Tax policy experts and lawmakers have long circled 2025 as a year to prepare for. What makes it so significant?

For one thing, Federal COVID money to states is expiring, straining state budgets at the same time the economy is starting to weaken. For another, Republicans in Congress are working to increase and extend President Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations — while cutting trillions from health care, housing, and education programs for everyone else. And it all up and you get a fiscal tsunami.

While major tax policy changes are being made and discussed in Congress, this is also happening in the states.

As the Circuit Courts and Supreme Court are increasingly called upon to correct immigration injustices, people are starting to realize that the U.S. immigration courts do not operate with independence and fairness.

Wednesday, April 23, 2025, 6:00 PM
Columbus Metropolitan Library, Hilltop Branch Library, 511 Hague Ave., room 1, Columbus. 

Columbus neighborhood historians and environmentalists you are invited! Will discuss effect of LinkUs on historic buildings and on the environment along the proposed corridors. Required public notice about federally required historic review and environmental impacts were not mentioned to public in numerous meetings citywide.  Adverse effects on environment and historical buildings bus were not advertised. COTA/City were selling the project to the public for a “yes” vote November 2024.

Please RSVP to communityimprovement614@gmail.com by April 20 at 5:00 PM. 

Despite much lofty rhetoric portraying the United States as a democracy (in which the people rule), this nation, in fact, has often resembled a plutocracy (in which the wealthy rule).

The confusion owes a great deal to the fact that the United States, at its founding, was somewhat more democratic than its contemporaries.  In the eighteenth century, European nations, governed by kings, princes, and other wealthy hereditary elites, usually provided a contrast to the more unruly, less hidebound new nation, where some Americans even had the vote.

Even so, the overwhelming majority of Americans didn’t have the vote, which was largely confined to property-owning or tax-paying white males―about 6 percent of the U.S. population in 1789.  Women (comprising about 50 percent of the population) were, with very few exceptions, denied voting rights.  And slaves (about 18 percent of the population) lacked both voting rights and citizenship.