I had a professional background in economic development and was fluent in the language of business - even while having fought and bled politically fo… - Pete Buttigieg

Little cruelties add up. And of course, the worst thing about them is that they can drain, not just the person who was targeted by anything from a mean little tweet to a violent attack - but they also drain something out of someone who was the aggressor.

No, no, no,” replied Brynjolfsson. “From about the 1930s through about the 1960s, the [top] tax rate averaged about seventy percent. At times it was up at ninety-five percent. And those were actually pretty good years for growth.” Indeed they were. Between 1948 and 1973, real GDP grew 170 percent in the United States and per capita income nearly doubled. During that same period, the revenue collected through that progressive tax code made it possible to build an interstate highway system and fund the space program, while dramatically expanding the social safety net, with new programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and food stamps. Even with historically high tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, the period of economic expansion came to be viewed as a golden age of capitalism. And with government largely delivering for people in a way they had not seen before, these years were also not coincidentally an age that saw Americans two to three times more likely to express trust in their government than they have in more recent years.

"It had been on my mind ever since allowing myself to call President Trump a "draft-dodging chickenhawk" during one of the DNC forums. While true, that statement was not in keeping with how I publicly speak about political figures, or anyone else, and afterward I reflected that this president was inspiring a loss of decency not just in his supporters, but also in those of us who opposed him. It was another way of looking at the moral stakes of politics as it filters through to millions of lives: that we might all be growing into harder and perhaps worse people, as a consequence of political leadership that failed to call us to our highest values."