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Zack Lori
Following last week's announcement that Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine is very effective, Political Union has decided to debate whether or not taking a coronavirus vaccine should be mandatory when one is released to the public. With this in mind, here is some information about coronavirus vaccine polling and the status of mandatory vaccinations in the United States.
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Zack Lori
Does your vote matter? It's up for tomorrow's debaters to decide what it even means for a vote to matter in the first place, so I won't try to provide possible answers to this question in today's blog post. However, I can provide some hopefully interesting information on Americans’ faith in the political system and voter turnout rates, which perhaps say something about whether Americans thought their votes mattered in the past and whether they think their votes matter this year.  The endowment’s payout rate (red line) from 2010-2019 Zack Lori
Coronavirus and its associated costs have been bad news for the university’s endowment. Northwestern started the year with an endowment valued around $10.8 billion, but it has decreased to about $10 billion as of the end of September, a decline of 7.4% of the total value. Consequently, the university has had to increase its endowment payout rate this year from 5.2% to 6%, which is the highest rate since at least 2004. (I did not check pre-2005 data.) Felix Beilin
This week, New York City Public Schools, the largest school district in the country, will follow through on an audacious public policy bet: nearly 500,000 students will return to in-person schooling. The city has come far from its days as the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in April, and local experts and politicians herald its accomplishments in reducing spread of the coronavirus and keeping the burden on emergency care workers low. The debate over the future of the public school system grew to encompass nearly all of New York’s local news bandwidth in August and early September, as Mayor Bill de Blasio repeatedly pushed back the targeted reopening date. It was really a month earlier, though, in early to mid July, that Americans had to debate amongst themselves whether or not to reopen schools in a quickly approaching fall term. Zack Lori
The US Constitution is, in some places, very specific. For instance, if you happened to be wondering which circumstances would allow for a soldier to live inside your house, you would consult the constitution, not statutory law. However, the constitution is decidedly sparse in its passages about the judiciary system. Most importantly for our purposes, it does not mandate a specific amount of justices to serve on the US Supreme Court. This is not entirely unusual---the constitutions of Australia and Germany don’t mandate the amount of justices on their highest courts, either. Felix Beilin
The term “American Dream” dates back to James Truslow Adams’s 1931 novel The Epic of America. As Adams describes it, it is: That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement…A dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. Felix Beilin
This week’s debate focuses on the relative power of China and the United States--we’re leaving the measurements and details up to you. In the meantime, here’s a brief refresher on the trajectory of China’s economy, as well as some of the geopolitical initiatives the country has taken. Since China’s position within the global COVID-19 crisis is relevant to this discussion, we’ll also briefly summarize their response to the pandemic and the international reactions that it has elicited.  Zack Lori
In light of the recent ASG election, Political Union has decided to debate whether or not ASG matters for the student body. So for debate prep this week, I am providing a quick overview of some things that ASG does. Felix Beilin
In late March, Congress passed the CARES Act, a comprehensive $2 trillion stimulus package to aid an American economy reeling from coronavirus protection measures. As businesses have shuttered and Covid-19 case numbers have skyrocketed, the United States has seen nearly 30 million new unemployment claims over the last month and daily falls in the Dow Jones Industrial Average of up to -13%. These are unprecedented figures. Consequently, Individual industries, like air travel and meat processing, have asked the government for bailout money as they struggle to stay liquid. The question before us on Monday evening at 7pm CST (we hope you’ll join us—check our Facebook for a Zoom link!) is whether the government should engage in bailouts to big businesses like these, in principle. Zack Lori
Hello everyone! For the debate tomorrow, I have written some summaries of a few different countries’ approaches to coronavirus lockdowns, so you can see how they have fared. |
POLITICAL UNIONWelcome to Political Union's blog! All opinions expressed are those of our writers, and not NU Political Union. Archives
January 2021
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