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Instead of offering tax breaks, San Jose pitched its talent, education and status as Silicon Valley's largest city in a bid to lure Amazon to town.
The bid represents a show of restraint compared to other cities and states that had until Thursday to submit proposals to Amazon. The Seattle-based online retailer, which last month unveiled plans to build a second headquarters expected to bring 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in construction, said it would choose its second home based on the financial incentives local governments are willing to offer.
As the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans attempt to portray a tax plan slanted to the top 1 percent as "middle-class" tax relief, it's worth asking what actual tax relief for American workers would look like. Among the ideas that should be at the top of the list should be expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a policy that provides millions of low-income American workers with up to a few thousand dollars when they file their taxes.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) is calling for the tech industry to "advance the common good" by expanding opportunities beyond Silicon Valley and pushing for greater political transparency online.
In an op-ed for The Washington Post on Monday, Khanna laid out a broad plan for tech companies to invest in middle America and expand recruiting operations to state colleges and historically black colleges and universities.
"Tech companies must offer an aspirational vision of how all Americans, regardless of geography, can benefit from a tech-driven economy," he wrote.
In California, raging wildfires fueled by climate change have killed at least 40 people, destroyed thousands of homes and businesses and scorched more than 200,000 acres—roughly the size of New York City. The fires are now the deadliest in California since record keeping began. At least 100,000 people have been forced to evacuate, with about 75,000 people still displaced. Some residents had to flee for their lives, as drought conditions and powerful, erratic winds have contributed to the explosive spread of the fires.
President Trump campaigned on helping the little guy. His latest tax proposal, he says, is about helping the middle guy.
"It's a middle-class bill," Trump promised an audience of truckers last week.
Other administration officials and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) have also claimed that their primary objective in reconfiguring the tax code is to help the middle class, not the wealthy.
Unfortunately, they seem to have gotten things backward.
The U.S.-backed, Saudi-led war and naval blockade in Yemen has sparked a cholera epidemic that has become the largest and fastest-spreading outbreak of the disease in modern world history. There are expected to be a million cases of cholera in Yemen by the end of the year, with at least 600,000 children likely to be affected. The U.S. has been a major backer of the Saudi-led war. But in Washington, opposition to the U.S. support for the Saudi-led war is growing. Lawmakers recently introduced a constitutional resolution to withdraw all U.S. support for the war.
If there's been a single, clear, consistent foreign policy message that's emerged from the last decade of U.S. elections, it's simple: Voters are exhausted of open-ended, expensive, destructive, and unaccountable foreign wars. From President Bush's "thumping" in the 2006 midterms to the resonance of retrenchment rhetoric from leaders ranging from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to President Trump, it's evident that Americans across the political spectrum want the federal government to exercise more prudence and humility when it comes to foreign conflicts.