Opinion

Make it so.

Five years ago, my family spent several days at Kellerman’s Resort. (You know, the place where Frances “Baby” Houseman took part in that fabulously dirty dance and ended up jumping into the up-stretched arms of Johnny Castle.)

Becky and I realized we had forgotten to explain the temporary route to daughter Rachel. She was driving down from Indianapolis with the grandkids for a visit. I called to talk her through it—hands-free, of course—while she was driving.

Once upon a time, well definitely more than once to be honest, a young girl wanted to be a princess. She wanted to be a princess so badly that she dressed as a princess for Halloween three years in a row wearing the same pretty pink glittery dress that her grandmother made for her until it would no longer fit. The next year (and for several years after) that little girl became obsessed with the history of witches and dressed as a witch for Halloween. And as a teenager, she had a thing for pirates – thanks of course to Captain Jack Sparrow.

The United States appears to be in the middle of a major political realignment. Really, this topic is in the domain of historians and political scientists, so I’ll largely confine myself to writing about what this means for economic policy. To be honest, it is difficult to make a thoughtful assessment of where we are headed. Perhaps the best way to think about this is to consider the coalition debates surrounding abortion and how it challenges internal alliances within political parties.

Recent columns have examined Indiana’s gross domestic product (GDP) in isolation and in mid-level detail. Now let’s widen and narrow the view.

Some years ago, a group opposed to abortion created a series of television commercials and an ad campaign.

Even before hearing a sound, I can feel that I’m being watched.

When I was a kid, after dinner we cleared the table and scraped whatever was left on our plates into a kitchen garbage bag. That bag was then dumped in one of two huge metal drums on the side of our house that were below ground. Not buried treasure: buried trash. On Mondays some guy yanked the drums out of the ground and hauled them to the street where he threw the contents in the back of a garbage truck. That’s when every dog in the neighborhood started barking.

June 24, 2022, should have been the political holy grail for Mike Pence. It was the day he had long strived for, the day Roe v. Wade was consigned to the “ash heap of history.”