Tag: federal government
Trump Would Break the Budget
A decision Donald Trump made in his first presidential term has triggered one of the most important policy choices at stake in this year’s election. The massive tax cuts for individuals that Trump signed into law in 2017 will expire at the end of 2025 unless Congress and the next president act to extend them. So far, the question of whether to preserve the Trump tax cuts has received almost no attention in the early stages of a presidential contest
What Has Happened to the Rule of Law in India?
On December 11, India’s supreme court upheld ending the constitutional privileges of the Indian-controlled province of Kashmir, a disputed region claimed by both India and Pakistan. The decision was a sobering example of the Indian judiciary’s creeping servility in the era of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Just as India’s vibrant, secular democracy is transforming into an authoritarian, ethnonationalist state, the supreme court, once vaunted for its fierce independence, is failing to stand up for the rule of law.
The Kashmir
America’s Long Campaign to Erase Gay People Is Itself Being Forgotten
In the summer of 1984, after he finished his first U.S. Foreign Service assignment, in Yugoslavia, Jan Krc flew to Washington, D.C., for what he thought would be a couple of weeks’ training en route to his next post, in South Africa. He thought nothing of it when he was called in for a security debriefing early one morning at the U.S. Information Agency headquarters. There, in a nondescript conference room, he was met by two middle-aged men in suits.
We’ve Been Thinking About America’s Trust Collapse All Wrong
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Americans don’t trust one another, and they don’t trust the government. This mistrust is so pervasive that it can feel natural, but it isn’t. Profound distrust has risen within my lifetime; it is intensifying, and it threatens to make democracy impossible.
Many readers will say, “Of course I don’t trust the candidate who tried to steal the last election, or the party
Arlington’s Civil War Legacy Is Finally Laid to Rest
The wind washed over the rows of white tombstones and carried the last leaves of autumn on its breath. I held the map of Arlington National Cemetery up to my face, clinging to its edges as its corners fluttered. I looked up, and saw the statue I was searching for in the distance, encircled by tall steel fencing that caught and held the light from the afternoon sun. Inside the fence, concentric circles of tombstones surrounded the memorial—gravestones of
The Wildfire Survivors Who Didn’t Want to Be Climate Models
Everyone says Lytton was a beautiful place to live. The small Canadian town sits at the confluence of two rivers and was built on one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in North America—the Nlaka’pamux people have called it home for more than 10,000 years. About 250 people lived in the Lytton of the recent past, on a few cross streets and several dozen lots—you could take it in all in one breath. One blistering June evening in 2021, a
When Milton Friedman Ran the Show
Well before Milton Friedman died in 2006 at 94, he was the rare economist who had become a household name. A longtime professor at the University of Chicago, he had been writing a column for Newsweek for a decade when he won the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics. Then, in 1980, his PBS series, Free to Choose—a didactic, yet not at all dry, paean to the free market—made the diminutive, bald economist something of a star.
The weirdness
Trump Isn’t Merely Unhinged – The Atlantic
With apologies to a certain newspaper’s slogan, many of Donald Trump’s most dangerous statements hide in the plain light of day.
The problem is not that they don’t get reported on—they do—but even so, they are easy to tune out, perhaps because he’s been saying outlandish things for so long that people simply can’t bring themselves to parse the new ones; or perhaps because they’ve become accustomed, or at least numb, to his utterances; or perhaps because they don’t want
Why Congress Keeps Failing to Protect Kids Online
Roughly a decade has passed since experts began to appreciate that social media may be truly hazardous for children, and especially for teenagers. As with teenage smoking, the evidence has accumulated slowly, but leads in clear directions. The heightened rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among young people are measurable and disheartening. When I worked for the White House on technology policy, I would hear from the parents of children who had suffered exploitation or who died by suicide after
Will Republicans Pay a Price for Extremism?
As president, Donald Trump imposed an array of deeply divisive immigration restrictions on both Latinos and Muslims. And yet from 2016 to 2020, he increased his share of the vote among both groups. Even some Latino and Muslim voters who opposed Trump’s immigration agenda moved to support him anyway because of his record on other issues, particularly the economy and conservative social priorities.
Now Trump and several of his rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are doubling down on