Annie Lowrey
@AnnieLowrey
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Staff writer @TheAtlantic, author of "Give People Money," working a book called "The Time Tax." Not here often, please say hi on [email protected].
Joined May 2009
I am writing a book about time taxes and I need your help! Tell me about the insurance snafu ruining your life, the years you spent waiting for benefits, your immigration process, your FAFSA cluster, your healthcare nightmare. I'm annie@theatlantic.com.
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The COVID-era boosts to SNAP, UI, CTC, and child care went away. Medicaid unwound. Food costs spiraled. Interest rates doubled. Measures of material hardship worsened. And Democrats pointed to headline figures showing a boom.
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Since it's coming up: Gosh, making it harder to get divorced is not a good way to encourage couples to stick together and coparent together. It's a good way to get women killed.
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I've spent a lot of the last six months working on this story about reports of abuse at one of the country's most-esteemed, certified-humane dairy farms.
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Since I've been a reporter, so since the GWB administration, it's been clear that headline economy statistics have become less and less of a clear guide in terms of telling you what average families are feeling.
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That's to say nothing of the housing debacle — rising homelessness counts, sense that neither renting nor buying is affordable pretty much anywhere, anymore.
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@Paddywan Yes, and that if you're flying first-class, you're due all earthly deference! Get a grip!.
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Has anyone ever modeled the labor-supply effect of having daycare/school for all kids 0-17, 9am-5pm, a reliable five days a week, 50ish weeks a year? Asking for, uh, me. For me.
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I found Melissa Kearney's book careful and interesting, but came away convinced the conversation we should be having is about how to improve outcomes for kids growing up with a single parent, not how to get those parents married.
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Some speculation on here that universities can't divest from Israel, bc they hold their endowment $ in index funds, hedge funds, PE, etc. This is just not true.
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He's lying. Undocumented immigrants, categorically, do not receive Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or SNAP. Foreign workers, documented and undocumented, are net payers into SS. They shore up the system for citizens.
The REAL reason so many Democrats are upset about entitlements (social security, medical, etc) fraud investigations is that they are using your taxpayer money as handouts to attract and retain ILLEGAL immigrants. Their future voters. That’s what it’s all about. Truth.
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Budget Lab on the new tariffs. A $4,400 tax hike per household in the short term.
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A canonical time tax! One of the simplest ways to make the lives of lower-income Americans easier would be to relax the rules so that you can use SNAP on prepared foods, hot food, diapers, paper towels, dish soap, etc.
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The transition to green energy is going to eliminate a lot of six-figure jobs for men w/o a college degree. I wrote the risk of letting decarbonization go like deindustrialization went.
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The reason the United States doesn't have automatic filing like pretty much every other wealthy democracy is because of corporate lobbying against services like Direct File
18F, the far left government wide computer office that was recently taken over by allies of @elonmusk, is also the same agency that built Elizabeth Warren's "Direct File" tax program. Direct File puts the government in charge of preparing peoples tax returns for them. 🤔🧐
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The debt-ceiling deal clarifies a position Democrats should have adopted a long time ago: No work requirements, ever, for any person, for any policy.
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so uh stuff like this is why fintech founders with money in crypto keep getting debanked; hope that helps!
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The cost of living crisis, extraordinary price of healthcare, and inequality contribute to that. Hard to understand pressures households are enduring and the choices they are making by just looking at what they earn and spend on.
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Turns out that my book is being used without my permission and with no residuals or payment to me to train private companies' AI systems.
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New York City is making residents purchase 3.4 million "rat-proof" wheelie bins. The bins are not rat-proof. My dispatch from the war on rats:
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I thought the story would be about this one farm. But it's really not. It's about how there is no system ensuring the welfare of farm animals, just a chimera of one.
I've spent a lot of the last six months working on this story about reports of abuse at one of the country's most-esteemed, certified-humane dairy farms.
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I try to answer the question, "How is Joe Biden losing the election with an economy like this?"
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I'm worried about crypto. I'm even more worried about how the traditional financial markets might come to look a lot more like the crypto markets.
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Lots of chatter about this null result, finding that giving $$$ to the low-income parents of low-birthweight kids doesn't improve a wide range of outcomes for the kids. It's a tough, sad finding. But some of the discussion seems a little sideways, imho.
SSI provides cash payments to over a million families who have children w disabilities. Do these substantial payments—which make up ~half of total income for recipients—improve kids’ outcomes? We use a cutoff in SSI eligibility for infants based on birthweight to investigate.
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I don't want to punch anyone, but this isn't true! We're having affordability problems in a *lot* of places, and *huge* problems in places where wages are high and people want to move.
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I'd also note that state flagships do not have these demented preferences, and SUNY/CUNY/Cal State et. al. are actually the engines of mobility the Ivies like to think they are.
I hadn't quite grokked how much, holding SAT scores and other academic measures constant, the Ivy-Plus schools *prefer* rich kids to poor kids. Totally maddening.
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Really do think that inflation in small-dollar goods raised the salience of the cost-of-living crisis brewing in the background -- it's not just that everything got really expensive, it's that people noticed it because they had to do so much mental math.
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Civil servants are often remarkably competent, as you'd know if you spent any time talking to them. It's a problem that they have a minimal role in shaping administrative procedure.
Even a brief stint in government by people with high competence and integrity would greatly help America.
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Real wages are growing faster for lower-wage workers than higher-wage workers and wage inequality is falling [ducks]
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I hadn't quite grokked how much, holding SAT scores and other academic measures constant, the Ivy-Plus schools *prefer* rich kids to poor kids. Totally maddening.
I have never really cared that much about the endless Ivy-centric culture wars that consume certain segments of the media but @AnnieLowrey makes a persuasive case that these schools do matter—and that their admissions policies need radical reform.
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@heikki_bear US has different rules than the EU -- in the US, antibiotics are forbidden in the organic program (so if an organic farmer has to give a cow antibiotics, they either sell the milk as conventional from that point forward or sell the cow to a conventional farm).
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SBF hurt dozens of worthy nonprofits and charities, both by promising money he knew he could never deliver and by forcing them to deal with SBF-and-EA-related reputational taint.
"He becomes toxic. Like, nobody wants to talk to him. He has no friends,’" says Michael Lewis. “There is still a Sam-Bankman-Fried-shaped hole in the world that now needs filling” for someone driven by their ideals to do good on a large scale, Lewis says.
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These arguments have felt over-technical to me on all sides. Can endowments divest? Yes! Do universities want to? No! Would divestment hurt the Israeli economy/affect stock prices much? No! Do the protestors get that and still think it is worth doing? Yes!.
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Waiting for mortgage rates to drop to buy a house? So is everyone else. Me on why it's not going to be a buyers' market for a very, very long time:
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People really, really hate inflation. And we don't have great answers for supply-side problems. Not to say that any of that was determinative.
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As a side note: As a parent of a baby who was born at 3 pounds, I have trouble even reading studies like this one. But it's a really excellent paper. And the policy response should be "how do we do enough to help?" not "well, let's cut SSI!".
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@besttrousers we only have hundreds of high-quality studies done over 50+ years in dozens and dozens of countries.
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I'm so honored that @carlzimmer has chosen this essay for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023. My thanks to @jaimealyse and @MarinerBooks and my brilliant colleagues @danteramos and @JaniceWolly.
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In short: People hate inflation; folks just don't love Biden; partisanship means you don't get credit for a good economy like you used to; bad economies are more salient than good economies; voters in general are more motivated by noneconomic issues.
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I don't know that you can replace the income of a second parent. But you can definitely provide low-cost, high-quality zero-to-five care, the expanded CTC, Medicaid and SNAP.
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The transfers averaged out to $146 per month for infants, $141 for toddlers, and $33 per month for kids 3+. Maybe that’s just not enough for kids starting life in a box in a NICU with parents struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food in everyone’s mouths.
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One thing this demonstrates is that trading chicken for beef is an easy thing to do for animal welfare (though trading beef for chicken is better for the climate). Square the circle by just eating less meat.
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Will humans treat AI better than we treat animals? Will AI treat *us* better than we treat animals?
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Not saying there is no fraud, bc there is. But in terms of the health programs, the problem is *providers,* not recipients. In SS? IDK anyone who thinks fraud happens at this kind of scale.
Ramaswamy: hundreds of billions of dollars can be cut from Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare through “basic program integrity measures.” Seemingly a starkly different position than Trump took in his first term
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Does this show that cash doesn’t work? Not so much as it shows that this level of cash doesn’t work for babies this disadvantaged in terms of their health, growing up in families this disadvantaged in terms of income/wealth and often a number of other factors.
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People (mostly) spend what they can afford on housing. Lots of folks are priced out of the location or type of place they want. That frustration / pressure doesn't show up in statistics like these.
@karltaro Nah. Housing costs as a proportion of income are at historical norms. If you control for age it's actually way down. Median personal income divided by housing costs is up over the last 20 years.
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First, responses like this. I’m not sure what to say. Cash isn't magic. It doesn't solve every problem. But we have hundreds of quality studies showing that cash has effects, sometimes big ones, on a lot of outcomes in a lot of contexts.
New study: sizable SSI boost to family income (for 10 years) given to low-birthweight kids born into poverty has no effects on kids. Please incorporate into your lit reviews on guaranteed income.
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From the paper itself: “These results indicate that current level of support targeted to populations endowed with especially high levels of need across multiple dimensions are likely insufficient to achieve the earnings and health gains observed in more advantaged samples.”.
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Also, what does "work" mean? Raising salience, keeping things in the headlines, affecting marginal business decisions, forcing position-taking, trying to make an issue one of bright moral lines -- this is all activism. It's messy stuff.
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I don't see a way for monetary and fiscal policy to fix this financial catastrophe. I don't see the White House changing its mind. And I don't see Congress doing its job either.
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But voters were very clear that they didn't feel great about the economy, and people spent a lot of time trying to tell them they were wrong; so many folks I spoke with told me they felt gas-lit and condescended to.
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I don't have answers here. I guess my point is that nobody does.
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Headlines about inflation (and that ever-imminent recession) largely disappeared in 2024, but voters kept talking about prices. Material-hardship measures backed them up. People are experts in their own experience.
@AnnieLowrey @leahmcelrath I wonder why they didn't believe it. Of course, it can't have anything to do with media failures.
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Innnnnnnnteresting, these fintech investors suddenly complaining about debanking.
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This is a profile of a radical vegan activist group -- so radical they annoy the heck out of other vegan groups, and a number of prominent vegans want nothing to do with them
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Getting housing and childcare prices down would help a tremendous amount, as would working on neighborhood poverty and raising wages across the board.
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inflation!
I reported in 2018 that after Access Hollywood, a group of billionaires discussed paying Trump to drop out. Back then, the number was $800 million.
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I'm looking to talk with folks who have considered moving, have moved, or want to move due to changes to abortion access and/or LGBTQ+ laws in their state. On annie@theatlantic.com if that's you or someone you know.
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I don't think deliverism is dead. I think Democrats didn't want to listen to voters telling them they didn't deliver.
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who is responsible for the budget and how is the budget related to efficiency?
DOGE is unlike other government departments in that its performance can be precisely measured. How much smaller is the federal budget next year? If Elon can cut the budget by 5% I'll be impressed.
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Medical bills are disappearing from credit reports. States are banning hospitals from foreclosing, garnishing paychecks. Govts are forgiving billions in past-due debt. Are we entering an era in which you could just. throw that medical bill in the trash?
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@chrislhayes Never met a low-income single parent who wouldn't love a committed, stable partner and coparent. And it's not clear to me the norms around marriage are changing at all.
“The most heavily anticipated economics book of the year makes a radical argument: Having married parents is good for kids,” @AnnieLowrey writes. But what do we do about that?
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(She supports these things, I should note! Along with a lot of other good ideas. I'm just not sure there's any norms/cultural issues we should be focusing on, rather than economic ones.).
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Nick's a writer's editor - a true joy to work with, so good with ideas, so good with copy. I really wish this industry were better.
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Scientists have been trying to make lab-grown meat taste just like regular meat. What happens when they start bioengineering stuff that tastes. really different?
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A lot of these studies do show marginal effects, just not very big ones. The more divestment you have, the bigger the effect. Divestment works, it just takes scale.
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That said, the US is an extraordinary outlier in delivering real (like, inflation adjusted) financial gains to a lot of families; the pressures that unseated incumbent parties around the world were a lot less strong here because growth was so much stronger.
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There's this idea out there that you just take the refinery workers and make them green energy workers. That. doesn't make any sense. We want to use those skill sets in heavy industry and get these folks six-figure jobs.
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New Chetty finds that Black kids raised in low-income families are seeing income gains and increased intergenerational mobility. White kids raised in low-income families aren't.
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Catch me yapping about moderates and men with @jonstewart and @RichardvReeves! .
Jon Stewart, @AnnieLowrey, and @RichardvReeves discuss how Democrats lost touch with men on today’s podcast. #TheWeeklyShow #Trump
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The null-result paper looks at whether $$ changes outcomes for kids who have a really tough start—born at less than 2.5 pounds (!) to poor families, often extremely poor. Good reason to think it might! Poverty and health are deeply intertwined; it's a good chunk of SSI money.
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I said I would write a little celebrity profile once the pandemic was over but it turns out the pandemic will never be over so, well, here's me with @ParisHilton:
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Trump's crypto reserve isn't a pet project or strategic investment. It's crony capitalism, strip-mining public resources for private gain: .
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My research assistants and I are once again driving cross-country, so I am once again soliciting audiobook recommendations. Bonus points for (a) short stories or short novels, (b) non-American accents, (c) funny, scary, and/or weepy.
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What if you got itchy and it lasted forever? My story on the psychic toll and enduring medical mystery of itch.
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That's not a statement about how much abuse there is on farms -- whether best-of-the-best regenerative organic or CAFOs. It's about whether we know. I don't think we do.
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wrote this a while ago but. we don't really know
is there some theory to explain why us elections are always so close? even the "blowout" in 2008 was a seven point win. this doesn't seem to happen in other countries, even with two party systems.
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But SSI $$ doesn’t affect high-school GPA, enrollment in a gifted and talented program, college enrollment, college completion, earnings, mortality, or the use of transfer programs.
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Public policy Twitter, or what remains of it: There's a theory (maybe?) in polisci (maybe?) about how problems tend to get political traction once they start affecting rich people. I think it comes from the donor-influence lit? What, if anything, am I half-remembering?.
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One last note: A lot of folks also think that because previous divestment campaigns have not affected the cost of capital much, divestment doesn't "work.".
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Meet the Buddhist monks meditating on x-risk and trying to build an enlightened AI:
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punching ourselves in the face more softly, returning to the issue of how hard we should punch ourselves in the face in 90 days
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I wrote about immersive art / interactive exhibits / rave caves / trip traps / why concerts look so cool now / why my kids' room looks like Shibuya Crossing (it's the LEDs)
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Border towns with Canada are already in a downturn thanks to tariffs + reduced visits from our neighbors to the North. A look at what might be coming many other communities across the United States:
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I'm also interested in great application or paperwork processes -- things that work! And arcane ones. And international comparisons. Really, just ping me. I love talking about this stuff, and am happy to keep folks off-the-record.
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Fun detail that didn't make it in: Young people's tendency to send all unknown numbers to VM has made life a lot harder for medical debt collectors.
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Anyway. I'm writing a whole book on this. But there's only so much you can do from the executive branch. The big stuff, that's Congress' job.
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The covid recession was. unusual. And bookended on both sides by a pretty good economy, warped by a cost-of-living crisis and a destabilizing period of inflation, mostly matched by wage growth. The whole period is hard to talk about without caveats! So, well. Here we are.
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@besttrousers it's like asking for more RCTs on aspirin! i'm all for pilots and demos, but they're political tools, not policy tools, at this point.
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another weird dc cost thing: lot of UMC parents paying the full, proper taxes for domestic workers, bc of security clearances / being in or up for a confirmed position
a dumb theory of mine is that the economics of UMC parenting are quite acute in dc, where you have a lot of high education couples where both parents earn six figures but not enough to really make the math of one not working pencil (and people in dc find their work meaningful).
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He wasn't helping them. He wasn't doing good. He was using them.
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Can't tell you how many folks I've spoken with in the VA or HHS or USDA who would love to fix that form or change that language or align procedures across agencies. They often can't. By law.
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These filing options don't preclude people from doing their own taxes! Want to work it all out on paper, go ahead!! Not having them is why one in seven families doesn't get the EITC and a majority of households spend a few hundred bucks a year on their taxes!.
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