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July 21, 2023
Over the past 40 years, no party has dominated the Spanish political landscape like the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or PSOE, now headed by Pedro Sánchez. Yet frustration over its handling of key issues — from the economy to immigration to regional separatist movements — has provided an opening for the centre-right People’s Party (PP)…
July 21, 2023
On July 13, a group of journalists, policy wonks, and political activists opened a new front in the war for American conservatism. One-hundred-twenty-two signatories, led by Avik Roy of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and John Hood of the John William Pope Foundation, affirmed 10 principles that define “Freedom Conservatism.” It’s a meaningful…
July 19, 2023
A hint of common sense has emerged in the Adams’ administration policy toward the wave of migrants crowding the hotels once occupied by the tourists the city’s economy needs. But the mayor’s just-announced 60-day limit for single adults in the city’s shelter system raises the obvious question: Where should they go next? There’s a short…
July 19, 2023
President Joe Biden is desperately trying to sell Americans on Bidenomics, but they’re not buying it. Recent polls show only 39% of US adults approve of Biden’s economic leadership, and a majority of the country has disapproved of his overall job performance for almost two years. At this stage of a presidential administration, only Jimmy Carter had…
July 18, 2023
How have the Great Recession in 2007, the COVID-19 pandemic that hit in 2020, and the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes that started in 2022 affected mortgages in the region? Here’s the short answer: Each year, researchers at George Washington University use the State of the Capital Region report to do a deep dive on a policy…
July 18, 2023
A few months back, I reflected on the 40th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” the landmark 1983 report. But there’s one important point that I didn’t really address: that the report was characterized by confidence in the DNA of Horace Mann’s familiar schoolhouse, whereas the momentum today is moving in a decidedly different direction. This struck…
July 17, 2023
“The shift among nonprofits and funders towards valuing lived experience has been a journey,” Anna Verghese, executive director of the Audacious Group, told the Chronicle of Philanthropy earlier this spring. Verghese, whose group includes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, MacKenzie Scott, and the Skoll Foundation, says this shift has been “the result of generations…
July 17, 2023
The federal overreach that was part of the Covid pandemic response included a ban on residential evictions, ordained by, of all agencies, the Centers for Disease Control. Ultimately, the Supreme Court slapped down a Biden-administration effort to extend the ban — which had no serious public-health basis. But that has not stopped the White House from…
July 16, 2023
If you want to understand the downside of seeing your work as a “calling,” just look at zookeepers. In his book, The Good Enough Job, Simone Stolzoff writes: “It’s a job where the money is short and the hours are long. The majority of zookeepers have college degrees but the annual salary is less than $40,000…
July 15, 2023
To what lengths will teachers’ unions and their allies go to destroy charter schools? Eduardo LaGuerre and Sobeida Cruz are in the process of finding out. The couple raised their three children in Yonkers. It wasn’t the best public school district, but they hired tutors to fill in the gaps. Two decades ago — when…