Ryan Cummings

There is little meritocracy or competition when it comes to Democratic consultants—they get paid the same regardless of how their candidates perform in the election.

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

Uber subsidized marketplace liquidity to lock in local network density. Frontier labs are funding clusters and training runs that lose pricing power within eighteen months, while API switching costs stay negligible. That capitalizes fast depreciation rather than a defensible moat.

News - Trump is set to attend another dinner at his resort for the biggest buyers of his meme coin You can probably get in to see the president for $1 million Trump has pocketed $635 million Investors down +$4 billion on Trump crypto www.washingtonsun.com/whitehouse/t...

Mandatory.

here in MA people at a cafe were just griping about their first oil deliveries of the year. prices are 74% more expensive than last year.

A longtime career goal to be on Marketplace, and I had to decline the first time I was asked because I was working at the White House. 🥁 So without further ado, I weigh in with thoughts on the gender pay gap and in particular, impact on child care workers and implications for the broader workforce.

Great new paper showing that the effect of the U.S.-Israel bombing of Iran was to essentially change protests from being against the hardline Iranian government to being for it. Hard to imagine losing this war--among every dimension--even worse than the U.S. and Israel already has.

Relatedly, my SIEPR colleague @weakinstrument.bsky.social is in the New York Times today, talking about the AI equities boom and what happens if it looks like AI investments will not be profitable for a while: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/b...

When I ran BLS, I was asked constantly about the impact of AI on jobs. It's still one of the most common questions I get. So we put together a policy brief - for policymakers, journalists, and anyone trying to sort through what is happening with AI and jobs: siepr.stanford.edu/publications...

45K+ bodies a year. In my city we have 3x as many fatalities from reckless driving than homicides. 1. There exists dumb traffic cameras which just take a picture of the plate & the offense and are not networked to other system. 2. Most PDs aren't even using flock cameras for traffic violations.

Lorenzo Salgado lived here longer than I’ve been alive, married to his wife of 30 years. Worked a blue collar job building houses to put his three kids through college. A real American and the kind of man they tell you you’re supposed to be. Fascism is so perverse.

It’s not a great sign that 1/3rd of the Supreme Court read what is arguably the most unambiguous part of the constitution and thought “no, actually the President can invalidate this 😜😜.”

GS estimating that consensus estimates for hyperscaler AI capex next year of $920 billion are ***too conservative*** and instead the right number is between $1-1.4 *trillion.* We're either at the bottom of a mountain or at the top of a cliff!! Exhilarating!!!! Terrifying!!!!

If you don't plan to celebrate America's 250th birthday by visiting ornamental fountains in D.C. or watching UFC fighters spar outside the White House, here are some picks for the best parks and public lands from my colleagues at the @uclalawemmett.bsky.social. legal-planet.org/2026/05/28/n...

~90% of the Somalis in MN are American citizens; this is the President directly calling 100,000 of our fellow countrymen and women crooks, 10 days after he announced his intention to steal $1.8 billion from taxpayers to pay him and his friends. If you're not going crazy, you've never been sane.

Boycott ON! The [NAACP] urges Black athletes to withhold commitments to athletic programs in eight states over redistricting, and it also asks fans to stop buying tickets.” wapo.st/43hRsdT

there has been talk about waiving the 18.4c/gal (gasoline) federal tax on gasoline and 24.3c/gal on diesel- these taxes also have not increased since 1993. If the fed tax on gasoline is waived, it would cost the government $2.1 billion in lost revenue per month.

Opinion | Mass Deportation and American Jobs A study finds that U.S. employment falls in areas with more ICE arrests. www.wsj.com/opinion/mass...

The vast majority of Americans — 8 in 10 — say there should be age caps for members of Congress, as well as term limits, according to the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll. n.pr/4ngwZiW

Alexis Goldstein, a former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employee, was fired this year for recording DOGE’s incursion into the agency. www.wired.com/story/a-fede...

Affordability is too often justification for lowering our ambitions to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. Panel 2 of our recent symposium covers the complexity of the issue. Plus: a high-speed lecture on CA oil prices from @weakinstrument.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJzV...

This isn't even remotely close to true. ~0 of those barrels were incremental, and all the sanctions waivers did was effectively allow the Iranians to sell oil to other countries at a prices *higher* than they were selling them to the Chinese, who were buying 98% of it at a discount.

Repeat after Ryan: "More drilling in California would not insulate the state from price spikes, because the price of oil is determined on the global market." Louder in the back, now!

Me and @nealemahoney.bsky.social are in the LAT today arguing that CA oil industry is trying to use the current crisis to jam through its deregulatory wishlist. Instead of caving, the state should use this moment to be a leader in the "mid-transition." www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Great example of this is monetary policy. Nearly 2/3rds of CEOs in a survey wouldn't even venture a guess as to what the Fed's inflation target was (something that directly impacts their business, btw!) and of those who guessed, only 20% could correctly identify it. www.nber.org/papers/w28836

Behind the acid blood and jump scares of the Alien franchise is an even more insidious horror: a single employer with unchecked power. How Weyland-Yutani helps explain monopsony — and the rise of inequality on Earth. n.pr/4dGFaCl

However much you think we should be funding cancer research, I can guarantee you it's not enough. The economic benefit of getting rid of it would be $197 ***TRILLION*** over 35 years. We should easily be 100Xing federal funding of this research, and instead we're cutting it.

What should be particularly worrisome for Trump: sentiment declined this month the most for *Republicans.* Even more so over a 6-month window. He's also completely wiped out the post-election enthusiasm among Rs; sentiment for Ds and Is is down sharply. (w/ @nealemahoney.bsky.social)

Updating this chart from me and @nealemahoney.bsky.social and adding a new one. Increases in the gas prices since Iran conflict have been unrelenting (+$1.14/gal since Feb 28), and we have now witnessed the biggest 30 day increase in gasoline prices on record (data going back to 1993).

every time i write about wage theft i do a double take because it's so crazy corporations steal more than $50 bn from workers' paychecks each year, illegally paying workers less than they earned for their labor that significantly exceeds the combined losses from larceny, burglary, & vehicle theft

“We’re going to cut your healthcare to pay for more wars“ is certainly a message one can choose to run on, I suppose.