By Jessie Levin (PO ’18), Staff Writer If you are like the average American, you probably spent forty-two hours of your year sitting in traffic.[1] Via a simple, back of the envelope calculation, this results in eighty days stuck in traffic during an average person’s working years. Of course, these numbers are averages and do not fully show the full picture of commuters in densely populated...
By Lea Kayali (PO ‘19) Race matters. Police brutality, immigration, and criminal justice reforms—these hot-button debates reflect how racial issues are front and center in American politics. As racialized politics percolate through party platforms,[1] Americans’ political identity is increasingly determined by demographics. White nationalism is on the rise in the self-proclaimed “alt-right,” and...
By Brian Chmelik (CMC ’18) On December 22, 2017, Congress passed its first piece of tax reform legislation in more than 30 years. The sweeping bill cut taxes across the board in the hopes of spurring economic growth and creating jobs. A few weeks later, the federal government shut down after Congress failed to reach a deal on raising the debt ceiling and fund the government. Despite the...
By Bryce Wachtell (PO ’21) On February 14th, 2018, a 19-year-old entered Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where he had previously been a student before being expelled, to commit what is now the ninth most deadly mass shooting in U.S. history. Following the carnage, scores of students and teachers have spoken out and called on their representatives to take...
By Jacob Wang (PO ’21) In its 2003 Thessaloniki Summit, the European Union (EU) declared that “the future of the Balkans is within the European Union,” suggesting that Western Balkan nations would one day be incorporated into the EU. Fifteen years later, the European Commission’s restated the EU’s commitment to the West Balkan nations on February 6, 2018. However, Despite the EU’s continued...
By Daisy Ni (PO ’21) The United States’ food stamp program—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—extends back to the era of the Great Depression, and provides food security to over 45 million people in the country today. The budget proposal President Trump handed to Congress indicates his intentions to overhaul SNAP by cutting the program’s budget by $17 billion dollars by...
Conducted by Frankie Konner (PZ ’21), Staff Writer Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the CATO institute, who has focused his research on poverty and welfare policy. He has written many books about public policy, with a particular focus on poverty reform issues. Tanner helped to launch the Project for Social Security Choice, which is considered to be one of the leading plans for the national...
By Elinor Aspegren (PZ ’20) In a referendum on June 23, 2016, 51.9% of voters in the United Kingdom (UK) elected to leave the European Union (EU) in a decision commonly referred to as Brexit. On March 29, 2017, the UK government invoked Article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union, kickstarting negotiations regarding the UK’s departure from the EU. Brexit’s impact extends beyond the UK...
By James Dail (CMC ’20) In the first article in this series, it was established that in the future, widespread worker automation is a highly probable phenomenon, barring an intervening legislative fix. It was also established that adopting a universal basic income for displaced workers would be an insufficient fix for this problem. The next two proposals to be examined will taxing...
By Blake Plante (PO ’18) “Every year the leaves bury memory of these juvenile graves – the crackling umbers and rusts muting to umbrage what otherwise should be rage.” Kyle Dargan’s poem “Natural Causes” is a response to the rate of juvenile homicide in Virginia. In the poem, youth purchase firearms from a farmer who “keeps his gaze down so as to remember nothing of [their] face[s].”...
