By: Ian Schneider Novels have the potential to provide insights on the world, both good and bad, that would normally pass by unnoticed when taking in society as a whole. Throughout everyday life, citizens are forced to engage with all aspects of society at once, often dulling our awareness to the extent or severity of … Continue reading Science-Fiction to Reality: A Novel Approach to the Crisis of Automation
Category: economics
By: Brian Krause On January 6th, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his historic eighth State of the Union address and inspired the American people with his famous Four Freedoms. The freedoms of speech and worship, with the right to live without fear and want, were spoken to be as inalienable as the rights laid … Continue reading “Necessitous Men Are Not Free Men”: The Case for FDR’s Second Bill of Rights Today
One of the most common maxims of the United States is: “everyone hates taxes.” The collective consciousness of taxes is that they are a heavy social burden and an irreconcilable nuisance. Even those who support raising taxes feel the need to vilify it by complaining about the percentage of their paychecks removed by the federal … Continue reading Burning Bridges: How Michigan’s Tax System has Eroded its Infrastructure
On May 12, 2018, the QLine celebrated its first anniversary. Though the QLine was championed as a step in public transportation, the streetcar only operates a 6.6-mile loop on Detroit’s Woodward Avenue. With its twelve locations limited to major entertainment and sport complexes including the Detroit Institute of Arts, a series of parking lots, the … Continue reading Trains to Nowhere: Mobility as a Right in Southeast Michigan
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
Access to public land is - or should be - a right, but two recent decisions made by the Trump administration threaten to make public land more inaccessible than ever. The Trump administration’s budget plans to cut $296.6 million from the National Park Service in 2018, and the National Park Service will “more than double … Continue reading National Parks Should Be Accessible to All
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
By Manon Steel and Walter Hanley Since the 1980s, many governments have been selling off their assets in order to minimize their deficits, increase their cash reserves, and reduce the scope of the government oversight. In other words, they have been engaging in a campaign of privatization. The concept of privatization is based in the … Continue reading Privatization and Hyperrationalization
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
Roosevelt @ Michigan State University 