Sam Thorpe
LightNews LightNews
banner
samthorpe.bsky.social
Sam Thorpe
@samthorpe.bsky.social
4.4K followers 550 following 350 posts
Researching the economics of inequality, tax, capital flows, and industrial policy. Formerly federal fiscal policy @ Brookings; research + organizing @ UChicago.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
beaubaumann.bsky.social
1/x Really delighted to say that my coauthored piece with @jedshug.bsky.social, “Quasi-Judicial: A History and Tradition” just landed with the Columbia Law Review. We really appreciate the editors’ hard work! This is a piece that retells the story of American admin law and Humphrey’s Executor.
February 9, 2026 at 2:54 PM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
nvondarza.bsky.social
This was to be expected - after cutting support to pro-democracy civil society last year, the US state is now looking to actively support far-right affiliated think tanks and charities in Europe.
financialtimes.com Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 4d
Senior state department official Sarah Rogers travelled to European cities in December and has spoken to key figures in Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party about deploying grants to spread ‘American values’. ft.trib.al/Kx8ta8a
February 6, 2026 at 7:19 AM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
jakemgrumbach.bsky.social
We have a Boston Review Forum out today on the Democratic Party in a time of authoritarianism

www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...
Senator Chuck Schumer conducts a news conference in the U.S. Capitol in May 2025. Image: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images FORUM How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism Moderation used to help Democrats win, but its advantages now have been greatly exaggerated. Adam Bonica, Jake Grumbach With responses from → Cori Bush, Amanda Litman, Matthew Yglesias, G. Elliott Morris, Julia Serano, Eric Rauchway, Suzanne Mettler & Trevor E. Brown, Thomas Ferguson, Timothy Shenk, Jared Abbott & Milan Loewer, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Lily Geismer, Danielle Wiggins, William A. Galston, and Henry Burke
February 3, 2026 at 3:50 PM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
brendanvduke.bsky.social
A @budgetmodel.bsky.social analysis of the megabill's combination of tax cuts, cuts to programs, and higher deficits will make the bottom 80 percent of kids born today worse off in the long run.
Bar chart showing lifetime cost of the Republican megabill by income quintile for those born in 2025, including effects of higher federal debt. Four red bars show losses: Bottom 20% loses $17,200, second quintile loses $9,600, middle quintile loses $9,800, fourth quintile loses $4,300. One yellow bar shows the top 20% gains $2,600. Title states "Only households with the highest incomes will gain" and "Households with the lowest incomes lose the most." Source: Penn-Wharton Budget Model, July 8, 2025. Chart by Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
February 3, 2026 at 2:56 PM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
brendanvduke.bsky.social
New 25-page @centeronbudget.bsky.social paper from me summarizing the distributional, fiscal, and economic effects of One Big Beautiful Bill's tax cuts and cuts to health care, food assistance, student loans, and climate investments. 🧵

www.cbpp.org/research/fed...
Republican Megabill Trades Essential Support to Low-Income People for Skewed Tax Cuts
The sprawling megabill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Trump in July 2025 will redistribute trillions of dollars upward over the next decade, making it harder for ...
www.cbpp.org
February 3, 2026 at 2:52 PM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
annastansbury.bsky.social
📢now forthcoming in ECMA!

The Class Gap in Career Progression: Evidence from US Academia

Class is rarely a focus of research or DEI in elite US occupations.

Evidence suggests it should be: we find a large class gap in at least one occupation - tenure-track academia...🧵
January 27, 2026 at 10:34 PM
samthorpe.bsky.social
Thinking a lot about this excerpt from Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down. It feels like for most of American history - and likely still today - we've lived in a society where force alternates with forbearance, and nonviolence is therefore an incredibly effective tactic for winning change.
January 25, 2026 at 3:30 PM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
bbkogan.bsky.social
Lifting this up again. A huge problem now is that there’s a giant slush fund for ICE & CBP separate from annual funding — that Trump can continue to use even during a shutdown.

Ds *must* make rescinding those pots of money the price of any future funding deals, as Rs did w/ IRS money from the IRA.
bbkogan.bsky.social Bobby Kogan @bbkogan.bsky.social · 18d
In 2022 we gave the IRS $80 bn. When Rs took the House they made rescinding that $$ the price of funding the govt. In each funding bill enacted since, large chunks of that were pared back

Ds should do that for the ICE money from OBBBA. Paring back that $$ must be a prerequisite for funding the govt
January 25, 2026 at 1:34 AM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
schumer.senate.gov
Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.
January 24, 2026 at 11:53 PM
samthorpe.bsky.social
The full video of this shooting is one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever seen. ICE just murdered another American in cold blood. I’m terrified to think about what’s going to happen to our country if this isn’t stopped.
January 24, 2026 at 9:08 PM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
benbraun.bsky.social
Financial war in response to trade war and territorial threats? More and more people appear to be calling for it. So I updated my post on U.S. Treasuries holdings—now with the latest data.
benjaminbraun.org/posts/treasu...
January 19, 2026 at 6:40 PM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
samthorpe.bsky.social
Loved this - thank you for sharing. Excerpt attached was especially compelling. I think one of the biggest issues in academic economics is exactly this class of problems: so many of the most important insights are unquantifiable and therefore ignored. It's a disservice to the profession + the world!
January 19, 2026 at 11:31 AM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
economeager.bsky.social
if i could make you read ONE (1) single post to improve your understanding of the challenges of social science in general it would be this one from @markfabian.bsky.social about wellbeing science specifically

profmarkfabian.substack.com/p/airing-my-...
Airing my grievances with wellbeing science
We have a streetlight problem
profmarkfabian.substack.com
January 19, 2026 at 9:35 AM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
thorberger.bsky.social
Everyone talks about the "credibility revolution", but I think one of the most valuable shifts in econ over the last decade has been the rise of rigorous descriptive historical work like this in top journals:
January 18, 2026 at 11:45 AM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
jakemgrumbach.bsky.social
New QJE for the minimum wage literature uses IRS data to study effects on small and medium size businesses. The effects seem…very good

academic.oup.com/qje/article/...
Who's Afraid of the Minimum Wage? Measuring the Impacts on Independent Businesses Using Matched U.S. Tax Returns* Nirupama L Rao, Max Risch The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 141, Issue 1, February 2026, Pages 373-427, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaf053 Published: 10 December 2025 Article history V PDF • Split View 66 Cite P Permissions < Share V Abstract A common concern surrounding minimum wage policies is their impact on independent businesses, which are often feared to be less able to bear or pass on cost increases. We examine how these typically small and medium-size firms accommodate minimum wage increases along product and labor market margins using a matched owner-firm-worker panel data set drawn from the universe of U.S. tax records over a 10-year period, and using state minimum wage changes as identifying variation. We find that on average, firms in highly exposed industries do not substantially reduce employment-they do not lay off workers but moderately reduce part-time hiring. Instead, these firms are able to fully finance the new labor costs with new revenues, leaving average owner profits unchanged. Higher wage floors, however, forestall entry, particularly for less productive firms, reducing the number of independent firms operating in these industries by roughly 2%. Yet these industries do not shrink; instead, incumbent responses and strong positive selection among entrants reshape industries that rely heavily on low-wage workers, yielding fewer but more productive firms after the cost shock. We also take a worker-level perspective to examine how potentially vulnerable individuals are affected by minimum wage increases. Using panels of low-earning and young workers, we find that their average earnings rise substantially with the minimum wage, while they are no less likely to be employed. Worker transitions indicate that minimum wage increases boost retention and that worker reallocation from independent firms toward corporations buffers dis…
January 17, 2026 at 1:53 AM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
ositanwanevu.com
I wrote about Renee Good, Venezuela, Greenland, and what it means to be a human being. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
America, JD Vance tells us, is merely a nation like many others ⁠– a “homeland”, he said upon accepting his nomination to the vice-presidency, for “people with a shared history and a common future”. That’s a vision of American identity that would have described bands of cavepeople in skins just as well or better. Stephen Miller’s proleptic defense of seizing Greenland last week suggests the Trumpists themselves know this. “We live in a world, in the real world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he declared. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Miller’s laws are the laws of animals. It is true, obviously, that high ideals have long been deployed to obscure or justify predation, here and elsewhere. But Miller’s stance and the stance of the administration is that there aren’t, actually, any high ideals worth pursuing or even pretending to – that the human being, in itself, is nothing so much ⁠and that we are, fundamentally and forever, primitives. Against the demands and best aspirations of civilization – western or any kind – they tell us the human being is a creature that yearns for nothing more than blood and soil, which is, of course, just mud. The lust for mud has taken up many guises in our history and has been many given names of late – neo-reaction, post-liberalism, fascism. But the name familiar to most is evil. It was evil – the standpoint that only might matters, that human morality, and our sense of reality itself, must yield to the turfism of the primates with the biggest clubs – that ginned up the propaganda that provoked an act of terrorism against our legislature and the policemen defending it five years ago. It is evil that undergirds pronouncements from the same voices responsible for that attack, in defense of the man who shot Renee Nicole Good, that those who disobey the commands of law enforcement, however unsound or unjust, deserve summary execution – that implies, as Fox’s Jesse Watters and others have, that Good’s killing was of trivial significance because she was a lesbian “with pronouns in her bio”. It is evil that sends innocent men to foreign gulags, evil that condemns hundreds of thousands of destitute people abroad to death without a moment’s discussion or debate about what the country they had depended on might owe them, or the furnishing of alternative arrangements for their wellbeing. The gutting of USAID remains this administration’s worst and least surprising offense against the human conscience – a president who rejects the idea that we might have obligations to all within our society can’t be expected to wonder or worry about whether we have obligations to those outside of it. This is also why, after all the noise and nonsense about the need to depose the Maduro regime, the Venezuelan people are now being told that regime will be left in mostly in place for as long as it takes to secure and extract the country’s resources on our terms – that Venezuela will not see democracy unless and until it is profitable for the United States. Democracy has always been a useless abstraction to those who deny we have basic human entitlements – for those who believe, instead, that the idea of human liberty is a luxury for those wealthy and powerful enough to consider themselves our betters rather than the birthright of all. As many who’ve taken to the streets in protest have noted, the Trump administration’s assaults on liberty here at home are the kinds of abuses that spurred the revolution we will commemorate this year. But no grand revolution is in the offing this time around. The only just and plausible recourse for our situation is politics – understood not merely as the contest to win any given set of elections but as the broader fight to forge a republic that honors and strengthens our humanity. The American project must and will succeed. Its enemies stand for too little. Our lives are worth too much.
January 14, 2026 at 3:26 PM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
bencasselman.bsky.social
I get this question a lot (not always in such polite language), so worth addressing directly. (Short thread)
dekgreen.bsky.social Doug King in San Jose @dekgreen.bsky.social · 27d
Sincere, non-rhetorical question: what agency is the source of these numbers? And how fully do you trust them?
January 13, 2026 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
jenniferlsullivan.bsky.social
The House passed a measure today to extend the Premium Tax Credit enhancements for three years. The bipartisan vote shows there’s strong support for immediate action to make millions of people’s health care more affordable. All eyes are now on the Senate. x.com/JakeSherman/...
January 8, 2026 at 10:45 PM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
robertsaunders.bsky.social
"we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world". (Stephen Miller, White House deputy Chief of Staff).

This is what that world looks like.

The history of freedom is the struggle to constrain power by law
chrisjustice01.bsky.social Chris⚖️Justice @chrisjustice01.bsky.social · Jan 7
👉 ICE Abusing Protesters After Murdering Driver 1/7/26
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnfi...
January 8, 2026 at 9:09 AM
samthorpe.bsky.social
Absolutely baffling that mainstream coverage of the Paramount bid for WBD barely alludes to its political dimension. If it goes through, right-wing billionaires will wholly own FOX, CBS, and CNN. This, not antitrust claims, is the reason that Paramount is likely to succeed.
December 8, 2025 at 11:20 PM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
justinbloesch.bsky.social
It still seems relevant to compare within, say, 25-34. The ratio of college unemployment to high school unemployment is definitely higher than it has been previously.
December 1, 2025 at 8:29 PM
Reposted by Sam Thorpe
dynarski.bsky.social
A senior academic using mentoring as leverage to obtain sex is a contemptible abuser of power.
dynarski.bsky.social Prof Dynarski @dynarski.bsky.social · Nov 17
Summers conferred with Epstein frequently about how to extract sexual favors from a Harvard econ grad (AB '04, PhD '09)

The grad is from China

Epstein and Summers referred to her by the codename "Peril"

Racism and sexual exploitation in one efficient package

bit.ly/3LHpin8
As Summers Sought Clandestine Relationship With Woman He Called a Mentee, Epstein Was His ‘Wing Man’ | News | The Harvard Crimson
When former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers was pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman he described as a mentee, he turned to a longtime associate for guidance: convicted sex offender Jef...
bit.ly
November 17, 2025 at 8:07 AM
samthorpe.bsky.social
R:e the 'AI bubble,' this analysis of what drove the 1929 bubble from White (1990) feels rather familiar. The difficulty of assessing fundamentals in novel industries + a massive expansion of retail investors + an expansion in credit availability are all seen as providing fuel to the fire.
November 17, 2025 at 12:46 AM
samthorpe.bsky.social
Another fantastic new stylized fact from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com - stable or declining NEET rates in many developed economies have been driven by a decline in parenting. The share neither studying, in work, looking for work, *or parenting* has marched up steadily since 2000. www.ft.com/content/bd61...
November 14, 2025 at 2:31 PM