Why subscribe?

Wicked Good Policy is a blog focused on big policy ideas that would solve America’s biggest problems.. I’m Samarth Gupta and I recently served in the Treasury Department, the Office of Management & Budget, and the Biden-Harris campaign’s economic policy team. Before and during, I did far too much school and far too little of my assigned reading at Harvard College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and Yale Law School.

The goal of every WGP piece is to offer a new idea for how public policy can solve some of our country’s challenges. I’m hopeful you won’t find our policy prescriptions fitting neatly into an ideological box. We won’t just publish moderate ideas or progressive ideas—whatever that even means these days—we’ll publish good, fresh ideas. If you have any idea you want to write about, please be in touch!

WGP is a place to think about the world as it should be and how to get there, even if it feels wholly unrealistic. In college courses, we debated big things: Why does poverty persist? How can we improve education within schools and across districts? What should be in the government’s role in all of this? In government, those debates quickly shrink: How many percentage points should we change a tax rate or what eligibility requirements for a program should we include? These questions are of course important; they affect millions of people’s lives. But spend too long on them and you can become an uninspired technocrat.

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Now, I’ll tell you what WGP is not. It is not a place to get a daily analysis of the economy and current events. I’d suggest Jared Bernstein or Paul Krugman for that. It is also not a home for technical analysis. For that, I rely on Briefing Book, the Yale Budget Lab, and anything Bobby Kogan or Brendan Duke write.