Category: Uncategorized

I see a lot of folks saying don’t get distracted by the Trump’s “craziness” and / or the investigations of his connection to Russia when the Republicans in Congress are about to pass a series of horrible pieces of legislation. It’s certainly important to keep fighting against all that legislation, especially, the attacks on the ACA and Medicaid which will lead to to thousands of premature deaths and enormous  suffering if they are successful. But… 1. That the President of the United State might have conspired with a foreign power to take power is not a distraction from more important issue. If Trump did what many suspect, he betrayed the core of political life, our republican form of government. Everything else we care about, including our freedom, the future of the earth, and economic justice depends on protecting that form of government. The mere possibility that Trump conspired with Russia… Continue reading

Originally published at the York Dispatch on December 23, 2016. Pennsylvania has been struggling with persistent budget deficits since the start of the Great Recession in 2008. And we at the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center have been recommending a “balanced approach” to resolving the deficit from the beginning, one that combines restraint in spending with new revenues. But since 2010, under Gov. Tom Corbett and Gov. Tom Wolf, the General Assembly has adopted an unbalanced approach. Spending has gone down but revenues have gone down faster. From 1994 to 2011, under both Democratic and Republican governors, the state spent 4.7 percent of the state’s GDP. During the Corbett years, that fell to 4.3 percent as spending on education and human services were sharply cut. And while, thanks to Wolf, the state has been able to restore some of those cuts, spending in the last two years remains at the same level… Continue reading

Had Bernie run a campaign that attacked Republicans for creating the horrible economic inequality we have today, instead of attacking Democrats for it, I think he would have had a much better chance to be the nominee. A lot of us who have worked for economic (and racial and gender) equality over the years wanted a candidate who put economic inequality first and put forward an aggressive and smart agenda for reducing it. But he constantly turned off people who have been working for economic equality by telling us the compromises we made to get the real victories we won were the equivalent of selling out. It was a stupid campaign strategy that taught a whole bunch of his followers to have a misguided and overly cynical view of Democratic (and democratic) politics. And today it makes it hard for him to (1) to recognize how much he has shaped what… Continue reading

I’ve never seen a political campaign like the Bernie Sanders campaign,  especially one which I intend to vote for.  It has  generated a more counter-productive kind of support, support which the candidate himself continue to disavow. I’ve been saying for months that Bernie’s political views are closer to my own and I intend to vote for him if I can see any evidence that he is building the kind of movement he would need to win a general election. So far, I see little evidence of that. I’ll probably still vote for him because I don’t expect him to become the nominee and it is important for him to do well to keep pushing the Democratic Party to the left on economic issues. But that has to be done in a way that builds a movement not a party tendency, cult, or sect. Bernie clearly wants to build a movement,… Continue reading

A lot of Republicans are wringing their hands about Trump. But I’ve yet to see one Republican admit that Trump is the inevitable outcome of the Southern Strategy, Lee Atwater, Willie Horton, Swift Boats, Death Panels and so on. You embrace racism and a politics of lies and this is what you get and, frankly, deserve. Continue reading

There is a Greek word, kalon, that refers to someone whose grace and nobility is so impressive that it is in fact beautiful. The human being on this planet whose life is best described by that word died today. Mandela showed us that a political life can be what it so rarely is, graceful, noble, and beautiful. Continue reading

The key issue is not just whether corporations have a right to religious freedom that allows them to escape government regulations that have a secular purpose. It is also, and more importantly, whether anyone has a religious right to escape from such regulations. Except with regard to regulations that impinge on religious ritual practices, I think the answer is no. If you look back at the text that gave one of the first and still most powerful arguments for religious freedom, Locke’s Essay on Toleration, you will see that religious freedom is not the freedom to have one’s own religious beliefs trump laws that have a legitimate purpose in serving the common good or protecting the rights of other. Continue reading