Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: As the 23 candidates seeking the Democratic nomination struggle to distinguish themselves, Senator Elizabeth Warren has set herself apart with a series of sweeping proposals that would significantly remake the American economy, covering everything from tax policy to business regulation to student debt relief. Together, her plans offer a detailed portrait of what her presidency might look like. Many of the proposals from Ms. Warren, a former Harvard law professor and hawk on financial regulation,…

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Reuters reports: Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on Tuesday urged a stop to the “endless war” that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a return to the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate accord scrapped by Republican President Donald Trump. Buttigieg, a Navy reservist who was deployed to Afghanistan, repudiated Trump’s go-it-alone, America First approach to the world in the first foreign policy speech of his 2020 White House campaign. He outlined a policy based on “America at our…

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Bloomberg reports: China has spent much of the past five years tightening its grip over Hong Kong with little challenge. Now, hundreds of thousands in the city are fighting back. Hong Kong is bracing for a potentially historic showdown over extradition legislation that could for the first time subject residents to face justice in Chinese courts, further eroding the city’s autonomy. Opponents on Sunday staged one of the largest protests since the former British colony’s return to China: Organizers said…

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Nicholas Kristof writes: To stop the flow of migrants, Trump has called for a wall at the Mexico border that would cost billions of dollars, has separated children from parents for months, has cut off aid to Central America and, most recently, threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico. The result? The torrent keeps getting bigger, with twice as many migrants seized at the border in each of the last few months as a year earlier. Trump’s strategy so far seems…

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The Guardian reports: A real estate company part-owned by Jared Kushner has received $90m in foreign funding from an opaque offshore vehicle since he entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump. Investment has flowed from overseas to the company, Cadre, while Kushner works as an international envoy for the US, according to corporate filings and interviews. The money came through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven that…

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Eric Levitz writes: The American public is in the mood for “big government.” According to the distinguished political scientist James Stimson’s “Public Policy Mood estimate” — a widely respected tool for measuring shifts in ideological opinion across time — the U.S. electorate is more sympathetic to left-wing economic policy today than at anytime in the past 68 years (which is as far back as Stimson’s data goes). Tracking ideological change across decades is inherently difficult, since some policy questions fall…

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The New York Times reports: Israel has a right to annex at least some, but “unlikely all,” of the West Bank, the United States ambassador, David M. Friedman, said in an interview, opening the door to American acceptance of what would be an enormously provocative act. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to begin annexing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a move that would violate international law and could be a fatal blow to a two-state solution to the…

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