Breaking News

Columns

Forgetting those things that are behind

The year 2025 passed pretty quickly, almost in the blink of an eye. It began with tragedy as soon as January hit, with 14 people being killed in New Orleans when a driver rammed his truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street. A similar deadly incident happened in Las Vegas when an active-duty U.S. Army Green Beret exploded a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel and killed himself. The news continued to be filled with troubling and sad events as political disputes on issues like immigration and vaccines intensified, and beloved celebrities passed away. I did a quick Google ...

So, should we really be paying higher taxes?

There is something emotionally satisfying about watching a wealthy person call for higher taxes on people like himself. It feels civic-minded, even noble. A recent commentary by former Utah senator, Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney fits squarely into this tradition. Faced with a looming fiscal cliff, Romney concludes that entitlement reform is unavoidable and that higher taxes on affluent Americans must be part of the solution. Don’t be fooled, though. Yes, the status quo is unsustainable, and pretending otherwise is reckless. But taxing the ...

When it comes to immigration and citizenship, listen to Washington

As news reports proliferate of multimillion-dollar — and possibly billion-dollar — fraudulent diversions of government funds involving Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community, it may be time at one year’s end and the next one’s beginning to take a longer look at America’s experience with immigration, and to seek the guidance of the first and one of its two greatest presidents. The Founding Fathers were aware that their new nation was gifted with vast acreage, but only 4 million people were counted in the first decennial Census in 1790. The Constitution’s first words, ...

Another year, another $2 trillion in U.S. debt

Just two weeks after he was sworn into office, former President Ronald Reagan went on national television to address the American people about what he perceived to be a dire problem. It was the national debt. “The federal budget is out of control, and we face runaway deficits of almost $80 billion for this budget year that ends September 30th,” he said. “The deficit is larger than the entire federal budget in 1957, and so is the almost $80 billion we will pay in interest this year on the national debt.” By 1960 our national debt stood at $284 billion,” said Reagan. ...

How AI is undermining our education system

If you want to develop human intelligence, you can’t let students rely on artificial intelligence. Generative AI will transform the world, even if no one is quite sure what the end product will look like. These are artificial intelligence programs that create new content based on prompts or questions submitted by a user. You can imagine the problems this has created for schools and teachers. Programs like ChatGPT can solve a student’s hardest math problem and spit out papers. Some in the education establishment believe the best path forward is to teach students how to ...

Obamacare always was, is and will be a problem in the United States

President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, in 2010 without a single Republican vote in the House or the Senate. When Obama announced it to the nation, Vice President Joe Biden could be heard on a hot mic telling Obama, “This is a big f—-ng deal.” It was no exaggeration, particularly given that most Americans opposed it. The liberal Brookings Institution think tank recently wrote: “The ACA was conceived in unpopularity. In October 2010, the month before the midterm elections, only 42% of Americans had a favorable view of the ACA. Republicans hated it ...