Gobi - Policy 2

 This week's reading of The Deficit Myth got me thinking about just how abstract money is, especially when it comes to "national" debt. I'll admit I've never understood how the deficit works in this country - how can the government be in debt...to itself? Don't they create the money now? How are we in debt but affording billions in bloated military costs, Congressional salaries, and bank bailouts?  When the government sent out the CARES act stimulus package, it was touted as the BEST they could do - there is only so much money, after all, to go around. $1200 for what is now a 6+ months crisis is laughable and shows just how out of touch most of Congress is with "regular" Americans.  I then thought about the New York Times article that came out about Trumps's taxes - that he paid $750 in taxes two years in a row. In 2017, my husband and I made, jointly, about $80k and we paid almost $3k in taxes - four times as much as the president. Does Trump...

 Friday, September 18th, at around 8pm, two friends were at my house for dinner. One of them looked at her phone and gasped, "Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She died."  My initial reaction was, "oh, shit." As a white woman of European descent, RBG represented to me the voice of gender equality on the Supreme Court bench, and her loss threatened to set back the many advances she supported.  But over the next couple of days, I saw many posts from WOC, Indigenous women, and BIPOC of all genders calling out the many harmful decisions RBG made or supported during her tenure. It's very hard, for me personally, to acknowledge that someone so widely regarded as symbol of progress was, in actuality, only a symbol of progress for a small part of the population.  I'm not saying RBG didn't do great things, nor am I saying no one is allowed to mourn the loss. She made her way to the Supreme Court as only the second woman ever, and the first Jewish woman. Her legacy is certainl...

 This week's readings, and especially "I Am Not Your Negro" (2018), have forced me to come to very honest terms with my own internalized biases in regards specifically to race.  I grew up in a small, predominantly white town and so never really thought about race. For years, I considered this to be an asset - how could I be racist if I'd never been told to hate people of color (POC)? How could I be racist when I was raised to judge people based on their character, and not on their appearance?  It wasn't until the protests in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 that I began to come to terms with the fact that my whiteness, by default, placed me in a position to not only be ignorant to racism, but to perpetuate it without even realizing. I have mostly to thank authors and activists of color for writing articles about race-based police brutality and putting the lifelong experiences of POC into terms understandable by white people.  As we move into what I keep seeing referred ...

This week, the Ingram & Schneider (2005) article really resonated with me, and felt especially relevant in our current political climate.  While there have long been division among people for various religious, moral, and political differences, the "us vs. them" mentality seems stronger than every these past few years. The divisions also seemed to be fueled by the same mechanisms that are currently bringing people together, such as widespread internet usage and virtual mobilization.  The "deservedness" discussed in the 2005 article refers mostly to who is and is not perceived to be deserving of good, positive things. But it also made me think of the way violence is justified against members of marginalized populations - the 17-year-old who shot and killed two people is justified in doing so because the protesters "attacked" him - they were deserving of death, and he is deserving of mercy.  Ingram and Schneider (2005) also mention the tendency for group...