On May 24, as a murderous gunman wrought terror and death through two adjoining classrooms full of children at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, 19 municipal police officers stood in the hallway outside, waiting. A total of 47 more minutes would elapse before the officers, led by the officers from the Border Patrol Tactical Unit...
I was very excited to move to Philadelphia in 2018. I went to school at Penn State, where I received both my undergraduate and graduate degrees. Many of my friends from college lived in the area, so Pennsylvania always felt like a home away from home. When the first wave of the pandemic hit the...
We’ve seen it everywhere, in the news, in our own lives: the Left’s policies and liberal cities failing, time and time again, to deliver on their promises. Housing will fix homelessness. Welfare will fix poverty. The right combination of the right laws is society’s panacea—if only the government was given the power to solve the...
When did it all start to go wrong? In the early 20th Century, Americans fighting poverty not only lost sight of the goal—lifting families up—but even of the problem itself, and instead sought to remake society through government intervention, often at the expense of the very people they were meant to help. In 1920, Owen...
The genesis of the horrific impact of the disastrously managed U.S. asylum system on American border security can be traced to 2010, the second year of the Obama administration. It was in January of that year that Obama ICE Director John Morton first directed the agency to routinely apply “catch and release” parole to asylum applicants entering...
Migrants being sent back into Mexico over the Hidalgo International Bridge from McAllen to Reynosa paused to lace their sneakers and restart smartphones. The migrants floated across the Rio Grande River during a torrential downpour in the small hours of Tuesday morning, but were captured by Border Patrol agents and returned to Mexico within seven...
In this series on the outrageous cost of American health care, we’ve described certain shadowy corners of the business. After all, only 27% of our health care dollar goes to practitioners, those who treat us. The other 73%? If you only knew. Have you ever heard of Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs)? They’re gigantic corporations, middlemen, that control the...
High property taxes are not just an urban and suburban problem. In rural Hays County (San Marcos and surrounding), for example, property appraisals are shooting up. “The overall market value of Hays County’s 2022 preliminary appraisal roll rose to nearly $59 billion, up 53.27% from $38.4 billion in 2021,” the Hays Free Press reports. “Commercial...
Top Stat: Average hourly earnings (inflation-adjusted) down by 2.6% over last year. Link Key Point: Total nonfarm employment down 1.2 million jobs since February 2020. Link Overview: The economic costs of the shutdown recession from February to April 2020 and subsequent policy errors have been persistent and substantial across the nation. The U.S. labor market has...
While in Tokyo, a reporter asked President Joe Biden if the U.S. would defend Taiwan. The president’s response, “Yes.” When pressed, Biden reiterated, “That’s the commitment we made.” Biden elaborated that, “The idea that (Taiwan) can be taken by force, just taken by force, it’s just not appropriate. It would dislocate the entire region and...
Headlines of violent crime strike fear in the hearts of Tennesseans. Our leaders have a duty to combat the scourge of violence with strong leadership aimed at crime prevention, not political posturing. It is through prevention that success is measured—by victims never created, prison beds vacant for want of occupants, and billions of dollars not...
Millions of young children face food insecurity every day; in fact, food insecurity is one of the greatest threats they can face. Here’s why: 50% of fruits and vegetables, 40% of roots and tubers, and 20% of grains are lost before they ever reach in the market in developing countries—in Africa specifically. But it’s not...