DJ Gribbin

Like it or not, this is what healthcare in America looks like today. Great report sponsored by @Arnold_Ventures detailing the 2,694 subsidiaries of UnitedHealth. sunlightreportinsurance.com

@johnarnold @aaron_renn Mr. Renn makes an interesting point. Would that renter have been an owner (without the need of an intermediary) if he could have matched the terms and conditions of the investor?

@aaron_renn I'd argue that you were competing against a renter, of which there was a financial intermediary that was willing to facilitate the transaction and take a small fee for providing that service.

A rare miss from Mr. Arnold, who surely knows that economics happens on the margin. Investors are having a material impact on the market. Last year in metro Atlanta, for example, 10% of all home sales were to investors. When we bought our house, we were competing against a sight unseen, full price, all cash offer from an investor. I won't pretend to know exactly what the impact of investor purchases, including private equity, of SFHs is, but it certainly isn't negligible.

I thought I was done with real infrastructure spending but CBO just released new data this afternoon (1st time in years) & it confirms what is also shown by Census/DOT, BEA & OMB--real public investment fell from 2019 to 2023. (Exception is rail which is volatile & 1% of total.)

@johnarnold Sad day for a great city. Infrastructure is not always a good investment. And it is hard to imagine any investment for which this financing makes sense. Bond salespeople need to put a big asterisk next to these. Yikes.

No surprise. The Chicago City Council approved the issuance of this bond today that funds near term infrastructure needs but only starts repaying the principal in 20 years. There's just no end to kicking liabilities to the next generation.

“If we are serious about modernizing urban transportation and unleashing the full potential of our cities, #congestionpricing is not just a clever fix - it’s the only fix.” @dj_gribbin sheds light on how NYC's results speak for themselves tinyurl.com/9abueh2b

@anniekarni Their English seems quite plain. Thanks for sharing. Fascinating.

In plain English: nytimes.com/2024/12/17/us/…

As pressure rises on Biden to direct the archivist to publish the ERA, the archivist says she won’t do it.

Great to see a Denver city councilman quoting an RCT of a basic income pilot meant to reduce homelessness that didnt work as justification for not making the program permanent. The final vote failed, 6-6. Avoiding things that dont work is as important as funding things that do.

@JDwithTW Question is — where is that running?!

Just finished writing an 1,100-word op-ed on why it's a bad idea to mix cash accounting and accrual accounting in Highway Trust Fund financial reports. And yes, I know just how exciting that sounds

...The city declined to answer basic questions about the program and its outcomes. I managed to reach one trainee who said the >$100mn green jobs program involved “sweeping buildings, mopping building floors, making sure the garbage is thrown out” prospect.org/environment/20…

“If you think about the market failures, healthcare has every one of them.” @johnarnold, cofounder and co-chair at @Arnold_Ventures, spoke with @katiecouric about healthcare access at the #ForbesPhilanthropy Summit. trib.al/FWnNHQd

Two slightly galaxy-brain ESG stories today~ A business group for sustainable investors says Texas’s anti-ESG “blacklist” violates investment companies’ free speech. Plus, why asset managers are putting military contractors in their “sustainable” funds: on.ft.com/47fBcv7

@TransportDems To help put that in context, the American Legion Bridge carries 86 MILLION vehicles each year.

Passenger railroads move more than 30 MILLION people each year. That’s why the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law invests $102 billion in rail—the largest investment since the creation of Amtrak more than 50 years ago. democrats-transportation.house.gov/bipartisan-inf…

Justice Neil Gorsuch has a new book out this week, “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” which notes that U.S. statutory law: * runs to 60,000 pages, * with another 188,000 pages of regulations, * which delineate 300,000 criminal sanctions, * while imposing on the American people 9.8 billion man-hours of paperwork each year. “Too much law actually winds up making people fear law rather than respect law, fear their institutions rather than love their institutions,” he notes. He decided to write the book after observing “good people trying to do the right thing, and not trying to hurt anybody, are just all of a sudden getting whacked.” wsj.com/articles/neil-…

Civil asset forfeiture, in which police can seize one's property without any criminal charges, places the onus on the individual to retrieve it only after significant time and expense, and allows police to use any proceeds to fund their own dept, is so counter to American values that it shocks the conscious. Despite orgs across the political spectrum, from ACLU to Cato to Heritage, fighting for reforms, the practice persists. The only defenders of the action are governments. Both red and blue states are guilty of abuses, but reforms have been quickening across the states. The most effective org defending individuals against civil asset forfeiture is longtime @Arnold_Ventures grantee @IJ. Yesterday, they won another case, this time at the Michigan Supreme Court. This goes along with wins in GA, OK, NV, TX and IN, and against the DEA and FBI just in the past year. We support this work because the 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th and 14th Amendments also need defending.

Biden floundered during the presidential debate against Trump, failing a key test to show voters he’s up for a second term. Here's what you need to know bloomberg.com/news/articles/… via @bpolitics

Congestion pricing looks like every other infrastructure project: 2007: mayor proposs; awarded fed grant 2008: plan finalized; city council approves 2008-17: stalled in legislature 2017: gov proposes 2019: legislature passes, due 2021 2020: delayed to 2022 2021: environmental assessment started 2022: delayed to 2023 2023: delayed to 2024, sued by NJ over EA 2024: delayed indefinitely

Notwithstanding huge influx of highway dollars, real spending fell 17% from Q3 2021 to Q3 2023.

@USDOL @CommerceGov @USDOT @United4Infra @USAccelerate @SuzanneUSCC @ActSecJulieSu @CeciliaERouse @BrookingsInst @TTDAFLCIO @Ron_Nirenberg @FedEx @BizRoundtable @FedExPolicy "We've only executed 20% of the actual dollars in the IIJA," Rep. @RepGarretGraves said at our United for Infrastructure event. "It's clear we have infrastructure urgency. But do we have a project development mechanism that responds to that urgency?"

@johnarnold When I last looked at this in 2000, the U.S. had 47 worker training programs across 15 agencies (on which we spent about $19 billion annually). The political rewards for starting a new program far exceed those for measuring impact.

If government budgeting wasn’t perpetually on autopilot, we could redirect the funding for all of the adult job training programs that have a robust evidence base of not working to summer jobs for at-risk youth, which has a robust evidence base of positive outcomes. But alas.