“the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of a teenage girl and her parents who are attempting to sue the girl’s school district for alleged disability discrimination. The decision, which did not rule on the merits of the case, is similar to another recent unanimous ruling finding that courts cannot require different discrimination cases to meet different standards of proof to receive a favorable judgment.”
…
“two lower courts ruled against the family. The 8th Circuit ruled that simply failing to provide A. J. T. a reasonable accommodation wasn’t enough to prove illegal discrimination. Rather, because the family was suing a school, they would be subject to a higher standard than plaintiffs suing other institutions. The family was told they had to prove that the school’s behavior rose to the level of “bad faith” or “gross misjudgment.”
The Supreme Court disagreed. In the Court’s opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that disability discrimination “claims based on educational services should be subject to the same standards that apply in other disability discrimination contexts,” adding that “Nothing in the text of Title II of the ADA or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act suggests that such claims should be subject to a distinct, more demanding analysis.”
In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor reiterated how nonsensical the 8th Circuit’s higher standard for educational disability discrimination claims was, noting that some of the most obvious forms of disability discrimination do not involve bad faith or misjudgment against the disabled.”
https://reason.com/2025/06/13/supreme-court-rules-again-that-different-standards-for-discrimination-plaintiffs-are-unconstitutional/
“Americans today are vastly better off than they were 50 years ago. After adjusting for inflation, household incomes have risen by about 50 percent—more than double what raw census data suggest. Unemployment remains near historic lows. Over the past three decades, the private service sector has created about 40.5 million net new jobs, many in high-wage, high-skill fields like health care, finance, and professional services.
Meanwhile, U.S. industrial output has surged. It’s now at its all-time high but with fewer workers thanks to stunning productivity gains. As economist David Autor notes, the so-called hollowing out of the middle class involves many workers moving up into higher-skill, higher-paying occupations.
None of this means that the labor-force detachment problem should be ignored. It does mean that the story is more complicated than Trump’s “China stole our jobs” narrative suggests.”
…
“The deeper problem exposed by the China shock wasn’t trade—it was America’s fading economic dynamism. In past generations, when industries declined, workers moved. They retrained. They found new opportunities. Today, many displaced workers simply stay put even as jobs emerge elsewhere.
Government policy plays an enormous role. Over time, policymakers have built a dense thicket of regulations and disincentives that trap people where they are and discourage adaptation.
Restrictive zoning and land-use legislations have sent housing costs in high-wage cities through the roof, pricing out workers who would otherwise migrate toward opportunity. Economists estimate that even modest housing deregulation would allow more Americans to live and work where their skills are most valued.
Another culprit is occupational licensing. Today, nearly one-third of U.S. workers must obtain some kind of government license to do their jobs, up from just 5 percent in the 1950s. These barriers disproportionately affect low-income workers and create huge hurdles to interstate mobility, effectively locking people into stagnant local economies.
Then there’s Social Security Disability Insurance. Reforms in the 1980s expanded eligibility with broader, more subjective criteria. Today, many prime-age men outside the labor force report being disabled even as overall health has improved and physically demanding jobs have declined. The effect is less labor-force reentry—and, thus, worse long-term prospects—for workers on the margin.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/01/tariffs-wont-fix-whats-ailing-american-men-in-the-work-force/
https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/3/16/21178197/people-with-disabilities-minimum-wage