Syndicated columns

Are many young people distressed about the war in the Gaza Strip? Yes.

Americans like feeling as though they know their political leaders personally. And yet I think many of us now feel we know a little too much about Kristi Noem, one of the more aggressive contestants in the MAGA pageant to be Donald Trump’s running mate.

MAGA Republicans say that America is in crisis: The economy is collapsing while the nation is being overrun by hordes of violent immigrants. Not true.

On Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” and in a lighthearted moment, explained – as she did during the last presidential election cycle – that in her blended family, her stepchildren affectionately call her Momala.

“Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Lately, I’ve been seeing people repeat Ronald Reagan’s famous question, many of them apparently believing that they’re making a slam-dunk case for returning Donald Trump to power.

It’s only right that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s evolving canine scandal should focus on Cricket, the 14-month-old wirehair pointer that Noem shot to death because Cricket was a bad girl. It was Cricket, after all, who took the bullet. Cricket’s bizarre manner of death, at the hand of a caretaker who allowed the puppy to wreak havoc and then made her pay for it, is relayed in a book ...

More than 30 years ago, economists Rudiger Dornbusch (one of my mentors) and Sebastian Edwards wrote a classic paper on what they called “macroeconomic populism.” Their motivating examples were inflationary outbreaks under left-wing regimes in Latin America, but it seemed clear that the key issue wasn’t left-wing governance per se; it was, instead, what happens when governments engage in magical thinking. Indeed, even at the time they could have included the experience of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, which killed or “disappeared” thousands of leftists but also pursued irresponsible economic policies that led to a balance-of-payments crisis and soaring inflation.

If I were a mystery novelist instead of an economist, I’d call it “The Case of the Missing Workers.”

Over the past few decades, in a surge of bipartisan national self-confidence, the federal government has borrowed a lot of money, sometimes in response to national emergencies and sometimes to do the things people thought were worth doing. We gave ourselves permission to incur all this debt because interest rates were low and many people assumed that things would stay that way, so the costs of carrying that much debt wouldn’t be too onerous.

Last week, employees at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted by almost 3-to-1 to join the United Automobile Workers. By the numbers, this wasn’t a big deal: It involved only a few thousand workers in an economy that employs almost 160 million people. But it was an important symbolic victory for a labor movement that even in its heyday never made significant inroads in the South.

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, anti-Vietnam War protesters clashed with police officers – whose brutal role in the confrontation was later described by a federal commission as a “police riot” – hijacking the focus of the convention.

The phrase “often in error but never in doubt” could have been coined for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The appellate court most frequently reversed by the Supreme Court in recent years should brace itself for another reprimand during Monday’s oral arguments before that court.

One of Kamala Harris’ most memorable moments during the 2020 presidential election cycle was when, during a Democratic primary debate, she sharply criticized Joe Biden for working with segregationists in the Senate in their shared opposition to busing.

Nostalgia seems harmless enough, and then someone starts earnestly — absurdly — glamorizing the Stone Age. “Damn can you imagine being a human during the paleolithic age,” tweeted a self-described “eco-socialist” podcaster in September 2021. “Just eating salmon and berries and storytelling around campfires and stargazing … no jobs no traffic no ads no poverty no capitalism-caused traumas just ...