Select factoids from their resumes: Rouse previously served as a member of the CEA under Obama. Has done a LOT of work on education (major issue right now obvi). Her paper best covered by popular press tho is probably one about "blind" orchestra auditions
Boushey has done a ton of work on women in the workforce (whose position is more precarious than usual lately, due to covid). For years she's been running the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, which focuses on inequality
Bernstein is a fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank that focuses on poverty/safety-net issues. He writes & speaks a lot about labor issues. He's a long-time Biden adviser -- was Biden's top economist when Biden was VP
Among the other senior aides being reported: Neera Tanden for OMB director. Tanden has run the liberal Center for American Progress for about the past decade, has long history of various positions advising Democratic politicians (prob most closely identified with Clintons).
Many in the far-left seem to hate her but having her helming budget agency seems good for the progressive agenda. No budget hawk, she has advocated for generous covid relief + expansion of social safety net democracyjournal.org/magazine/a-new…
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Fifteen Asia-Pacific economies formed the world's largest free trade bloc on Sunday, a China-backed deal that excludes the United States, which had left a rival Asia-Pacific grouping under President Donald Trump. cnbc.com/2020/11/15/asi…
When Obama spoke of having the US, rather than China, “write the rules of the road” on trade, this is the alternative trade pact (then still in negotiations) that he specifically warned about. washingtonpost.com/opinions/presi…
Pacific trade pact that Obama admin negotiated & that Trump then pulled us out of, TPP, was put into place without us, renamed CPTPP. To my knowledge Biden still hasn't said whether he would rejoin the deal. Here's what he told The Post during the primary: washingtonpost.com/graphics/polit…
USCIS has released a new version of the naturalization civics test. There are 128 questions total, of which 20 will be asked. Candidates must answer 12 of these 20 correctly. uscis.gov/citizenship-re…
interesting to see what questions got added. this seems to be a new one
Here is a test question whose "correct" answer changed from past test (1st image) to new one (2nd image). And another similar q added about House (3rd).
Perhaps thematically related to Trump administration's ongoing efforts to change who the census should count for apportionment
In a recent poll asking voters to name Trump's "major accomplishments," top response had been "boosting the stock market" today.yougov.com/topics/politic…
"Boosting the stock market" as your greatest presidential achievement would be lackluster enough. U.S. stocks are mostly owned by rich people and foreigners, as @stevertax has pointed out.
But then to lose even *that* meager bragging right... taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-own…
No, Biden isn’t going to unilaterally kill fossil fuels. Renewables/battery tech have gotten so cheap, so fast, that they’ll eventually replace fossil fuels *no matter what* the next president does. Only question is how quickly this transition happens washingtonpost.com/opinions/biden…
Biden's statement about transitioning away from oil only seems radical if you ignore what the industry itself is saying. E.g. the usually bullish OPEC recently said developed nations are past peak oil. washingtonpost.com/opinions/biden…
International Energy Agency’s new World Energy Outlook found that solar PV is “consistently cheaper than new coal- or gas-fired power plants in most countries, and solar projects now offer some of the lowest cost electricity ever seen.” washingtonpost.com/opinions/biden…
Earlier this year I wrote about visa applications getting rejected for having inapplicable blanks on them. Thanks to a newly resolved FOIA suit, we now have a better sense of the scale of this policy and its consequences.
They're enormous. (thread)
This summer, lawyers from @UrbanJusticeDVP & @ClearyGottlieb filed a FOIA suit to get info about how the "no blanks" was being applied to just one category of visa, the U-visa. U-visas are given to victims of serious crimes who assist law enforcement to catch/prosecute criminals
No-blanks policy went into place for U applications on Dec 30, w/ no advanced warning. In first few weeks, *98%* of these applications were rejected because of new policy -- applicant without middlename hadn't included middlename, no current address offered for dead parents, etc.
So...I just scraped new State Dept data on student visas (F-1's), and it looks like student visa issuance fell by ~70% from FY2019 to FY2020.
This is an astounding idiotic own-goal for America, given that education is one of our most successful exports.
What happened? First, covid closed consulates in the spring, and various travel bans then prevented issuance of visas initially for students in some countries even when consulates reopened. Some of that got sorted out eventually. But then...
...Trump admin wouldn't grant visas to new internat'l students if classes were online, as is the case for many schools during covid. (Initially ICE said even *returning* foreign students wouldn't be allowed to study here if classes are online, then changed to new students only)