Coronavirus

Despite the impact of “Stupid-19,” life rolls on in a very essential fashion for myself and many other workers. In my case, I work in energy distribution, and here in the cold northeast, the “propane must flow” if homes were to be kept warm this past winter, and some level of comfort is to be […]

The American Dream — people have hung on to those three little words for decades, passed them down for generations. But it’s hard to see how we can believe in the dream right now. To me, the American Dream is having a good paying job, having good health insurance, earning benefits for your family and […]

The pandemic has placed an enormous burden on the lives of parents and children in particular.

As large swaths of the country prepare to re-enter COVID-19 lockdowns—my current city of Denver, for instance, banned all indoor dining just last week—it is worth pausing to again lament the ham-fisted, blunderbuss nature of most of these virus-fighting measures. As many presciently pointed out at an early stage of the outbreak, mass, society-wide lockdowns are, at […]

In March, I could see that our social response to the coronavirus would be more consequential than the virus itself. Natural disasters can do great damage, but they do not usually change societies. By contrast, mass mobilizations for wars in the modern era have been deeply consequential. The lockdowns and country-wide quarantines have been exercises […]

With surging COVID-19 cases in many parts of the country and a widely available vaccine months away—and with consumer and investor confidence and spending likely to be weak even with a vaccine—the odds are quite high that economic recovery will be long, drawn-out, and weak. As such, Congress is rightly debating a fifth economic recovery […]

In March as Ohio began to shut down, Emily—a thirtysomething mom who asked that I not use her real name—worried about her family, her neighbors, and especially the elderly. She posted on her town’s Facebook page offering to grocery shop for those unable to go to the store, or to share a meal with anyone […]

Try as we might, those of us who dare to challenge economic orthodoxy within the GOP are unlikely to prevail on policy and moral grounds alone. But the politics of today offer us another course that is just as powerful: offering a prescription to protect from impending electoral doom of the party if the course […]

The Senate is finally back in Washington and negotiations over the next coronavirus recovery package are underway. The White House’s initial salvo was reported Monday and includes a capital gains tax cut, a measure to increase entertainment tax deductions, and a payroll tax cut.  If you tasked me with putting together a parody recovery plan […]