celebrities
When Hollywood takes Washington. Keep tabs on the celebrities influencing politics with their activism, opinions, campaign endorsements and more.
Do Not Replace the Welfare State With a Stay-Home Salary. AI-Generated.
The existing welfare system deserves major reform. It can spend enormous amounts around low-income families while leaving those families with very little cash, little flexibility, little ability to save, and strong incentives to remain below benefit thresholds. Child-care subsidies can exceed the wages a parent earns by leaving the home. Food assistance, housing subsidies, refundable tax credits, cash benefits, caregiving authorizations, and administrative overhead can push the government's total expenditure on a household far above the household's private earnings. Those contradictions are real. The current system can absolutely become more expensive than the problems it is attempting to solve. The answer, however, should not be to convert most of that expenditure into a large permanent cash payment that makes withdrawal from market production financially attractive.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast2 months ago in The Swamp
The Buyout Trap. AI-Generated.
Why Cashing Out a Family's Safety Net Solves the Wrong Problem — and What to Do Instead The Family Support Buyout is seductive precisely because it's built on a true observation: government spends enormous, fragmented sums on poor families while those families remain cash-poor and administratively exhausted. That diagnosis is correct. The prescribed cure — discount the package, hand the family cash, and let them walk away from the underlying programs — is where the argument quietly stops being about efficiency and starts creating a new set of problems, several of which are worse than the ones it claims to solve. A reform can be right about the disease and wrong about the treatment. This is that case.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast2 months ago in The Swamp
The Case Against Converting Support Into Unconditional Cash. AI-Generated.
The strongest case for reforming the current system begins with an accurate diagnosis of its failures and ends with a refusal to replace those failures with a more durable form of dependence. The present architecture spends large sums around low-income families while leaving many of those families cash-poor, time-constrained, and trapped by benefit cliffs. That diagnosis is correct. The proposed remedy—converting a discounted share of existing ordinary non-medical expenditures into direct, largely unconditional family payments—solves the immediate administrative and cash-margin problems while creating stronger long-term incentives against work, production, and eventual exit from public support. A system that already struggles to maintain a sufficient productive base cannot afford a reform whose primary effect is to make non-work more stable and more attractive for the households that already generate the highest public costs.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast2 months ago in The Swamp
The Case For Direct Family Payments. AI-Generated.
The strongest fiscal and family policy available to governments that already spend large sums supporting households with children is to convert a discounted share of that spending into direct, controllable cash. When the state is already prepared to expend tens of thousands of dollars per year on a given family through child-care subsidies, nutrition programs, housing assistance, refundable credits, disability-related caregiving authorizations, and the administrative machinery that operates them, offering the family sixty to seventy-five percent of that total as unrestricted income while retaining the remainder as taxpayer savings produces three simultaneous results: lower overall public expenditure, greater household autonomy, and a reduction in the bureaucratic overhead required to police multiple restricted channels. The arrangement is especially coherent for households that have already demonstrated limited earning capacity and high need—families with young children, multiple children, or children whose care demands exceed ordinary parental obligations.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast2 months ago in The Swamp
Stop Spending More to Keep Families Poor. AI-Generated.
American social policy contains a contradiction that becomes hard to defend once the full ledger is placed on the table. Government can spend tens of thousands of dollars a year supporting a low-income family through child-care subsidies, food programs, housing assistance, cash aid, refundable tax credits, disability-related caregiving authorizations, and the case-management systems that administer all of it — while the family itself continues living with almost no financial margin. The household is officially poor, dependent on half a dozen agencies, unable to save, and one unexpected bill away from crisis. Meanwhile taxpayers may already be spending enough on that family's behalf to give it a substantially higher standard of living, if even a discounted share of that spending were handed to the family directly.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast2 months ago in The Swamp
The Driving Force Behind Our Votes In The Ballot Box
The result of the imminent by-election in Clacton , UK, between the right wing Reform Party leader, Nigel Farage , who is now fighting for his political credibility, and a popular man dressed as a bin, Count Binface (who has caught the nation's attention and admiration) should confirm one major thing about how we actually make our political choices.
By Elaine Sihera 3 months ago in The Swamp
Mad dictators
Americans! Where are your laws? Where are you checks and balances ? When I last looked across the great Atlantic, health policy was a matter for state Governments, not federal. The USA is a federation of states, united under a single Constitution, is it not? Or has that changed? The USA is a democracy, yes? Has been for 250 years, has it not? Though we are aware that the understanding of democracy has changed over that time, bringing more and more of the peoples of your great nation under that banner. Not a perfect setup, any more than any other, but getting there, yes?
By Raymond G Taylor3 months ago in The Swamp
The Invisible Hand: How Covert Influence Operates Behind the Public Record
Covert Influence, Visible Perpetrators, and Hidden Causal Responsibility: Introduction: In analyzing high-profile acts such as assassinations, it is crucial to distinguish between what actually happened in reality and what can be publicly demonstrated or proven . Events are independent of evidence; a physical act occurs regardless of whether it is documented, understood, or acknowledged. Public validation is only one pathway to knowledge, not the ultimate source of truth.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast4 months ago in The Swamp
Between Crowns and Chaos
The morning headlines arrived with their usual urgency, but this time they carried a familiar tension—one that has lingered around the British royal family for years. Prince Harry had returned to the United Kingdom, but instead of signaling reconciliation, his visit seemed to reopen old wounds.
By Behind the Curtain4 months ago in The Swamp
What the Border Numbers Actually Show
The argument over whether the true number was 14 million, 16 million, or 20 million points to a larger failure. The government failed to give the public a reliable answer about who came in, who stayed, who was released, who disappeared, who gave false information, who had criminal history, who had foreign ties, who received meaningful vetting, and who could be found and removed later.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast4 months ago in The Swamp
