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Hey everyone, welcome back to the Jacobin Show. I'm Jen Pan. We of course have a great show for you today, but before we get to that, I do want to mention that although it is not quite Mayday yet, happy Mayday in advance, and a reminder that on Mayday you can get a digital subscription to Jacobin for a dollar and a print subscription for $10, so definitely keep your eye out for that. Again, that will be coming up on Mayday. On today's show, I am very excited to be talking

to American Prospect Editor, David Dan. You may have been following his coverage over there. I'll be talking to him about why the supply chain is so broken. What basically got us to this point, how decades of pro corporate policies set us up for this failure. And I also want to shout out that David has a recent piece in the prospect that looks at a very little known trade deal that's kind of idling in the house in the Senate right now. So stay tuned for that conversation. I had a great time talking to him.

And like I said, he really gets into the details of a bill that I think is pretty under reported. Now for my own comments, I will be taking a look at some new polling that is out that shows that Biden now has lower approval ratings with Latinos than with any other racial or ethnic group. I'm going to be looking into some of the reasons for why that is and countering some, I think myths about why that is. So again, that's coming up.

But first to kick off, I am talking to one of our favorites, repeat guest Matt Brunig. He's just written a piece about some of the internal dysfunction in the DC policy world and how this all leads to just broken and shitty policies being passed. So let's get to it.

All right. So we are now joined by Matt Brunig. He is, of course, the founder and president of the People's Policy Project. Matt, good to see you.

Thanks for having me back.

So you have written a pretty interesting article for People's Policy Project about kind of how the policy sausage gets made in DC and the ways in which it is in fact super dysfunctional.

This all kind of goes back to last year. You were very openly critical of certain aspects of the childcare plan that Democrats were trying to include in Build Back Better.

Specifically, I remember you pointed out that the way that the childcare subsidies were structured would sort of inadvertently end up raising costs for certain families right above the kind of threshold cutoff.

And obviously, you know, Build Back Better is in limbo, if not completely dead. So, you know, we don't have to get to into the weeds of the policy specifics at this point.

But maybe just start by talking about the reaction from Capitol Hill and the policy world to some of these criticisms because there was quite a lot of blowback, which is interesting because, you know, we love the People's Policy Project.

But I didn't know that that, you know, it was such a hot topic in Congress. So tell us about what happened.

Yeah, I mean, there was there was a tremendous reaction on the Hill and and Politico and a lot of publications, the Center for American Progress put out a whole tweet thread, probably, I don't know, 15, 20 tweets talking about in which they had screen shot at the headline of my article and then like sort of like crossed out parts of it and it was very, very elaborate, which as you point out is very funny, right?

The Center for American Progress has a budget of, I think, over 40 million a year and our budget is a little over $100,000 a year.

And, you know, Republicans were passing it around. I mean, it was, it was just lighting up the hill, going through emails and stuff. And I guess they thought, oh man, this was, this is a real problem for us.

This is a talking point. People are going to be able to seize upon. And they, they started coming after me. I would say the most interesting instance of this was in Politico, which ran a piece that was basically just there to kind of slam me.

I mean, they did talk to me for comment and stuff like that, but they, you know, you know, how these things are done. Someone must have pitched a piece to the author and they lined up quotes from everyone.

A Senator Patty Murray had a quote against me and unnamed Democratic aides and think tankers at cap and the National Women's Law Center and, you know, everyone who was kind of behind it, you know, sort of did all these, put out all these quotes saying that I was off base.

But it was very weird. You know, it was happening because, of course, I'm reading all this material. Okay, let's see what you have to say. And it's all very non-specific. You know, I raised a very, very specific point, not a vague kind of like ideological point about the cutoff. It was a technical point.

So what is your technical objection? And, and that none of it really contained a technical response. So.

Yeah, so the DC Democratic policy apparatus kind of turns against you in one fell swoop. Matt, maybe, maybe you're wrong, right? Maybe you had a really bad idea and, you know, everybody, everybody closed ranks because, you know, what you were saying was, in fact, truly, truly just beyond the pale.

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