Gastonia, NC Correspondent — Help Wanted in a window and a federal supplement that still competes with a shift isn't a mystery of the human soul. It's a residual with a date on it. Reservation wages can move. People who spent a year staring at a kitchen table may want more money or a different … Continue reading Is the summer 2021 labor shortage a temporary residual of enhanced unemployment and school disruption, or evidence that reservation wages have shifted in a lasting way?

Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — Private discretion that can remove a sitting president and suppress a newspaper's reporting in the same season is not a coffee shop. A common-carrier rule that treats a ranking algorithm as a telephone line will be captured by whichever office writes it. So the honest menu is unattractive in both … Continue reading Should social-media platforms’ post-2020 amplification and suppression decisions trigger common-carrier rules, or remain a matter of private discretion and advertiser pressure?

Gastonia, NC Correspondent — A deadline isn't a plan. A plan is a list of people you won't leave and a list of equipment you won't gift to whoever holds the road in October. Limited wars do end messy. Messy isn't a permission slip to treat interpreters as weather. Congress should write the dull requirements … Continue reading As U.S. forces leave Afghanistan toward a September deadline, should Congress reassert statutory requirements for evacuation planning and equipment accountability, or accept that limited wars end in messy improvisation?

Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — Industrial policy that lasts looks like a plant and a rule a banker can still use after a House flips. A credit stack looks like a catalogue with timers. This draft is a catalogue. Climate pages are credits and adders and approved equipment. Tax pages are rates that will be … Continue reading Is the first-year tax-and-climate reconciliation draft a durable industrial policy, or a credit stack that will be relitigated when inflation is no longer “transitory”?

Gastonia, NC Correspondent — Local control is a real value and it isn't a shield for a second lost year after the emergency year already happened. Vaccines are available to every adult who wants one. Pediatric risk was never the intensive-care story. Learning loss is now measured rather than theorized. Federal money already comes with … Continue reading Should schools that remain remote or hybrid into the 2021–22 year face federal funding consequences tied to learning-loss metrics, or is that an intrusion on local control?

Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — When a pipeline stops and a meat packer stops, you're not in a fraud unit anymore. You're in a country that just learned a criminal group can ration fuel and supper. Criminal casework still matters — attribution, the wallet, the employee who opened the attachment. What can't stay is the … Continue reading After Colonial Pipeline and JBS, should ransomware against critical infrastructure be treated as a national-security event with offensive options, or remain a criminal matter for firms and the FBI?

Gastonia, NC Correspondent — Once-in-a-generation is a fundraising sentence. A capital program is a bridge that exists and a pipe that doesn't poison a child. What took shape in late June is actually two things now, which is the useful development. There's a bipartisan framework that's mostly roads, bridges, transit, water, and broadband, and there's … Continue reading Is the infrastructure bill taking shape this summer a once-in-a-generation capital program, or a conventional spending package with an infrastructure label?

Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — The trail doesn't read press releases about capacity. It reads whether the last family was released. The encounter numbers aren't a weather event. They're what happens when you retire a deterrent and keep a protection statute that can't finish a case at volume. Humanitarian processing is the name you give … Continue reading Should the United States treat the Southern border encounter surge of 2021 as a humanitarian processing problem or as a deterrent failure that requires remaining-in-Mexico and expedited removal at scale?