Trump Thinks Background Checks Won’t Stop Shootings. He’s Wrong.
President Donald Trump speaks to the Nation Rifle Association in April.Michael Conroy/AP After mass shootings left 31 people dead in El Paso and Dayton, President Donald Trump signaled a willingness to pursue significant new gun control legislation—in particular, by strengthening the federal background check system. Currently, gun-buyers are required to pass a background check if…
Environmental Groups Just Sued the Trump Administration Over Its Endangered Species Act Rollback
Lance King/Getty Environmental and animal rights groups are taking the Trump administration to court over rules finalized last week by the departments of Commerce and Interior weakening the Endangered Species Act’s protections. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday by Earthjustice on behalf of seven groups including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Defenders of…
Trump’s New Indefinite Family Detention Plan Completes a Cruel Agenda
Detained immigrant children line up in the cafeteria at the Karnes family detention center in Texas in 2014.Eric Gay/AP In April, after starting a new system of sending asylum seekers back to Mexico to wait for their US court dates, the Trump administration received a familiar piece of news: A judge in California was blocking…
Jay Inslee Wants to Pay Farmers to Pull Carbon from the Atmosphere
Caroline Brehman/Associated Press True to his fixation on battling climate change, today Washington governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Jay Inslee released a rural policy platform centered on encouraging farmers to pull carbon from the atmosphere and trap it in soil. For decades, United States farm policy has pushed farmers in the nation’s Midwestern states to…
Beatings, Kidnappings, and Rape: Sobering New Data Shows Just How Much Violence Migrants Through Mexico Endure
AlxeyPnferov/Getty In recent months, migrants at the southern border have endured grim living conditions and forced deportations. A sobering study led by researchers at Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health and published in the academic journal PLOS ONE sheds light on what migrants go through to arrive at the border in the first place. The…
Trump’s Tariffs Are a Huge Middle-Class Tax Increase
Robert VerBruggen reacts to CBO’s calculation that Donald Trump’s tariffs will reduce average earnings by 0.4 percent: The median household income is roughly $60,000, so crude back-of-the-envelope math puts the typical cost somewhere around $240 per year. This is consistent with a lot of other work: The trade war isn’t exactly devastating to the average…