Author: nick

[ad_1] “I just want to say there was tremendous love in that room,” President Trump declared as he wrapped up the 2026 NATO summit in Ankara. But anyone looking beyond the carefully choreographed photo-ops saw an alliance beset by public feuds, competing visions of security, and widening political divisions. Here are eight contradictions that defined the Ankara summit—and raise fundamental questions about NATO’s future. 1. Military Spending vs. Real Security NATO leaders had already agreed at the previous summit to move toward spending 5 percent of GDP on military-related expenditures, but Ankara exposed how divisive that commitment remains. Trump used…

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[ad_1] From Spengler v. Coop. Educ. Serv. Agency 7, decided yesterday by Seventh Circuit Judge Michael Scudder, joined by Chief Judge Michael Brennan and Judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi: In 2018, Becky Spengler started working as a special education administrator in Wisconsin. A couple years into the role, her supervisors pushed her and the rest of her team to adopt an “equity mindset,” which required everyone to interrogate their implicit racial biases and privileges. Spengler understood the demand differently. She thought she had to believe that all white people—and only white people—are naturally racist. Spengler refused to adopt the equity mindset, and…

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[ad_1] Gas what? Something you eventually learn when you write about American politics for the better part of two decades is that a lot of it just comes down to the price of gas. This is something that Donald Trump, the American president now serving his second term, seems to have learned as well, albeit belatedly.  The Reason Roundup Newsletter by Liz Wolfe Liz and Reason help you make sense of the day’s news every morning. This week on social media, the Trump administration touted the launch of Freedom Fuel, a network of gas stations “lowering the price at the…

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[ad_1] Politicians continue insisting that mass migration carries no economic consequences. Anyone who questions the policy is immediately accused of being anti-immigrant. That has always been the tactic. Rather than debate the economics, they attack the person asking the question. Yet reality eventually catches up with political slogans, and now even economists are beginning to quantify what common sense should have told us years ago. A new working paper from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas examined the unprecedented surge in unauthorized immigration between 2021 and 2024. The researchers estimate that unauthorized immigrant workers accounted for roughly 30% of employment…

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[ad_1] Robert Reich, an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former U.S. labor secretary, makes popular economics videos arguing that the U.S. economy is rigged against workers. One of his recent pieces caught my eye because it makes heavy use of numbers and charts. The video is a great example of how to misuse economic data to support a preconceived narrative—in this case, a fairy-tale account of evil CEOs stealing wealth from their employees. At the outset of the video, Reich presents a chart showing that in 2024 the “typical worker” earned $36.49 per hour, while…

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