Beto O’Rourke Is About to Run the Campaign Pollsters Warned Against
Former congressman and Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke speaks at a vigil in El Paso, Texas, on August 4, the day after a mass shooting there left 22 people dead. Josh Bachman/ZUMA Three days after Beto O’Rourke launched his presidential campaign in March, he promised to stop swearing. Using the f-word is part of the…
I’ve Heard Anti-Latino Racism for Years. But the El Paso Massacre Weaponized It.
Mother Jones illustration; Lola Gomez/Zuma Last week, while sweating through my clothes reporting in El Paso in the wake of the deadliest attack on Mexicans and Mexican Americans in recent US history, I got on my phone and noticed a disturbing but familiar conversation happening on Twitter. The subject was what it’s like to be Latinx…
Hundreds of New Child Sex Abuse Cases Are Flooding New York’s Courts
ChiccoDodiFC/Getty When 52-year-old Michael Whalen stood up in front of the St. Louis Roman Catholic Church in downtown Buffalo, New York, in February 2018, to tell his story of being sexually abused by a priest as a teenager, it set off a Spotlight-style chain reaction. The accused priest, the Rev. Norbert F. Orsolits, told a…
Wealth Taxes Are a Dying Breed
For those curious to learn more about wealth taxes, Brad DeLong recommends a primer written a few months ago over at Equitable Growth. It’s a good introduction, but in the end the most important takeaway is probably this: Most countries have given up on wealth taxes because the game wasn’t worth the candle. There are…
The Trump Administration Is Trying to Make It Easier to Fire Unmarried Pregnant Women
Syda Productions/Shutterstock The Department of Labor proposed a new rule this week that would make it easier for employers to discriminate against workers who they say violate their religious beliefs, including members of the LGBTQ community, pregnant women who are not married, and others. The proposed rule, published Thursday in the Federal Register, purports to…
The Great Yield Curve Inversion of 2019
Yesterday the yield curve inverted: the interest rates on 10-year treasury bonds were briefly lower than the interest rates on 2-year bonds. But that’s not a curve. It’s just two points. So why is it called a yield curve? Here’s why: If you plot the interest rates for all the different US treasury bonds, you…