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it’s none too soon to begin asking the question: what have we learned about economic policy in this crash that should inform our thinking for the next downturn? 

Let’s start with the safety net since it’s a fixture of advanced economies and serves the critical function of catching (or not) the most economically vulnerable when the market fails

For many of today’s conservatives, the increased use of a safety-net program is proof that there’s something wrong with the user, not the underlying economy.

IT is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.

The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own interests.

this reaction misses the complexity of the political dynamic that’s taken hold in these parts of the country. It misdiagnoses the Democratic Party’s growing conundrum with working-class white voters. And it also keeps us from fully grasping what’s going on in communities where conditions have deteriorated

The Justice Department is set to release about 6,000 inmates early from prison — the largest one-time release of federal prisoners — in an effort to reduce overcrowding and provide relief to drug offenders who received harsh sentences over the past three decades, according to U.S. officials.

inmates from federal prisons nationwide will be set free by the department’s Bureau of Prisons between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2. About two-thirds of them will go to halfway houses and home confinement before being put on supervised release. About one-third are foreign citizens who will be quickly deported, officials said.

The commission’s action is separate from an effort by President Obama to grant clemency to certain nonviolent drug offenders, an initiative that has resulted in the early release of 89 inmates.

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded. From Our Advertisers .story-link { position: relative; display: block; text-decoration: none; padding: 6px 0; min-height: 65px; min-width: 300px; } .story-link:hover { background-color: #eeeeec; } .story-kicker, .story-heading, .summary { margin: 0; padding: 0; } .thumb { position: absolute; left: 0; top: 6px; } .thumb-hover, .story-link:hover .thumb-main { display: none } .thumb-main, .story-link:hover .thumb-hover { display: block } .story-body { padding-left: 75px; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: #000; } .story-body .story-kicker { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 11px; line-height: 11px; font-weight: 400; color: #5caaf3; } .story-heading { font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 700; padding: 5px 0 0; } Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation Changing Charity Younger donors are finding new ways to give. <noscript class=&quot;MOAT-nytdfp348531439194?moatClientLevel1=31074278&amp;amp;moatClientLevel2=343740158&amp;amp;moatClientLevel3=58584518&amp;amp;moatClientLevel4=94015704638&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer1=28390358&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer2=30706478&amp;amp;zMoatPR=n

The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.

An E.P.A. official on Tuesday disputed the finding. “We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities,” Liz Purchia, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement. “At no point did the E.P.A. encourage the public to contact Congress or any state legislature.”

the trend of rising emigration actually predates the pandemic—and coincides with the emergence of several other important economic trends since 2017, including higher youth unemployment, the state’s renewed grip on the financial sector and an apparently structural downtrend in Chinese growth.

Rebounding emigration is also striking in the context of a declining overall birthrate, and suggests that Beijing must do far more to convince talent, both domestic and foreign, that China is a good place to put down roots if it wants to avoid a steeper growth slowdown in the years ahead.

China, unlike the U.S., has always been a nation of emigrants—its diaspora is among the world’s largest and most influential.

DRONES ARE A TOOL, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word “assassination.” This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, targeted killings.”

When the Obama administration has discussed drone strikes publicly, it has offered assurances that such operations are a more precise alternative to boots on the ground and are authorized only when an “imminent” threat is present and there is “near certainty” that the intended target will be eliminated. Those terms, however, appear to have been bluntly redefined to bear almost no resemblance to their commonly understood meanings.

Additional documents on high-value kill/capture operations in Afghanistan buttress previous accounts of how the Obama administration masks the true number of civilians killed in drone strikes by categorizing unidentified people killed in a strike as enemies, even if they were not the intended targets. The slides also paint a picture of a campaign in Afghanistan aimed not only at eliminating al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, but also at taking out members of other local armed groups.

there is a really simple way of thinking of the debate over net neutrality: Is access to the Internet more like access to electricity, or more like cable television service?

For all the technical complexity of generating electricity and distributing it to millions of people, the economic arrangement is very simple: I give them money. They give me electricity. I do with it what I will.

One theory of the case, and the one that the Obama administration embraced Monday, is that the Internet is like electricity. It is fundamental to the 21st century economy, as essential to functioning in modern society as electricity. It is a public utility. “We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas,” the president said in his written statement.

It’s become a predictable pattern: One act of violence in the world overshadows a similar, concurrent violent act, inviting a backlash against this imbalance in scrutiny, sympathy, and grief. But that predictability doesn’t make the pattern any less distressing. Each time there’s a major terror attack in an American or European city—New York, Madrid, London, Paris, Paris again—it captures the attention and concern of Americans and Europeans in a way that similar atrocities elsewhere don’t seem to do. Seldom do events line up so neatly, offering a clear comparison, as the bombings in Beirut and the rampage in Paris.

Onepotential explanation is simple: There were three times more deaths in Paris than in Beirut. Beyond that are a host of other, intertwined reasons. Perhaps chief among them is familiarity. Americans are much more likely to have been to Paris than to Beirut—or to Cairo, or to Nairobi, or to any number of cities that have experienced bloody attacks. If they haven’t traveled to the French capital themselves, they’ve likely seen a hundred movies and TV shows that take place there, and can reel off the names of landmarks. Paris in particular is a symbol of a sort of high culture.

There is also a troubling tribal, or racial, component to this familiarity factor as well: People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s administration is falling apart because it turns out someone will have to pay for decarbonizing the eurozone’s largest economy.

This shocking and horrifying revelation is brought to you by Germany’s highest constitutional court, which ruled in mid-November that Berlin’s favorite budget gimmick violates the balanced-budget amendment. The amendment, known as the debt brake, limits the federal general-budget deficit to 0.35% of gross domestic product in any year unless Parliament declares an emergency.

German governments devised a workaround even before the amendment forced them to. By establishing special funds—called Sondervermögen—with their own revenue streams and borrowing authority, the government could shift a portion of its expenditures off its balance sheet.

Terms like entitlements, government benefits and safety net often conjure images of tax dollars sliding from the hands of the wealthy into the pockets of the poor. But as we reported Sunday, that image is badly outdated. Benefits now flow primarily to the middle class.The center’s study found that the poorest American households, the bottom fifth, received just 32 cents of every dollar of government benefits distributed in 2010.

the recent recession did not cause any significant increase in the share of benefits flowing to the poor, as might once have been expected.

older people received slightly more than half of government benefits, while the nonelderly with disabilities received an additional 20 percent. Most of these benefits are not means-tested – indeed, better-paid workers get more in Social Security.

As the recent riots at a Foxconn factory in northern China demonstrate, growth alone, even at sustained, spectacular rates, has not produced the kind of life satisfaction crucial to a stable society — an experience that shows how critically important good jobs and a strong social safety net are to people’s happiness.

Starting in 1990, as China moved to a free-market economy, real per-capita consumption and gross domestic product doubled, then doubled again. Most households now have at least one color TV. Refrigerators and washing machines — rare before 1990 — are common in cities.

most policy makers would confidently predict that a fourfold increase in a people’s material living standard would make them considerably happier.

This is a staggering turn. When I last wrote about the topic in mid-May, it seemed the FCC would permit a limited fast and slow lane scheme. Then the winds began to shift.

In June, John Oliver exhorted his viewers to write to the FCC in defense of net neutrality, and they did so in droves, crashing the agency’s servers. By the fall, more than 4 million people had submitted public comments on the topic, overwhelmingly in support of stronger rules to protect net neutrality.

now there is today’s promise, from the FCC chair, that cable industry lobbyist himself: that the Internet should be regulated as the landline phone system was. That Internet service is a utility. “It was a combination of everything: good legal arguments coupled with popular and political support—and public outcry any time it looked like the FCC hadn't quite gotten the message yet,”

A new class of astronauts is being sought by Nasa, now that a return to crewed missions from American soil is on the horizon.

The US space agency said it would accept applications for its astronaut corps from 14 December to mid-February 2016 and announce the successful candidates in mid-2017.

Since the space shuttle was mothballed in 2011, the only way to get into space has been to secure a seat aboard the three-person Russian Soyuz capsule and fly from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. While the Soyuz will continue to ferry people to and from the International Space Station, other vessels are on course to take over some of the trips. Boeing and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are developing the CST-100 Starliner and Crew Dragon spacecraft, respectively. Meanwhile, Nasa is building the Orion deep space exploration vehicle.

Markets fell after President Donald Trump announced planned tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, an effect that was exacerbated by what the move symbolizes fo

When a key economic input suddenly becomes scarce, &nbsp;it’s called a supply shock: It pushes costs up and economic activity down.

This helps explain why markets have responded so badly to President Donald Trump’s announcement of a 25% tariff on steel imports and 10% on aluminum. Like a geopolitical shock that reduces the supply of oil, it’s bad for both inflation and growth.

In a 368-page document published this week, the government announced its strategy to cut emissions to net zero by 2050 and confirmed its target for all electricity to come from low carbon sources by 2035.&nbsp;

the net zero debate has essentially boiled down to how quickly the cultural elite can enforce total eco-austerity, rather than a nuanced discussion about trade-offs. Parliament declared a climate emergency in May 2019, and hasn’t looked back since.

Proponents of net zero justify the policy with a range of pathways that supposedly show that it is both achievable and affordable. But a vast number of uncertain assumptions undermine their claims

Implementation matters, but it’s harder to cover because it’s happening in all parts of the country simultaneously. There isn’t a huge Republican-Democratic fight over it, so there isn’t the conflict that draws the attention to it

we sort of implicitly treat policy like it’s this binary one-zero condition. One, you pass a bill, and the thing is going to happen. Zero, you didn’t, and it won’t.

ROBINSON MEYER: You can almost divide the law up into different kind of sectors, right? You have the renewable build-out. You have EVs. You have carbon capture. You have all these other decarbonizing technologies the law is trying to encourage

Alberta wildfire: Emergency declared in Fort McMurray

A state of emergency has been declared in the province of Alberta in Canada

Officials say the fast-moving blaze could destroy much of the city.

The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline,

Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution — the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower.

study also examined net worth at the 95th percentile. (For households at that level, 94 percent of the population had less wealth and 4 percent had more.) It found that for this well-do-do slice of the population, household net worth increased 14 percent over the same 10 years.

Islamic State's official magazine carried a photo on Wednesday of a Schweppes soft drink can it said was used to make an improvised bomb that brought down a Russian airliner over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula last month, killing all 224 people on board.

The photo showed a can of Schweppes Gold soft drink and what appeared to be a detonator and switch on a blue background, three simple components that if genuine are likely to cause concern for airline safety officials worldwide.

"The divided Crusaders of the East and West thought themselves safe in their jets as they cowardly bombarded the Muslims of the Caliphate," the English language Dabiq magazine said in reference to Russia and the West. "And so revenge was exacted upon those who felt safe in the cockpits."Western governments have said the Airbus A321 operated by Metrojet was likely brought down by a bomb and Moscow confirmed on Tuesday it had reached the same conclusion, but the Egyptian government said it has still not found evidence of criminal action.

It has been a busy week for Martin Shkreli, the flamboyant businessman at the center of the drug industry’s price-gouging scandals. From Our Advertisers quot;frameC

He said he would sharply increase the cost of a drug used to treat a potentially deadly parasitic infection. He called himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor” on Twitter and railed against critics in a live-streaming YouTube video. After reportedly paying $2 million for a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, he goaded a member of the hip-hop group to “show me some respect.”

Then, at 6 a.m. Thursday, F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Shkreli, 32, at his Murray Hill apartment. He was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.