inflatable you
April 22, 2020
One of the bigger ‘destabilizing’ forces in economy is when prices of everything goes up or down. If the price of stuff goes up (inflates), then money...
Towards a socialist finance, part 2
April 20, 2020
In trying to craft some socialist concepts of finance, I’ve been reading about the history and theory of socialist economics in the 20th century. Right now...
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