David Atkins

Conservatives like to complain that immigrants not only take jobs citizens would otherwise do (mostly untrue), but also constitute a drain on social services. It’s not only an inhumane argument but also impractical: if you need people to perform difficult and dangerous jobs, do you really want them not to be able to get medical […]

As everyone waits to see if the actual torture report will ever be released, the uptick in American police shootings hasn’t gone unnoticed by the international community, either: The U.N. Committee against Torture urged the United States on Friday to fully investigate and prosecute police brutality and shootings of unarmed black youth and ensure that […]

It’s a very exciting time in the world of oil geopolitics, if you’re a fan of juvenile saber-rattling in the service of making billionaires even richer: The fracking boom has driven US output to the highest in three decades, contributing to a global surplus that Venezuela has estimated at 2 million barrels a day. That’s […]

It has become conventional wisdom in the press, seriously intoned at every level, that Republicans need to “prove they can govern” in order to succeed in 2016. Jay Rosen throws some clarifying cold water on that notion: You can’t simply assert, like it’s some sort of natural fact, that Republicans “must show they can govern” […]

Danielle Kurtzleben at Vox has a fascinating article about real unemployment versus perceived unemployment. It turns out that not only Americans but workers all around the world vastly overestimate the number of people who are out of work. In America, people think the unemployment rate is an astonishing 32%, though the official figure is closer […]

As the President and Congress prepare for a battle over the Keystone pipeline, another quieter battle between the oil and gas industries and the public is taking place over fracking. With states unable or unwilling to implement major restrictions against fracking and other high-pressure injection techniques like cyclic steam and acidization, it fell to local […]

It’s not exactly news that the American healthcare system is a broken mess that delivers lower-quality care at outrageous prices. It’s also not news that the Affordable Care Act is at best a bandage addressing the very worst abuses of the system. That hasn’t prevented conservatives from demagoguing against the ACA for their own political […]

When future historians look back at our era, they will doubtless be puzzled about how we allowed it to come to pass that faceless corporations were granted all the freedoms and protections of real people, but faced none of the consequences that real people face for criminal behavior. This puzzle is related to the problem […]

I was listening to Left, Right and Center on NPR today and had the pleasure of listening to David Frum intone how the only workable answer to climate change lay not in regulation but in “market solutions.” Ironically enough, this puts Frum (as usual) on the left of the Republican spectrum, since he sees fit […]

The entire conservative ideological program on economics depends on cosmic justice: the idea that those who develop talent and work hard will succeed as they deserve, while those who are lazy and without skills will fail as they ought. That meritocratic concept is the justification for slashing all forms of assistance to the poor and […]