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Back to School Shopping? Expect Higher Prices, “Invisible” to the Consumer
AI-driven “surveillance pricing” hides the price increases from stressed-out parents
By Steven Hill, The Fulcrum, August 21, 2025
For families with school children, the summer is coming to a close, and it’s time to start thinking about—school shopping! New clothes, shoes, daypacks, and school supplies are topmost of mind, making sure your little Einsteins and Rembrandts are ready to take on the new school year.…
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Using democracy to kill democracy—Trump takes a redistricting trick from Viktor Orbán
Democrats’ unilateral disarmament via independent redistricting commissions is coming back to haunt them
By Steven Hill, DemocracySOS, August 6, 2025
It’s “drive off the cliff” time again in America’s casino democracy. The Trump racketeers have a plan to swipe votes from Americans in order to keep their bare GOP House majority in the 2026 midterm elections.…
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Trump’s Health Care Law Could Double Premiums for Millions by 2026
Millions of Americans face skyrocketing premiums as ACA subsidies expire under Trump’s new law.
By Steven Hill, The Fulcrum, July 29, 2025
Media coverage of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) mostly focused on the deep cuts coming to Medicaid, which will potentially result in an estimated 10 to 12 million low-income and disabled Americans losing their health care access.…
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Democrats are their own worst enemy
Democrats often oppose political reforms that would both empower voters AND help Democrats
By Steven Hill, DemocracySOS, July 22, 2025
Democratic leaders are rightfully assailing President Donald Trump over his many anti-democratic transgressions. But they should look in the mirror. Because on many occasions, Democrats have had a chance to improve and open up our democracy, and make it work better for regular people, but more often than not they have refused to do so.…
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Another nail in Democracy’s coffin: “crafted talk” and “simulated responsiveness”
Steven Hill, DemocracySOS, July 14, 2025
For both Republicans and Democrats, politics has become a tricky balancing act. In their never-ending bid to win elections and governing majorities, both the major political parties are caught between the poles of their most partisan base voters and undecided swing voters. In the 49-49 nation, whichever political party can sufficiently stimulate its spectrum of voters, wins.…
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Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill: Hidden Cuts, Legislative Tricks, and Who Really Pays the Price
By Steven Hill, The Fulcrum, July 12, 2025
President Donald Trump received a great Fourth of July present — he signed his administration’s signature piece of federal legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is a sweeping tax cut and spending package. The law makes Trump’s massive 2017 tax cuts permanent and boosts defense and border patrol funding.…
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Are Trump’s tariffs good for the economy or will they increase prices?
By Steven Hill, The Fulcrum, December 23, 2024
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the Oval Office, there is much talk about tariffs as the foundation for his economic policy. Trump himself says he’s “a Tariff Man,” and in fact implemented tariffs on a number of countries in his first term.…
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America votes: Will Trump or Harris be better for the economy?
By Steven Hill, The Fulcrum, Nov 5, 2024
There is no question that Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are offering two very different visions of America and the economy. But amidst all the campaign noise and insults from the two sides, it becomes difficult to separate what’s real from what’s campaign bluster.…
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Project 2025: The Federal Reserve
By Steven Hill, The Fulcrum, September 9, 2024
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum’s cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.…
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Project 2025: Federal Trade Commission
By Steven Hill, The Fulcrum, August 12, 2024
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum’s cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.…
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Project 2025: Federal Communications Commission
By Steven Hill, The Fulcrum, August 05, 2024
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum’s cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.…
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Project 2025: The Department of Labor
By Steven Hill, The Fulcrum, July 25, 2024
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum’s cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.…
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San Francisco: a Multi-Everything City that needs a new approach to local democracy
By Steven Hill, New Democracy Institute, May 11, 2023
How should urban zones structure local democracy to ensure fewer turf wars, broad participation and greater engagement of its human talent and genius?
San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, San Jose, Atlanta, San Diego, Houston, Chicago – these large metropolises are what I call “multi-everything cities.”…
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Another shooting, another crazy day in Winner-Take-All land
By Steven Hill, DemocracySOS, March 28, 2023
America’s winner-take-all elections bedevil common sense and ensure a vast gap between public opinion and policy
Another shooting. Another SHOOTING? ANOTHER SHOOTING!!!
Another SCHOOL shooting. I can hardly believe it. Three school children are dead, gunned down at nine years of age, along with three of their adult care keepers.…
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How Trump could win the GOP nomination–again
By Steven Hill, DemocracySOS, March 23, 2023
Like in 2016, the pathway to the nomination is clear due to the “winner take all” rules in most GOP states; RCV would ensure a true majority of GOP primary voters prevail
Donald Trump seems to be showing up more and more in the headlines these days.…
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Employer surveillance against workers spreads
By Steven Hill, Hans Böckler Stiftung, December 2, 2022
Silicon Valley says technology will liberate. In reality, it is trapping workers inside a Big Brother panopticon where you don’t even know when and how you are being watched.
The relentless tentacles of Big Brother digital surveillance continue to creep into the workplace and the lives of workers.…
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If it seems too good to be true…it probably is
By Steven Hill, Hans Böckler Stiftung, July 6, 2022
Why it’s important to separate worker reality from corporate media hype, which often tries to decree what is best for workers – despite being wrong again and again and again.
There is an old saying: “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”…
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The center is not holding – here’s why, and how to fix it
By Steven Hill, DemocracySOS, June 28, 2022
Recent Supreme Court rulings are the latest examples of a future under “minority rule”
Over the last few months, we have slowly awoken to a troubling new world. The unfamiliar America that is emerging has become post-Roe, post-gun control, post-safe schools, post-Supreme Court impartiality, post-majoritarian and possibly post-fair elections (we shall see in November and in 2024).…
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Why electoral systems matter: a thought experiment
By Steven Hill, DemocracySOS, June 24, 2022
What’s this? The same votes cast through different electoral systems can elect completely different representatives?
Imagine a mythical city in the heartland, which is seeking a better method to ensure that all of its residents in their “multi-everything” city feel like they have adequate political representation and a vested interest in participating in a healthy society.…
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Why no gun control? Because of the failure of winner-take-all elections
By Steven Hill, DemocracySOS, May 26, 2022
“Swing voter-ocracy” is contributing to this tragedy for America’s children
FairVote’s Rob Richie and I first wrote about the role of swing voters blocking popular gun control legislation in the 1990s. The problem remains true today.
We have seen this movie too many times.…
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Helping gig workers help themselves
By Steven Hill, Hans Böckler Stiftung, April 11, 2022
From new technologies to new organizing methods, tools and training for gig workers: Support is starting to emerge. Will it help? Will organized labor in the US pitch in?
Gig workers emerged from an economy flattened by the contraction of 2008-9, which saw massive layoffs and a growing reserve labor pool.…
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Workers of the world…QUIT?
By Steven Hill, Hans Böckler Stiftung, December 9, 2021
US workers are leaving their jobs in record numbers. Are they newly empowered? Or just taking a break from reality?
US workers of all ages and occupations have been voluntarily quitting their jobs in record numbers. In April 2021, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded a giant surge in the number of people who left their jobs, with just under 4 million workers quitting voluntarily.…