Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent — It already has. The question is written as though we're waiting on something. High-value jobs, capital gains, and cultural influence concentrated in a small number of metros, and large parts of the interior concluding they're permanently outside it. That shows up in voting, in trust, and in tone. Treating it … Continue reading Will the increasing concentration of wealth and economic opportunity in a few coastal metropolitan areas eventually produce a lasting political backlash?

Clermont, Florida Correspondent — High-skill immigration, properly selected, raises productivity and fills genuine gaps. Expanding those pathways serves long-term growth better than restricting them. The political difficulty is that immigration is debated as a single package, so the category with the strongest economic case gets held hostage to the categories with the hardest politics. Separating … Continue reading Should the United States adopt a more restrictive approach to legal immigration in high-skill categories, or expand it further?

Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent — Easy federal lending combined with accreditation that rarely withdraws approval let costs rise while the quality signal weakened. Accreditation has functioned more as a gate to loan money than as a guardian of educational value, and the accreditors are funded by the institutions they review, which would be considered a … Continue reading Is the current model of higher education accreditation and federal student lending still serving the public interest?

Dayton, Ohio Correspondent — The first response is to stop being surprised. Interdependence can be weaponized and some states are willing to do it. That's not a revelation anymore and we keep treating each instance as one. Better mapping of critical dependencies, diversified sourcing for those items, coordinated responses when coercion is used. Collective resilience … Continue reading How should Western democracies respond to the increasing use of economic coercion and supply-chain leverage by authoritarian states?

Owatonna, Minnesota Correspondent — Debt that outpaces growth eventually forces an adjustment. The available tools are higher revenue, slower spending growth, or inflation that erodes the real value of what's owed. Political systems prefer to defer the choice, and deferral is itself a choice with a price. The longer it runs, the more likely inflation … Continue reading Will the continued rise in corporate and government debt eventually force a choice between higher taxes, reduced benefits, or inflation?

Clermont, Florida Correspondent — Utility treatment brings heavier obligations on neutrality and access. It also brings heavier regulation and slower movement, and these firms aren't a clean parallel to a railroad because they're carriers and editors at once. A lighter approach — clearer rules on transparency, data portability, consistent enforcement of their own published standards … Continue reading Should large technology platforms be treated as common carriers or public utilities for purposes of content and data regulation?

Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent — Policy disagreement is normal. What feels different is the willingness to treat ordinary opposition as illegitimate. When large parts of the public and the political class see the other side as an existential threat, the strain lands on courts, election processes, law enforcement, and the basic norms around transferring power. … Continue reading Is the growing political polarization in the United States now a greater threat to institutional stability than any single policy disagreement?

Dayton, Ohio Correspondent — The MAX showed gaps in how new systems were certified and in how internal schedule pressure was managed. Those are two different failures and the second one is the one my profession recognizes. I've worked under a launch date. Everybody has. What keeps a launch date from killing somebody is a … Continue reading How can the United States reduce the risk of another major aviation safety failure after the Boeing 737 MAX grounding without creating excessive regulatory delay?

Clermont, Florida Correspondent — When a handful of private platforms become the primary public square, their moderation decisions start to function like public rules without any of the accountability that attaches to public rules. I see this at the level of my clients, which is smaller than the free-speech argument but more concrete. A professional … Continue reading Will the rapid expansion of online content moderation by private platforms ultimately create a new form of de facto public censorship?