Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
Every spring, American employers enter a lottery for the right to hire foreign professionals. For fiscal year 2024, they submitted 780,884 registrations for 85,000 places. For fiscal year 2027, the count fell to 211,600. A tempting story writes itself from those two numbers: AI coding tools arrived, demand for imported programmers collapsed, and technology quietly Read More “The H-1B Numbers Are Falling. AI Is Only Part of the Story”
A factory can have a full order book, a skilled workforce, and every intention of opening on Monday morning. Its executives can have secured financing, negotiated shipping contracts, and purchased sophisticated equipment. Yet a missing component can render all that preparation useless. The value of the missing part may be modest. Its power over everything Read More “What does China want in return?”
There is a phrase that lands differently depending on where you sit in the American political conversation. Say “social engineering” to a conservative and you will see a familiar tightening around the eyes, the look of someone who has just caught a bureaucrat in an admission. Say it to a progressive and you will see Read More “What We Quietly Teach Ourselves”
On a quiet street in Shelby, North Carolina, a medical office sat ready for a colleague who would never arrive. The appointments had been made, the charts prepared, the patients with failing kidneys told that relief was finally coming. The new nephrologist, trained in India and credentialed in the United States, remained thousands of miles Read More “How Immigration Policy Became a Health Care Shortage”
For more than six decades, the National Defense Authorization Act has been one of the quiet wonders of American governance. While much of Washington cycles between theatrical crisis and procedural drift, the NDAA has marched forward every year like a metronome. It is the legislative embodiment of something we rarely acknowledge anymore: the capacity of Read More “Understanding the National Defense Authorization Act and Why This Year Is Different”
Thanksgiving week in Indiana always tells a story. Highways fill with families, pickup trucks, and the hum of engines that shaped the state’s identity for generations. The American car has been more than transportation. It has been freedom, pride, and a ticket to the middle class. That is why a quiet shift in the global Read More “How Much Longer Will Americans Pay the Premium? Thanksgiving Reflections from the Crossroads of America”
Thank you. That is the only honest way to begin. The past week brought a surge of new readers to Breaking Barriers, and the analytics point to something I did not expect: most of this new traffic is coming from outside the United States. A large percentage is coming from China. Several other countries follow Read More “Curiosity is an act of courage”
Here’s what’s happening right now with artificial intelligence: A handful of giant corporations are seizing control of the most transformative technology of our era, making unilateral decisions about who gets access, how much it costs, and what purposes it serves. This approach is fundamentally backwards. AI should function as a public resource accessible to all Read More “The Future of AI Belongs to All of Us, Not Just Silicon Valley”
What happens when we stop asking how much people make and start asking how fairly it gets shared? That question drives the new web-based dashboard “Who Shares the Wealth?” at gini.commandos.cloud, a free, public tool that explores global income inequality before and after taxes. Built from this week’s 2025 TidyTuesday dataset, this project combines data Read More “Unequal. Unjust. Unacceptable: A Global Dashboard of Redistribution and Inequality”
Tariffs are back, louder, sharper, and more lucrative than they’ve been in decades. As of mid-June, the federal government has collected over $72 billion from tariffs in 2025, an 81 percent increase from the same period last year. That kind of growth would turn heads in any revenue stream. But when it comes to understanding Read More “When Revenue Rises but Stability Slips”