EUROPE-IS-US

Review assisted by Mistral.ai 1. Build a “big, beautiful wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it Status: Partially fulfilled, but Mexico did not pay. About 450 miles of new or replaced barriers were constructed during his first term, mostly replacing existing structures. The project remains controversial and incomplete, with ongoing legal and funding challenges [1,2]. 2. Repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) Status: Failed. Despite repeated attempts, the ACA remains in place. Trump’s administration supported legal challenges to dismantle it, but the Supreme Court upheld the law. No comprehensive replacement was enacted [3,4]. 3. Massive tax cuts, especially for businesses and the middle class Status: Highly successful (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017). Corporate tax rates were slashed from 35% to 21%, and individual tax cuts were implemented. Critics argue the benefits skewed toward the wealthy, a...

  1. From “Efficiency” to Hollowing Out The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was intended to streamline the state and “unleash” private-sector productivity under an America First banner. However, in practice, much of the effort focused on reducing personnel, budgets, and rulemaking authority across federal agencies, especially in environmental oversight, labor enforcement, and public health [4][5]. These areas are regulatory multipliers : small investments in them sustain much larger levels of private-sector productivity. Cutting them rarely yields true efficiency; it instead shifts costs downstream to firms, households, and local governments [5]. 2. Impact on Production Productivity a. Reduced Institutional Coordination Industrial productivity depends on predictable and transparent regulatory environments. By trimming inter-agency capacity, DOGE weakened the connective tissue that supports innovation within stable rules. ·     ...

  Why defending democracy requires both patience and power Summary The civic path to constitutional renewal is America’s best hope — but also its most fragile. Authoritarian movements, armed with emotion and speed, threaten to overtake the slow work of democratic trust. Reflecting on the lessons of the 1930s, this essay argues that civic renewal must be reinforced by an organized effort — a Project 2028 — to reclaim the moral and emotional power of “heritage” before it is monopolized by autocracy. The challenge is to make democracy feel strong again: proud, purposeful, and shared by all. 1️⃣ The Civic Path — Noble, Fragile, and Urgent In Reclaiming Heritage Without Losing the Republic , we traced a path of constitutional renewal rooted in civic duty and shared stewardship. It envisioned a democracy restored not by force but by care — through trust in institutions and one another [1]. Yet noble paths are rarely safe ones. Civic repair takes time, patience, and mutual goodwill...

  A Civic Path to Constitutional Renewal 1️⃣ From Nostalgia to Reconstruction In the previous analysis, When Heritage Turns into Power , we traced how America’s “heritage” vision — originally rooted in constitutional reverence — has been overtaken by cultural anxiety and political ambition. That anxiety transformed preservation into a power struggle, threatening the very framework it sought to protect [1]. But the underlying impulse behind the heritage narrative — the desire for meaning, stability, and continuity — need not end in constitutional destruction. The same energy that fuels nostalgia for a lost America can also drive reconstruction : a civic renewal rooted in the Constitution’s pluralism, not its weaponization. A genuine heritage renewal must therefore be constitutional in spirit and civic in practice — seeking restoration through inclusion, competence, and accountability rather than domination. 2️⃣ Rethinking Heritage as Shared Inheritance True heritage is no...

  Summary As America’s conservative movement redefines what it means to “protect heritage,” its anxiety over cultural loss has begun to target the very institutions that sustain democracy. The Constitution, once seen as the foundation of American heritage, is increasingly treated as a captured tool of hostile elites — something to be reclaimed, even if that means tearing at its limits. This piece examines how a vision of moral renewal evolved into a struggle for power — and the profound irony of saving heritage by endangering it. When Heritage Turns into Power 1️⃣ The Heritage Vision and Its Anxiety The Heritage Foundation’s intellectual project has long sought to restore what it calls America’s founding principles — faith, family, free enterprise, and constitutional liberty. In recent years, however, this “heritage” vision has grown increasingly anxious, shaped by a sense of civilizational loss and betrayal [1][2]. Heritage’s message has evolved from preservation to recover...

Introduction In many advanced economies the question of regulation is framed as: Are we over-regulating and thereby choking productivity and competitiveness, or are we under-resourcing regulation and risking institutional fragility? One way to approach this is to think of a rough metric: regulatory capacity ÷ production capacity . In other words, how large is the institutional/governance apparatus compared with the economy’s ability to produce goods and services. For the U.S., the recent deregulatory wave argues that the regulatory burden is excessive and must be cut to free up production. This piece asks: Did the U.S. really have an excessive regulatory-capacity relative to its production capacity — or was the problem elsewhere (fragmentation, weak enforcement, outdated frameworks)? The data suggest the latter. Subsequently the actual broader impact of this deregulation drive is reviewed. This article was supported by ChatGPT research. Re-thinking the regulation vs production c...