Preview

I’ve been at the Prospect for almost a year, and I’ve enormously appreciated the opportunity to write on important and often little-noticed stories about power and politics. In that tradition, my best stories this year are an eclectic bunch. I reported on stories from the Faroe Islands, on Tennessee Republican politics, and on the science of refrigerants, as well as writing arguments on judicial review, Medicare Advantage, and tech unionization. I’m excited to see what comes in 2023.

The Best Tax System on Earth: I traveled to the Faroe Islands, a semi-autonomous part of Denmark far out in the North Atlantic, to report on their tax authority, which is so good that most Faroese never have to think about it. The system automatically collects data on all wage income for every employee, and adjusts tax withholdings on the fly, so that ordinary workers don’t even have to file a tax return. That system, combined with the Faroes’ exceptionally clean tax code, means the authority has been able to cut back staffing and spending while increasing audits of the wealthy and business.

How Republican Rep. John Rose Found His Wife: This article, co-written with Alex Sammon, was our most-read piece at the Prospect this year by a considerable margin. We discovered that Rose met his future wife Chelsea Doss in 2008 when she was 18 and he was 41, and possibly even earlier than that. At the time, Rose was chairman of the board of directors at Tennessee Technical University, which Chelsea attended and where she received a scholarship named after Rose’s parents. The two married in 2011 when she was 21 and he was 45.

The Case Against Judicial Review: A 6-3 supermajority of radical reactionaries on the Supreme Court does not bode well for progressive politics. In our “Prospects: 2032” issue looking over the policy horizon, I argued that the Supreme Court’s judicial review power is unconstitutional. With rare exceptions, the Court has been a reliable defender of corporate power, patriarchy, and racism for its entire history. And contrary to modern norms, its review powers have been highly controversial for much of American history, and both Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt directly confronted the Court’s power to achieve justice.

American Government-by-Lawsuit Is a Disaster: In a follow-up article, I took aim at American legal culture in general. American politics is exceptionally litigious, and the result is that access to justice is rationed by price. Lawsuits are cumbersome, slow, inconsistent, and frequently decided by who can hire the most expensive lawyers. This is no way to run a country.

Medicare Advantage Is a Massive Scam: Medicare is being stealthily privatized through the Advantage program, in which private insurance companies are paid to provide Medicare coverage. The program has mountains of regulations to prevent profiteering, which don’t work—these companies have figured out several ways to rig the system, and provide worse coverage for a higher price. But those profits allow them to advertise and lobby heavily, and if present trends continue, fairly soon almost every senior will be enrolled in Advantage plans.

The Cure for Hate Speech Is Not More Speech: In a review of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom by Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, I explored the so-called crisis of free speech on American campuses. The authors argue convincingly that free speech in itself can’t override other academic values like scholarly rigor—and by the same token, the best speech does not automatically win in the “marketplace of ideas.” Propaganda works, and America would be wise to consider regulations to constrain the power of the billionaire class over our collective discourse commons.

Tech Company Workers Should Unionize Immediately: Elon Musk’s reign of terror at Twitter is only the most egregious example of a culture of “bossism” that is taking root among Silicon Valley elites. If tech workers don’t want to be ground under the bootheel of owners and executives eager to dominate and humiliate their employees, they would be wise to organize themselves.

President Biden’s Lonely Foreign Policy: The war on terror has been perhaps the greatest unforced error in American foreign-policy history—inspiring harsh criticism from the paleocon right to the socialist left. So it’s quite mysterious that President Biden’s actions to drastically restrict drone strikes, end the war in Afghanistan, and pivot American attention somewhat away from the Middle East have gotten little attention and less support, even from his own party.

The Hank Hill Solution to Climate Change: One of the most promising technologies for dealing with climate change is the electric heat pump, which provides heating and cooling and is vastly more efficient than a conventional furnace. But there’s a problem: Heat pumps require refrigerants, many of which are stupendously powerful greenhouse gases. It’s worth considering a return to one of the original refrigerants—propane.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s Quiet Revolution on Public Power: The IRA expands the familiar tax credits for renewable-power production and investment that the private sector has used for years, and makes them permanent for a decade. But, in a lesser-known provision, it also makes these credits available to public and nonprofit institutions—which were previously ineligible because they pay no tax. This “direct pay” provision is not just helpful for decarbonizing a large part of the American electric grid, but also a major break with decades of policy orthodoxy.

Europeans Have Far More Reproductive Freedom Than Americans: American conservatives commonly point to European restrictions on abortion to argue that actually, their proposed abortion bans are similar to what one finds in France or Germany. But in reality, while Europe does have some facially restrictive rules on abortion access, they are not nearly so punitive as Republican laws and contain generous exceptions. Meanwhile, Europe’s far superior health care systems enable most anyone who needs an abortion to get one without having to fuss with payment or insurance.

Why Uvalde Cops Were Too Cowardly to Charge a Mass Shooter: When Uvalde cops stood around for an hour while children were being massacred, I wrote on the warped culture of American police. Cops are routinely trained to be in a constant state of sheer terror—to view every person as a potential threat, to be ready at any second to open fire, and to prioritize their own safety above anything else. That’s not a good way to produce courageous protectors of public safety.

Finally, when I came on to the Prospect this year, I also brought along my podcast Left Anchor. Here are three of my favorite episodes:

The Crypto Shill Brigade: We talked with economist Marshall Steinbaum and writer Jeet Heer about the plague of crypto con artists and their enablers in culture and politics.

Stealing America Back From the Right: We brought on writer Jamelle Bouie to talk about the brighter strands in American history and how they might be used to confront the right’s attack on the Constitution and democracy.

Digging Into the Inflation Reduction Act: The Prospect’s executive editor David Dayen came on to discuss the complex inner workings of the biggest climate bill in history.

~RYAN COOPER