Kansas City spans two states, both of which have constantly competed for businesses to relocate to their side of the city with tax incentives. Obviously this was a negative-sum game, and the governors of both states have worked out a deal to end it (link). Everyone appears to correctly recognize this as a good thing to stop, but isn't this what's happening across all cities and states offering tax incentives to specific businesses!? Should we not pass a federal law to end this at a higher level?
The PATRIOT Act created special warrants that were supposed to give federal agents more power to stop terrorism. It turns out, this new power has been used a lot, but almost entirely on the war on drugs instead of terrorism. Link.
And yet... per capita US drug deaths have doubled every decade for the last 4 decades! That's a far bigger increase than I realized. Link.
A long-term look at California's Paid Family Leave Act suggests that it "tended to reduce the number of children born". That seems very surprising to me, and I don't know whether to consider this a case where evidence should overturn common sense or it's safer to brush this aside as noise in the data? Link.
ICE accidentally deported an American citizen with mental disabilities to Mexico with only $3. It took 125 days of living on the streets of foreign countries before he was able to get back. Yet another reminder that you can lose all your rights as soon as you are suspected of being an illegal immigrant. Link.
A guy who was born in Greece, then moved to America as a kid, was deported by ICE to Iraq because he was ethnically Iraqi. He had never lived there, did not speak Arabic, had diabetes, and of course... died, apparently from a from lack of insulin. Link.
"65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians ... down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated ... now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009." Link. There has also been an especially rapid drop in religiosity the last few years in parts of the Arab world, without almost half of young adults in Tunisia now identifying as not religious (link). I expect these trends to continue, but... if religiosity remains somewhat heritable and correlated with larger family size, then in the long-run, maybe those less naturally inclined to be religious will fade from the gene pool and religion will make a major comeback?
People often mention Trump's deregulation efforts without ever getting into any details. The Brookings Institution keeps a running list here. As noted here, the deregulations are largely environmental, such as less restrictions on pollution and removing the rule requiring humane treatment of animals in order to be officially "certified organic". On the other hand, regulations of the labor market have increased in many ways, e.g. "employers have been asked to document every possible project a prospective immigrant employee might work on over the next three years".
Per "average fine particulate matter" measurements, American air pollution decreased by 24.2% from 2009 to 2016, then reversed course and increased by 5.5% between 2016 and 2018. "The increase was associated with 9,700 additional premature deaths in 2018." Link.
