“The biggest problem plaguing U.S. public schools [is] a lack of resources.” So claims Robert Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, in an op-ed published last week in The Washington Post. In fact, Pianta asserts, government spending on K-12 education actually has declined since the 1980s.

It’s been two years since President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law. To the delight of supply-siders, the law contained significant marginal tax rate reductions for individuals and corporations. At the time there was lively debate concerning the likely economic impact of the bill, with opponents pointing to analyses that found little effect from the rate reductions. At the White House, where we worked at the time, we produced analyses that suggested economic growth would surge. 

[Subscription required] Decades matter. For all that they logically ought not to, because human events do not move in neat 10-year cycles, they do affect the way we think about the past. For all the clichés flung up by them – the ‘Roaring’ Twenties, ‘Swinging’ Sixties and so on – we tend to measure our history (and often our own lives) in decades. So what will people make of the one now ending, even centuries into the future?

European politicians seeking to rebuild their ravaged societies in the immediate aftermath of the second world war had their work cut out for them. The conflict had devastated the continent, leveling cities, destroying economies, and uprooting 40 million people. It had spawned a series of civil wars in which occupiers and collaborators fought resistance movements for control of soon-to-be liberated territories.