Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson Liberals are sleepless in Seattle. Apparently, there is little rest for Seattle progressives who want to right what they perceive as economic injustice. Three years ago, the Seattle City Council decided to incrementally raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Employers ended up cutting thousands of jobs and cutting hours for those who remained on the payroll. Well, the Seattle City Council is at it again. The council members unanimously voted to approve a new “head tax”…

Kerby Anderson The debate about shooting incidents in America can be divided into at least two categories: What can we do to prevent a shooting? What can we do to stop a shooting that is taking place? Gun control advocates focus most of their attention on the first issue. But Glenn Kessler (doing a fact-check in the Washington Post) explained that most gun restrictions wouldn’t prevent mass shootings. A recent example was the shooter in Santa Fe, Texas, who had…

Penna Dexter The US Department of Health and Human Services is issuing a rule that lines up with the principle that abortion is not health care. The Trump HHS is updating a rule to bring the Title X Family Planning Grant Program back in line with what existed under the Ronald Reagan administration. President Reagan’s “protect life rule” prevented family planning clinics from receiving this grant money from being located in the same facility as abortion providers. The proposed rule…

Kerby Anderson A recent vote in the state of Connecticut brought the country one step closer to the dismantling of the Electoral College. Ten years ago, I first wrote about states that passed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Back then there were two states that passed it. Now there are eleven states and the District of Columbia. These states have entered into a compact in which they agree to allocate their electors to the winner of the national popular…

Kerby Anderson Earlier this month the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act that barred state-authorized sports gambling with some exceptions. New Jersey plans to join Nevada as another state that will allow legal sports betting. Other states (like Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia) will probably follow. I wondered how the professional sports associations would react to the decision. We didn’t have to wait long. The NFL said that it has a “long-standing and…

Kerby Anderson A significant percentage of Americans have little or no retirement savings. That means that future debates about Social Security may become even more contentious than they have been in the past. As I have discussed in previous commentaries, the only thing in the Social Security trust fund are IOUs. Sometime in the future, the government may not have the necessary funds for all the Baby Boomers who are currently retiring. A report from Northwestern Mutual found that one…

Kerby Anderson We love our smartphones, but many of us wonder if they are controlling our lives in ways that may not be healthy. Markham Reid responds to this question in his commentary in Time magazine: “You Asked: Should I Ditch My Smartphone?” He rehearses much of the evidence I have discussed in previous commentaries. Dr. Brian Primack, professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh explains how “the little wobble of the emoticon, or the A-flat ding that stimulated the…

Penna Dexter The #MeToo movement is curtailing sexual predation in the workplace. But it has a growing destructive component. Institutions across society are doing all they can to make certain the term “all white male” could never be used to describe them. Journalist, attorney, and Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather Mac Donald spoke about this to students and faculty at Hillsdale College. She warned, “#MeToo is going to unleash a new torrent of gender and race quotas throughout the economy, on…

Kerby Anderson One of the many dividing lines between progressives and conservatives is their belief in the efficiency and effectiveness of government bureaucracies. Liberals may have some misgivings about how they are treated at the Department of Motor Vehicles or by the TSA at airports. Nevertheless, they tend to believe that government is the solution to most social and political problems. Conservatives are usually more skeptical about government and support the private sector over the public sector. But their reactions…

Kerby Anderson Ayaan Hirsi Ali begins her commentary with these words: “I was a Muslim refugee once. I know what it’s like.” She was en route to Canada to consummate a marriage arranged against her will by her father. At the Frankfurt Airport, she fled to the Netherlands. There, she learned Dutch and received a master’s degree in political science before coming to America. She has worked as an interpreter for abused Muslim women and understands the Muslim refugee experience….

Kerby Anderson Whenever I speak to an audience about the influence of the media on children, I quote from a survey done by the Kaiser Family Foundation concerning electronic media. When you add together the amount of time children spend with television, cell phones, iPads, video games, and computers, it essentially becomes a full-time job of more than 53 hours. This is a dramatic increase from over a decade ago. The findings of the survey of over 2,000 young people…