Ezra Klein

Dear Commons Community,

Ezra Klein had a column yesterday in The New York Times entitled, “There is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk” that provides advice on how Democrats can reclaim the political narrative.  Here is the gist of his message.

“Right-wing populism thrives on scarcity. The answer [to it] is abundance. But a politics of abundance will work only if Democrats confront where their approach has failed.

I keep seeing Democrats say the resistance failed. On these pages, James Carville counseled Democrats to “roll over and play dead” until the Trump administration collapses beneath its own weight. Assuming corpse pose, Carville said, would be “a wiser approach than we pursued in the first Trump administration, when Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics.”

But Democrats succeeded at the art of resistance politics. They won the 2018 midterms, flipping 40 House seats, seven governorships and six state legislatures. Democrats won the 2020 presidential election, driving Donald Trump into exile in Mar-a-Lago. The resistance succeeded. The problem was what came next — and, in some ways, what had come before: Democrats failed at the work of governing.

Trump won in 2024 because Americans were furious about the cost of living and they trusted Republicans, not Democrats, to lower it. Part of that was the burst of post-pandemic inflation that deranged the economy from 2021 to 2023. But in 2020, before that burst, exit polls showed voters evenly split on whether they trusted Trump or Joe Biden to manage the economy. In 2016, Trump led Hillary Clinton on that question.

I know many Democrats believe this is a byproduct of Trump’s years of playing a businessman on TV. That may be part of it. But Democrats allowed an affordability crisis to metastasize on their watch in ways they cannot blame perception or messaging for. If they are going to marginalize MAGA, they need more than a resistance; they need new answers that admit past failures.”

I agree!

Klein’s entire piece is below.

Tony

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The New York Times

By Ezra Klein

Opinion Columnist

There is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk

Right-wing populism thrives on scarcity. The answer is abundance. But a politics of abundance will work only if Democrats confront where their approach has failed.

I keep seeing Democrats say the resistance failed. On these pages, James Carville counseled Democrats to “roll over and play dead” until the Trump administration collapses beneath its own weight. Assuming corpse pose, Carville said, would be “a wiser approach than we pursued in the first Trump administration, when Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics.”

But Democrats succeeded at the art of resistance politics. They won the 2018 midterms, flipping 40 House seats, seven governorships and six state legislatures. Democrats won the 2020 presidential election, driving Donald Trump into exile in Mar-a-Lago. The resistance succeeded. The problem was what came next — and, in some ways, what had come before: Democrats failed at the work of governing.

Trump won in 2024 because Americans were furious about the cost of living and they trusted Republicans, not Democrats, to lower it. Part of that was the burst of post-pandemic inflation that deranged the economy from 2021 to 2023. But in 2020, before that burst, exit polls showed voters evenly split on whether they trusted Trump or Joe Biden to manage the economy. In 2016, Trump led Hillary Clinton on that question.

I know many Democrats believe this is a byproduct of Trump’s years of playing a businessman on TV. That may be part of it. But Democrats allowed an affordability crisis to metastasize on their watch in ways they cannot blame perception or messaging for. If they are going to marginalize MAGA, they need more than a resistance; they need new answers that admit past failures.

Look at the places Democrats govern — liberal strongholds like New York, Illinois and California. In 2023, California saw a net loss of 268,000 residents; in Illinois, the net loss was 93,000; in New York, 179,000. Why are they leaving? In surveys, the dominant reason is simply this: The cost of living is too high. It’s too expensive to buy a house. It’s too expensive to get child care. You have to live too far from where you work. And so they’re going to places where all of that is cheaper: Texas, Florida, Arizona.

For Democrats, this is a political crisis. In the American system, to lose people is to lose power. If these trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the Electoral College sharply to the right. The states that Kamala Harris won in 2024 will lose perhaps as many as a dozen House seats and Electoral College votes. The states that Trump won would gain them. In that Electoral College, a Democrat could win every state Harris won in 2024; add in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; and still lose.

But it is also a spiritual crisis: You cannot be the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families cannot afford to live. You are not the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families can no longer afford to live.

This is the policy failure haunting blue states. It has become too hard to build, and too expensive to live, in the places where Democrats govern. It is too hard to build homes. It is too hard to build clean energy. It is too hard to build mass transit. The problem isn’t technical: We know how to build apartment complexes and solar panel arrays and train lines. The problem is the rules and the laws and political cultures that govern construction in many blue states.

The Second Avenue Subway project in New York City was the most expensive subway project, by kilometer, that the world has ever seen. Has New York reformed its policies to make the next expansion easier and cheaper? No, it hasn’t. Did the decades of delay and the billions of cost overruns on Boston’s Big Dig change how Massachusetts builds? Not really. California has the worst housing problem in the country. The state has 12 percent of the country’s population, 30 percent of its homeless population, and 50 percent of its unsheltered homeless population. Has this undeniable failure led to California building more homes today than it was building a decade ago? No.

I could tell you a dozen stories — and in my new book, I do — but let me tell you just one.

In 1982 — more than 40 years ago — Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill to study what it would take to build a high-speed rail system across California. He liked what he saw, and so did California’s voters. In 1996, California formed a high-speed rail authority to plan for its construction.

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High-speed rail is not some futuristic technology like nuclear fusion or flying cars. Japan broke ground on high-speed rail back in 1959. You can ride these trains today across Japan and Europe and China.

In 2008, California’s voters approved Prop 1A, which set aside $10 billion to begin construction on a high-speed rail line that would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, running through the Central Valley, in 2 hours and 40 minutes. It would cost, they thought, $33.6 billion, and Californians would be able to ride by the year 2020.

Prop 1A passed. And the news kept getting better for high speed rail. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. It had hundreds of billions to build the infrastructure of the future. And high-speed rail had captured Obama’s imagination.

“Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city,” Obama said in April 2009. “No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination. Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America. Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It is now. It is happening right now. It’s been happening for decades. The problem is it’s been happening elsewhere, not here.”

Obama wanted it to happen here. And California, where the voters had already begun planning and funding it, was the obvious place. And politically, the stars kept aligning. In 2011, high-speed rail’s foremost champion returned when Jerry Brown won back the governorship, almost 30 years after leaving it. In his 2012 State of the State address, he marked high-speed rail as his signature project.

“If you believe that California will continue to grow, as I do, and that millions more people will be living in our state, this is a wise investment,” he said, adding, “We are within weeks of a revised business plan that will enable us to begin initial construction before the year is out.”

It didn’t happen. By 2018, it was brutally clear that nothing was going to be ridable by 2020. And the cost estimate wasn’t $33 billion anymore; it was $77 billion.

In 2019, Gavin Newsom, who had served as Brown’s lieutenant governor, succeeded Brown as governor. And in his first State of the State address, Newsom admitted what everyone already knew.

“Let’s be real,” Newsom said. “The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency. Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were.”

In October 2023, I went to Fresno, Calif., and toured the miles of rail infrastructure that the California High-Speed Rail Authority has built.

The project is caught in a strange limbo between political fantasy and physical fact. The agency doesn’t have anywhere near the money or political capital it would need to complete the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco line Californians actually want, a system that is now estimated to cost $110 billion. It doesn’t even have the money to complete the Bakersfield-to-Merced segment that Newsom proposed. It has no line of sight on how it will get that money or that political capital. But since it has some money and some political capital, it is building anyway, in the hopes that Californians will want to finish what they started.

How did this happen? What I heard as I walked that track with the engineers who built it was less about engineering problems than political problems. I stood on a patch of the 99 freeway that had been moved in order to clear the hoped-for train’s path. Not far away there had been a self-storage facility. In folk imagination, eminent domain is a simple process by which the state simply tells you it wants your land and then gives you some money and takes it from you. In reality, it took the High-Speed Rail Authority four separate requests for possession, and two and a half years of legal wrangling, to get that little spit of land.

That story repeated itself again and again. There are parts of the high-speed line that intersect with freight rail lines. But the freight rail lines are so busy in the holiday season that some impose a construction moratorium from October to December. So in those areas work has to stop.

Trains are cleaner than cars, but high-speed rail has had to clear every inch of its route through environmental reviews, with lawsuits lurking around every corner. The environmental review process began in 2012, and by 2024, it still wasn’t done. “I’m always amazed the staff has been working on these segments for a decade or longer to get through the environmental process,” Brian Kelly, the chief executive of the High-Speed Rail Authority from 2018 to 2024, told me.

Many Californians were confused that construction had begun in the Central Valley, which was far less populated than the corridors near Los Angeles or San Francisco. Why did the Authority begin construction there?

One reason was that when California applied for federal money, the Obama administration wanted bids that would improve air quality in poor communities. And so the $3 billion the federal government offered was not really to build high-speed rail. It was to begin building high-speed rail in ways that addressed air pollution in specific communities.

The Central Valley is poorer and more polluted than coastal California, so federal funding went there, and so did the initial construction. But that made it less likely high-speed rail would generate the ridership, political support and financial backing to ever finish.

What has taken so long on high-speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. It’s negotiating. Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners. Those negotiations cost time, which costs money.

Those negotiations lead to changes in the route or the design or the construction, which costs money and time. Those negotiations are the product of decades of liberal policies meant to protect against government abuses. They may do that. But they also prevent government from building quickly or affordably.

“Time is a killer on the estimate of a project’s cost,” Kelly said. “When you don’t have funding and can’t make decisions and can’t drive to get operational and you can’t move the ball — the cost is huge: 2 to 3 percent a year, and in higher inflation periods, like we just had, 5 percent.” As delays mount, costs keep rising. The project becomes more expensive to finish. The public loses faith. The politicians begin second-guessing.

“I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now governor as years became decades on high-speed rail,” Newsom told me. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things. People look at me all the time and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?’”

In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail. China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to trains.

I do not want America to become China. But I do want it to be able to build trains.

This is an awkward time to make this argument. Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency are trying to raze the federal government under the moniker of “efficiency.” But driving out talented employees and slashing capacity indiscriminately will not make government more efficient. Neither Musk nor Trump seek a more capable state; they seek a broken state that they can control and corrupt.

Donald Trump could have run on bringing Texas housing policies to the nation. In Houston, there’s no zoning code, so building is easy, and the median home price is over $300,000. Compare that with Los Angeles, where the median price is around a million dollars. Or look at Austin, which has been a popular destination for many fleeing San Francisco’s housing costs. In November 2024, San Francisco’s metro area authorized the building of 292 housing structures; Austin authorized 3,059.

In the 2024 campaign, Trump and Vance ran on none of that. Instead, the housing crisis became a cudgel against immigrants. “Illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” JD Vance said in the vice-presidential debate. Trump sounded the same theme. Voters “cannot ignore the impact that the flood of 21 million illegal aliens has had on driving up housing costs,” he warned.

Trump could have run on the success Operation Warp Speed had in speeding up the Covid vaccines. Instead, he’s slashing government funding for science and medical research. He could have run on making it easier to build energy generation of all kinds in America. Instead he is trying to destroy the solar and wind industries. He could have run on making it easier for Americans to make things and trade them with the world. Instead, he’s trying to cut international trade by imposing tariffs and alienating partners. Musk is rich because of SpaceX and Tesla — companies that are built on federal subsidies — but he is slashing what government does rather than reimagining what it can do.

There is a reason Trump has chosen this path. The populist right is powered by scarcity. When there is not enough to go around, we look with suspicion on anyone who might take what we have. That suspicion is the fuel of Trump’s politics. Scarcity — or at least the perception of it — is the precondition to his success.

The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance; a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government to make sure there is enough of it. That doesn’t lend itself to the childishly simple divides that have so deformed our politics. Sometimes government has to get out of the way, as in housing. Sometimes it has to take a central role, creating markets or organizing resources for risky technologies that do not yet exist.

Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? Valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt. If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not? If the government is repeatedly failing to complete major projects on time and on budget, then what is going wrong and how do we fix it? If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do we pull these inventions from the future and distribute them in the present?

But if Democrats are to become the part of abundance, they have to confront their own role in creating scarcity. In the last few decades, Democrats took a wrong turn. They became the party that believes in government, that defends government, not the party that makes government work.

Liberals spent a generation working, at every level of government and society, to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to putting together coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive, or decades late, or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. They explained away government’s failures rather than fixing them. They excused their own selfishness, putting yard signs out saying no human being is illegal, kindness is everything, even as they fought affordable housing nearby and pushed the working class out of their cities.

To unmake this machine will be painful. It’s also necessary. In the long run, the way to marginalize the most dangerous political movements is to prove the superiority of your own. If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government. They need to offer Americans a liberalism that builds.

This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book “Abundance,” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew wants mayoral candidates to teach for a day. (Stephanie Snyder/Chalkbeat)

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, David Bloomfield, alerted me to this story that appeared in Chalkbeat.

New York City’s teachers union has a new requirement for any mayoral candidates seeking their endorsement: spend a day teaching in a public school classroom.

The announcement came Thursday as a crowded field of candidates vies for political support ahead of the June 24 primary and November 4 general election.

Mayor Eric Adams faces a difficult road to reelection amid a federal corruption indictment and a controversial bid by the Trump administration to drop the case against him. He will confront a slate of notable Democratic challengers, including former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who currently leads the pack, according to polling data.

And on Thursday, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who has called for the mayor to resign, entered the fray, announcing her own campaign for mayor.

To earn support from the United Federation of Teachers, which represents nearly 200,000 members, President Michael Mulgrew said candidates will need to spend at least seven periods in a public school classroom.

They’ll need to assist the teacher and paraprofessional with lessons, classroom management, and anything else students require.

“Mayoral candidates have traditionally promised to listen to educators and to base their education policies on the recommendations of the people doing the work. Then they get in City Hall and all that goes out the window,” Mulgrew said in a statement. “We have offered classroom time to candidates and elected officials, but they don’t take us up on it. So today we are on the record – if you want our endorsement you have to understand the work we do.”

The UFT will work with the city’s Education Department to identify classrooms for interested candidates and accompany them during their visit, union officials said.

Some observers were skeptical about the idea.

David Bloomfield, a professor of education, law, and public policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, supported mayoral candidates visiting classrooms, but questioned whether they should spend time teaching.

“What is a candidate to learn in 1 day that can be generalized to almost a million kids in 1,700 schools across 5 boroughs?” he said in an email. “Mayoral candidates need to think in system terms, appointing a Chancellor and [Panel for Educational Policy, a city board that votes on major policy proposals and contracts,] majority who can lead with expertise and judgment. Petty command performances are a ridiculous hurdle for the UFT to impose.”

Don’t hold back, David!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Daylight saving time took place at 2 a.m. this morning ( March 9^th).  

With the change, we lost an hour of sleep.

Medical research has shown this shift is associated with a number of health concerns, including an uptick in strokes, heart attacks and traffic accidents in the days following the time change.

When does daylight saving time end in the fall?

Daylight saving time will end on Sunday, Nov. 2.  

Some interesting comments about Daylight Saving Time!

Which countries do daylight saving time outside of the U.S.?

Outside the U.S., most of the countries that observe daylight saving time are in Europe, where it’s common, according to the Pew Research Center. France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are among the countries where it’s practiced.

Daylight saving time is also observed in some parts of Canada and Australia. In Africa, Egypt is the only country to observe it.

Which U.S. states don’t do daylight saving time?

Hawaii and most of the state of Arizona do not observe daylight saving time, according to the Department of Transportation, which oversees time zones in the U.S.

Daylight saving time is also not observed in the U.S. territories of:

American Samoa Guam Northern Mariana Islands Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Who invented daylight saving time?

Some have said Benjamin Franklin started the practice in 1784. He wrote a satirical essay for the Journal de Paris proposing regulations to ensure early risers.

Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, however, disputes the claim, and looks to New Zealand entomologist George Hudson, who proposed a two-hour clock rollback in 1895. The suggestion was inspired by his passion for collecting bugs, as he wanted more light after work to gather insects.

Still others credit British builder William Willet, who wrote a pamphlet in 1907 that encouraged moving clocks forward in the spring so that people could get out of bed earlier. Lighter and longer days were supposed to save energy, reduce the number of traffic accidents and help people be more active.

In 1916, during World War I, Germany became the first country to practice daylight saving time to conserve fuel, according to the Congressional Research Service. Other European countries soon followed, and the U.S. started practicing daylight saving time in 1918 to add additional daylight hours and help conserve energy.

Today’s practice of starting daylight saving time on the second Sunday in March each year and ending it on the first Sunday in November was enacted under former President George W. Bush.

I like the extra hour of sunlight in the evening!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, Robert Ubell, had an article earlier this week in Inside Education commenting on budget cuts at the USDOE Institute of Education Science (IES).  Entitled, “Ed Data Goes Dark: Why It Matters” the article sounds the alarm to the damage being done by these funding reductions.  As someone who has been involved in an IES project, I can attest to the fact that this office does thorough, high-quality research on many aspects of education.

Below is Ubell’s entire piece.

Well-worth a read!

Tony

———————————————————–

Inside Higher Education

“Ed Data Goes Dark: Why It Matters”

By  Robert Ubell 

When President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency set out to slash billions from the federal budget, it puzzled me as to why one of their first targets was an obscure data collection and research agency, the Institute of Education Sciences, a relatively modest operation buried deeply in the corridors of the Department of Education, and indeed one few had ever heard of. Since then, the newly installed secretary of education has ordered a review of all the department’s functions as part of what she ominously called the department’s “momentous final mission.”

A conversation with a trusted colleague helped me understand the cuts to IES, noting that the action should be seen as part of a new breed of autocrats around the world who seek to control information to hide the impacts of their actions from the public. In contemporary authoritarian governments, control of information—or what has come to be known today as informational autocracy—often substitutes for brute force.

Similar to how the Trump administration is seizing control of the White House press pool, canceling contracts for independent, high-quality education research is another way of controlling information. As Democratic lawmakers wrote in a Feb. 21 letter decrying the cuts, “The consequences of these actions will prevent the public from accessing accurate information about student demographics and academic achievement, abruptly end evaluations of federal programs that ensure taxpayer funds are spent wisely, and set back efforts to implement evidence-based reforms to improve student outcomes.”

IES houses a vast warehouse of the nation’s education statistics. Data collected by the agency is used by policymakers, researchers, teachers and colleges to understand student achievement, enrollment and much more about the state of American education. With IES being among the largest funders of education research, cutting it limits public access to what’s happening in the nation’s schools and colleges.

Claiming to eliminate waste and corruption, Musk’s first round of cuts involved canceling what DOGE initially said were nearly $900 million in IES contracts (though, as subsequent reporting has since revealed, DOGE’s math doesn’t add up and the canceled contracts seem to amount to much less). A second round purportedly sliced another $350 million in contracts and grants. It’s unclear how much more is destined to be chopped, since these may only be the first in a series of cuts designed to completely dismantle the Education Department. Though a department spokesperson initially said that the cuts would not affect the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test known as the nation’s report card, and the College Scorecard, which allows citizens to search for and compare information about colleges, we’ve since seen the cancellation of a national NAEP test for 17-year-olds.

In the Obama years, public data helped reveal bad actors among for-profit colleges, which were receiving millions in federal aid while delivering inferior education to poor and working-class students who yearned for college degrees. Since so few actually completed, what many got instead was crushing college debt. Luckily, good data helped drive nearly half of all for-profit programs to shut down. Publicly disseminated data exposes where things go wrong. But you can’t track down con men without evidence.

Ideally, in a well-functioning democracy, with a richly informed public, data helps us reach informed decisions, leading to greater accountability and enabling us to hold officials responsible for their actions. With access to reliable information about what’s happening behind closed doors, data helps us understand what may be going on, even to protest actions we may oppose.

Lately, however, things aren’t looking good. Since Trump and his top officials have slashed race-conscious programs and moved to prohibit funding for certain areas of research, higher ed leadership has remained mostly silent, with only a handful of college presidents protesting. Most have shrunk into the wings, cowed by Trump’s power to defund institutions. It already has the eerie feeling of watching your step.

Shutting down potentially revealing data collection is perhaps the least worrisome page in an autocrat’s playbook. As Trump continues to follow the authoritarian path set by leaders in Hungary, Turkey and elsewhere, we should expect other, more damaging and more frightening higher ed moves that have been imposed by other autocrats—selecting college presidents, controlling faculty hiring and advancement, punishing academic dissent, imposing travel restrictions.

Just a few months ago, there was comfort in knowing everything was there—data on enrollments, graduation rates, participation rates of women and other groups. All very neatly organized and accessible whenever you wanted. Even though some found IES technology old and clunky, it felt like higher ed was running according to a reliable scheme, that you could go online and open data files as in a railroad timetable. Without it, there might be a train wreck ahead and you wouldn’t know it until it was too late. Now these luxurious numbers may soon be lost, with decades of America’s academic history pitched into digital darkness.

It’s frightening to realize that we’ll no longer be operating on solid intelligence. That we’ll no longer have guideposts, supported by racks of sensibly collected numbers to tell us if we’re on the right path or if we’re far afield. Trump’s wrecking ball has smashed our confidence, a confidence built on years of reliable data. We’ll soon be in the dark.

Dear Commons Community,

OpenAI has committed $50 million for research and technology to support AI breakthroughs at 15 institutions. including the University of Michigan, the California State University system and Harvard University.  OpenAI announced the establishment of NextGenAI, hailing it as a “first-of-its-kind consortium … committing funding for research grants, computer acquisition and more for students, educators, and researchers advancing the frontiers of knowledge … to catalyze progress at a rate faster than any one institution would alone.”

The  founding partners of NextGenAI include the University of Michigan, California Institute of Technology, the California State University system, Duke University, the University of Georgia, Harvard University, Howard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ohio State University, University of Oxford in England, along with Boston Children’s Hospital, the Boston Public Library and OpenAI.

Congratulations and good luck to all involved!

Tony

Debris streaks through the sky after SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft exploded in space. Credit: @_ericloosen_/via REUTER.S

Dear Commons Community,

Elon Musk’s company SpaceX launched its huge Starship rocket on the program’s eighth test flight yesterday, but a malfunction  triggered multiple upper stage engine shutdowns and the vehicle failed to reach its planned sub-orbital altitude, breaking apart in a spectacular shower of debris.

It was the second failure in a row for a Starship upper stage, a vehicle critical to NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon in the next few years.  As reported by CBS News.

“During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost. Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses,” SpaceX said in a statement.

“We will review the data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause. As always, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship’s reliability.”

“Obviously, a lot to go through, a lot to dig through. We’re going to go right at it,” said SpaceX launch commentator Dan Huot. “The primary reason we do these flight tests is to learn. We have some more to learn about this vehicle, but we’re going to be right back here in the not-too-distant future, and we’re going to get a ship to space.”

The Federal Aviation Administration said it has ordered a mishap investigation into the loss of the Starship.

Flights at several Florida airports were temporarily grounded due to the risk of falling debris.

Ground stops have now been lifted, but the FAA reported Miami International Airport and Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport both had departure delays of about 45 minutes, with the cause listed as “space launch debris.” Flights at Palm Beach International Airport and Orlando International Airport were also affected.

“During the event, the FAA activated a Debris Response Area and briefly slowed aircraft outside the area where space vehicle debris was falling or stopped aircraft at their departure location. Normal operations have resumed,” the agency said.

Three days after a last-minute scrub due to unspecified technical issues, SpaceX fired up the Super Heavy first stage’s 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines at 6:30 p.m. EST. Two seconds later, the tallest, most powerful rocket in the world lifted off from the company’s launch site on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Capable of generating up to 16 million pounds of thrust — more than twice the power as NASA’s Saturn 5 moon rocket — the Super Heavy-Starship arced away to the east atop of long jet of bluish flame.

After boosting the Starship upper stage out of the dense lower atmosphere, the 230-foot-tall, 30-foot-wide Super Heavy first stage booster flew itself back to the launch site and into the grasp of two giant mechanical arms known as “chopsticks” mounted on the side of the launch tower.

The 160-foot-tall Starship upper stage, meanwhile, climbed toward space as planned on the power of six Raptor engines, appearing to work flawlessly as it soared skyward toward the planned sub-orbital trajectory.

But a little more than eight minutes after liftoff, telemetry shown on SpaceX’s live webcast indicated four of the six engines had prematurely shut down. A camera on the Starship showed the spacecraft starting to spin about and several seconds later contact was lost.

Multiple videos posted on social media showed a dramatic shower of debris arcing back toward Earth after the vehicle broke up. It wasn’t immediately clear if the breakup was triggered by the Starship’s self-destruct system or by extreme structural loads as it fell back into the lower atmosphere.

While SpaceX will no doubt attempt its usual rapid recovery, the Federal Aviation Administration will almost certainly order another failure investigation. Given two destructive breakups in a row, it could take longer to return to flight status this time around.

Musk’s comment on his latest SpaceX disaster – “rockets are hard.” 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

David Sanger, White House and financial correspondent for The New York Times, has an article today entitled, “Tariffs by Whim Keep Allies Off Balance, but Do the Same to Markets.” He reviews the roller coaster ride the US Stock Exchange takes every time Trump makes “on-again/off again” announcements about tariffs.  For this week, the Dow Jones is down $1052. as Trump imposed tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China on Tuesday only to pause them yesterday. Here is an excerpt from Sanger’s article.

“On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on Fox Business to reassure nervous allies and even more twitchy investors that the Trump administration was negotiating a deal to avoid tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and that the president is “gonna work something out with them.”

“It’s not going to be a pause” for Mr. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs, he insisted. “None of that pause stuff.”

On Thursday, the world got what the president characterized as more of that pause stuff.

Mr. Trump’s announcement that he had a good conversation with Mexico’s president, and would delay most tariffs until April 2, was only the latest example of the punish-by-whim nature of the second Trump presidency. A few hours after the Mexico announcement, Canada got a break too, even as Mr. Trump on social media accused its departing prime minister, Justin Trudeau, of using “the Tariff problem” to “run again for Prime Minister.”

“So much fun to watch!” he wrote.

Indeed, it appears that Mr. Trump is having enormous fun turning tariffs on and off like tap water. But others are developing a case of Trump-induced whiplash, not least investors, who sent stock prices down again on Thursday amid the uncertainty over what Mr. Trump’s inconstancy means for the global economy.

When the White House finally released the text of Mr. Trump’s orders on Thursday evening, it appeared that some of the tariffs — those covered in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement that Mr. Trump negotiated and celebrated in his first term — were indeed permanently suspended. Other tariffs were merely paused.

Most everyone involved was confused, which may well have been the point.

As Mr. Trump hands down tariff determinations and then pulls them back for a month or so, world leaders call to plead their case, a bit like vassal states appealing to a larger power. Chief executives put in calls as well, making it clear that Mr. Trump is the one you need to deal with if you are bringing in car parts from Canada or chips from China.

And the president responds, as if he is granting reprieves, though not pardons. If, in a usual presidency, tariffs are debated by layers of experts and aides, their potential impact weighed with care, in the Trump White House the determinations are part whim, part weave, part pique. Explanations for what triggered the imposition of tariffs shift, and decisions to delay or suspend them are not accompanied by detailed rationales. Mr. Trump himself says he makes the call based on his latest conversations.

Trump is showing the world that he is a chaotic individual who has one interest – himself!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dori Zinn of Bankrate has advice for those thinking about retirement.  She provides eight sound reasons why you might want to delay it.  As someone who has delayed retirement, I am in agreement with everything she says.

Below is her entire piece.

Tony

——————-

Bankrate

Should you delay retirement? Here are 8 reasons why you might want to

Dori Zinn

Updated March 5, 2025 at 10:18 AM

If you’ve been dreaming of retirement since you entered the workforce, you might have a certain idea of what it looks like. But there’s a chance you might not start retirement when you thought you would, perhaps due to circumstances beyond your control or because you’re simply not ready to exit the working world. While life doesn’t always go according to plan, would-be retirees can make the best of a delayed retirement timeline, and may even find that putting it off for a few years is a good idea.

8 reasons to delay retirement

Amid a shifting economic landscape and the possibility of living longer than ever before, the traditional retirement age of 65 to 67 might not be the best plan for everyone. For some, punching out for the last time may need to be pushed back a few years.

Here are eight reasons why you might want to rethink your retirement timeline.

1. You give yourself more time to save and invest

For many retirees, $1 million is the magic savings number for retirement, but most Americans are nowhere close to that figure. According to Vanguard’s “How America Saves 2024” report, workers who were between 45 to 54 years old in Vanguard’s retirement plans had a median savings of $60,763 at the end of 2023. Those aged 55 to 64 had a median savings of $87,571 in their plan.

Delaying retirement gives you more time to save for your golden years and less time to live off your savings. Many retirees fear they will run out of money before they die, so the more time you spend saving, the less you’ll depend on that nest egg when the time comes to stop working.

2. You can delay Social Security for a bigger payout

While you can file for Social Security benefits as early as age 62, the longer you put it off, the higher the amount you’ll receive. Waiting until your full retirement age — or all the way until you hit 70 — significantly bumps up your benefits. For example, if your full retirement age is 67 and you delay filing until age 70, you’ll get a 24 percent boost in your monthly Social Security check.

Delaying Social Security means you’ll need to rely on income from another source until you file by either drawing down from your nest egg or continuing to work. But even if you do have to work a little while longer, you’ll be locking in some more Social Security boosts while you’re on the clock.

3. You like what you do

Not everyone enjoys their jobs, and many look forward to the day they don’t have to go into the office anymore. But if your job brings you satisfaction, don’t feel compelled to stop once you hit a certain age. Aside from income, working has numerous other benefits for emotional, psychological and mental health. Older workers needn’t stop working at a certain age, especially if they enjoy it.

4. You can capitalize on other work benefits

While income is useful, a job typically provides valuable benefits beyond just a paycheck. For instance, your employer may help pad your retirement portfolio via an employer-matched 401(k) program. Access to workplace health care benefits can save you a lot of money if you don’t qualify for Medicare yet and would otherwise have to pay out-of-pocket for coverage.

You might also want to stick around at your job to keep access to other perks, such as reimbursement for continuing education, gym memberships, reimbursement for some bills and more.

5. You can wait out inflation

Inflation may have cooled a bit since the summer of 2022, but if it picks up again, you might consider delaying retirement. It can make sense to wait out rising prices and ensure that your finances are on a stable footing before you move on to the next stage.

6. You’re stuck and unable to retire

Sometimes important elements of your retirement plan get derailed. For instance, you may not be able to downsize because of an uncertain housing market. Or maybe you got laid off and had to find a job that wasn’t what you traditionally did for work, so you’re making up for lost income now. Maybe you wanted to relocate to be close to family, or sudden health concerns have eaten up more of your budget than you expected. Regardless of the reason, you may not be able to retire now and may need to re-evaluate your plans or consider alternatives, including working longer.

7. Health insurance

If you opt to retire before reaching the age of 65, the age at which you become eligible for Medicare, you will need to secure health insurance. Several options exist, including COBRA coverage, which can extend your employer’s group health plan for a certain period, usually 18 months. Alternatively, you might be able to join your spouse’s employer-sponsored coverage or explore individual plans in the health insurance marketplace.

Remember, though, retiring early can significantly impact your health insurance options and associated costs, primarily because of the coverage gap before you qualify for Medicare at 65.

8. Continue to delay taxes

Delaying retirement can also provide you with the opportunity to defer taxes on certain retirement accounts. If you continue to work past age 73, you will still need to take required minimum distributions (RMDs) from your traditional IRAs, regardless of your employment status.

However, if you are working and don’t own more than 5 percent of the company you work for, you might have the option to delay RMDs from your current employer’s 401(k) plan. It’s important to familiarize yourself with the specific rules of your plan and seek advice from a financial advisor to avoid any potential penalties.

Bottom line

Retirement isn’t a one-size-fits-all path. If you have to delay retirement for whatever reason — unexpected events or by choice — the tradeoffs aren’t all bad. Delaying gives you time to build your nest egg, pad your Social Security benefits and save money on taxes and other expenses along the way. Take some time to review your options so you can map out a path to retirement in the future.

Damon Winter/The New York Times

 Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd in her column this morning entitled, “The State of Himself” analyzes Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday.  She makes a number of keen observations summarizing Trump’s aim was simply “to glorify himself” during the longest ever presidential address. I agree with her fully and gave up on it after about 40 minutes.  I could not stand his lies and insults.

I thought Dowd’s best comment included a shot at the Democrats.

“Trump was loud, confident and forceful and, for his supporters, enormously effective. G.O.P. lawmakers were jubilant, even though many are unnerved by his tariff infatuation — markets plummeted over the past week — and his disgusting embrace of Putin.

Democrats could only combat this dominant Trump by refusing to applaud or stand, waving little paddles with messages like “Musk steals” and “False,” wearing hot pink or, in the case of Representative Al Green, getting thrown out.

They’re going to need a bigger boat.”

They are going to need a bigger boat indeed.  The Democrats right now are reeling at the national level.  There are several good and decent governors but no one is stepping up to really challenge Trump.

Dowd’s entire column is below.

Tony

The New York Times

The State of Himself

March 5, 2025

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington

Interviewing Donald Trump over the decades, I would sometimes do a lightning round of questions at the end. It was always his favorite part. He relished giving short bursts of opinion on a range of political and cultural topics.

Now he has turned his entire presidency into a lightning round, putting out a breathless stream of executive orders, slapping tariffs around the globe, siccing Elon Musk on the federal government to rip it apart from the inside out, blowing up alliances as he pulls Vladimir Putin close. Trump’s energy, his output and the sheer volume of words he has uttered in the first six weeks of his presidency are stunning.

He spilled many more words on Tuesday night during his address to a joint session of Congress, talking for 100 minutes, the longest presidential address to Congress ever.

Again, it played like a lightning round. He was Action Jackson, racing through pledges to cut regulations, getting rid of seemingly silly or superfluous foreign aid programs, leaving the World Health Organization. He sped through boasts about economic success, even though the Atlanta Fed says the economy will contract this quarter. He dashed through sketchy claims, painting electric cars as evil, predicting that tariffs will lead to a car boom and asserting that there are nearly 20 million centenarians — some pushing 150 — who are getting Social Security. (Data shows that only 89,000 people over 98 received Social Security payments in December 2024.)

He sounded like a Bob Barker-style game show host, tossing out prizes in a rapid-fire style to his guests in the gallery. Congratulations, you’re going to West Point! Congratulations, you’re in the Secret Service now!

He was loud, confident and forceful and, for his supporters, enormously effective. G.O.P. lawmakers were jubilant, even though many are unnerved by his tariff infatuation — markets plummeted over the past week — and his disgusting embrace of Putin.

Democrats could only combat this dominant Trump by refusing to applaud or stand, waving little paddles with messages like “Musk steals” and “False,” wearing hot pink or, in the case of Representative Al Green, getting thrown out.

They’re going to need a bigger boat.

When I interviewed Trump during the 2016 race, I wondered if the profane and rambunctious former reality show star could ever be presidential. He replied that he could do it if he wanted, pointing to the fact that he could get along at fancy dinners with the society matrons of Palm Beach.

But it turned out that Trump did not need to alter his behavior to be president. He simply altered the presidency to match his personality.

He has mocked Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” at political rallies, and he mocked her as “Pocahontas” again to her face in his formal address to Congress.

He sprayed the air with exaggerations and untruths at his rallies, and he didn’t feel the need to add any fact-checking as president. “A manifesto of mistruths,” proclaimed Nancy Pelosi after the speech.

He blithely ignores blatant contradictions in what he’s saying and doing. He praised police officers, saying they would get the respect “they so dearly deserve” and calling for the death penalty for anyone who murders a police officer. This, even though he sided with the insurrectionists, pardoning nearly 1,600 “patriots,” as he calls them, in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, where police officers got hurt trying to fight off the violent Trump mob.

He declared in the House chamber that “the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over,” ignoring the irony of Musk — the most powerful chainsaw-wielding unelected government official in history — basking in the first lady’s box. (At long last, wearing a suit.)

Giving a shout-out to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump said, “Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment.” But Trump has been eliminating regulations that would accomplish that. He wants to make deep cuts in the E.P.A., and two of his top appointees at the agency are former chemical executives.

He honored a child who he said had probably gotten cancer from chemicals, even though he is slashing scientific and public health research.

He hailed his tariff hikes as “protecting the soul of our country,” saying, “I love the farmer — who will now be selling into our home market, the U.S.A.” But many farmers make money selling abroad, so they may not appreciate Trump’s sanguine exclamation, “Have a lot of fun. I love you, too.”

Trump crowed that he “brought back free speech in America.” Meanwhile, some of his executive orders have mandated that the government ax selected “woke” words and phrases, and he has threatened that schools that tolerate certain types of protest will lose federal funding.

He has also barred The Associated Press from covering him in the Oval Office and Air Force One because the news service won’t bend the knee and call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

It seems unsavory to brag about free speech when his administration has been conjuring Joseph McCarthy by asking government employees to name names. The administration set up a hotline to get snitches to tell on colleagues promoting D.E.I. And the head of the F.B.I.’s New York field office was forced out this week when he interfered with Trump’s revenge rampage, urging employees to “dig in” and refuse to name names of agents who had worked on Jan. 6 cases.

Other presidents might have tried to heal divisions after an acrimonious election, but not Trump. He knows that trolling the Democrats, ratcheting up divisions and stoking the culture war got him to the Oval, and he never gives up what gets him to No. 1.

In his address, Trump relentlessly trashed his predecessor, blaming him for everything, even the price of eggs. Ignoring the decorum that once marked presidential addresses, he dismissed Joe Biden as “the worst president in American history.”

As usual, he took all the credit and gave everyone else the blame.

“We have Marco Rubio in charge,” Trump said. He added, as his secretary of state looked on, “Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.”

Trump has not been focused on his campaign promise to lower prices. But at the Capitol, he finally raised the issue. “The egg prices, out of control. We’re working hard to get it back down.” Then he swiftly passed the buck to his agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins. “Secretary, do a good job on that.”

He offered a softer tone on Ukraine, citing a message from Volodymyr Zelensky urging peace and saying he was ready to sign the minerals deal. Now that Trump has forced the Ukrainian president to grovel, now that he has humiliated the war hero in public and put his own swollen ego above America’s longstanding foreign policy principles, he may give Zelensky another chance.

His new imperialist attitude was on display, a sharp contrast to his old rants about how awful George W. Bush was for his failed occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. About Greenland, Trump said, “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” He also vowed, “My administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal, and we’ve already started doing it.”

The thrust of Trump’s speech was, of course, to glorify himself, to claim sanctification bestowed on him by God when he escaped assassination. The main point was to brag that he is the best of the best. It is the same way he once boasted that the rolls in the restaurant at Trump Tower were “the best rolls in the city.”

The first month of his presidency, he said, was “the most successful in the history of the nation. And what makes it even more impressive is, do you know who No. 2 is? George Washington. How about that?”

Trump has remade the presidency, just as he has remade the Republican Party, in his own image. The first presidential address of his new term mirrored all his old rallies: It was an ode to himself.