“More than 100 years ago, the US government encouraged Americans to populate rural areas like this, build infrastructure, and farm more land, according to Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. That’s when engineers started building canals to take water from the Colorado River. At the time, the US policy was “to try to get every acre of land under the plow,” Porter said.
These canals turned the desert into a produce powerhouse. When farmland in Iowa or Nebraska is frozen and blanketed in a thick layer of snow, it’s 70 degrees and sunny in the Imperial Valley and Yuma. As soon as there was enough water in the mix, the conditions were ideal for growing crops year-round.
oday, the Imperial Valley, Coachella Valley, and Yuma together use close to 4 million acre-feet of water per year. That’s an enormous amount, equal to roughly a third of the entire flow of the river. (An acre-foot fills one acre of land with one foot of water and is roughly what two average houses use each year.)”
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“In determining the share each basin would get, water officials ignored inconvenient science and massively overestimated the river’s average flow. Western water users each got a piece of the river, but — together with water later allocated to Mexico through a treaty — those pieces turned out to be more than what it can offer in a typical year. (The 1922 decision also failed to spell out what shares would be given to the 30 or so tribal nations in the basin.)”
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“water officials didn’t factor in the possibility of a changing climate. Decades of recent warming have been drying out the West, causing less water to flow into the river.”
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“Conserving water obviously sounds like a great idea. The problem is that farmers in these regions are already highly efficient. Water-saving technologies are also pricey, and farmers I spoke to are concerned that any future payments won’t be enough to cover them.”
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“I’ve spent the last few weeks searching for a good solution to the crisis, an end to this story. No source I found could offer one. Any effort to restore the river will mean some people (or animals) get less water, barring several more winters like this one. And there’s no way around that, no secret technology to grow food without water. “It’s just such a complicated, ugly problem,” Schwabe said.
It’s an unsatisfying conclusion. Then again, maybe that’s what climate change creates: ugly problems where everybody loses. The best thing we can do, perhaps, is to sober up to this reality — that climate change will reshape economies and human lives — and use that knowledge to prepare.
Scientists have known for decades that the Colorado River is over-allocated and that warming is drying out the basin. Yet water regulators have failed to act in a meaningful way to rebuild Lake Powell and Lake Mead, Schwabe said. They should have started overhauling the Law of the River years ago, he said, instead of always being in “crisis mode.”
“The longer you wait to act, the more drastic your action has to be,” Schwabe said. “If we had started making these cutbacks in the ’80s and ’90s, in incremental steps, we probably wouldn’t be talking about this today. The situation is dire because we failed to act previously.””
“The Colorado River, which supplies drinking water to seven states in the US and two in Mexico, is the lifeblood of the American West and beyond. It’s drying up at an alarming rate, threatening cities, industries, agriculture, and energy sources. As it shrinks, rich ecosystems across its 1,450 miles are also disappearing.”
“In a 2019 paper, economists Jeffrey Liebman and Daniel Ramsey ran through the changes the US would have to make to adopt this system of exact-withholding. Under this approach, used by the UK, Japan, and others, “the majority of taxpayers do not need to file tax returns. Instead, these countries use withholding systems in which the correct amount of tax is withheld during the year.”
That could be us — so why isn’t it? They offer four big aspects of the US tax code that prevent it.
The first is the complex system of benefits for families with children. Creating a simple monthly child benefit would solve that.
The second is that capital income like interest and stock capital gains aren’t “taxed at the source”: your broker doesn’t automatically tax, say, 30 percent of the proceeds from selling stock and send it to the IRS. Creating a flat tax on capital imposed at the source would eliminate filing requirements for most people with this kind of income.
Third is the numerous deductions in the tax code. Most of these, like the mortgage interest or charitable deductions, don’t come up much in VITA because it’s almost always more advantageous for clients to claim a standard deduction — but things like the education credits do come up, and removing them would simplify our clients’ lives.
Fourth and most important is eliminating joint returns and moving to individual-based taxation. Joint filing makes precise withholding much more difficult because employers would need to know the earnings of each of their employees’ spouses in order to withhold correctly. If everyone’s taxed as an individual, then eliminating joint filing wouldn’t mean couples would have to file two returns: They’d have to file zero because precise withholding would be possible.”
“On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates another quarter point in regulators’ ongoing bid to reduce inflation. It’s a move that marks the Fed’s 10th straight rate hike and it’s one that’s proven contentious given fears that it could slow the economy too much.
The rate hike — which puts the Fed’s benchmark rate between 5 to 5.25 percent — comes as another mid-size bank, First Republic Bank, failed and was later acquired by JPMorgan Chase, becoming the second-largest bank failure in US history. The Fed favors the hike because it’s continuing to fight inflation, which has dipped substantially in the last year. At 5 percent, inflation is still higher than the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent.
Economists and experts who oppose raising rates, however, say inflation is already showing signs of slowing, and that additional rate increases could add even more challenges for small businesses and lead to a harmful uptick in unemployment.”
“Given that IS lost its last piece of territory roughly four years ago, that would seem to eliminate the stated justification for maintaining an active anti-IS mission there.
The argument now is that we have to keep troops in Syria so that IS stays defeated.
“If you completely ignore and turn your back, then you’re setting the conditions for a resurgence,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The New York Times during a recent visit to Syria.
What exactly the U.S. interest is in further suppressing a rump remnant of a vanquished terrorist group goes unexplained.”
“Vong spoke with his interim manager and new team director in December about his upcoming trip. They indicated that it wouldn’t be a problem for him to work from Australia remotely, so he left the U.S. in January, first visiting Singapore and then Malaysia. There, Vong got the news that he’d been laid off after all. His interim manager had been moved to another team and his director had been fired.
The layoff would’ve been bad enough on its own, but because of the rules of Vong’s visa, it landed him in a bureaucratic mess that now prevents him from returning to the United States. “February was hard,” Vong tells Reason. “Coming to terms emotionally with staying in Australia a lot longer…how to move things out of my apartment in L.A., sell my car, and I’ve been trying to facilitate all of that remotely.”
Vong was in the U.S. on an E-3 visa, which is reserved for highly skilled workers from Australia. Similar to the H-1B visa, another temporary visa for specialty workers, E-3 holders only have 60 days to find a new job if they’re laid off. Otherwise, they have to leave the country. With mass layoffs taking place recently across the tech industry—which relies heavily on the H-1B program—thousands of foreign workers have been forced to scramble to find new work.
But Vong’s case had an added layer of complexity since he was out of the country when he was laid off. “I was thinking, well, I have 60 days’ grace, I’m still technically employed, maybe I can just like fly back to the U.S. right now, cancel the plans to hang with my family in January,” he says. He consulted his immigration lawyer—who is also his friend—and learned that it might not be that simple. “There were all of these potential risks that plausibly could happen because of the uncertain, undefined circumstances around my unemployment, or technical unemployment,” explains Vong. “None of that language matches the visa language.
Immigration officials could interpret his employment status in very different ways. On one hand, he was still technically employed, having been given “two months of a nonworking period” where he was still getting paid. On the other, he’d lost access to his company email. They could welcome him back without issue. “Or it could go the other way where it’s like, ‘It doesn’t look like you’re actively employed right now, and this visa requires you to be actively employed, so we’re going to have to deny you entry,'” Vong says. An immigration officer might also feel that Vong was intentionally misrepresenting himself, which could lead to more severe penalties.
Ultimately, his lawyer warned him not to risk it. “I didn’t have a reliable way to get back in,” he says. Immigration lawyers interviewed by Fast Company, which covered Vong’s story, indicated that he was “right to stay overseas for now.””
“Caroline’s zoning supporters are typically either active or retired professionals. They live in the town and love it as much as anyone. But they also have no need to make a living there. It’s a position that lends itself to more restrictive notions of what should be allowed in Caroline: some homes, some businesses, some farms, and a lot of protected views and open space.
For them, a zoning code is a pretty straightforward way of protecting the things they like about Caroline while banning the things they think will spoil it. And if anti-zoners are worried about losing the ability to do something on their land, they should say as much, and come to the table to get protections included in the draft code.
Things aren’t so simple for Caroline’s anti-zoners. The necessity of making a living from their land means they have to be pretty open and adaptable to change. They often don’t know what the future will bring. It’s impossible for them to say how they might want to use their properties in the future.”