One of the perils of our increasingly-connected lives is the extent to which many of the constitutional protections we rely on in our non-digital lives either do not apply or work differently when applied to our electronic devices. Perhaps the most important example of this lies in fifth amendment jurisprudence, or what is more commonly … Continue reading What’s Testimonial?: The Fifth Amendment in the Digital Age
Author: Walter Hanley
Walter Hanley is a senior majoring in Social Relations & Policy and Political Theory & Constitutional Democracy. He is also a Chapter Head for Roosevelt @ MSU.
Over the past few months things have seemed different on the web. We've begun to widely ask questions we haven't publicly considered about the role of data collection in our connected lives. Part of the trigger for this is a result of the ongoing fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where data collected from users … Continue reading Beyond GDPR: Banning Targeted Advertisements
Editor's Note: This piece was originally published on Roosevelt's national blog under the title "Roosevelt@: Starving the Beast: How the SALT Deduction Exposes Conservatives’ Economic Strategy." During last year’s tax debate, one particularly contentious issue involved the state and local tax deduction, commonly known as the SALT deduction. A mainstay of federal tax policy for decades, … Continue reading Starving the Beast
In the past five years or so, our devices have gotten really smart. We all have phones in our pockets capable of responding to our commands (at least in theory), and a wide selection of tubes we can put into our homes to translate our spoken words into action. The intelligence these devices display is … Continue reading Garbage In, Garbage Out
At this point, it has become something of a cliché to talk about how internet access is increasingly intertwined in our everyday lives. Pundits opine our addiction to social media, and despair our use of technology in places where it was previously unthinkable. However, these stories tend to gloss over the ways in which the internet … Continue reading Broadband as a Public Good
The Roosevelt @ MSU blog is taking a much-needed break this week as we prepare for the upcoming school year and decompress from Hyde Park 2017. We'll be back next week with a post about ethnic cleansing. Instead of leaving you without any policy content, though, I'd like to direct you towards a 10 Ideas … Continue reading We’re Taking a Week Off
In 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA), commonly known as welfare reform. PRWOA was designed to alter the structure of welfare to shift it from a program designed for long-term assistance to one designed for short-term help. This was in response to decades of criticisms of the program by conservatives … Continue reading Destroying an Entitlement
Last Friday, Amazon announced its plans to acquire Whole Foods for $13.4 billion. This was the latest in a series of acquisitions by the company, which now owns Twitch, a video game streaming service; Zappos, an online apparel retailer; and Diapers.com, an online retailer for childcare essentials. This latest acquisition represents another milestone in Amazon’s … Continue reading Break Up Amazon
Every once and a while an idea comes around that is both quite popular among Very Serious People and pretty dubious. One of the latest examples of this age-old phenomena is means testing. Programs are said to be means tested when they phase out at the point where the government believes beneficiaries would be able … Continue reading Against Means Testing
Democracy works best when all citizens have a say in the policies that govern us. However, there is a real sense of pessimism about our democracy, and our youngest voting age adults are among the most underrepresented in our politics. Especially in state and local elections, young people’s participation is incredibly low. In local elections for the East Lansing City Council in November 2015, the five precincts located on Michigan State University’s campus had a voter turnout rate of 1.15%.
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