Spotlight

The Texas Affirmative Action Case

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to take the Fisher v. Texas case challenging affirmative action has started a conversation on the morality and legality of racial preferences.  Senior Fellow Richard Kahlenberg discussed the case on The Takeaway. Kahlenberg writes about it in Slate and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He was also interviewed inThe New York Times, The Texas Tribune, Mother Jones, Bloomberg and the L.A. Times.

Photo: Envios

Graph of the Day: More Squeeze on Labor

Since the Reagan Revolution, corporate profits have surged while wages have flatlined, breaking the post-war trend that essentially created the American middle class. Read, "Graph of the Day: Putting the Squeeze on Labor, Part II" by Benjamin Landy.

Clear and Present Safety

U.S. officials and national security experts chronically exaggerate foreign threats, suggesting that the world is scarier and more dangerous than ever. But as Fellow Michael Cohen and Micah Zenko say in Foreign Affairs, that is just not true. From the U.S. perspective, at least, the world today is remarkably secure, and Washington needs a foreign policy that reflects that reality.

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

A Focus on Community Colleges

Century Foundation Senior Fellow Richard Kahlenberg interviews task force co-chair Eduardo Padron and U.S. Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanther on the issues that define this TCF task force on community colleges, Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal.

Rotting From the Inside Out

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney don't generally agree on much. But these days they appear to have one area of surprising consensus, they both believe that stories of American decline are greatly exaggerated. Fellow Michael Cohen says the debate over American decline is missing the point, any talk about projecting U.S. power abroad is futile if we can't fix our severe problems at home. Read his article in Foreign Policy.

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Shifting the Center of the Political Debate

Fellow Mark Thoma follows up on Paul Krugman's post on the shifting Overton window in the UK toward the political right. Thoma says the shift is not just in the UK as one considers the current discussion over the president's proposed budget that is touted as consistent with the bipartisan deficit reduction proposals by the Bowles-Simpson Commission. Thoma says the recommendations gave too much to the GOP and were much further to the right of the political spectrum. Read more in Blog of the Century.

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President Obama’s FY 2013 Budget

The tax policies in President Obama’s budget request for fiscal year 2013 more closely resemble those proposed for the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (i.e., the Super Committee) last September than those included in last year’s budget request. Consequently, this year’s budget raises more revenue (ostensibly to finance job creation) and does more to restore tax progressivity than previous budgets. Read Andrew Fieldhouse's analysis in Blog of the Century.

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Iraq on the Brink

While Syria has the world’s attention at the moment, Senior Fellow Morton Abramowitz writes that keeping Iraq from falling apart is critical to maintaining America's relations with Turkey and the future of Kurds in Syria and Iran. Read Abramowitz's article in the National Interest.

Photo: Creative Commons/BWJones

Taking on Charles Murray's Coming Apart

Greg Anrig takes on Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America in this Blog of the Century series. Murray is co-author of the widely debunked, endlessly discussed best-seller The Bell Curve, which argued that genetic differences play a role in explaining racial variations on IQ tests. Read Anrig's take on the book in this series for Blog of the Century.  Read the latest: Charles Murray Blames Slackers.

Photo: Truthout.org