Today, the richest Americans control a greater share of the country’s wealth than during the Gilded Age of Carnegies and Rockefellers, a period of unprecedented concentration of wealth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is partly due to significant decreases in taxes on the rich. Throughout the 1900s up to 1963, the
Congressional Republicans’ budget plans would force America’s working class to foot the bill for tax cuts for the wealthy by cutting back on programs that help families remain financially secure. The programs at risk for the largest cuts include Medicaid, which enables 72 million people – more than 1 in 5 Americans – to obtain
Taxes are by far the largest source of revenue for the federal government. While the government does receive revenue from several other sources, those revenues are dwarfed by how much citizens collectively pay in taxes. The average taxpayer in Pennsylvania paid $15,998 in federal income taxes in 2024, $1,768 less than the national average. Would
It’s always darkest just before … it turns totally black. We can’t say we weren’t warned. John Adams wrote, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” In his Farewell Address in 1796, Washington said, “The disorders and miseries which
The book “No Democracy Lasts Forever, How the Constitution Threatens the United States” is by Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California, Berkeley. The framers who wrote the Constitution made certain compromises to produce a document that the Constitutional Convention and the 13 original states would approve. As a result, its inherent flaws, including
Fake news is false or misleading information presented as news but slanted to fool readers into thinking it’s for real. Fake news includes fabricated content (stories made up to mislead people), deceptive headlines (stories with truthful content but exaggerated or deceiving headlines), satire or parody (articles intended as jokes or satire but mistaken by readers
One December, when my older son was about four years old, he accompanied me to pick up my new pair of glasses. The optometrist asked him, “Is Santa Claus coming to your house?” “No,” Joel answered, “we don’t decorate.” We’re Jewish, but in his four-year-old mind, not decorating was the reason why we didn’t celebrate
Republicans argue that safety net programs can inadvertently discourage work by offering benefits that make low-wage jobs less attractive. They imply programs such as long-term unemployment benefits, rental assistance, and food stamps reduce incentives for people to seek work. Republicans often highlight examples of fraud, misuse, or administrative inefficiencies in safety net programs. That’s not
We might think that Donald Trump is a new phenomenon in American politics, the likes of which we haven’t seen before. This is false. There was Huey Long. Nearly a century before Trump descended the escalator, Long showed the power of a politician who is cunning and charismatic and establishes a dynamic whereby the hatred
Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine gave this, her Declaration of Conscience speech, before the U.S. Senate in 1950. “I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling declared that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. It overturned the previous “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy v. Ferguson in an 1896 Supreme Court decision that ruled racially segregated
After the debate, Trump went to the spin room – Presidential candidates rarely if ever spin their own performances after leaving the stage, but Trump felt compelled to do so – and told reporters he won the debate while setting the stage to avoid another one. “I think it was the best debate that I’ve
As president in 2018, Trump said, “When a country is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win.” He then imposed a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum. Trump now says that
Americans’ confidence in the Supreme Court has dropped sharply in recent years to the lowest in Gallup’s nearly 50-years of polling. Even before the Court’s recent decisions, only 25 percent of U.S. adults have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the Supreme Court. It was 50 percent as recently as 2002.
The so-called “debate” between Biden and Trump had the smallest viewing audience for a presidential debate since 2004. Still, it gave Trump an opportunity to recount many of his favorite illusions. For example, Trump continues to believe China pays the tariffs he imposed on Chinese exports to the United States. That is not how tariffs
2014 is the 70th anniversary of a change that altered the course of my life. I was eleven years old but I remember it very clearly. In early March 1954, my father met me as I stepped off the PTC “N” bus on my way home from Woodrow Wilson Junior High School in Northeast Philadelphia.
Current and former members of Gettysburg’s Over the Teacups, along with Gettysburg Mayor Rita Frealing , celebrated the book club’s 125th Anniversary on Monday evening. In attendance was Carol Heiser, the longest-serving member of the group. Over the Teacups was founded in 1899 by seven Gettysburg women who met in the home of Mrs. P.
In 1917, Thomas Adams, an advisor to the U.S. Treasury Department, said “modern taxation…is a group contest in which powerful interests vigorously endeavor to rid themselves or present or proposed tax burdens. It is…a hard game in which he who trusts wholly to economics, reason, and justice, will in the end retire beaten and disillusioned.”
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the 2023 Antisemitism Awareness Act. The bill states that: The definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is “a certain perception of Jews,” which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews, including rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals
Sixty years ago, I was a junior at Temple University in Philadelphia. I was interested in computers, but Temple did not offer any courses in electronic data processing. In fact, in Philadelphia, only the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Engineering offered courses in computers focused primarily on the design of the computers themselves. There,
“A scam is an attempt to defraud a person after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using a combination of the victim’s fear, naivete, compassion, vanity, or greed.” By now, most of us have been a potential victim of one scam or another. Has your computer screen ever been covered by a message warning you
I was born in 1942; I am now 51 years old. How is that possible? If you know, please send a comment through Gettysburg Connection. Speaking of age, Republicans are trying to convince voters that Biden is not only old, he’s also actually senile. That’s why his poll numbers are low, and why he is
Elie Wiesel once wrote, “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” There are various fictional stories and real-life examples of individuals who protest alone, not expecting an immediate change but perhaps making a symbolic statement or holding onto their
I find witty quotations valuable for several reasons. They can summarize or express a thought or idea in a few well-chosen words, and their brevity makes them easy to remember. Many remain relevant across generations because they express universal truths or insights. H.L. Mencken. the cranky “Sage of Baltimore,” was a satirist and cultural critic.
Americans’ beliefs about the Constitution and their beliefs about the U.S. government’s relationship to religion have been widely debated in recent years by those concerned about the rise of Christian nationalism, the idea that America should be an overtly Christian, not secular, nation in which a certain interpretation of the Bible holds sway There is
Israel’s war of revenge on Gaza is both a moral failure and a strategic blunder. Every war is a moral failure because of the immense suffering, destruction, and loss of life that accompanies armed conflicts. It leads to a tragic and undesirable outcome in human affairs. Article 51 of the U.N. Charter states that countries
“To lower our voices would be a simple thing. In these difficult years [the 1960s], America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontent into hatred; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading. We cannot learn from one another
Is Trump a fascist? In his book “The Anatomy of Fascism”, Columbia University Professor Emeritus Robert Paxton defines fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in
“I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear. It is a condition that comes from the lack of effective leadership in either the Legislative Branch