One component of the House Republicans’ newly passed tax bill is a small, temporary expansion to the child tax credit, meant to help nudge up the birth rate and enable more parents (mostly mothers) to opt out of paid work.

At the same time, the bill includes major cuts to child-serving programs including Medicaid and SNAP (formerly food ...Read more

What’s most remarkable about the economic policies of Donald Trump’s second term is the absence of effective opposition. The president’s ambitions are radical and enormously consequential — nothing less than to wreck the global trading system, expand executive power far beyond prevailing norms and explode public borrowing. Four months in...Read more

KYIV, Ukraine — As we sped along the highway from Odesa to Kyiv on Sunday, one of the Ukrainian passengers in the car suddenly let out a shout. The car swerved into a roadside gas station where people were glued to their cell phones.

The news had just broken online about Ukraine’s stunning drone assault on four Russian air bases — two of ...Read more

There is no constituency for debt reduction, which is a fancy way of saying voters don’t care that the federal balance sheet is roughly $37 trillion in the red — and growing.

This simple fact of American politics goes a long way toward explaining why President Donald Trump, with the help of congressional Republicans, is pushing a sweeping ...Read more

Never let it be said that California Democrats were silent on the scourge of sex trafficking.

Assembly Bill 938 from Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, D-San Francisco confronts the disgrace of sex trafficking in California head-on by giving survivors the opportunity to vacate their records. It just passed out of the Assembly and will head to the State ...Read more

Mayor Brandon Johnson has positioned himself as a champion of working families and the poor. But his messaging is getting complicated as it collides with the city’s difficult fiscal reality.

“You all know my position. The ultra-rich continue to get away with not having to put more skin in the game,” he said at a Tuesday news conference. ...Read more

As the United States deepens its investments in artificial intelligence (AI) partnerships abroad, it is moving fast — signing deals, building labs, and exporting tools.

Recently, President Donald Trump announced sweeping AI collaborations with Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These agreements, worth billions, ...Read more

I’ve been a faculty member at the University of Chicago for 27 years; for 12 of them, I was married to the university’s late president, Robert J. Zimmer. Bob was well known for his endorsement of the “Chicago Principles” addressing academic free speech, which were formulated by a faculty committee he appointed in 2014.

Now, in 2025, at ...Read more

We wish that Elise Stefanik was sitting at the large C-shaped table in the UN Security Council chamber over on the East Side on Wednesday, where she would have ripped apart the fecklessness of the diplomats (from both friend and foe) who lined up to do the bidding of Hamas in support of a lopsided resolution that had to be vetoed by the United ...Read more

When public figures take actions that contradict both expert consensus and common sense, we’re left to wonder: What are they thinking?

Two recent examples—Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine rhetoric—illustrate the puzzling nature of such choices.

At the start of his second term, Trump imposed “...Read more

The 2025 hurricane season is under way, but its start became a cringe-inducing moment for Floridians.

Acting FEMA Director David Richardson, named in early May to run the crucial national disaster management agency, reportedly said he was surprised to learn that the U.S. has a hurricane season. That’s according to news reports based on ...Read more

Over the past 46 years that I’ve been part of America’s job training system, work requirements for government benefits have been proposed several times.

Each time these work rules have been initially denounced by opponents as “cruel,” “punitive,” “blaming the victim” — with accompanying fears that benefit recipients were not ...Read more

They won’t succeed. Whoever recently spray-painted sickening racist and antisemitic graffiti on a Miami mural celebrating African-American history tried to blot out our shared history with one act of hate and a can of paint. This community won’t let them.

Already, local leaders are calling for unity and strength and planning to make the ...Read more

It’s hard to believe U.S. trade policy could get any more confused and confusing, but somehow it has. Last week’s court ruling deeming many of the tariffs levied by the White House to be illegal has only deepened the uncertainty confronting U.S. companies and trading partners.

What’s clear, however, is that the decision hasn’t deflected...Read more

“I run the country and the world,” President Donald Trump boasted to reporters for The Atlantic in April, by way of explaining how his current presidency differs from his first. Even for the clinically braggadocious Trump, that was a mouthful.

Yes, alas, he does run the country, with a bold recklessness like no president before him, and ...Read more

The U.S. labor market is a truly astonishing thing to behold. It includes 171 million Americans, as young as 14 and older than 90, some who never finished elementary school and others with PhDs.

It is resilient and dynamic, shrinking during recessions but growing again after. It provides the majority of Americans with the majority of their ...Read more

President Donald Trump is pursuing a path that is actively destabilizing the guardrails of our Constitution. Unless he changes course, our nation — the world’s oldest continuing democracy — risks a crisis where the president is no longer beholden to the rule of law. Americans will suffer the consequences.

America’s Founding Fathers ...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- She rides three buses from her Panorama City home to her job as a caregiver for an 83-year-old Sherman Oaks woman with dementia, and lately she's been worrying about getting nabbed by federal agents.

When I asked what she'll do if she gets deported, B., who's 60 and asked me to withhold her name, paused to compose herself.

"I ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — The Department of Homeland Security's "sanctuary jurisdiction list" has more holes than the plot for the latest "Mission Impossible" film.

All you need to know about its accuracy is how my native Orange County fared.

The only O.C. city on the list is Huntington Beach — you know, the 'burb with an all-Republican council that's...Read more