“France supported the fledgling continental army for about four years with supplies, weapons, advisors, men; you know, [the army got many of its words from the French]. Yeah, I don’t recall France ever telling the U.S. they should just surrender to England. You don’t bend the knee to Communists and dictators…you punch them in the face until they stop. If we bend the knee to Russia now, how long will it be until we beg the dragon that rises in the East to please eat us last?”
Reading the Bible literally is more of a modern phenomenon. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the official teaching was the Bible is not to be read literally when it comes to things we can know by science.
“the demise of public housing was not an inevitable outcome. As my colleague Rachel Cohen has pointed out, other countries have successfully pulled it off. Governments around the world have shown that they can operate mixed-income housing developments that have reliable maintenance and upkeep and that public housing doesn’t have to segregate poor people away from the middle class.
So why did public housing in the United States age so poorly?”
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“efforts to undermine public housing are about as old as the efforts to build it. From the outset, opposition was fierce. Many Americans didn’t like the idea of the government using their tax dollars to subsidize poor people’s housing, and real estate developers were concerned about having to compete with the government.
The Housing Act of 1949, which had a goal of providing “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,” bolstered America’s public housing plans by heavily investing in the construction of new housing units. But by then, the federal government had already undermined its own stated plans by capping construction costs (which encouraged using cheap materials and discouraged modern appliances) and allowing racial segregation. Congress had also doomed public housing authorities’ ability to raise revenue through rents in 1936 when it passed the George-Healey Act, which established income limits for who can qualify for public housing — making mixed-income public housing models impossible for federally funded projects.
As housing projects started to draw more Black residents, white people who lived in public housing started leaving, especially after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s banned racial discrimination in housing. This was partly because the Federal Housing Authority pushed for more people to own homes and expanded its loans mostly to white people, helping white families move out of the projects. Black families didn’t receive the same opportunity.
“You saw a change in the racial composition, which simply added to the stigma and the pattern of administrative neglect that characterized many housing authorities,” the historian Ed Goetz told The Atlantic in 2015.
Starting with President Richard Nixon — who declared that the US government had turned into “the biggest slumlord in history” and suspended federal spending on subsidized housing — public housing started facing serious austerity measures and never recovered. Federal investments shifted away from building new public housing units and toward housing vouchers and public-private partnerships.
In the decades that followed, public housing started declining in quality, and Congress funded a program to demolish dilapidated public housing units and replace them with newly constructed or renovated mixed-income developments. But according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, those demolitions were an “overcorrection”; public housing simply needed more funding and better management.”
Eastern European countries were brought and kept in the Warsaw pact by force. These countries wanted to join NATO because they were afraid Russia would invade them.
Before many of them joined NATO, Russia was already violently intervening in its neighbors.
Poland threatened to develop nuclear weapons to defend itself, and got involved in U.S. politics to push for it joining NATO.
Human beings don’t naturally care about the welfare of human beings from out-groups. And, economic incentives can lead to owners brutalizing and killing their enslaved workers.
“Donald Trump will soon become the second president to serve non-consecutive terms. Naturally, this invites comparison between Trump and the first president to serve non-consecutive terms, Grover Cleveland. In one crucial respect that juxtaposition is both instructive and cruelly ironic.”
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“When tariffs are too high, Cleveland argued, it means that corrupt politicians and businessmen are able to exploit consumers, often imposing severe hardships through price increases. Just as bad, it means that the government is failing to treat all citizens as equal before the law, instead picking winners and losers in the aforementioned “communism of pelf.”
This was the situation that existed in America during and after the Civil War, when politicians imposed weighty tariffs under the pretext of supporting the nation’s burgeoning business community. While American consumers initially accepted the additional taxation as a wartime necessity, the high rates persisted even after the nascent military-industrial complex had been wound down.
The problem was both simple and intractable: There were thousands of manufacturing, industrial, agricultural, and other business interests that profited from high tariffs. Each special interest group disregarded the national welfare to protect themselves, and as a result, the government accumulated massive surpluses—$113 million in 1886–1887 alone.
Despite this growing crisis, initially, Cleveland did not prioritize tariff reform. For the first two-and-a-half years after taking office in 1885, Cleveland concentrated on rooting out government corruption, which had reached such a nadir that in 1873 Mark Twain dubbed the post-Civil War era as a “Gilded Age.” To the extent that Cleveland’s anti-corruption agenda involved vetoing legislation he deemed financially wasteful, he indirectly picked off some of the rotten fruits that grew from the protectionist tree. However, it was not until 1887 that he shifted his attention to a need for sweeping tariff reform. When he did, he transformed the presidency and America in the process.”
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“Cleveland’s tariff reform proposals passed the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives but failed in the Republican-controlled Senate. Even worse, despite winning the popular vote, Cleveland lost the 1888 election to Republican nominee Benjamin Harrison amid Electoral College disputes in the key states of New York and Indiana. (Unlike Trump, Cleveland accepted his defeat with grace and peacefully ended his term in 1889.) The Republicans took office and passed a high tariff law (framed by future president William McKinley, then an Ohio congressman). The McKinley tariffs raised the average duty on imports by almost 50 percent, and as Dartmouth University economist Douglas Irwin demonstrated in 1998, these tariffs did little to stimulate the economy even as they imposed considerable suffering on low-income Americans.
This is why, just like Trump, Cleveland was able to comfortably get elected to a non-consecutive term by promising to lower prices. The key difference is that, unlike Trump, Cleveland proposed an intelligent solution to the problem—lowering tariffs, not raising them.
Unfortunately for both Cleveland and the Americans of his time, he would not live to see his vision for tariff reform realized. America plunged into an economic depression shortly after he took office in 1893, compelling Cleveland to confront a number of unrelated crises before he could get to tariff reform. By the time a tariff bill did reach his desk in 1894, special interest groups in both parties had diluted it almost to meaninglessness.”
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“Tariff reform along the lines Cleveland advocated would not become the law of the land until the Underwood-Simmons Act of 1913, which was promoted with far more political effectiveness by Woodrow Wilson, the first Democratic president to serve after Cleveland’s administration. By then, Cleveland had been dead for five years.”