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From Vox
What proposed SALT changes could mean for your next tax bill -
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) speaks with reporters on the steps of the US Capitol on Thursday, November 4, 2021, in Washington, DC. | Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The Build Back Better Act could include an increased cap for the state and local tax deduction.
As negotiations over the Build Back Better Act (BBB) move forward, the state and local tax deduction, or SALT, has emerged as the latest intraparty bargaining chip in Democrats’ efforts to pass the $1.75 trillion social spending package.
Specifically, Democrats in states with high state and local taxes like California, New York, and New Jersey are backing a proposal to raise the cap on the amount of state and local taxes individuals can deduct from their federal income taxes from $10,000 to $72,500.
The SALT deduction is a way for people, especially in states where income, sales, and property taxes are high, to escape double-paying on taxes that they’ve paid for the services provided by states and localities — things like education, health care, and transportation. Before 2017, taxpayers who itemized their returns could claim an unlimited dollar amount as a SALT deduction; subsequently, a Republican Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or TCJA, limiting the eligible SALT deduction to $10,000 per year.
Imposing that cap primarily affected high earners in blue states and allowed the government to raise more money from taxes, though it was offset at the time by sweeping tax cuts in the same Republican bill. Now, the push to raise the cap is a way to get more Democrats — particularly moderates and the aforementioned legislators from high-tax states with high earners — on board with the broader reconciliation bill.
But given that the existing SALT cap aligns with the general progressive belief that the highest earners should pay more in taxes to fund investments like the BBB, Democratic support for raising it can be confusing. Here’s why some Democrats want to see the SALT cap lifted anyway, what that would mean for tax policy in the US — and how it could affect ordinary American taxpayers:
How will a higher cap on the SALT deduction affect me?
If the SALT cap changes currently being discussed for the reconciliation bill go through, whether or not they’ll affect your tax bill depends on your income, where you live, and other specifics, like property ownership.
As Vox’s Emily Stewart explained in April, people can choose to deduct some expenses from their taxable income.
As Stewart writes:
When people file their taxes, they can deduct certain expenses to make their taxable incomes lower. A lot of people just take the “standard deduction” and lop off a flat amount. Others, however, choose to itemize their deductions, so they can subtract things like charitable deductions and medical expenses. Generally, taxpayers choose whichever avenue will be more beneficial for them — as in, whichever will leave them with less income to be taxed.
The types of expenses people can choose to deduct — income or sales tax, property tax, medical expenses, and charitable donations, for example — won’t change. The amount they are able to deduct because of those state and local taxes, however, could.
Much like the 2017 deduction cap impacted higher earners — typically those earning more than $100,000 — by effectively increasing the amount of annual income subject to federal taxes, an increase in the deduction cap would primarily benefit those same higher earners.
Furthermore, higher earners are more likely to own property and thus pay property taxes in their state and locality — another expense people can choose to deduct from their taxable income.
According to the Tax Policy Center, a joint project from the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, “sixteen percent of tax filers with income between $20,000 and $50,000 claimed the SALT deduction in 2017, compared to 76 percent for tax filers with income between $100,000 and $200,000 and over 90 percent of tax filers with income above $200,000.”
High earners in places with high taxes — primarily blue states like California, New York, and New Jersey — are more likely to be able to claim the SALT deduction in order to reduce their taxable income.
What are the specific proposed changes to SALT, and who supports them?
In the most basic terms, the proposed changes to the SALT deductionwould increasethe deduction cap from $10,000 to $72,500 per year, with the raised cap set to expire January 1, 2032.
According to Roll Call, the new $72,500 cap would also be retroactive to the start of the year.
Legislators in favor of lifting the SALT deduction cap include Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY), Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) — all of whom represent districts with lots of high-earning individuals paying high taxes. But high-profile progressives, like Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), are also in favor — in fact, Porter, whose district in California had a median household income of $115,427 and median property value of $794,400 in 2019, has been a driving force behind raising the SALT cap.
In September, Porter defended her position on the Pod Save America podcast, arguing that keeping the current SALT cap or eliminating the deduction altogether would mean taxpayers would essentially be double-paying some taxes.
“No American with the same income level, the same earning power, the same salary, should owe more federal taxes just because of where they live,” Porter said.
The SALT deduction described above is the version currently in place in the most recent House version of the Build Back Better Act — but it’s not the only plan. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ) have proposed an alternate plan — one which would keep the $10,000 cap in place, but only for taxpayers making more than about $400,000 to $550,000, depending on estimates from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. For taxpayers who make less than that, there would be no SALT cap.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has proposed his own idea, which would completely do away with the SALT cap for the next five years and shift back to the $10,000 cap in 2026.
When did the SALT deduction change?
The SALT deduction been a part of tax policy since before the federal income tax was created in 1913, and apart from some minor changes in the 1960s and 1970s, it hadn’t changed significantly until the 2017 overhaul through the TCJA.
Whereas the 1964 and 1978 changes to the law addressed what could be deducted, the TCJA addressed how much could be deducted.
Taken on its own, the 2017 cap — which was set to expire in 2025 — looks like progressive tax policy. But it was enacted by a Republican Congress to make up for a revenue shortfall caused by cutting the marginal tax rate for the highest earners from 39.6 percent to 37 percent and corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 21 percent — hence the “tax cuts” part of the bill. Overall, according to the Tax Policy Center, the Congressional Budget Office predicted at the time that the Republican tax bill would increase the federal deficit by almost $1.9 trillion over its first decade.
Will the SALT changes actually become law?
The proposed SALT changes — either the current House version or the alternate Senate plans — are by no means a sure thing yet. As part of the BBB, an increase to the current SALT cap still has a long road ahead.
Specifically, as Vox’s Li Zhou explained Friday, the reconciliation bill still needs to pass the House — which at this point likely won’t happen until mid-November at the earliest — before moving to the Senate and then back to the House for (potential) final passage. In both chambers, unified Democratic support is crucial — with a 50-seat Senate majority decided by Vice President Kamala Harris in her role as president of the Senate, the party has no margin for error in one chamber, and only a few votes to spare in the closely divided House.
SALT, however, could help with that. Lifting the current SALT cap has been a key priority for Gottheimer, who leads the small group of moderate House Democrats who have thus far resisted voting for BBB without a Congressional Budget Office score, and the inclusion of SALT changes in the House bill could prove important in shoring up his support for reconciliation.
“We’re confident that with this [SALT relief] agreement, we can move forward on this crucially important package and we will continue working to ensure that this tax cut gets signed into law to deliver this relief to our constituents as soon as possible,” Gottheimer said in a Friday statement with Sherrill and Suozzi.
Can the Iran nuclear deal be saved? -
A boy carries an Iranian flag at a rally celebrating the 41st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran, in February 2020. | Vahid Salemi/AP
Talks are set to resume at the end of the month, but the challenges to reaching an agreement are still immense.
At the Group of 20 summit, the United States and its allies said they were “convinced that it is possible” to bring everyone back into compliance with the Iran nuclear deal.
It was the latest attempt from Western governments to salvage the agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). And now, at least, there’s a date to maybe start making that happen: November 29, when talks will resume in Vienna.
Signed in 2015 by Iran, the United States and the rest of the P5+1 countries (China, Russia, United Kingdom, France, and Germany), the JCPOA set limits on Iran’s nuclear program such that the country wouldn’t be able to create a nuclear weapon for the duration of the deal. Tehran agreed to allow independent international inspectors to verify it was complying with the terms (like limits on uranium enrichment and centrifuges.) In exchange, the other signatories relieved global economic sanctions put on Iran for its nuclear activities, which had pushed Iran’s economy to the brink.
The negotiating will restart later this month. The goal of any talks is to get both sides to climb down — Iran to stop doing things like creating nuclear fuel in fast, next- generation centrifuges; the US to peel back sanctions, like those on Iran’s energy sector and anyone who trades with it — and reach what the diplomats and negotiators like to call “mutual compliance.”
And Tehran may want one more thing that might be extraordinarily difficult to deliver: a guarantee that it won’t all go away if another guy — or the same guy again — becomes US president.
Reviving the JCPOA is going to face tough odds. Iran has signaled it’s coming back to the table, so that’s something. The remarks at the G-20, on the part of the Europeans and the US, are also a nice show of unity. But those are tiny Band-Aids on the badly broken political trust between Washington and Tehran.
The Iran deal’s current state-of-play
The United States’s goal is to “quickly reach and implement an understanding on a mutual return to compliance” to the JCPOA, as State Department spokesperson Ned Price said this week. On Thursday, Price said that will put Iran’s nuclear program “back in the box that it was in for several years after the deal was implemented in 2016.”
Critics of the Iran nuclear deal often lambasted the agreement because it failed to address Iran’s other malign activities, like its ballistic missile program and its interference by and support for proxy forces in the region. When it comes to “lengthening and strengthening the deal,” the US has said it wants to get everyone back into that mutual compliance first — so the JCPOA will deal, as it did before, with just Iran’s nuclear activities. Some experts think a restoration of the JCPOA will be a starting point for more cooperation, or at the very least a victory for nonproliferation, while Iran’s regional adventures get dealt with in other forums. But the Biden administration is continuing to sanction Iran for things, including a recent batch related to its drone program, a sign the US still keeping up the pressure.
For Iran, it may have dilly-dallied on coming back to negotiations to try to build its leverage by continuing to push its nuclear program along. The United States, meanwhile, has exhausted a lot of its leverage. It has throttled Iran with sanctions (though, again, it’s still adding to them), and despite Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying last weekend that “every option is on the table,” it seems unlikely the administration has an appetite for more military intervention in the region. And while the sanctions are crushing Iran, the country is withstanding the pressure to a degree.
Evan Vucci/AP
President Joe Biden speaks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken during the G-20 leaders’ summit in Rome, on October 31.
If leverage is the goal, then the big question ahead of any new talks is what, exactly, Iran might want. “There’s an assumption that this [Raisi] administration is going to take a maximalist approach to the negotiations,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
That “maximalist” approach is a bit of a nice way of saying Tehran could makea demand that is a nonstarter for the United States, something like pushing for more sanctions relief beyond that involving its nuclear program, or by calling for the US to offer economic support or a sanctions reprieve first.
Iran will likely argue that the United States is the one that blew the deal up, and Tehran stayed in compliance for a year, so it’s up to the US to prove they’re acting in good faith. But that line is a bit tired now that Iran has definitely breached the agreement, too. “Both sides are now very far away from compliance with the deal. So it does make sense for both sides to incrementally take steps to return to the deal,” said Samuel Hickey, a research analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to eliminating the threat of nuclear weapons.
Even if Iran doesn’t go full maximalist, exactly what sanctions relief will look like, and how it will work, will be a big part of making these negotiations work. Alex Vatanka, director of the Middle East Institute’s Iran program, said that in 2015, the sanctions relief the JCPOA promised didn’t fully deliver for Iran. “What they discovered in reality was that the threat of American penalty still loomed large and was hanging over their heads. On paper, they could trade with the world,” he said. “In reality companies, and many countries, still kept a distance from Iran.” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said the same: Iran wants sanctions relief not only on paper, but “in practice.”
Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi called for an end to US sanctions against Iran in a pre- recorded video at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, on September 21.
That first demand may be further complicated by a second: some sort of guarantee that this deal can withstand US domestic political shifts. Opposition to the Iran deal persists, especially among Republicans; as Sen. Ted Cruz recently tweeted of the Iran deal: “it is a 100% certainty that any future Republican president will tear it up.” This issue of US credibility is a real challenge, as it’s not something the US can easily deliver on, even if the Biden administration would like to do so. So the threat of American penalties still looms.
This also works in Iran’s favor, as it can use it as a cudgel in any talks. As Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson replied to Cruz’s tweet: “Onus is on @POTUS to convince int’l community—incl all JCPOA participants—that his signature means something.”
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian diplomat and Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, said Iran could deliver by curtailing its nuclear program, but when it comes to assurances that the US won’t renege, “the US delegation cannot give any assurance.”
All of that is going to be difficult to overcome. Experts said the US and its European partners may have to offer speedy relief from sanctions, but also find a mechanism to reassure the rest of the world and financial institutions that it’s truly okay to do business with Iran. Vatanka said the “silver bullet” would be American buy-in, including by US businesses, which would be an important signal when it came to the “in practice” part.
Batmanghelidj, at ECFR, said Western governments got a “crash course” from the failures of JCPOA implementation and attempts to mitigate Trump’s unilateral sanctions. And that may, counterintuitively, help negotiations. (European countries tried to set up a workaround to Trump’s sanctions, but it didn’t really do much.) The US and other countries can be prepared for pitfalls they weren’t before, and potentially could come up with ways to try to make the sanctions relief more robust and more durable.
Still, there are no guarantees for what might happen in 2024. Some experts think it may still be in Iran’s interest to take even a temporary break from sanctions, and then use that time to prepare in case another Iran-deal skeptic ends up in the White House and sanctions are reimposed.
That may be in Iran’s interest, but Iran itself might not see it that way. “Iran is in the driver’s seat,’’ said Afshon Ostovar, an Iran expert at the Naval Postgraduate School. Iran doesn’t really seem all that interested in returning to the deal, or even in getting sanctions relief.
“They’ve found a way to skirt sanctions, at least to the extent that they can stay afloat and manage the crisis that sanctions imposed upon the country,” he said. Meanwhile, they haven’t had to sacrifice or compromise in any other way; strategically, or militarily, or in terms of foreign policy,” Ostovar said.
Iran has withstood the “maximum pressure” campaign, even if it has compounded the economic pain for Iran and its people. The country may try to see if it can stall a little bit longer, while continuing to advance its interests and regional ambitions, and the nuclear program that Europeans and the US still really want to scale back.
And if that’s the case, these November talks might not deliver that so-called “mutual compliance” with the JCPOA that the parties are saying they want.
America can’t fix policing without fixing the country’s gun problem -
Amanda Northrop/Vox
America’s tremendous number of firearms makes it much harder to reform policing.
I started reporting this article with a simple question: What would it look like to build a better police department from the ground up?
Police in the US, after all, are more likely to shoot and kill someone than their peers around the developed world, and disproportionately the victims are Black Americans. Meanwhile, serious crimes are often unsolved — with almost half of murders in 2020 going uncleared.
So I asked a dozen experts, focused on criminal justice, what could be done about this to build better police departments. They gave me a lot of different answers, with a consensus on more accountability, a greater focus on crime prevention and more serious offenses over minor ones, and support for non- police efforts to address root causes of crime, among other ideas.
But they consistently gave the same caveat: America’s gun problem. The US has the most civilian-owned firearms in the world, with more than one gun in circulation for every person. A bevy of research has linked greater gun ownership to more deadly violence in the US — and, America, relatedly, has the highest murder rate out of the world’s developed countries.
For police, the huge number of guns in America also means that every single call is treated as if someone involved could be armed — and that an otherwise nonviolent wellness check, mental health call, or traffic stop could turn into a deadly encounter. US law generally allows police to use force because they merely perceive a threat, and the many firearms in civilian hands give police officers a reason to believe they’re in danger.
“It’s Schrödinger’s gun: It’s always there, but it’s not there until you see it,” Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist at the University of Texas Austin, told me. “That cost is borne by two parties: It’s borne by the public, when police make mistakes, and it’s borne by police themselves, when they’re attacked by firearms.”
Of course, other factors play a role in how US police behave. Racism, at the individual and systemic level, is a real force throughout much of American society. Racial disparities in all aspects of American life, from health to the economy, can translate to higher crime rates in minority communities, where police are subsequently deployed in greater force. And since the 1970s and ’80s, US policymaking has trended toward a “tough on crime” approach that encourages police to act very aggressively.
But guns act as a ratchet in policing. Firearms make every call to the police more risky, but also make officers and the public perceive every situation as inherently more risky. This helps explain not just how cops themselves behave but why police are involved in so many different calls to begin with, from murders to wellness checks. Armed officials ended up in charge of so many areas of society in part because the US has more guns and sees more deadly violence than its peers.
This complicates any effort to reduce the role of the police in American society. One of the more popular proposals today is to get the police out of mental health crises, replacing the cops called about people in crisis with special teams that take a softer, more public health–minded approach.
But the vast number of firearms makes it more likely these calls could escalate, endangering a member of the response team and potentially requiring armed backup. Eugene, Oregon’s vaunted CAHOOTS program, for example, has reportedly diverted 5 to 8 percent of dispatch calls away from the police by deploying unarmed, health-oriented staff to crisis situations. But as the Eugene Police Department explains, sometimes officers have to be deployed along with CAHOOTS, or even beforehand, to secure a possibly dangerous scene.
Reducing the footprint of police isn’t impossible. But the abundance of guns places limits on how far these reforms can go. To put it another way, there’s a choice that America, as a whole, and its leaders have to make: Do something about all of the guns in circulation, or limit the scope of police reform.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
People gather at the “Stand Up Against Gun Violence” rally at Bronx Borough Hall on July 19 in New York City. Families affected by gun violence were joined by violence interrupter groups, community leaders, and elected officials for a press conference and rally calling for an end to gun violence in their communities.
Guns complicate any efforts to reform police
The US has more civilian-owned firearms than any country on Earth. There are about 120 guns for every 100 people, according to 2018 data from the Small Arms Survey. Yemen, in second place, has about 53 guns per 100 people. Canada has about 35 per 100, England and Wales — where police are often unarmed — have nearly five per 100, and Japan has fewer than one per 100.
A long line of research has connected more guns to more gun violence, including police shootings. The issue is not that America has more crime or violence than other developed countries, but that guns make it much easier for an event to escalate from a merely criminal offense to a deadly encounter. For police, this reality makes them more guarded, and, potentially, more likely to shoot unnecessarily.
“Police officers are being asked to make these often very subtle decisions in situations in which they legitimately feel their life is really threatened,” Emily Owens, a University of California Irvine economist focused on crime and policing, told me. “The prevalence of firearms in the United States doesn’t help that situation, certainly.”
To be sure, other factors besides guns, from personal views to systemic issues, contribute to those subtle decisions officers make as well. There are reforms that could be tried even within the context of Americans’ massive stockpile of firearms. But guns act as a constant force in the background, drawing boundaries around how far reforms can go and how well they can work.
As one example, the abundance of guns complicates a key concept in many police reform proposals: a higher bar for getting officers involved at all.
American law enforcement respond to a lot of calls that don’t involve violence or even conflict between people. One recent study in Police Quarterly found the top three calls across nine departments were about traffic, public disturbances (like noise violations, graffiti, fireworks, and public urination), or suspicious people and activities; just 7.2 percent were about violence or involved some kind of conflict between different people. The hope is that police, as armed and possibly violent state actors who can escalate a situation themselves, could be removed from the many lower-level calls.
“If police are going to be the armed emergency first responder, what do you want these people with guns to do?” Tracey Meares, the founding director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, said. “There are people whose dogs poop in my front yard, and there’s a law against that. Do I think it’s a good idea to call a person with a gun to deal with that? No, I don’t. Just like I don’t think it’s a good idea for a person with a gun to deal with a noise complaint. I can come up with a whole bunch of other examples.”
But the number of guns among the civilian population raises the chances any given call in America will turn into violence, either by a police officer or by a civilian on the scene. In the UK or Japan, anyone responding to a mental health call — police or otherwise — can safely assume a gun won’t be present; in the US, that’s far from a sure bet.
The potential risk of a hypothetical gun is further complicated by the unpredictable nature of policing. Temple University criminologist Jerry Ratcliffe analyzed 911 calls in Philadelphia for a study in Crime Science. He found that calls for one thing can often turn into an entirely different matter — those about crime often turn out to be mental health cases or “sick assists” (such as helping a person who’s physically ill), and wellness checks sometimes turn out to be violent crimes or missing persons situations.
Jerry Ratcliffe/Crime Science
On the left, the chart shows what calls for service in Philadelphia were originally about. On the right, the chart shows what the calls actually ended up being.
Even if someone thinks that they might be going into a relatively safe call, it could turn out that’s not the case. Add in the risk presented by America’s guns, and you may have a very volatile, potentially dangerous situation. “You don’t know what you’re getting,” Ratcliffe told me. “You don’t know for sure it’s a nonviolent call when you turn up.”
Most police calls are resolved safely without any serious incident. As New York City Police Department analyst John Hall noted, “just one in every 6,959 [traffic] stops results in an assault on an officer … an officer sustaining serious injury or death from a traffic stop is even rarer.” Still, each cop can respond to multiple calls while on duty — and each call carries a roll of the dice that ends in a dangerous encounter. As Hall put it, “Over the course of a career, these stops add up.”
The officers responding to these calls are also planning for the worst, not the ideal. If there’s a decent chance that someone will encounter a gun at a call — especially if something has already happened to a colleague — officers will tend to be more guarded.
This doesn’t excuse criminal acts or horrifying, avoidable mistakes by police officers. Other factors can drive up the risk of violence at any given call, from racial profiling to insufficient housing to poor mental health systems.
But guns are the one uniquely American factor that can escalate a police call.
Addressing the root causes of crime means addressing guns
Ideally, policing in the US would look very different. Several experts pointed to the principles laid out by Sir Robert Peel, who established the London Metropolitan Police Force in 1829, emphasizing crime prevention, rather than reaction to crime, and efforts to build public support. They called for evidence-based police training, stronger accountability measures, more use of research-backed crime prevention strategies, and greater focus on violence and interpersonal conflicts, leaving lower-level offenses and incidents to unarmed officials when possible.
Some activists have gone further, with calls to “defund the police” and redirect savings to other programs that address root causes of crime, such as poverty, mental health care, and housing.
But guns are also a root cause of violence, and not addressing it makes police reform approaches less likely to succeed as intended. What happens, for instance, when staff members of an unarmed team tasked with responding to nonviolent calls get shot? Do they ask for police escorts or backup — diminishing the purpose of the reform? Do they ask to be armed — also defeating the purpose of the reform?
University of Missouri St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld said that the latter has happened before: Probation and parole officers frequently started out unarmed but over time have armed themselves because, in their view, “they were endangered by their armed clients.”
That doesn’t mean other reforms aren’t worth trying, experts said. But they are likely to be limited in scope and reach by the reality of guns in America.
In some cases, police reform may even conflict with the task of addressing root causes — making it less likely the reform can succeed on all fronts. For example, a lot of attention has gone to police’s involvement in routine traffic stops, with Philadelphia recently banning officers from stopping drivers for low-level offenses.
But it turns out traffic stops are also a big source of the guns police take off the streets. Hall’s analysis for the Manhattan Institute found 42.3 percent of the NYPD’s gun arrests in 2020 were during vehicle stops. Many of these calls can start over a broken taillight or reckless driving, only for the officer to discover an illegal firearm. And, unfortunately, it’s really hard for officers to know which stops will go in this direction; you can’t tell who’s carrying a gun simply by looking at the vehicle or driver.
It also may not be that police’s footprint in US society — and all the costs that brings — are taking up resources from better solutions, but that police are necessary because US society has failed to address root causes of crime and violence first. As University of Pennsylvania criminologist Aaron Chalfin told me, “The police are the residual claimants on all the stuff that no one else is willing or able to deal with. We put them in that position.”
In the case of guns, police are frequently needed because a country awash with firearms requires some sort of armed presence to keep people safe. Only once that abundance of guns is reduced can the police safely retreat.
Jon Cherry/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Handguns for sale at Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky, on July 22.
Stricter gun laws could help. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that reducing access to guns can save lives. In the US, there’s particular evidence for requiring a license to purchase and own a firearm. But for political and cultural reasons, America has resisted new, serious national measures for decades, letting firearm purchases continue with few if any checks.
This has contributed to the dynamic of police acting as American society’s backup solution, which is what has saddled officers with so much responsibility to begin with. It’s not that cops wanted more duties. In my years of reporting on this issue, many officers have told me the opposite: that they were called to fill in — by lawmakers and the public — when society had already failed.
To describe these extra duties, police officers “use different terms — nonsense, bullshit, whatever they want to call it,” Sierra-Arévalo, the sociologist, said. “That’s a consistent thing: They don’t think they should be going to a lot of these things.”
America’s tremendous number of guns is at the center of all of this, exacerbating many of the country’s problems by adding a higher risk that any situation can escalate into deadly violence. Once this problem is seen, it’s hard to unsee; it makes it clear why police are responding to so much of the “nonsense” and “bullshit” in the first place.
Doing something about the guns may be the only hope of truly altering that reality — and allowing more police reform.
From The Hindu: Sports
T20 World Cup | Short break after IPL would have helped, says outgoing bowling coach Bharat Arun - “May be a short break between IPL and World Cup could have done a lot of good for these boys”
ICC Twenty20 World Cup | Afghanistan post 124/8 against New Zealand - Afghanistan needs to restrict New Zealand below 124 for India to have a chance to qualify for the semis
T20 World Cup 2022 | West Indies, Sri Lanka to play in qualifying round; Bangladesh, Afghanistan earn direct entry - The automatic qualifiers for the Super 12 stage next year were determined to be the winner and runner-up of the ongoing T20 World Cup, alongside the next six highest ranking teams
Grand Swiss chess: Harika draws with Paehtz, in joint third place - Indian chess ace Dronavalli Harika could not break through the defences of lower-rated German Elisabeth Paehtz in the 10th round to slip to joint thi
Mexican Grand Prix | Bottas takes pole as Mercedes goes 1-2 in qualifying - Verstappen leads Hamilton by 12 points with five races to go in Formula One’s best driver duel in years
From The Hindu: National News
Faizabad Junction now Ayodhya Cantt: Mixed reactions from historians, locals on station renaming - The BJP government in U.P. had earlier renamed Allahabad as Prayagraj and Mughalsarai Railway Junction to Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay Junction in 2018
ISRO to set up a space museum and space centre in Kanniyakumari - Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will set up a Space Museum and Space Centre in Kanniyakumari at a cost of ₹ 100 crore.Information Technology
BJP national executive meeting | Party’s best yet to come: Nadda - Very few parallels in Indian politics to party’s growth in Bengal, says BJP president J.P. Nadda
Chennai Rains | Flights continue to take off and land at Chennai airport with some minor delays - Though water from Chembarambakkam lake is being released, for now, the water levels have not risen to alarming levels.
Maharashtra fisherman killed in firing by Pakistan maritime troop off Gujarat coast: Police - The body of the deceased fisherman, Sridhar Ramesh Chamre, was brought to Okha port
From BBC: Europe
Three seriously injured in knife attack on train in Germany - A 27-year-old Syrian man is arrested after the attack on a high-speed train in Bavaria.
Palma de Mallorca: Fleeing passengers shut down busy Spanish airport - Palma de Mallorca Airport closes for four hours after 21 people run from a plane across the tarmac.
Russian diplomat found dead outside Berlin embassy - Reports of last month’s death have only just emerged and suggest the man fell from an upper floor.
Brexit: ‘Serious consequences’ if Article 16 triggered, warns EU - EC Vice-President Maros Sefcovic says the move would lead to instability in Northern Ireland.
Camels escape circus and wander Madrid streets - Eight camels and a llama were found, with managers blaming their escape on animal rights activists.
From Ars Technica
Eleven tries to adjust to SoCal life in underwhelming Stranger Things S4 teaser - There are surfer dudes, roller rinks, mean girls, and some pretty disastrous haircuts - link
Here are the best “early Black Friday” deals we’re seeing this weekend [Updated] - Dealmaster has new lows on Amazon tablets, AirPods Max, gaming chairs, and more. - link
Tagalong robots follow you to learn where you go - Burro makes carts that help growers of trees and vineyards with harvests. - link
These parents built a school app. Then the city called the cops - Official app was a disaster, so knowledgeable parents built an open source alternative. - link
It’s time to delete carbon from the atmosphere. But how? - It’s not enough to drastically slash emissions—we need more carbon capture. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
James Bond walks into a bar -
He looks around, and takes a seat neat to a very attractive women.
He gives her a quick glance, then causally looks at his watch for a moment.
The women notices this and asks, “Is your date running late?”
“No”, he replies, “Q has just given me this state- of-the-art watch. I was just testing it.”
The intrigued women says “A state-of-the-art watch? Whats so special about it?”
Bond explains “It uses alpha waves to talk to me telepathically”.
The lady says “Whats it telling you now?”
“Well, it says you are not wearing any panties.”
The women giggles and replies, “Well , it must be broken because I am wearing panties”
Two men are playing golf when one realizes he’s left his jacket at the last tee -
He goes back to get it, stops halfway and turns back. “What’s up?” asks his mate. “Well, you see those two women at the tee. One’s my wife, and she’s playing with my mistress.” His mate laughs and says, “No worries, I’ll go get it for you.” He stops halfway, comes back, looks at his mate and says “Small world.”
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