Ok everyone. It happened. I’m mad at what someone said on the internet again. Sorry to interrupt the usual light but doomy scroll. As I work out my anger at the universe.

So Adam Looney. Phd from Harvard. Undergrad at Dartmouth. Oh boy, can you smell trouble. If you can’t you may want to get tested for COVID-19. He served among other places in Obama’s Treasury.

He has an op-ed from a little over a week ago which I’m not going to share again where he argues against the Warren-Schumer proposal to cancel up to $50,000 in student loan debt. That proposal is here https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schumer-warren-the-next-president-can-and-should-cancel-up-to-50000-in-student-loan-debt-immediately-democrats-outline-plan-for-immediate-action-in-2021

Now a question you didn’t ask is where does Looney work now?

He is the executive director of the Marriner S. Eccles Institute at the University of Utah.

I have to cross myself when I say Marriner as I received several scholarships in his name and he is one of our greatest Federal Reserve policy makers and a rare New Dealer from the banking sector.

The institute founded in his name is barely a few years old and is a Koch brothers funded enterprise.

The fascist right has long understood that to shape policy you need to capture academia. That’s hard to do but one way you get there is use your wealth advantage to create little institutes inside of major universities.

These institutes like George Mason’s Mercatus create content to throw at legislatures aimed at advancing legislation that reduces economic mobility by limiting parents and their children access to food, health care and training.

They of course seek to reduce taxes on the rich and limit or reduce the scope of programs that rely on those taxes.

But these institutes also create outpost of employment and grant opportunities for academic fellow travelers.

In my previous life of state level public policy advocacy in the Obama era I fielded on many occasions calls from reporters doing stories on the elevated number of people receiving food stamps.

While these were interesting stories to reporters read “falling unemployment but elevated food assistance” they were also an opportunity for partisans in the Koch network to take pot shots at food stamps as being out of control.

And this brings me back to Looney’s op-ed where in arguing against student debt cancelation he invokes the high bang for the buck of food stamps as stimulus.

Food stamps are a really effective form of stimulus because people that receive food still spend all their income, they just don’t spend as much of it on food. And in an economy where your spending is someone else’s income that makes it a powerful form of stimulus.

Knowing what I know about what the network that gave Looney his new gig did to undermine public support for food stamps when I read his dishonest argument I felt a new appreciation for all of those exploding heads in the “The Boys”.

The point of the Schumer-Warren proposal is Biden can act without the Senate. We all want and need effort to help people cushion the crippling blow of COVID-19 but we have to wait for the Senate.

Elevating food stamps as a superior form of stimulus is dishonest at best and deeply hypocritical for a man whose income is facilitated by a Koch funded enterprise.

To put the icing on the cake another economist tweeted out the Looney Op-ed invoking their having worked with him in the Obama Administration.

You know, he showed me pictures of his apple pie once so I’m sure he wouldn’t advocate to reduce nutritional assistance to a poor child. “He is a very nice guy”

The world is full of really wonderful people who went to Dartmouth and Harvard and work very hard to make sure that millions of poor and middle income children don’t get the same opportunities in life as their own children.

That’s a hard lesson for people to learn and it’s an illustration of the way elite networks reinforce and reproduce inequality.