Senator Murkowski, the daughter of a former Republican senator and governor, has never been beloved by Alaska’s conservatives. “It encourages candidates to talk to all constituents and to build a broad coalition and to serve them,” says Robert Dillon, a Republican consultant who worked on the Alaska ballot measure. Advocates call it a model for alleviating polarization. The Alaska senator may escape the GOP base’s ire over her impeachment vote, thanks to a ballot measure ending partisan primaries. If adopted more widely, advocates say the system could serve as an antidote to partisan polarization and government gridlock. Other states have adopted open primaries and ranked-choice elections, but Alaska is the first to combine them. Proponents say the reforms should boost politicians who work across party lines, since they no longer have to cater to their party’s base to win the primary. The top four vote-getters will proceed to a November election with ranked choice voting, in which voters list candidates in order of preference for runoff rounds if none wins a majority. The measure, which passed by a narrow margin, replaced party primaries in Alaska with a single open primary. But at the same time, Alaska’s voters also approved a ballot measure that is now complicating the defeated president’s revenge campaign against GOP Sen. Even though these are sometimes framed in either/or terms, it may prove hard to achieve one without the other. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, for example, recently described climate change as an “existential threat” from an economic as well as social perspective.And at a recent conference of business economists, just a few blocks from the Monitor’s Washington office, one fiscal expert urged bipartisan efforts to address the widening imbalance between federal spending and revenues. “It’s not the biggest problem out there it’s the one that weakens our ability to deal with all the others,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.She sees some in Congress pointing toward possible solutions, despite polarization that “is one of the biggest problems we face.” And yes, the same is happening on protecting Earth’s environment.In fact, amid the challenges, it’s encouraging to take a lesson from the buds and blossoms that emerge around the time of Earth Day in the Northern Hemisphere each year: Under the right conditions, systems like an economy or a biosphere are resilient – more so than many might expect.ĭonald Trump’s victory in Alaska in 2020 extended a half-century run for Republican presidential nominees in that state. There’s a partisan standoff in Congress over raising the national debt limit, and a deeper issue is fast-rising debt that neither party has successfully addressed.And we’ve recently documented the incomplete progress worldwide toward those Paris goals. To some extent, maintaining a strong economy and sustainable habitats are intertwined. In coming weeks the Monitor will be covering the U.S. And most say in polls they support the Paris Agreement goal – which nations formally signed on Earth Day 2016 – of addressing climate change by shifting increasingly toward clean energy sources. Yet difficult challenges lie ahead. Most Americans do pay the taxes they owe. Questions of individual and collective responsibility. Whether you’re thinking about fiscal or planetary health, big issues are currently at stake. This coming Saturday is when protecting our planet’s environment will be in focus, globally.And I’m seeing a connection. taxpayers were supposed to file their 2022 returns by yesterday. Earth Day, this is Tax Day.Maybe it’s because I edit stories about both the economy and the environment, but this year I couldn’t help but notice the proximity of these two days on the calendar.
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