• CHEAT SHEET: The Truth About Student Debt — We wrote this Cheat Sheet after President Joe Biden signed off on the seventh extension of the federal student loan repayment pause that began in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. While the extension was welcome, it underscored Biden’s refusal to take more drastic permanent action to reduce the whopping $1.7 trillion Americans owe on student loans. While the president has taken some action on the matter since then, including his announcement in August to do means-tested cancellation of some student debt, there is much more that could be done to solve the crisis. Here, we dig into the nuts and bolts of the subject, Biden’s track record of empty promises, and right-wing pundits and neoliberals’ flawed logic that student loan forgiveness is welfare for the middle and upper classes.
  • CHEAT SHEET: How To Tax The Rich — Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” The founding father would have been wise to add a caveat: For the ultrawealthy, taxes are far from a certainty. Demands to “tax the rich” gained steam during the pandemic, and the calls were renewed this spring as millions of Americans scrambled to file their taxes by the April deadline. That’s why we wrote this Cheat Sheet, which tackles the unfairness of our tax system: who is and isn’t paying up, how legal loopholes create tax giveaways, and what can be done to hold accountable those who can and should be paying the most.
  • CHEAT SHEET: What’s Really Driving Inflation — Corporate media tricked many Americans into thinking that government spending and workers’ wages are to blame for price increases. In response to that false and destructive narrative, we wrote this Cheat Sheet on the real factors behind the largest increase in consumer goods prices since 1982. In it, we explore what’s really driven inflation, from corporate profiteering to fossil fuel fleecing, and we give our take on what lawmakers can do to tackle the issue and protect Americans’ pocketbooks.
  • CHEAT SHEET: The Truth About Crypto — The Lever team has long been rightly skeptical of decentralized digital forms of money. In May, long before the eye-opening collapse of the crypto trading platform FTX, we sounded the alarm in this sobering Cheat Sheet. We explained what crypto is, revealed why it’s not the boon to personal privacy that many advocates claim it to be, exposed the sway that its champions hold in Washington, and detailed the enormous fossil fuel consumption required to create such currencies. The last point is especially astounding: Due to the electricity-intensive computing resources needed to develop lines of code for each coin, the annual carbon impact of mining Bitcoin alone is currently equivalent to the total yearly emissions of New Zealand. Read more about those emissions and much more in this Cheat Sheet.