▲ 75 r/azpolitics
Andy Biggs pledges to repeal Arizona income tax. How would he cover the $6 billion hole?
12news.comu/Public_Finance_Guy — 2 days ago
u/Public_Finance_Guy
r/50501Arizona r/mesaaz r/santanvalley r/ChandlerAZ r/Gilbert r/EconomyCharts r/charts r/neoliberal r/EastValleyUnite r/AZAdvocacyHub r/nyc r/Tucson r/Futurology r/supremecourt r/azpolitics
An estimated 25k Mesa residents have lost SNAP since last July.
I live in Mesa and write a policy newsletter. This is my own analysis. Sources at the bottom.
H.R. 1 (better known as 'The Big Beautiful Bill') changed SNAP eligibility and pushed part of the program's cost onto states. Arizona has lost roughly 437,000 recipients since July 2025, the biggest drop of any state in the US. DES reports caseload by county every month, but there's no official figure for Mesa or for any Arizona city. So I estimated one for all 397 places in the state by splitting each county's reported caseload using Census SNAP household shares. These are estimates, but they are based on real county-level and state-level data.
The first figure is the map. Mesa is one of the larger blue circles in Maricopa County. An estimated 25,000 Mesa residents lost food assistance between July 2025 and June 2026, which is 4.9% of the city's population. About 9.9% of Mesa residents participated in the SNAP program last July and 4.9% this June. About 1 in 10 people here, down to about 1 in 20.
The second figure ranks places by how many people lost benefits. Mesa is third in the state behind Phoenix at 114,637 and Tucson at 49,936, ahead of Glendale, Chandler, and Yuma. Each bar splits adults and children. Roughly 11,000 of Mesa's are children. Statewide the child figure is over 200,000.
The third figure shows the twenty Arizona communities where SNAP reached at least a third of residents last July. Mesa is not on it, since more rural Arizona communities are the places that are more dependent on SNAP as a percentage of total population. Only one Maricopa County place is, and that is Guadalupe which went from 41% to 20%.
Mesa's estimated loss is $58.4 million a year in benefits, again third in the state. That is $114 per Mesa resident in grocery spending that was happening here and is not anymore.
United Food Bank's director of agency network said this spring that the warehouse is at capacity and distribution is up 10 to 12% every month. How does Mesa feel about the SNAP cuts? Know any of the 437,000 people in Arizona or the 25,000 in Mesa who have been impacted?
Method and the full table for all 397 Arizona cities, towns, and communities: Arizona's SNAP Collapse in 397 Cities, Towns, and Communities
u/Beautiful_Aerie6775 — 3 days ago
▲ 87 r/azpolitics
Arizona lost 437,000 SNAP recipients this year. Under the new federal law, that also cut the state’s potential penalty from about $292M to about $131M.
Arizona’s SNAP caseload fell from about 909,000 people in July 2025 to about 472,000 in June 2026. That is a 48 percent drop, the largest of any state by a wide margin. Louisiana is second at 21 percent. Unemployment in Arizona rose over that period and grocery prices did not fall, so it's not like fewer people are needing help.
For SNAP’s entire history the federal government paid 100 percent of benefits. H.R. 1, the reconciliation bill passed in July 2025 (also known as The Big Beautiful Bill), ended that. Starting in FY2028, any state with a payment error rate at or above 6 percent has to pay part of the cost of its own SNAP benefits. The rate determines the share: 5, 10, or 15%.
Arizona’s error rate for FY2025 was 10.8 percent, which lands it in the top bracket at 15 percent. At that rate, the penalty could reach $300 million a year.
The important thing though is what that 15% gets multiplied by. It is 15% of every benefit dollar the state pays out in SNAP benefits, not 15% of the dollars it gets wrong. So the bill is the state’s rate bracket times its total benefit spending. Fewer benefits issued means a smaller bill, even if the error rate never improves.
Arizona was issuing $162 million a month in SNAP benefits in July 2025. By April 2026 it was issuing $73 million. Run that through the formula and the potential annual penalty drops from roughly $292 million to roughly $131 million. The error rate doesn't need to move if you can just cut spending!
The state tightened documentation requirements, added income monitoring, and added a preauthorization review step, all of which it says were done to reduce errors and avoid the cost share. It also points out that the FY2025 rate covers cases from before the law passed, and that caseload has risen slightly since April. I am sure the error rate will drop in in the next fiscal year with all the work they've done, but it definitely has come at a cost to program participants.
Arizona seems to be the first mover among states responding to the new cost-sharing agreement in the SNAP program, but other states will likely follow soon. Do you think your state will rely more on cutting spending or reducing their error rates, or both like Arizona is?
Arizona moved first and hardest, but FY2026 error rates close September 30 and the federal share of administrative costs gets cut in half October 1, so the rest are about to be in the same position.
Full writeup with sources in the link!
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 10 days ago
▲ 74 r/nyc
I went through Mamdani's pied-à-terre roll in NYC. The tax raises $500M, and the thing it forces the city to build in 2028 would move billions.
The pied-à-terre tax took effect July 1. It is a surcharge on homes that are not the primary residence of the owner, a family member, or a tenant. Condos and co-ops worth over $1 million pay 4.0 to 6.5% of the city's market value. Houses worth over $5 million pay 0.8 to 1.3%.
The table above is the borough breakdown of every record that clears a threshold. Manhattan holds 83% of them. Those are properties at or above a value line, not properties that will owe anything. The roll is an inventory, not a tax list, which is why even Council members who have lived in their homes for decades got notices last week. Most of those owners live in their units and owe nothing once they prove it.
Note the house column. Brooklyn has 3,310 houses over $5 million against Manhattan's 3,356, so the outer-borough share of the exposure is almost entirely single-family and two-family homes rather than apartments.
Narrowing to neighborhoods:
Nine ZIP codes hold half the exposure. Tribeca and the Upper East Side are the apartment story. Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope are the house story.
The amount of money that will be raised is smaller than the table's right-hand column suggests, since that column assumes every owner is a non-resident. The city projects $500 million. The Comptroller's model lands at $340 to $380 million once rented units and behavioral response are counted. The city budget is $116 billion.
At that scale the revenue is hard to read as the point, and the mechanism has a problem underneath it anyway. A 1981 state law requires New York to value condos and co-ops as if they were rental buildings, so sale prices never enter the math. City values run about 20.6% of what units actually sell for, and the gap widens as you move up the market. At the top one percent, city value is 11% of sale price. Because the surcharge is a flat rate on that undercounted base, the effective rate falls as the property gets more expensive. Ken Griffin's penthouse at 220 Central Park South sold for $238 million in 2019 and carries a city value of $15.5 million. His surcharge works out to 0.42% of what he paid. A median-priced affected unit pays 0.96%.
Fixing that requires knowing what things are worth. From July 2028 the threshold for condos and co-ops rises to $5 million and the city has to set their values from actual comparable sales. Once sales-based values exist for some condos, the case for keeping the rest on imputed rents collapses.
That is the reform NYC's own commission recommended in 2021, the Comptroller endorsed, and the Court of Appeals revived a lawsuit over in March 2024. CBC modeled it as revenue neutral, so the levy holds and the burden moves: down for about 65% of parcels, up for about 35%. Down in Staten Island, eastern Queens, and the northeast Bronx. Up in Manhattan and northwest Brooklyn.
How many of you guys have gotten the notice? Will you have to pay the tax, or will you be exempt?
Full writeup with sources: https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/what-mamdanis-pied-a-terre-tax-actually
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 16 days ago
▲ 20 r/santanvalley
Arizona’s newest town gets 38% of its general fund from the income tax Andy Biggs wants to eliminate
I write a policy newsletter and live in the Phoenix metro. This is my own analysis. Charts above show where San Tan Valley’s money comes from, its police contract against what it raises locally, and what replacing the loss could take.
Andy Biggs won the Republican primary for governor promising to eliminate Arizona’s individual income tax. He has not said what would replace it. San Tan Valley has the least room of any city in the state to absorb it.
San Tan incorporated in August 2025 and took over services from Pinal County on July 1. It is Arizona’s 92nd city or town and the largest incorporation by population in state history. It has only been operating for four weeks on its own!
Arizona sends cities 18% of what it collects in income taxes, split by population. Cities gave up the right to levy their own income taxes in 1972 in exchange for that share.
San Tan Valley’s general fund is $55.2 million. The income tax revenue is about $21 million of it, or 38%. Add shared sales tax and vehicle registration money and the state supplies about 75% of the budget. Everything the town raises on its own comes to about $14 million, which does not cover its $17 million police contract with the Pinal County Sheriff.
Biggs has proposed eliminating only the individual income tax, which is about three quarters of the shared money. That is roughly $15.4 million a year for San Tan Valley, or 28% of the general fund.
The town has fewer ways to respond than a well-established city. It levies no property tax, so creating one would require a vote of residents. Its own sales tax is four weeks old and nobody knows yet what it will bring in. Finance Director Gabe Garcia told the council, “We have no idea what it costs to run San Tan Valley because it never existed.”
Replacing the money through the sales tax could roughly double the rate the council just passed, putting the total rate shoppers pay between 10.4% and 11.1%. Both ends sit above the highest average state sales tax rate in the country. A property tax would cost the owner of a $400,000 home between $290 and $780 a year.
The legislature could come up with a plan to save cities, and it raised the city share from 15% to 18% in 2024. Residents would also stop paying the 2.5% income tax. That is the trade, and voters should get to weigh it in those terms.
Are folks in San Tan aware of Biggs’ plan? It would really negatively impact your new town and leave you guys with no choice but to cut services drastically already, or some sort of local tax hike to cover the difference.
Sources: JLBC 2025 Tax Handbook, A.R.S. § 43-206, League of Arizona Cities and Towns, Pinal Post, Arizona Department of Revenue. Full analysis: (https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/arizonas-newest-town-depends-on-the)
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 20 days ago
▲ 65 r/azpolitics
Arizona’s newest town gets 38% of its general fund from the income tax Andy Biggs wants to eliminate
I write a policy newsletter and live in the Valley. This is my own analysis. Charts above show where San Tan Valley’s money comes from, its police contract against what it raises locally, and what replacing the loss could take.
Andy Biggs won the Republican primary for governor promising to eliminate Arizona’s individual income tax. He has not said what would replace it. San Tan Valley has the least room of any city in the state to absorb it.
San Tan incorporated in August 2025 and took over services from Pinal County on July 1. It is Arizona’s 92nd city or town and the largest incorporation by population in state history. It has only been operating for four weeks on its own!
Arizona sends cities 18% of what it collects in income taxes, split by population. Cities gave up the right to levy their own income taxes in 1972 in exchange for that share.
San Tan Valley’s general fund is $55.2 million. The income tax revenue is about $21 million of it, or 38%. Add shared sales tax and vehicle registration money and the state supplies about 75% of the budget. Everything the town raises on its own comes to about $14 million, which does not cover its $17 million police contract with the Pinal County Sheriff.
Biggs has proposed eliminating only the individual income tax, which is about three quarters of the shared money. That is roughly $15.4 million a year for San Tan Valley, or 28% of the general fund.
The town has fewer ways to respond than a well-established city. It levies no property tax, so creating one would require a vote of residents. Its own sales tax is four weeks old and nobody knows yet what it will bring in. Finance Director Gabe Garcia told the council, “We have no idea what it costs to run San Tan Valley because it never existed.”
Replacing the money through the sales tax could roughly double the rate the council just passed, putting the total rate shoppers pay between 10.4% and 11.1%. Both ends sit above the highest average state sales tax rate in the country. A property tax would cost the owner of a $400,000 home between $290 and $780 a year.
The legislature could come up with a plan to save cities, and it raised the city share from 15% to 18% in 2024. Residents would also stop paying the 2.5% income tax. That is the trade, and voters should get to weigh it in those terms.
Has anyone seen Biggs address what happens to city budgets under this plan? I have not found a replacement agreement in his platform. San Tan voters should especially know what they are voting for!
Sources: JLBC 2025 Tax Handbook, A.R.S. § 43-206, League of Arizona Cities and Towns, Pinal Post, Arizona Department of Revenue. Full analysis: https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/arizonas-newest-town-depends-on-the
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 21 days ago
▲ 3 r/ChandlerAZ
What Andy Biggs's income tax repeal would cost Chandler
I write a policy newsletter and live in the Valley. This is my own analysis, with sources at the bottom.
Andy Biggs is running for governor and has promised to eliminate Arizona's individual income tax. He has not said what would replace the revenue, and how the state would fill the hole in city/town budgets it would create. Chandler would also be hit by a complete repeal of the state income tax.
A share of every dollar the state collects in income/corporate tax goes back to cities. Voters created that arrangement in 1972, and cities gave up the power to levy their own income tax as part of the deal. Cities now get 18% of collections, distributed by population. Statewide that was $1.19 billion in FY 2026, roughly $872 million of it from the individual income tax.
Chandler receives the fifth largest distribution in Arizona.
Chandler is an interesting case. It has one of the strongest commercial and manufacturing bases in the state, and it is still more exposed than Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe, and Scottsdale as a share of its budget. That is because revenue sharing is allocated by population and not by economic output. A city with a lot of residents gets a large check regardless of how much it could raise on its own, and that money has been holding local tax rates down.
The strong employer base does mean Chandler could probably absorb the loss, and absorbing it means replacing it. The question for residents is whether that comes back as a city sales tax or a property tax.
Chandler took about $36 million in FY 2022, which was 6.5% of city revenue.
Chandler already does levy a primary property tax and could theoretically raise it. But levy limits cap growth, Truth in Taxation requires published notice and a hearing, and the council has to take a recorded roll-call vote. An increase of 15% or more above the prior year requires a unanimous council. Cities in the bottom panel of that chart, including Gilbert next door, can't do even that without going to the ballot.
What would you want Chandler to do if that the state income tax is repealed? Would you want higher state sales taxes? Higher local sales taxes? Higher property taxes? Or worse government services?
Sources: JLBC 2025 Tax Handbook, Census Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances, city budget documents. Full analysis with all 91 cities and towns: https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/how-arizonas-income-tax-repeal-would
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 22 days ago
▲ 217 r/Gilbert
I ran the numbers on what Andy Biggs's income tax repeal would cost Gilbert
I write a policy newsletter and live in the Valley. This is my own analysis. Sources at the bottom.
Andy Biggs won the Republican primary for governor promising to eliminate Arizona's individual income tax. He has not said what would replace the tax. Gilbert has a specific problem with that.
Arizona sends cities a share of state income tax collections under a system voters approved in 1972. Towns gave up the ability to levy an income tax of their own in return. The share is 18% today, split by population, and it distributed $1.19 billion statewide in FY 2026. About $872 million of that comes from the individual income tax. It generally goes into general operations, funding things like police, fire, and parks.
That 7.1% is above Phoenix, Mesa, Chandler, Tempe, and Scottsdale. Among the large East Valley communities, Gilbert leans on this money the hardest.
Now the part that makes Gilbert unusual.
Gilbert is the second largest municipality in Arizona with no primary property tax, behind Mesa. That has been a point of pride here for a long time. It also means there is no existing rate to nudge upward if the state check shrinks. Under state law, a city that did not levy a primary property tax the previous year has to take the proposed amount to its voters. If the election fails, the town cannot levy it that year.
So the realistic menu is a town sales tax increase, higher fees and utility revenue, service cuts, or asking Gilbert voters to approve a property tax for the first time.
Worth adding that a revenue-neutral swap at the state level means a higher sales tax on top of that. The state would need roughly 2.6 additional percentage points to fill its own hole, before the town adds anything to cover its own.
Does anyone here think a primary property tax would pass in Gilbert? What would you rather the town do?
Sources: JLBC 2025 Tax Handbook, Census Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances, town budget documents. Full analysis with all 91 cities and towns: https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/how-arizonas-income-tax-repeal-would
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 24 days ago
▲ 205 r/Tucson
I ran the numbers on what Andy Biggs's income tax repeal would cost Tucson
I write a policy newsletter and live in the valley. This is my own analysis, sources at the bottom.
Andy Biggs won the Republican primary for governor promising to eliminate the state individual income tax. He has not said what will replace the revenue, only that he wants to eliminate it. Here is what it would mean for Tucson and its neighboring cities/towns.
Since 1972, Arizona has returned a share of state income tax collections to cities and towns. It was the deal voters approved when cities gave up the right to levy an income tax of their own. Cities get 18% today, distributed by population. That paid out $1.19 billion statewide in FY 2026, and about $872 million of it comes from the individual income tax that would be eliminated.
Tucson is more dependent on this money than Phoenix is, and it has a thinner commercial base to make up the difference. In FY 2026, the city received over $100 million through the income tax revenue sharing agreement. Tucson does levy a primary property tax, which means there is an existing rate to raise. State law caps how fast the levy can grow, requires Truth in Taxation notice and a hearing, and makes the council take a recorded vote. Any increase of 15% or more over the prior year has to be unanimous.
Sahuarita gets 10% of its revenue from this check and levies no primary property tax. Oro Valley is at 6.7% with none. Marana is at 4.5% with none. South Tucson, the small incorporated city inside Tucson, is at 9.5%. A repeal would hit the whole metro at once, and the towns with the least room to respond are the ones that grew fastest.
If it happened, would you rather Tucson raise the city sales tax or the property tax? Or is the answer service cuts?
Sources: JLBC 2025 Tax Handbook, Census Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances, city budget documents. Full analysis with all 91 cities and towns: https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/how-arizonas-income-tax-repeal-would
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 25 days ago
▲ 292 r/mesaaz
I ran the numbers on what Andy Biggs's plan for eliminating the state income tax would cost Mesa
I live in Mesa and write a policy newsletter. This is my own analysis. I’m an ASU alumni! Numbers and sources at the bottom.
Andy Biggs won the Republican primary for governor promising to eliminate Arizona's individual income tax. He has not said what replaces the money. Here is the part that matters for Mesa specifically.
Mesa is unusually exposed. Mesa collects a secondary property tax for bond debt and no primary property tax. The city has operated that way since 1945. Voters have turned down a primary property tax more than once. That means Mesa leans harder on city sales tax, utility revenue, and state shared revenue than a comparable city with a property tax to fall back on.
State shared revenue is one of those legs. Arizona sends 18% of state income tax collections back to incorporated cities through urban revenue sharing, roughly $990 million a year statewide, distributed by population. Mesa's share works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million a year. That money goes into general operations, meaning police, fire, parks, and streets.
Eliminate the income tax and that distribution goes away unless the legislature separately backfills it. Nobody has proposed a backfill. Mesa cannot lean on a primary property tax to cover it, because there isn't one. The realistic levers are a city sales tax increase, utility rate increases, service cuts, or a primary property tax vote that has failed before.
And the register. If the state fills its own hole with sales tax, it needs about 2.6 additional percentage points. Mesa's combined rate today is 8.3%. That would put us near 10.9%, before any city increase to cover the city's own shortfall.
Two more Mesa-specific things.
Mesa does not tax groceries. To hit revenue neutrality on a sales tax swap, the state would be under real pressure to broaden the base, and food for home consumption is the biggest untaxed piece sitting there.
East Mesa has a very large retiree and winter resident population. Arizona already exempts Social Security from the income tax, so a retiree living on Social Security and modest savings pays little or no state income tax right now. Repeal gives them nothing back and charges them more on everything they buy. They are the clearest losers in the whole exercise.
What do you guys think of Biggs's plan? Do you like these trade-offs? Do you think it would be good for Mesa? I want to have more conversation before the General Election about this idea!
Sources: JLBC 2025 Tax Handbook, City of Mesa budget documents, ITEP Who Pays 7th edition. Full analysis with charts: https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/i-did-the-math-on-andy-biggss-income
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 28 days ago
I went through the JLBC collections data on Biggs's plan to eliminate the state income tax. Replacing it takes a 2.6 point sales tax increase.
Andy Biggs won the Republican primary for Governor on a promise to eliminate Arizona's individual income tax. He has not said what replaces the revenue, so I pulled the FY 2025 numbers.
- The income tax raised $5.48 billion last year, 30.8% of ongoing General Fund revenue.
- 18% of collections go to cities and towns through urban revenue sharing. That is about $990 million a year for municipal police, fire, and streets.
- Total hole including the city share: roughly $5.5 billion.
Arizona's sales tax raised $11.78 billion at a 5.6% state rate, so about $2.1 billion per percentage point. Covering $5.5 billion takes 2.6 more points. State rate goes to 8.2%. Average combined rate with county and city rates goes to about 10.6%. Louisiana is currently highest in the country at 10.11%.
Biggs has said he would pay for it by cutting waste and fraud in Medicaid instead. Arizona's entire AHCCCS General Fund appropriation is $2.6 billion. Eliminating the whole program covers 48% of the gap.
Applying ITEP's Arizona incidence tables to the swap, households under about $70,000 pay more and households above that pay less. Retirees living on Social Security are the clearest losers, since Arizona already exempts Social Security from the income tax.
What do you guys think about the idea? Are you willing to shift the tax burden from high earners to low earners?
Sources are JLBC's 2025 Tax Handbook, the FY 2027 Baseline, and ITEP's Who Pays 7th Edition. Happy to answer questions about the method.
Full writeup with charts: https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/i-did-the-math-on-andy-biggss-income
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 27 days ago
▲ 74 r/neoliberal
Arizona's GOP gubernatorial nominee wants to eliminate the state income tax. A revenue-neutral consumption tax swap would require +2.6pp and make Arizona the highest combined-rate state in the country.
My own analysis, sourcing AZ JLBC FY 2025 collections and ITEP's Who Pays report 7th edition.
Andy Biggs is the Republican nominee for governor in Arizona. His central economic promise is full repeal of the individual income tax. He has offered no state-level replacement, but he was an original cosponsor of H.R. 25 in the 119th Congress, so a consumption tax swap is the natural place to look.
The math:
- Income tax: $5.48 billion in FY 2025, 30.8% of ongoing General Fund revenue. Add the 18% flowing to municipalities via urban revenue sharing and the real hole is about $5.5 billion.
- TPT yield: roughly $2.1 billion per point at the current 5.6% state rate. Revenue neutrality requires about +2.6pp, taking the state rate to 8.2% and the average combined rate to 10.6%. Louisiana currently leads at 10.11%, and it got there through a version of this same trade in January 2025.
- That is a static estimate and should be read as a floor. Cross-border shifting to NV, UT, and NM, substitution into exempt services, and compliance decay at double-digit rates all push the required rate up.
The distributional result is the expected one but the magnitude is worth seeing. Arizona's bottom quintile spends 4.6% of income on general sales taxes and 0.3% on income tax. The top 1% spends 0.8% and 1.7% respectively. Run the swap through ITEP's tables and the bottom three quintiles pay more, the top two pay less, and the average top-1% household nets roughly a $15,000 annual cut. Break-even sits in the fourth quintile around $80k to $90k.
The steelman is real and I want to give it its due. Consumption taxes do not penalize saving, they resist income shifting, and Arizona exports meaningfully to tourists, about $1.15 billion in state revenue attributable to visitor spending in 2023. That is roughly 10% of the operating budget and it scales with the rate.
The problem is the instrument. Arizona's TPT exempts nearly all services, with $27.7 billion in forgone collections at a 5% rate, including $2.8 billion in health services. So the base erodes as consumption shifts toward services, while the income tax base tracks total income including capital gains. TPT also pyramids heavily on business inputs and construction, which embeds into housing costs. You get the regressivity of a consumption tax without the broad-base efficiency that justifies one.
What do you guys think? Good idea or bad idea? It is crazy to me how not many people are talking about this plan.
Full writeup with charts: https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/i-did-the-math-on-andy-biggss-income
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 28 days ago
▲ 17 r/Futurology
Share of US unemployment coming from AI-exposed jobs has risen from ~1 in 5 to more than 1 in 4 since 2019 (new national tracker, public data)
Every time the "is AI taking jobs" question comes up, the debate runs on vibes. One side says white-collar bloodbath, the other says nothing is happening, and almost nobody points to data you can actually open and check.
The best work on this is the California Policy Lab's AI-Unemployment Tracker. They linked confidential state UI claim records to occupation-level AI exposure scores. The catch is that it only covers California, because it relies on microdata locked inside one state's employment agency.
I wanted to know whether you could build a credible national version using only public data. Turns out you can, with a tradeoff (breadth instead of depth).
The approach: every month the US Department of Labor publishes the characteristics of UI claimants by occupation, for all 50 states. I attach an AI-exposure score to each occupation using two measures: the "potential" exposure from Eloundou et al. (2024) in Science, and the "observed" exposure from the Anthropic Economic Index (how often people in a job actually use AI). Each occupation lands in a high, moderate, or low bucket, and the tracker follows how the share of claims from each bucket moves over time.
What the first release shows:
- The share of UI claims from highly AI-exposed work has risen from roughly 1 in 5 before the pandemic to more than 1 in 4 by mid-2026, with a visible inflection after late 2022.
- There is no mass-layoff spike. Total claims volume has not jumped. What shows up is a compositional shift in who is filing, tilting toward more exposed, more white-collar work. That lines up with what the California Policy Lab and the Yale Budget Lab have found: a signal worth watching, not a five-alarm fire.
- It varies a lot by state. The knowledge-economy hubs (DC, Virginia, New Hampshire, Georgia, Colorado, Utah, Maryland) lead; states with more physical, hands-on work sit at the bottom.
The big caveat, and the reason I would not run a scary headline off this: exposure measures whether a job's tasks overlap with what AI can do, not whether AI is why anyone actually lost their job. A rising exposed share is consistent with AI displacement, but also with ordinary business cycles, the multi-year tech downturn that predates ChatGPT, and shifts in who files. Claims data also miss anyone who never files. It describes a pattern. It does not prove a cause. That said though, some states do appear to be hit harder than other states.
Disclosure: this is my project (PoliMetrics, with Alt-30). The dashboard is free with no paywall, I'm just interested in talking about it with people who are also interested in the future of AI and work!
Dashboard: alt30.shinyapps.io/AI_Labor_Market_Impact_Tracker/
Write-up with the charts and full methodology: https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/is-ai-showing-up-in-the-unemployment
Happy to get into the data sources or where I think it's weakest.
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 2 months ago
▲ 41 r/mesaaz
Free meals for kids this summer – Mesa Public Schools
Mesa Public Schools is offering free breakfast and lunch this summer at some locations for anyone 18 and under.
No sign-up, no paperwork, just show up! It’s an awesome program and gets kids fed/fed better! Adults can buy meals too ($3 breakfast / $5 lunch).
Locations and times are on the MPS site: mpsaz.org/food
Also, if your family qualifies for free/reduced lunch during the school year, check out SUN Bucks. It’s $120 in grocery benefits for the summer. Apply at azed.gov/SUNBucks (open through August 3).
Pass it along if you know someone who could use it!
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 3 months ago
▲ 43 r/charts
The states with the highest food insecurity rates also tend to have the most restrictive SNAP eligibility thresholds [OC]
Data Source: https://map.feedingamerica.org/
Two maps I made for my policy analysis blog.
The first shows county-level food insecurity rates from Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap data.
The second shows gross income limits for SNAP eligibility by state. 16 states sit at the federal floor of 130% FPL, while 27 have expanded to 200% FPL.
In the 130% FPL states, an estimated 55% of food-insecure residents fall above the income cutoff and are ineligible for SNAP. In states that expanded to 200%, that figure drops to 38%.
Source: Feeding America, Map the Meal Gap 2025 (2023 estimates).
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 3 months ago
▲ 0 r/supremecourt
The Denominator That Gutted the Voting Rights Act
Justice Alito’s majority opinion in the recent Louisiana vs Callais court case rests on a specific factual claim: that Black voters turned out at higher rates than white voters in two of the last five presidential elections, nationally and in Louisiana.
That claim came from a DOJ amicus brief and uses VAP as the denominator, which includes non-citizens, incarcerated individuals, and people with felony disenfranchisement. The Census Bureau’s preferred measure for racial turnout comparisons is CVAP, which filters to eligible voters only.
I pulled the CPS Voting and Registration Supplement tables and charted both. The results are pretty different depending on which denominator you use.
Personally, I think the Supreme Court should be held accountable. Their decisions HAVE to be based on real empirical evidence and not numbers that have been manipulated to tell the story the Trump administration wants. What do you think?
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 3 months ago
▲ 297 r/EconomyCharts
Consumer confidence just hit its lowest point in 74 years. The April 2026 final reading came in at 49.8, below the 2008 crash, COVID, and the 2022 inflation spike.
Sentiment dropped across every demographic regardless of age, income, or political party. Year-ahead inflation expectations jumped from 3.8% to 4.7% in a single month.
Source data: https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/
More context on the chart: https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/consumer-sentiment-just-hit-a-74
u/Public_Finance_Guy — 4 months ago