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Give Americans choice to use Social Security

National Columnists

Trustees of the Social Security program just issued their annual report. Each year, the picture of the program's solvency is dismal. But this year it's even worse. Rather than falling short in 2033, as reported last year, this year the shortfall is projected to be in late 2032. That's six years from now. Without action taken, benefits, per the report, will be cut 22% late in 2032. That means that every young working person is now forced to pay, by law, 12.4% of their pay – half paid by them and half paid by their employee – into a bankrupt system. As I recall, ...

Men don't have to suffer in silence

National Columnists

While we have traditionally celebrated Father's Day in June, this month has also been set aside to highlight awareness of men's struggles with mental health and depression. The National Alliance on Mental Illness continues to advocate for breaking the cultural stigma that men have to "tough it out" on their own while wrestling with internal issues. Current statistics show what many mental health professionals are calling a "silent crisis." Many men do not like to talk about how they are weighed down emotionally, and this suppressed affliction often leads to anxiety, ...

Professors against academic freedom

National Columnists

Does academic freedom have a greater enemy than the American Association of University Professors? With millions of dollars in backing from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the AAUP recently set up a Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF) that's about as accurately named as the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four." Instead of defending academic freedom, the director of the AAUP's center wants to stamp out some of the last vestiges of viewpoint diversity on today's campuses. In the face of overwhelming hostility from hiring committees – ...

Academy's mission is to fill workforce gap

National Columnists

Mike Rowe has been on a lonely mission. For two decades, he has been raising the alarm. Rowe has been warning anyone who would listen that our skills gap in the trades was widening to a chasm so large that the economic effect on U.S. manufacturing companies, in particular auto and steel industries but also defense, construction and energy sectors, was going to be nothing short of catastrophic. Few listened. Rowe appeared before Congress. Twice. He sent an open letter to then-President Barack Obama. Crickets. Nonetheless, Rowe persisted. His alarm bells were not hyperbole. In ...

Pattern of American socialism older than DSA

National Columnists

The face of American socialism is increasingly young, college-credentialed, and conspicuously well-bred. This is not coincidence. It is structure. The pattern is older than the Democratic Socialists of America. Engels co-authored the Communist Manifesto while running his father's textile mill. Marx married into Prussian nobility and lived on Engels's industrial fortune. Lenin's father held hereditary status under the tsar. Castro was the son of one of Cuba's largest landowners. What socialism reliably produces is not equality but a closed caste. The Soviet nomenklatura had ...

What lurks outside the frame

National Columnists

I consumed a lot of horror movies during my teen years. For a couple of my friends, my room became the hub where we watched the standard fare of slashers, munched on overly processed snacks, and critiqued the characters' decisions as they ran for their lives. We, of course, would make ...