The Declaration of Independence states that our inalienable rights include “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Life and liberty are easy to understand, but that last phrase is less intuitive. How can people have a right to strive for happiness?
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Uniting to Fight Poverty: A TED Talk
How do we solve problems like poverty with so much political polarization?
Welcome to the Pursuit
To pursue our happiness, to achieve our liberty, and indeed to find fulfillment in our lives, we must start with a moral consensus, a fundamental truth around which we all revolve. Think of an atom. The outer field of electrons is full of chaotic activity. Electrons are rapidly orbiting and moving in a constant buzz. What contains that chaos and gives it structure? The fact that the whole chaotic cloud orbits one central nucleus.
How Work Requirement in Food Stamp Program Helped Reduce Poverty in Maine
TPOH has long advocated maintaining a safety net for those truly in need, but also supporting work as a means to build value in one’s lives and in the lives of others. Work provides meaning and purpose, despite those who wish to argue otherwise.
So it’s refreshing to read a strong rebuttal to a shocking claim that suggests proposed changes to the food stamp program will force people to hunt squirrels for food. Turns out such hyperbole doesn’t stand up to the evidence.
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Reagan’s Legacy? ‘Privatization’ Is a Dirty Word
Ronald Reagan was big on running the federal government more like a business, and proposed broad ideas to get the private sector to take over some of the jobs government was doing. These public-private partnerships helped pump the economy, and it seemed to make more sense for these jobs to be done by companies whose business it was to do this kind of work. But now, in the era of billionaire President Donald Trump, any discussion of privatization turns nasty, and it’s Ronald Reagan’s legacy that is getting beat up in the process.
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Which Pays Better Wages? Government or Private Sector
The Congressional Budget Office, the federal government’s numbers cruncher, recently completed an analysis comparing salaries and benefits received by employees of federal and large private-sector employers, and concluded that all things being equal, the federal government pays better wages than the private sector.
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Student Loan Defaults Are Huge, Do We Know Who’s Not Repaying Their Debt?
The nation’s student loan industry is nearly as large as the federal government’s largest mortgage program through the Federal Housing Administration. Nearly $100 billion in loans are offered to students every year. Outstanding debt from student loan stands at $1.3 trillion. That’s a big number and it isn’t going down because the number of student loan defaults is massive. What to do about it? Well, deciding a plan of action has hit a bit of a speed bump.
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Rebuilding America: An Investment in Social Capital
No longer is this country based on loving they neighbor, but perhaps neighborliness is a lost art in need of a renaissance. That’s the gist of a new report just released by the Joint Economic Committee on Capitol Hill. “What We Do Together: The State of Associational Life in America.”
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Everybody Lies: Except in a Google Search
Don’t bother answering questions by the next pollster who calls to do a survey. You’re probably going to lie to him. Pretty much everybody lies. And there’s no point in taking a survey if you’re going to lie. Besides, Google already got you on the truth meter.
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The Always Entertaining State GDP Map Is Back
University of Michigan-Flint Economics Professor Mark Perry annually produces a very helpful visual tool: a state GDP map that compares how each U.S. state’s economy matches up to a corresponding country of equal output.
It’s a great way to see how enormous the United States’ GDP is compared to the rest of the world.
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FCC Website Crash Doesn’t Free the Internet
Apparently, the guy with the HBO comedy show doesn’t think innovation is a good thing. So John Oliver, host of “Last Week Tonight” decided that it’d be a good idea to encourage his fans to a website that would take users to a page to file comments to the Federal Communication Commission about its plans to roll back Obama-era rules on so-called “net neutrality.”
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Beyond the Military: Veterans in Public Office
General George Washington set the standard for Americans’ comfort with veterans serving in public office, but that post-military public service is on the decline. Despite the barriers, military veterans offer a unique contribution to the Legislature from having served in the Armed Forces.
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What US News & World Report’s High School Rankings Missed
The U.S. News & World Report does a decent job with the tools it has to measure the performance of more than 20,000 U.S. public high schools. The problem, however, is that it only uses one tool, over and over again, which doesn’t accurately measure how far schools go in educating students.
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