We are in an economic recession. While some monetary sacrifices for governmental agencies are inevitable, the latest push to deprive Planned Parenthood of all federal funding is not solely motivated by the desire for fiscal conservatism. Instead, the burgeoning campaign against funding for Planned Parenthood is overtly purported to be a means of rectifying an existing ethical dilemma: forcing Americans to finance abortion services through their...
We all know what’s going on in Washington: somehow health care, the driest of all dry political issues, has become the most incendiary topic in politics. Politicians are shrieking at the President, constituents are fired up about… something, and grown men are crying into their pillows at night. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, someone is paying his or her bill after a lovely meal and smiling at the fact that a surcharge is funding on...
public housing, and to even fix up the Statue of Liberty – now slated to open on the Fourth of July. While Congress eventually passed greatly needed recovery funds, the case of Sandy demonstrates that federal disaster relief funding is far too susceptible of becoming a legislative hostage in partisan and ideological deficit battles or of simply getting gummed up in congressional procedures – at the considerable cost of communities who can’t affo...
...oes not identify where the financing will come from. Moreover, Obama’s proposal to provide subsidies to the uninsured who do not qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP seems alarmingly implausible, without a more detailed strategy for funding. Republican candidate John McCain does not pursue universal healthcare as a goal; he would not seek to require Americans to carry health insurance, though he does acknowledge the need for extensive reform. McCain pro...
...l leak in one of Brazil’s newer offshore oil drilling platforms, and fears of a “resource curse” have increased since the Brazilian Deputies Chamber failed to pass a bill pipelining all future federal royalties to educational funding from the exploration of deep water oil reserves. Concerning inequality, there has been remarkable progress with conditional cash transfers such as Bolsa Família, a titanic poverty-reduction program, but long-overdue...
...t passed four years later increased and established a more flexible cap on the number of legal immigrants allowed into the United States, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 lead to massive federally-imposed deportations by requiring those who had unlawfully immigrated to the United States to leave the country until they could acquire a pardon. In 2001, Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) introdu...
...cency. Throughout the crisis, they have only acted when absolutely necessary, coming up with half-baked stopgaps and avoiding the question that should be at the forefront of their minds: How does Europe move to a full-fledged federal republic? The indisputable fact is that a monetary union with independent fiscal policies will inevitably be chronically unstable and prone to crises and possible break up. Draghi’s actions might have given Europe so...
...rsial illegal immigration laws simultaneously targeted and implicated racial minorities. Arizona’s bill, S.B. 1070, is one such piece of legislation that opens with a declaration that all local police departments must enforce federal immigration laws to their fullest extent and directs the officials to “prioritize immigration enforcement in all contexts and whenever there is reasonable suspicion.” Section 2(B) of the Arizona law mandates that “fo...
...e hardships that millions of Africans endured during the Atlantic slave trade) and purposefully (to help ordinary citizens realize how devastating the situation still is so that they can pressure their governments to increase funding for anti-slavery research and policy). Reclaiming the word “slavery” will not end slavery by itself, but it is an important step creating rhetorical campaigns that can be used to inspire large-scale change. If we rig...
...ting the HHS mandate and the recent compromise would violate expressed First Amendment rights; without augmenting the religious exception, the mandate remains unconstitutional. Throughout the history of the United States, the federal government has habitually sought to safeguard religious liberty – except for when the Supreme Court historically reversed this precedent in 1990. In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), a group of Native Americans su...
Follow us at
Like us on
Recent Comments