Debt and diplomacy
It’s challenging to get either Americans or policy wonks excited about the European debt crisis. Foreign countries are having problems to which there are no clever policy solutions? I’d rather listen to a panel discussion of Mitt Romney’s hair.
A nation’s son home safely
Last week, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was finally allowed to return home after being kidnapped and held hostage for over five years by Hamas. Shalit’s release showed the immense value that Israel attributes to a single human life, and this value of life deserves praise and emulation.
Abolish the Electoral College
A new poll from Gallup confirms once again the widespread support for amending the Constitution to provide for presidential election by popular vote. For those unacquainted with the issue, in the United States, the president is not elected by direct popular vote. Rather, the framers of the Constitution saw fit to create a college of electors, appointed and regulated by their respective state legislatures, to choose the president by majority vote. While the procedure for the selection of electors has been modified in the intervening 200 years — for example, electors are now nominated by state political parties and elected on Election Day — the gist is largely the same. Currently, 48 states and Washington D.C. allocate their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis; only Maine and Nebraska delegate part of their votes on a district-by-district basis.
STATE OF THE RACE Romney will face Obama, Republicans might take Senate
With 70 days remaining until the Iowa caucus, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is the heavy favorite to become the Republican presidential nominee. Leading in the polls and viewed by many within the party as the sole remaining credible candidate, it is unsurprising that Romney is being given a 70 percent chance of taking the nomination by Intrade, a leading prediction market.
The road forward for American-Iranian diplomacy
When U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearm agents decided to sell guns to Mexican drug cartels as part of some inscrutable scheme to battle the drug trade, it’s unlikely they were acting as conspirators in some grand Machiavellian plan to restrict U.S. gun rights or achieve some devious geopolitical goal in Mexico. They embarked foolishly on a doomed adventure of their own choosing, and little else should be read into the events that transpired.
GETTING OUT OF THE RED YouTuber go home
Between January 2008 and January 2010, the U.S. private sector shed 9.8 percent of its workforce, either through layoffs or reduction of employee hours. One might have expected the output of the private sector to have declined during the same period, but no — Real Gross Domestic Product remained essentially the same.
GETTING OUT OF THE RED Less red with more green
Earlier this year, the Inter-Agency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon, a panel assembled for the purpose of estimating the harm that a ton of CO2 emissions causes to the world, concluded its efforts to put a price tag on greenhouse gas emissions. Using up-to-date scientific assessments and an appropriate time discounting of future harms, the working group concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal bodies should use $21 as the baseline estimate of the damage caused by releasing a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere.
EDITORIAL How The Tech works
For many of our readers, The Tech might be something of an enigma. The paper we publish twice a week is readily and freely available on campus, of course, but rarely will our readers get a real sense of the process behind those issues just by reading them. Since The Tech is MIT’s only remaining newspaper, and because the community (and world) depends on our work to learn about MIT, we feel it is our obligation to explain what we do and why we do it.
Government is a crappy venture capitalist
Solyndra deserves more credit than the media is giving it. But not much.
How hot is the cup of tea? Tea Party thoughts at MIT
The Tea Party is a very hot topic in American politics nowadays. This is especially evident in our publication, as a number of my colleagues at The Tech have published articles discussing the position of the party regularly. Depending on with whom you bring up the issue, however, it seems that opinions vary largely between Democrats and Republicans. When you add major media outlets and the Tea Party themselves into the mix, you’re left with a huge number of diverse views.
GETTING OUT OF THE RED Legalize it
For a moment, ignore the question of whether, as a matter of principle, marijuana should be legal or illegal. What would be the net improvement of U.S. public finances if the drug were legalized and taxed?
CORRECTIONS
Because of a production error, the SMBC comic run last Friday transposed the ordering of the last two pairs of frames. The female character’s declaration of the ease of avoidance of “clingy guys” should come after the male character’s statement of his inability to eat a brick, not before. The comic is reprinted in the correct order on p. 12 of this issue.
Why moving farther right is so wrong
By this point, it is no secret that the Republican field of presidential candidates is not ideal (and that’s being generous). But the flaws of the party have made themselves apparent not only in the candidates, but also in the voters. The positions of the candidates and the disgusting responses of the audience at the Republican debates have put on full display just how far to the right the Tea Party has driven the GOP.
Rush is good — but too rushed
At the end of orientation, we all experienced the frantic week known as Rush. Many things have been written regarding the Rush process, including statistics on the number of men who have received bids and accepted them (369 and 321, respectively, as of two weeks ago). Most men who pledged did so because they felt that they got along very well with their fraternity brothers.
A state of their own
Palestine’s bid to become a voting member at the United Nations is nearing its final hour. In the latest tally, it appears that Palestine is close to securing nine votes on the Security Council, with Brazil, China, India, Lebanon, Russia, and South Africa voting yes; Bosnia, Gabon, and Nigeria very likely to vote yes; and Britain, Colombia, France, Germany, and Portugal set to abstain from the vote. Should Palestine reach the nine-vote threshold for entry, the United States will be faced with a choice. Should it abstain, and defer to the Security Council super majority, or should it vote no and veto the Palestinian entry?
Lies, damned lies, and presidential reduction plans
During the debt ceiling negotiations, President Obama made an offer to Speaker of the House John Boehner that was the epitome of reasonable:: in return for lifting the debt ceiling, Obama proposed a $4 trillion reduction in federal deficits over ten years, split roughly 2-to-1 between spending cuts and revenue increases, with little to none of the cuts occurring in the next two years. Boehner, having waited for this sort of middle-of-the-road compromise for weeks, quickly accepted. And for a moment, I thought it was all going to work out.
What oil subsidies?
Among President Obama’s recommendations for fixing the budget is the elimination of $4 billion per year in “subsidies” for oil companies. This will be the third time the president has made a push for ending oil subsidies and the third time that economists have scratched their heads and asked, “What subsidies?”
State of the Race
The electoral picture continues to look grim for Democrats. In the good news category, Obama’s approval ratings have stopped the steep decline that they have been on since May of this year. In the bad news category, the approval ratings have not bounced back either; they remain at roughly 43 percent approving, 51 percent disapproving — dangerously close to a Jimmy Carter-ish netherworld of unelectability.