Connor O’Brien (@cojobrien) / X

Connor O’Brien

5,124 posts

Connor O’Brien

@cojobrien

Fellow @IFP. Thinking about: high-skilled immigration reform, building pro-family cities, and the godforsaken New York Mets. Definite optimist.

Washington, DC

Joined October 2011

Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Aug 21, 2025
Per the Urban Institute, the federal government spends about $5 on seniors for every $1 it spends on kids. Between all levels of government, seniors get twice as much.
Saagar Enjeti
@esaagar
Aug 21, 2025
Compare the benefits a senior 65+ gets to a child born in the US age 0-5 (and their parents) I don't wish to take senior benefits away. Only to fight the ongoing senior campaign to eliminate any financial/societal contribution to the younger generation
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Jul 8, 2025
CLEAR will now let you pay $99 to skip the CLEAR premium security lane at the airport. No, not a joke.
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Feb 24, 2025
This figure is from the Thrift Savings Plan, the retirement plan for federal employees, which has become a great model for the private sector. Everyone gets auto-enrolled and your contributions get matched up to 5%. No scandal here - just people saving for retirement!
@amuse
@amuse
Feb 23, 2025
CIVIL SERVANTS: Almost 160,000 federal civil service employees are now millionaires.
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Sep 19, 2025
It's possible that a $100,000 H-1B fee (especially if that's per year or per term) actually *increases* the federal deficit. Our back-of-the-envelope math suggests the average H-1B contributes $40,000 more per year in taxes than they use in benefits.
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Jun 1, 2025
Abundance is so moderate/banal/measured that I'm half-convinced there's some secret, second book out there with the same name that you're all arguing about.
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Aug 28, 2025
There is a great retrospective in the WSJ today on how the UK's post-Brexit experiment with big increases in legal immigration went wrong. Their mistakes yield some important policy lessons for supporters *and* critics of skilled immigration. Let's dive in: (tl;dr: What was
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Dec 24, 2024
The country caps are even worse than described here. Lots of Indian applicants will die waiting in line (and all the while be heavily restricted in what jobs they can do). And their kids will be kicked out when they turn 21. Madness.
David Sacks
@DavidSacks
Dec 24, 2024
Replying to @LauraLoomer and @sriramk
Point of clarification: Sriram didn’t say he wants to remove all caps on green cards. He said he wants to remove *country* caps on green cards. Right now, every country in the world gets allocated the same number of green cards, no matter how many qualified applicants it has. So
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Feb 8, 2025
Austen Allred
@Austen
Feb 8, 2025
I do think DOGE is going to be able to actually balance the budget. People used to say, "You can't, because look at these sacred categories: There's x in entitlements, y in healthcare, you can't change those." But how much in those sacred categories is fraud/waste/abuse?
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Mar 20, 2025
This is candy land math. Federal spending is $6.6 trillion. Federal revenue is $4.9 trillion, $2.4 trillion of which is income tax. If you eliminate income tax, you have $2.5 trillion left in federal revenue. To get a $1 trillion surplus, you'd have to cut spending by more
DataRepublican (small r)
@DataRepublican
Jan 31, 2025
Replying to @elonmusk
Get to 1T in budget surplus, eliminate income tax, then drive down interest rate on national debt to 0. Not paying interest on national debt will give a balanced budget. Then you'll see the greatest economic boom in history and pay down the national debt pretty fast. And
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Oct 24, 2025
What if I told you the administration is changing the H-1B visa program to prioritize event planners, landscape architects, and marriage counselors over Intel engineers, AI researchers, and pediatric surgeons? Sounds too insane to be true, but it's happening! 1/
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Dec 18, 2024
-Member pay should be higher. -They should each have more staff. No legislative staffer's portfolio should account for more than 5% of GDP. -Staffers should be paid significantly more, particularly early and mid-career.
Maxwell Meyer
@mualphaxi
Dec 18, 2024
Raising the Congressional salary from $174,000 to $180,600 is obviously reasonable after 15 years of no raises, and people raging against this as corrupt are not thinking clearly. Do you think we get better results from *not* paying members adequately? Huh?
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Oct 26, 2025
The median American family’s net worth is at an all-time high of $192,000.
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Jun 17, 2025
Just make new apartments legal please
Kate Willett
@katewillett
Jun 17, 2025
I genuinely think everyone involved with the Abundance Agenda is one of the worst people in the world. It’s like if you made a list of Kinds of People That Are Bad- Nazis, tech fascists, cryptocurrency lobbyists, the people responsible for Trump’s win it has like all of them
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Connor O’Brien
@cojobrien
Nov 13, 2025
There are no cashiers getting H-1Bs, period. The screenshot here is Labor Condition Application data, not actual H-1B winners. Don't take my word for it. Bloomberg FOIA'd all H-1B winners from FY2021 - FY2024. It's all public. Roman Helmet Guy wrong.
Roman Helmet Guy
@romanhelmetguy
Nov 13, 2025
America needs the H1B program to survive, that's the ugly truth. You think you're gonna teach an American how to work a cash register? We simply do not have the cognitive capacity. Every time I enter a 7/11, my primitive American brain can barely comprehend what I'm seeing.
Readers added context
The screenshot is not H-1B visa issuance data, it's the LCA application data. The H-1B data is public and available on USCIS website: uscis.gov/archive/h-1b-e… The are no visa applications for these two positions, approved or denied. The only 7/11 approved visas are in their HQ in Irving, TX.
GitHub - BloombergGraphics/2024-h1b-immigration-data: US H-1B Visa Lottery and Petition Data FY...
From github.com
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