To understand what just happened in this week's elections'notably Zohran Mamdani's win in New York City, Mikie Sherrill's win in New Jersey, and Abigail Spanberger's win in Virginia'wind back the clock five years. In 2020, Joe Biden won by promising that he could restore normalcy to American life. That did not happen. As the biological emergency of the coronavirus pandemic wound down, the economic emergency (inflation) took off. An affordability crisis broke out around the world. The public revolted. Last year, practically every incumbent party in every developed country lost ground at the ballot box. So it went in the United States. In 2024, Donald Trump won an 'affordability election.' I'm calling it that because affordability is what Trump's voters said they wanted more of. Gallup found that the economy was the only issue that a majority of voters considered 'extremely important.' A CBS analysis of exit-poll data found that eight in 10 of those who said they were worse off financially compared with four years ago backed Trump. The AP's 120,000-respondent VoteCast survey found that voters who cited inflation as their most important factor were almost twice as likely to back Trump....

One Sunday morning in March 1949, a group of nearly 300 people, clutching deck chairs and sleeping bags, lined up to buy new homes in what had, until recently, been a stretch of potato fields in central Long Island. They hoped to move to 'fabulous Levittown,' as its developer, William J. Levitt, had branded his creation: more than 17,000 gleaming houses in an all-white community with freshly dug wells and newly paved roads. But that was the extent of the neighborhood'Levitt's profits were in home sales, not city planning. In fact, his namesake had hardly any public infrastructure, and Levittown's new political leaders needed to come up with money for maintenance, trash, and schools. So they took a gamble and decided to enter the municipal-bond market. Selling bonds'essentially issuing buyers an IOU, plus interest'is a quick way for a government to raise funds. You, or someone you know, probably own a U.S. Treasury bond. But institutional investors'a mix of insurance companies, mutual funds, and private-equity firms'buy bonds too, including from local governments and school districts. Cities get money up front, and buyers are assured that they'll turn a profit; this win-win proposition made many postwar suburbs take the plunge into the bond market. Throughout the 1950s, as private developers rapidly constructed new suburbs, school districts in Nassau County, where Levittown is located, increased their debt load by sixfold to meet the needs of their new residents. The problem was: Not every town and city was treated the same. Credit-rating agencies saw richer locales as very likely to repay their debts and gave them sweet deals on interest rates, which meant that these towns owed less to those who'd bought their bonds. The poorer places got shortchanged....

Let's take a look at the United States, historically the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter. Over those three decades, the U.S. population soared by 28% and the economy, as measured by gross domestic product adjusted for inflation, more than doubled. Yet U.S. emissions from many of the activities that produce greenhouse gases ' transportation, industry, agriculture, heating and cooling of buildings ' have remained about the same over the past 30 years. Transportation is a bit up; industry a bit down. And electricity, once the nation's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, has seen its emissions drop significantly. Overall, the U.S. is still among the countries with the highest per capita emissions, so there's room for improvement, and its emissions haven't fallen enough to put the country on track to meet its pledges under the 10-year-old Paris climate agreement. But U.S. emissions are down about 15% over the past 10 years. U.S. electricity use has been rising lately with the shift toward more electrification of cars and heating and cooling and expansion of data centers, yet greenhouse gas emissions from electricity are down by almost 30% since 1995....

Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old New York State Assembly member and democratic socialist, was elected New York City's mayor on Nov. 4, 2025, after pledging to make the city more affordable through policies that include freezing rents, providing free public buses and a network of city-owned grocery stores. Of all of Mamdani's campaign commitments, free high-quality child care for every New Yorker from 6 weeks to 5 years old ' while boosting child care workers' wages to match that of the city's public school teachers ' could be the most transformative. The cost of child care in New York City is expensive. More than 80% of families with young children cannot afford the average annual cost of US$26,000 for center-based care. A recent study found that families with young children are twice as likely to leave the city as those without children. The study identified housing and child care costs as key drivers of migration out of the city. New York's child care problem mirrors a nationwide system that is seen by many experts as broken. U.S. families spend between 8.9% and 16% of their median income on full-day care for one child. And prices have been rising: Between 1990 and 2024, the cost of day care and preschool rose 263%, much faster than overall inflation....