Jake Blumgart: tallest blogger ever

Adam Smith: Down With The Cause?

Jake Blumgart — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:52:13 EST

You know him, you love him.

Well, you probably don't love him if you've ever bickered with a conservative friend about, well, anything. Those guys love to liberally sprinkle their conversations with Smith quotes and references. It doesn't matter if they are arguing for free trade, financial deregulation, or clubbing baby seals: they always manage to work him in somewhere.

Until now! I'm officially co-opting Adam Smith for my pro-soda tax argument. You may remember last year when the The idea of a soda tax was floated to help pay for healthcare—and then squashed by huge piles of industry money. But the idea itself is sound, and several states (California, New York) and cities (Philly) are considering soda taxes to help plug the ragged holes in their budgets. The argument is that soda isn't a food, but a luxury, and a ridiculously unhealthy luxury at that (akin to tobacco and booze). Therefore, when policy makers have to choose between cutting education or health programs for poor people and raising the tax on high-fructose corn syrup in a can, they can chose the latter.

Expect conservatives to raise their usual whinging chorus whenever any new tax is considered. But this time we can use the words of their hero against them.

Quoth the great capitalist sage of yore: "Sugar, rum, and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessities of life, which are become objects of universal consumption, which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation."

Boo-yah!

Stanley Fish: Bush Wasn't a Bad Prez, 'Cause I Say So

Jake Blumgart — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:40:12 EST

Stanley Fish has done it again. The bane of my college career has a new Times column up, and he proves still capable of making eloquently nonsensical arguments for the sheer sake of contrarianism.

Fish has always seemed to pride himself on the ability to deflate popular wisdom. Where there are heated emotions around a common consensus (particularly among people who may have actually heard of him, i.e. urban liberals) he has taken great delight in arguing the opposite side. Sometimes that has merits (see: his writings on the “war” between science and religion), but sometimes he does it just to do it. Today’s column on the merits of George W. Bush is a case in point.

Fish argues that W’s legacy is already being revived (just as the good professor predicted, natch). His proof? There is one billboard in Minnesota, that great bellwether state, along I-35, that great bellwether highway, with a picture of our ex-president asking “Miss Me Yet”? Also, Obama’s popularity is way down, because he hasn’t been able to keep all his campaign promises while constrained by an antimajoritarian Senate, a poisonously obstructionist political climate, the continuing fallout from a recession, and a ballooning deficit his predecessor created. Because of this completely unprecedented occurrence (that’s sarcasm, by the way, his numbers still edge out Reagan’s at this point is his presidency) people must now embrace the fact that Fish was right all along, um, I mean, that Bush wasn’t such a bad guy.

He contention that Bush-haters are “indistinguishable in temperament from the professional Obama-haters” is simply insupportable. Fish argues that things in Iraq may be looking up. Sure, compared to the last more-than-half-decade of carnage. No one knows how things will end up in Iraq, but there can be no doubt that George W. Bush sent this country to war on a lie. He sacrificed many thousands of American lives, and countless Iraqis, for a poorly planned, poorly executed mission with no coherent end goal. And that doesn't even touch on unneeded tax cuts for the rich or his disastrously unpopular plans to privatize Social Security. Or his abandonment of low-income Americans and middle income Americans, not to mention our mission in Afghanistan, any semblance of fiscal responsibility, and our most cherished ideals. The Obama-haters don’t like countercyclical spending and a healthcare plan they cheerily proposed in 1994. It’s not quite the same thing Fish, old boy. Better luck with the next column.

Scary Chart for the Week: Copywriting Edition

Jake Blumgart — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:33:11 EST

Earlier this week, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) released a study which questioned 665 magazines about their online presence. The report is quite comprehensive covering everything from profitability to fact-checking, and the resultant data is fascinating. It will certainly give more fuel, as if more were needed, to the raging debates over journalism’s future. (One particularly interesting finding shows little correlation between accessibility and profitability—those websites that hide their content behind a paywall, don’t make any more money, on average, than their freebe competitors.)

But the study’s most disturbing revelation relates to the copy-writing habits of web magazines: namely, they don’t seem to have any. (Or should I say, we don’t seem to have any.)

48 percent of magazine websites copy-edit their content “less rigorously than print content”. 11 percent don’t copy-edit their online content at all. This doesn’t include the blogs that are attached to these sites. If blogs were included, those numbers would probably be even worse (that is certainly how CP works, plenty of editing on articles, not as much on blog posts). Your favorite magazine is probably included in this damning figure. Sites with 50,000 or more readers are less likely to copy-edit rigorously, as are more profitable outlets.

The New York Times has a neat summary here, including extensive quotes from the man behind it all. “There isn’t yet a generally accepted set of norms for this new medium,” said Victor Navasky, chairman of CJR chairman and publisher emeritus of The Nation. “There’s chaos out there.”

As a grammatically-challenged, yet strangely frequent, contributor to online magazines I issue this plea to all those editors and publishers out there: start copyediting rigorously! Readers deserve it and writers, specifically this writer, need it.

The Teamsters and Union Corruption

Jake Blumgart — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:23:58 EST

If one union can be said to exemplify the labor movement in the minds of many Americans, it is the Teamsters union, just as their murdered president, Jimmy Hoffa, is still one of the most well known labor leaders in the nation. The notoriety of the Teamsters hasn’t been too good for labor’s image in the public eye. But the union’s well known history of deep-seated corruption and close associations with the mafia obscures the whole story.

If you read a history of the union, it seems that all of the right-wing’s most reliable anti-union talking points can be found in the Teamsters’ annals. The union really did shelter a fair number of cigar-chomping, pinky-ring wearing bosses with long criminal records and little interaction with, or interest in, the membership (other than their dues money). These men stained the organization’s reputation, stealing from pension funds, screwing over workers for a dime, and resorting to violence to get their way. (It is widely believed that mobster Tony Provenzano, who moon-lighted as one of the Teamsters sixteen vice-presidents, had Hoffa killed because the he was harder to control than the then-current leadership.)

No one can dispute this history of corruption. But there is more to the story. It should be remembered that the Teamsters and other unions forged alliances with organized crime because the other side did first. Since the labor movement’s inception gangsters and thugs had been employed by management to break strikes and intimidate workers out of unions. Soon some labor leaders decided to employ their own muscle, but once established mob-connections are hard to root out. While this fact doesn’t remotely excuse violence or corruption, it does place it in a more understandable context.

Most importantly, the Teamsters union mostly did right by its members. Outside of locals that were corrupt to the point of complete inefficiency (a couple northern Jersey outfits stand out in this regard), even the mobbed-up Teamster branches provided relatively good benefits to their members, including (usually) completely free medical care, strong pensions, and middle-class incomes. The most honest locals, like those run by Ron Carey in New York, Harold Gibbons in St. Louis, and Jesse Carr in Alaska went even further, getting superb contracts for their members, while promoting an ideal of economic justice that could have changed the country, had men like these run the International all along.

In short, the Teamsters of old weren’t all scary mobster-types, and since the union’s progressive turn in the early 1990s (when Carey was elected president), the union’s bad reputation has become less and less deserved. Not that anyone outside of labor has noticed. The bad old Teamsters make too good of a talking point for anti-union conservatives, and as far as the MSM goes, well, economic justice just isn’t as sexy as Mafioso violence.

More Strikes in France

Jake Blumgart — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:18:35 EST

Labor unrest is totally in right now, if you happen to be French. To follow up on my earlier post about the disparities between American and European unions, I have to make note of yet another New York Times article that highlights the divide.

French refinery workers are currently on strike against Total, the French oil behemoth. Eighty percent of the companies refinery workers are on strike, with sites operated by Exxon Mobil and other oil giant’s considering joining in. Fuel shortages loom and if the dispute continues interior transit in France could be frozen for the duration of the strike.

The cause of all this militant activity? Total has made clear its plans to end refining at its Dunkirk site, largely due to the fact that demand is way, way down after more than a year of global economic downturn. While operations have been suspended since September, but “the workers have been promised they will not lose their jobs”—indeed the company plans to convert the refinery into a fuel depot. (The site employs 370 people and another couple hundred indirectly.) Total chief executive, Christophe de Margerie, has personally confirmed their job safety, saying “There will be no people hurt in this decision.”

Despite these assurances, workers across the nation continue to strike in support of the Dunkirk employees. I can’t hold judgment over either side in this dispute, although it does seem that Total’s reason for closing the refinery is sound: oil consumption is down, and different companies in different nations have been slimming down too. But the point here is that American unions can rarely expect such assurances from an employer, and if they did get them, the mood would be celebratory, not militant.

American companies tend to drop their workers with little warning, unceremoniously dumping entire industries into oblivion and their attendant laborers into poverty. (See: Chicago’s steel industry in the 1980s.) Labor has taken these lumps, but with little help from the political sphere and shrinking popular support they haven’t been able to do much about it. While the French and American labor movements are roughly the same size (in terms of union density), French unions are able to operate with a confidence and aggressiveness that we can only dream about.

European Unions Keep Striking; Here, Not So Much

Jake Blumgart — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:49:38 EST

The Europeans are at it again: they’re all on strike. Today French air-traffic controllers went on strike, paralyzing the nation’s airlines. (They are protesting an EU plan entitled “Single European Sky”, which would “integrate” the continent’s air traffic control systems, which the union fears could result in job losses.) Air traffic controllers from most other European nations have been threatening strikes as well, protesting a variety of ills, mostly concerning potential job loss. This mass unrest highlights the stark differences between the staid American labor movement, and their European counterparts.

The last time U.S. air traffic controllers tried anything this audacious was during 1981’s Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike. The union, which had supported Ronald Reagan in 1980, demanded better pay ands working conditions. Instead, they all lost their jobs. Their man Washington fired them all en masse, crushing the union and essentially declaring open season on American labor. As Alan Greenspan, gleefully recalled in a 2003 speech,

“[P]erhaps the most important. . . domestic initiative was the firing of the air traffic controllers in August 1981. The President invoked the law that striking government employees forfeit their jobs. . . . his action gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and discharge workers.

The extermination of PATCO was the anti-Wagner Act (the 1935 law that basically gave unions the federal seal of approval), and one of final nails in the coffin of the relatively equitable New Deal political economy. Reagan’s action legitimized poisonously anti-worker tactics on the part of private employers, including intimidation, forced anti-union meetings, and illegal firings. It also frightened most American unions away from militancy, forcing an even greater contrast with their more aggressive, and more successful, European counterparts.

There are endless reasons for the differing attitudes and strategies of the European and American labor movements, most of them summarized in this excellent Steven Greenhouse article from last year. (Size isn’t necessarily one of them though: France and American have similar levels of union density, but French workers threaten to blow up factories, kidnap their bosses, constantly take to the streets and then win.) What is certain is that a Democratic President and progressive majorities in Congress aren’t enough on their own. Reagan’s legacy still rules, and as long as it does there can be no true revitalization of American labor. And there certainly won't be the type of militancy on display in Europe.

Twitter is Here to Stay

Jake Blumgart — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:36:44 EST

Twitter has endured a lot of scorn and vitriol since its inception. I recall many of my friends turning up their noses in disgust at the concept. ("It's like Facebook stripped down to status updates," the oft-heard complaint went.) More famously, The New Yorker's George Packer recently had an online freakout about Twitter:

"Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell....Twitter is crack for media addicts."

Yikes. Well, apparently (and unsurprisingly, I suppose) media crack is really, really popular:

Twitter use is blowing up, scorn and vitriol be damned! These numbers are very impressive: 5,000 tweets a day in 2007 became 2.5 million tweets per day in 2009. That isn’t Facebook territory yet (they’ve got 400 million active users, not an exact comparison but it gives you an idea of how mammoth FB has become). But using my seer-like powers I predict that the 2010 numbers will keep expanding, with a noticeable uptick in February as hordes of rabid teabaggers turn to Twitter for their evisceration of Scott Brown following his vote for the “jobs bill”. Ah, sweet Twitter, allowing us to watch the bizarre antics of the extreme right without putting our eardrums in danger. Long live media crack!

No Soda Tax in the Near Future

Jake Blumgart — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:23:43 EST

In last year’s health care debate, few ideas were quashed as quickly and completely as the soda tax. Although the subject remains relevant in the progressive blogosphere and in some op-ed pages, it is unlikely to make headway anytime soon, at least on the national stage.

The idea was to tax sugar-drinks to help pay for much needed health care reform. And why not? Virtually all experts agree that Americans consume far, far too many calories, and soda, which basically amounts to candy in a can, is a big part of that. (Mark Bittman’s Sunday NYT op-ed notes that “sugared beverages are the No. 1 source of calories in the American diet”.) As any college student worth her high fructose corn syrup knows, soda is dirt cheap. It’s available in most gas stations and corner stores at a lower price than bottled water.

But soda makers moved with amazing swiftness to block the idea, banding together with fast food distributors, retailers, and other industry allies in an impressive display of “business solidarity” (follow the link for Matt Yglesias’s excellent take on the term).

For the authoritative analysis of the soda industry’s successful effort to block reform read this excellent LA Times article, which walks you through the anti-tax lobbying and the arguments for and against. Also featured, this shocking chart on soda lobbying:

The forces arrayed against the soda tax (which included Dominios and McDonalds) united under the misleading name “Americans Against Food Taxes”. They managed to be everywhere at once, almost as soon as the idea was broached.

They aggressively lobbied Congress, launched a $10 million television campaign, released articles in peer-reviewed medical journals undercutting arguments for the tax, and even got a large number of nominally progressive identity advocacy groups on their side (by arguing that the tax was unfair, because low-income groups drink more soda). They even got a Latino medical advocacy group to publicly declaim the effort.

It’s almost as though the soda industry had a blueprint they were able to activate instantly in the face of a threat. With such thorough planning and the ability to summon tens of millions of dollars and armies of allies against the tax, I very much doubt we’ll be hearing more about the idea in the near future.

Another Note on our Huge, Scary Defense Budget

Jake Blumgart — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:30:23 EST

Buried in the military’s new and still gargantuan budget a discerning reader can find this hubristic science experiments ripped from the pages of Phillip K. Dick (from Wired):

"As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating 'the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.' The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to 'produce the intended biological effect.' Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “'ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.'”
"Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, 'similar to a serial number on a handgun.' And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch."

It’s almost as though these guys have never seen a sci-fi movie. These projects always go wrong. From Rossum’s Universal Robots to Dollhouse weaponized beings turn on their masters who are soon drowned in seas of blood and robot bits. Gross. (I’m only partially kidding, for the record.)

I realize $6 million is a tiny sum of the military’s budget, but this project really sums up a lot of what is wrong with our country. Nifty scientific experiments with genetics are howled down by religious conservatives when they are used to cure horrific diseases. But when genetics can be used to build weird bio-weapons, it’s all good. Ah, double standards.

The Defense Budget in an Era of Endless War

Jake Blumgart — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:22:51 EST

I realize everyone is buried under a ton of snow and the budget probably isn’t much on your minds. But I’ve been bouncing around the cities of the east coast for the last several days, having meetings and dodging storms, so I’ve only recently been able to compile a few thoughts on the budget—specifically the astronomical sums of money Obama is planning to spend on the military.

The Nation’s D.C. editor Chris Hayes runs a weekly audio program, entitled The Breakdown, and last week he responded to a listener’s question regarding the defense budget for this fiscal year. (The question: Will the 2010 drawdown in Iraq reduce the amount we spend on the military? The answer: Not really. )

Hayes and his guest Spencer Ackerman, a national security reporter, dissect the military budget in about ten minutes. I highly recommend you listen to the whole thing. But the takeaway message for those unschooled in National Security policy is that the defense budget “in the era of more or less permanent war” looks like this…

Thoughts on the Employee Free Choice Act, Featuring David Madland

Jake Blumgart — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:44:12 EST

I’m going to have an article up soon on our main page about the probable demise of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a bill that I have frequently supported throughout my tenure at Campus Progress. (The bill would make it easier to organize unions, an almost impossible task these days.)

In preparation for my article I interviewed David Madland, the Director of The Center For American Progress’ American Worker Project, and a strong EFCA advocate. He has a quote in the forthcoming article, and his ideas certainly bear out my own.

Me: "What is the principal obstacle to labor law reform today?"

Madland: "The Senate."

But there were some things we talked about that I didn’t get to include in the article and I think they deserve some screen time to. Below you’ll find some excerpts about the reasons behind the near-universal conservative opposition to the bill, and my post interview comments are in italics.

Passing healthcare reform with phone calls

Jake Blumgart — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:10:56 EST

Political bloggers and reporters, this blogger included, are starting to get angry about health care reform. Take Kevin Drum’s post here on the Pass the Damn Bill surge, which included this quote from Mark Kleiman’s blog:

<blockquote>The polite young man who answered the phone said that he could take a comment about a legislative matter, listened politely to about three polite sentences of Pass the Damned Bill and an expression of displeasure about DiFi’s “slow down” comment, assured me that the Senator had voted for the bill and was eager to see it pass — and then gave me the first ray of sunshine I’ve seen since the catastrophe in Massachusetts. He said that they’d been getting a lot of Pass the Damned Bill phone calls and wanted to know whether my call was part of an organized effort.</blockquote>

The fact is that health care reform has become a defining issue for progressives and if we don’t pass it now we aren’t going to get it for the next quarter century. We’ve spent the last six months watching the ugly legislative process at work, watching congressional conservatives in both parties destroy the public option and never even consider single-payer. As hard as it has been to live with that political reality, we swallowed those defeats and watched Obama and the 111th Congress get closer to significant health care reform than any other president since LBJ’s Medicare and Medicaid.

Now the Coakley disaster has brought this historic process to a standstill. The only way to really salvage the situation is if the House of Representatives passes the Senate’s version of the bill. But liberal and centrists in the House would both come under fire by their constituents, and they need to know that they have constituents who aren’t Glenn Beck-inspired nut jobs or single-payer diehards. They need to know how important this bill is to their political futures, and more importantly, to the future of the United States. Without this bill tens of thousands will continue to die every year because they lack health insurance. That is completely unacceptable, and progressives need to do everything in their power to ensure it doesn’t happen. And that includes making some phone calls.

Jimmy Carter, Iran, and the 1980 election

Jake Blumgart — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:45:41 EST

I just took a peek at my recent backlog of Campus Progress blog entries and I notice that my portfolio is pretty thin. I have an excuse, of course, but I think it’s one that may actually excuse my gross negligence.

As I noted in my last post, I’ve been working for Julian Zelizer this past month, fact-checking his new biography on Jimmy Carter. In the process I’ve learned quite a bit about ol’ Jimmy, a president I had never held in particularly high regard. I’ve been thinking over this new infusion of info and I’m going to do one more Jimmy Carter-related post. Then I promise to focus on something a little more contemporary.

I’d like to shine a light on the 1980 presidential election here, which as I’m sure you all know, was a complete blow out. (Ronald Reagan won 44 states, 489 electoral votes and 51 percent of the popular vote to Carter’s 41 percent). In retrospect, the outcome seems preordained. The landslide outcome fits neatly into our understanding of 1980 as the electorate’s right-ward turning point, when voters decisively renounced liberalism for the next generation.

But as it turns out, the result election was much closer than I had thought, and voter rejection of Carter had as much to do with late breaking developments in the Iranian hostage crisis as with the grand narrative outlined above.

How bad was Jimmy Carter's presidency?

Jake Blumgart — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:01:55 EST

I’m going to take shelter from this week’s cripplingly depressing political realties by blogging about the cripplingly depressing realities of yesteryear.

I just finished fact-checking the manuscript for Julian Zelizer’s slim new biography of Jimmy Carter, and as I went through every name, date and quote in the book I picked some new perspectives on our 39th president. To put it succinctly, I’ve found he didn’t quite deserve the scorn I’ve heaped on him over the years. But that doesn’t mean he was a good president.

Packer inspired thoughts, pt. II

Jake Blumgart — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:48:34 EST

George Packer’s Thursday talk at CAP swept over a broad range of topics, but the domestic front consumed the final fifteen minutes. Packer predicts a big backlash against Obama and the Democrats in next year’s elections as white working class voters turn on a President they supported tenuously, if at all. With the Wall Street bailout still pissing people off, unemployment creeping up towards 11 percent, and the benefits of health care reform slated for the long-term, this particular demographic isn’t likely to be forgiving.

Notes on George Packer, pt. 1

Jake Blumgart — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:36:46 EST

The New Yorker’s George Packer spoke at CAP yesterday. Packer is a well-sourced expert on foreign affairs, and the author of The Assassin’s Gate, an insightful analysis of the Iraq debacle. Packer was a supporter of the humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and he backed the Iraq war for much the same reason. But unlike the more ardent journalistic hawks, Packer kept an open mind, and as he reported from outside the Green one he quickly became disillusioned with the enterprise.

I managed to scribble down a few notes from Packer’s talk, when I wasn’t stuffing the complementary sandwiches into my pockets (Mmmmm, squished think tank tuna on rye.)

Goldman Sachs: "We're sorry, but we're not THAT sorry"

Jake Blumgart — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:35:20 EST

Yesterday, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein announced a generous $500 million dollars in funding for small businesses. Why? In contrition for the whole ruining-the economy-and-having-taxpayers-bailout-his-company-thing. Wowsers, $500 million for the hundreds of billions we spent to save your ass! That puts us about even, right guys? Right?

Taxpayer Bills of Rights Go Down in Flames

Jake Blumgart — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:00:28 EST

The tax payer bill of rights (TABOR) initiatives on the ballot in Maine and Washington State were both voted down yesterday. The measure, which is a pet project of many on the anti-tax right, would have capped state, county, and city funding at current revenue levels. Recession-era spending would be locked in place, decimating essential services. But it didn't happen.

In WA I-1033 lost by 55 percentage points, while Maine's Question 4 lost by 60 percentage points. In the beginning of the race, both were up by similar numbers. In between early polls and election night, spirited opposition campaigns arose in both states. TABOR opponents highlighted the potential damage to public services and voters took heed.

I wrote an article for the Prospect on why a TABOR victory would have been disastrous for either state.Check it out.

The Economist calls out the Senate

Jake Blumgart — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:23:15 EST

The Economist’s Democracy in America blog has a post up today recommending the abolishment of the Senate. (Our own Dylan Matthews has the specifics.) As the DA notes, it would be functionally impossible to get rid of the Senate, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea. Preach it, anonymous blogger!

“The Senate embodies no rational philosophy of governance, and has a completely irrational electoral system. There is no representational philosophy that would legitimate apportioning the most powerful legislators in the country according to arbitrary and widely disparate numbers of voters, representing arbitrary tracts of land that owe their boundaries to the whims of land granters centuries ago. The fact that there are two senators each from North Dakota, Delaware, Texas and California is flat-out insane.”

Why Grover Norqist should have NOTHING to do with state budgets

Jake Blumgart — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:00:31 EST

I have a new article on the American Prospect today about Taxpayer Bill of Rights initiatives (TABOR). If tax reform doesn’t sound particularly interesting, think of it as libertarian plot to eviscerate funding for social spending. There are TABOR initiatives on the ballot in Washington State and Maine this year, threatening funding for education, roads, Medicaid, and other aspects of the social safety net.

Check it out!