Recent Viewpoints

Penna Dexter An absurd phrase is used in the White House’s 2021 budget proposal: “birthing people.” It appears in a section dealing with funding to reduce maternal mortality, which is worse among black mothers. Senators tried to get clarification at a hearing. Oklahoma Senator James Lankford asked Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, “Can you help me get a good definition of ‘birthing people’? Secretary Becerra couldn’t — or wouldn’t — do it. “I’ll check on the language there,…

Kerby Anderson According to Peter Van Buren, there is another virus loose in the land. He refers to it as “learned helplessness.” The previous pandemic and lockdown encouraged many Americans to adapt by no longer challenging the ever-shifting rules promoted by various politicians. He wonders why we would allow the government to deny us the opportunity to say goodbye to a parent dying in a hospital. And now that we are in this post-vaccination period, it seems hard for some…

Kerby Anderson If you’ve watched congressional politics, you know the game. Pull together all sorts of funding projects that would never pass on their own, and then stick them in a bill with a title like “health care reform” or “COVID Relief.” This time the bill is referred to as an “infrastructure bill. We obviously need to fix our roads and bridges. We need to upgrade our ports and airports. We even need to modernize our water and sewer systems….

Kerby Anderson Prices are increasing everywhere and so there is lots of talk about inflation. At the same time, there are other economists warning that a future oversupply of goods might bring a deflationary period. Whatever economic circumstances are on the horizon, we can be sure that the value of the dollar will be decreasing. Let’s look at each of these issues. One measure of inflation is the consumer price index. It grew by 4.2 percent in April and surged…

Kerby Anderson Cryptocurrency has been in the news lately, so it’s not surprising that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been a topic of discussion in Congress. In fact, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Representative Warren Davidson (R-OH) recently spoke at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami. However, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) took the opportunity at a Senate hearing to criticize cryptocurrency, calling on the federal government to regulate or eliminate it. She does seem open to a government-backed digital currency,…

Kerby Anderson The opening lines of a Wall Street Journal editorial observed, “That didn’t take long.” We aren’t even half a year into the Biden presidency, and already have an IRS scandal. ProPublica published “The Secret IRS Files” showing how some of the wealthiest Americans avoid income tax. It documents the years in which Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Michael Bloomberg paid no federal income taxes. It also provided an inside look at the financial lives of Bill Gates, Warren…

Penna Dexter The California State Board of Education has developed a curriculum that, if approved, is supposed to help attract “Black, Latinx, and Multilingual” people to mathematics. Here’s the plan: First, teachers will be asked to reconsider “preconceived biases” like the one that says there’s “one right answer” to math problems. Instead, the teacher is to lead the class in a “numbers talk” where the students would work a problem, write their answers on the board and be asked to…

Kerby Anderson Although the lockdowns have been ending at various times in different states, we are discovering that some people are scared to go back to normal life. Anna Russell writes about this in the New Yorker. Some Americans are facing full-blown withdrawal. A report by the American Psychological Association, published in March, found that almost half of Americans surveyed felt “uneasy about adjusting to in-person interaction” after the pandemic. What was so interesting is the fact that the numbers…

Kerby Anderson In our digital world, the major media organizations are allowed to shove inconvenient facts and headlines from the past down “the memory hole.” In the book, 1984, the “memory hole” was a small chute leading to an incinerator. Winston Smith, while working at the Ministry of Truth, was given the task of throwing documents into the “memory hole” in order to create a forgery of the past. In a recent column, Michael Brendan Dougherty reflects on how easy…

Kerby Anderson Yesterday I talked about how even some liberal commentators are very concerned about the arguments for Critical Race Theory. It turns out that if you are a critic of Critical Race Theory, you will be labeled as ignorant and racist. Tom Gilson addresses those charges in a recent commentary. He quotes from a Texas state board of education member who writes that critics “have no idea what critical race theory is, what it does, who the founders are….

Kerby Anderson Over the last few months, I have discussed many of the concerns with Critical Race Theory that come from a number of Christian leaders and philosophers. What is even more interesting is the criticism that is coming from liberals. Andrew Sullivan is one of these commentators sounding a warning that this perspective is “Removing the Bedrock of Liberalism.” He begins by acknowledging that even trying to accurately define Critical Race Theory is difficult because of the “sheer volume…