Opinion

By Lu Hill

By Conor Lincoln and Mike Kelly

Over the past few decades, in a surge of bipartisan national self-confidence, the federal government has borrowed a lot of money, sometimes in response to national emergencies and sometimes to do the things people thought were worth doing. We gave ourselves permission to incur all this debt because interest rates were low and many people assumed that things would stay that way, so the costs of carrying that much debt wouldn’t be too onerous.

Last week, employees at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted by almost 3-to-1 to join the United Automobile Workers. By the numbers, this wasn’t a big deal: It involved only a few thousand workers in an economy that employs almost 160 million people. But it was an important symbolic victory for a labor movement that even in its heyday never made significant inroads in the South.

By Sivani S. Kuruvada, M.D.

Dear Kiantha,

Don’t skimp on insurance

Querida Kiantha,

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, anti-Vietnam War protesters clashed with police officers – whose brutal role in the confrontation was later described by a federal commission as a “police riot” – hijacking the focus of the convention.

End the era of ‘do-nothingism’

The post-convention results of candidate endorsements are going to leave some newbies to the political process disillusioned. As Inigo Montoya said in “The Princess Bride,” “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Make Idaho greater