Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

A massive bill that extends billions of dollars in tax assistance to businesses and expands the budget deficit won U.S. House of Representatives approval on Thursday in the closest thing to a grand bipartisan tax bargain in years.

Lawmakers voted 318-109 for the $622 billion measure, which is a step toward avoiding a government shutdown.

The bill now goes to the Senate, where it will likely be voted on together with a $1.1 trillion spending bill that must be approved to avert a repeat of a government shutdown in 2013 that damaged the U.S. economy.

Part of my research methodology was to engage in focus group discussi

ons with women in village settings. In order to do this in any village in Malawi, one has to seek permission from the village chief.And so I did. The chief told me to come back the next day so that he can have time to mobilize the women, as well as give them proper notice of the proposed discussion

They were... kids. Teenage girls.

They are angry more generally, and this is part of why a movement that didn’t exist a month ago became consolidated so quickly: Anger is one of the things that travels quickly on social media, a form of communication that favors emotion; it’s also one of the things that brings people together in a world where trade unions, church organizations and political parties are fading in importance.

There is an irony here: Macron’s own political party, La République En Marche, also started out as an anti-party party, a haven for people who no longer identified with the traditional political parties. But it was conceived in a political context, and its members took part in elections. As a result, En Marche, which didn’t exist three years ago, is now perceived as part of the establishment it was formed to defeat.

French history is full of revolutions overtaken by even-more-radical revolutions, but the speed with which these changes happen now is breathtaking.

The stability (and even monotony) associated with German politics under Ms. Merkel appears to be coming to an end. Her looming retirement marks a deepening crisis of the German political system that threatens not just the future of the country, but of the European Union.

Thirty years later, this society has vanished. Average real incomes declined for nearly 20 years beginning in 1993. Germany not only grew more unequal, but the standard of living for the lower strata stagnated or even fell. The lowest 40 percent of households have faced annual net income losses for around 25 years now, while the kinds of jobs that promised long-term stability dwindled.

on the surface Germany appears to be an economic success story. Its G.D.P. has grown consistently for nearly a decade; unemployment is at its lowest since reunification in 1989. In amassing trade surpluses, Germany has enjoyed several advantages: an advanced manufacturing sector; the ability to get primary products and services from other members of the European Union; and being in the eurozone, which effectively gives the country a devalued currency, making its exports more attractive.

O’Brien’s show received a call from a Leave voter named Bill, who said he owed the host an apology. “I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong,” the man began to say, in an accent that placed him firmly outside the British élite. “I’m an old-fashioned git, really, I suppose . . . For some reason, I thought we were better off, but, clearly, I was wrong.” As Bill made this admission, his voice broke and he started crying. O’Brien pointed out that 17.4 million Britons made the same choice, and told him not to blame himself. Bill was inconsolable. “I was wrong, I am so sorry,” he blubbered. “What have I done to my country?”

May had very little bargaining leverage. She and the Europeans both knew that, even as Britain went through the motions of leaving the E.U., it couldn’t afford to make a clean break. Which, of course, raises the question of what the point of the exercise was to begin with.The harsh fact is there was no point.

Contrary to the claims of the Brexiteers, Britain already had substantial flexibility within the E.U. Having long ago opted out of the common currency and other E.U. initiatives, it retained the freedom to set its own interest rates and fiscal policies, check visitors at the border, and reject some of the legislative directives from Brussels, but it enjoyed all the advantages of the single market. To the extent that any E.U. member country was having its cake and eating it, Britain was the one.

Last month, scientists warned that we had only about 12 years to cut global emissions in half and that doing so would require a worldwide mobilization on the scale of that for World War II.

perhaps it should not be surprising that, even in many of the world’s most progressive places, even in the moment of acknowledged environmental crisis, a sort of climate NIMBYism prevails. The cost of inaction is sort of unthinkable — annual deadly heat waves and widespread famine, tens of millions of climate refugees, global coastal flooding, and disasters that will cost double the world’s present-day wealth. And so we choose, most of the time, not to think about it

This is denial, too, whatever you check on a survey about whether you “believe” the climate is changing.

The trend was consistent: The more often a Trump voter attended church, the less white-identitarian they appeared, the more they expressed favorable views of racial minorities, and the less they agreed with populist arguments on trade and immigration.

The differences were particularly striking on race. For instance, a quarter of Trump voters who never attend church describe being white as “very important” to their identity; for the most frequent churchgoers voters, it was 9 percent. Among non-churchgoing Trump voters, only 48 percent had warm feelings toward black people, compared to 71 percent of weekly churchgoers; the same sort of pattern held for views of Hispanics, Asians and Jews.

their views of Muslims, interestingly, seemed to have been influenced by Trump’s own rhetoric, becoming more hostile between 2016 and 2017.

You sense, in some of the stories to emerge from these fraud charges, an odd form of intergenerational class conflict, in which wealthy people who did not grow up pampered (Loughlin is the child of a telephone-company foreman) are now trying to impose middle-class values (a good education is important) on superrich kids who see little use for them.

Many kids compete for elite college slots in an attempt to gain access to a higher social class, but some of these parents are surely seeking the opposite effect — a degree that suggests their kids are not simply coasting on their inheritance while cultivating vanity careers. They are heaping money on their progeny in an attempt to correct for how rich they are.

An underperforming, school-averse teenager is often content to attend a low-pressure state school with good parties; it’s his parents who are desperate to prevent this.

WASHINGTON — Senator Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who has tangled with President Trump for months, announced on Tuesday that he would not seek re-election in 2018, declaring on the Senate floor that he “will no longer be complicit or silent” in the face of the president’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified” behavior.Mr. Flake made his announcement in an extraordinary 17-minute speech in which he challenged not only the president but also his party’s leadership. He deplored the “casual undermining of our democratic ideals” and “the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency” that he said had become prevalent in American politics in the era of Mr. Trump.

Without mentioning Mr. Trump by name, Mr. Flake, 54, took direct aim at the president’s policies, notably his isolationist tendencies, but also his behavior and that of his aides. In his time in Washington, Mr. Flake embodied an old-line conservatism. He avidly pitched smaller government, spending cuts and an end to home-district pork-barrel projects, but also supported free trade, engagement with the world and an openness to immigration.

“We must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal,” Mr. Flake said. “They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified. And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”

One of the more interesting metaphors for this idea of balance was first coined in the 17th century by the Englishman George Savile, Earl of Halifax. He celebrated in a famous tract what he called the art of the political “trimmer,” governed by a simple rule: “If men are together in a boat, and one part of the company would weigh it down on one side, another would make it lean as much to the contrary.” Otherwise, the boat might capsize.

always attempting to meet in the middle of two competing forces. Call it “both sides-ism,” “zombie centrism,” or whatever. I share the general contempt for that kind of “splitting the difference” moderation. There may be times when it works, in an attempt to close a political deal, but it’s mindless if it doesn’t take into account external reality. So to return to the metaphor of a boat, it’s no good being equally balanced if a gale-force wind is pushing the boat in one direction. You may need to get everyone on one side of the ship to keep it upright. You trim your sails not according to ideology, or a compass, but according to the winds and the waves

There’s no easy formula for this; it requires prudential judgment. It requires leaders who have a sense of the exigencies and passions of their time and respond to them empirically.

Even if most of the tariffs go away, Trump’s trade belligerence has done lasting damage to America’s reputation, and hence to a global economy that depends on American leadership.

The whole world now knows two things about us. First, we’re not reliable — an agreement with the U.S. is really just a suggestion, because you never know when the president will invent some excuse for breaking it.

Second, we’re easily rolled: The president may talk tough on trade, but in classic bully fashion, he runs away if confronted.

To my understanding, the Green New Deal is pretty clearly written as (and meant as) a rallying cry, “This is what we care about. Let’s move the ‘Overton Window’ kind of stuff.” So why are people treating it like it is (or was meant to be) a detailed policy proposal? It feels like going to an auto show to see “Car of the Future” designs, and then being pissed that you’re not looking at a 2017 Taurus.

I think it has a lot to do with the presidential campaign. Democratic candidates want to be able to point out that they’re on board with the new left-leaning litmus tests without having to get pinned down by policies that might prove controversial. I think that’s a learned behavior from the 2016 campaign: people don’t vote on detailed policy proposals, they vote on the good feelings evoked by broad goals.

I do think there’s an implicit critique of Obama in there. That he was naive to think the Republicans would go along with his agenda. And that taking half-measures doesn’t really get you anywhere. In fact, it might weaken your bargaining position relative to demanding a ***lot*** and then settling for half of what you get.

f food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2, after China and the United States. In our nation alone, we throw away some 63 million tons of food a year, even as 40 million Americans are considered food insecure.

boil down to the old mantra to reduce, reuse and recycle.

advocates are getting the problem exactly backward. Less than 20 percent of total food waste happens at farms and packinghouses, where the ugly-produce movement works its magic, according to ReFED, a nonprofit dedicated to researching food waste policies.

That led him in recent years to highlight a link between two ostensibly separate problems: low labor-force participation and rising addiction to opioid painkillers. In a discovery that alarmed many policy makers, Mr. Krueger found that nearly half of working-age American men outside the labor force took pain medication on a given day.

“Prime-age men who are out of the labor force report that they experience notably low levels of emotional well-being throughout their days, and that they derive relatively little meaning from their daily activities,” Mr. Krueger wrote in a 2017 paper.

A development that particularly bothered him in recent years, Ms. Stevenson said, was companies’ growing use of non-compete clauses in employment contracts targeting low-wage workers. Not only do such practices impede the functioning of competitive labor markets, but they hold down wage growth and “lead to depressed people who feel trapped,” she said

hat hyper-partisanship is wrecking American democracy is a truism of our times. But there is a lack of consensus about what to do about it. One challenge is that many pundits and would-be reformers lack historical understanding of the problem

reformers should read Sam Rosenfeld’s new book, The Polarizers, a timely and valuable guide explaining how our current political divisions came to be

Rosenfeld, a Colgate University political scientist trained as a historian, goes through the historical record to recreate two parallel stories—the intellectual debate over whether to have two distinct political parties, and the on-the-ground intraparty battles in which activists triumphed over insiders in restructuring party organizations and coalitions. Told together, these stories add important context to our present dilemma, reminding us that party politics are so different today from the 1950s

(CNN)The world's most listless and impotent -- err, "greatest" -- deliberative body shelved further debate over the future of DACA more than three weeks ago, after senators voted down four proposals, one of which didn't address the question at all, over the course of about an hour. Even with a pair of court decisions delaying its expiration date, which was supposed to hit on Monday, the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is now rolling downhill to collapse. Nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants, brought into the country -- the only home many of them have ever known -- as minors, will over the coming months, or weeks, lose their shield against deportation. Some already have.

DACA is ending because Trump ended it.

What's more, Trump had every opportunity to both protect DACA recipients on the brink and deliver on his dearest campaign trail promise. Democratic lawmakers had been largely willing to exchange billions of dollars for border wall construction in exchange for some kind of legislation to save DACA and the "dreamers," a wider swath of the mostly young, DACA-eligible undocumented immigrants.

As South Korea’s national-security adviser told it on Thursday, Donald Trump will meet with Kim Jong Un this spring for one purpose only: to achieve the “permanent denuclearization” of North Korea. But according to one of the U.S. officials who came closest to striking that kind of deal, the president better lower his expectations. By a lot.

“I don’t think [the North Koreans are] going to want to negotiate giving up all their nuclear weapons,” he added. “But even if they did … I have no idea how we could verify it.”

The years since have brought a series of nuclear agreements that at times froze the North Korean nuclear program, but over the long term failed to prevent the North from becoming a nuclear-weapons state. The achilles heel of many of these accords was the Kim government’s refusal to disclose all its nuclear activities and permit outside monitors to verify that those activities had ceased.

it was the Faustian bargain he struck with the president, normalizing the abnormal and forgiving the unforgivable for the sake of a single mediocre policy win.

It will remember the alacrity and ease with which the supposedly likable face of pro-growth, family-friendly conservatism opportunistically played the sycophant to the congenitally mendacious and previously priapic nativist bigot who, through a bad fluke, captured the White House.

A conservative rejoinder to this critique is that the speaker had no choice; that Trump was the lemon with which he had to make lemonade. Nonsense. Congress and the White House are coequals, and Ryan and other Republicans who saw Trump for what he is never owed him obeisance

BEIJING — Two days of inconclusive U.S.-China talks ended here Friday amid signs that the Trump administration is demanding dramatic concessions that challenge core elements of China’s economic system and its ambitions for future development.

unclear where the two sides had found common ground

Chinese negotiators presented their own hard-line terms for a reshaped trade relationship, demanding the United States drop a complaint over China’s licensing terms for foreign patent holders and immediately designate China a market economy, which would give it easier treatment under routine U.S. trade enforcement actions.

the current attacks on the Federal Bureau of Investigation by President Trump and the Republican Party raise the question of whether it’s possible to maintain an effective, and legitimate, intelligence establishment, while the elected leaders who are supposed to control it engage in open-ended, winner-take-all, partisan conflict.

Bipartisan consensus has played a crucial but underappreciated role in the history of U.S. intelligence.

The United States developed no real national intelligence agency in the 19th century, while European states such as France, Russia and Prussia did. Partly this was due to small-government constitutional norms on this side of the Atlantic; but mistrust between American political factions was another inhibiting factor.