By Kate Best

Bipartisan issues seem scarce in our current political climate, so when I attended Sen. Kevin Cramer’s town hall about the Export-Import (EXIM) Bank of the United States, I expected a conservative, partisan discussion.

I was pleasantly surprised. It turns out the U.S. EXIM bank has bipartisan support (and opposition) and has helped North Dakota businesses looking to increase sales through exporting. Attending this event helped me understand why.

First, the EXIM bank provides and facilitates banking services related to international trade. This usually means backing services provided by private banks and insurance brokers, including export credit insurance…

By Chloe Spoden

All across the world, as education continues for countless college students, the burden of quarantine weighs heavily. Personally, I’ve been quarantined three different times for 14 days each. This amounts to 42 total days that I have spent in isolation in just a few short months. It’s clear that quarantining is an effective way to slow the spread of COVID-19, but what effect does it have on mental health?

COVID-19 spread like wildfire, creating a global pandemic affecting more than 200 countries and, as of December 2020, claiming the lives of 1.6 million people. …

By Zachery Tiedeman

Listen the next time you hear a political debate. Pay attention to the partisanship in Washington. If you listen carefully, you will find that all of our “hot button topics” have been subverted to serve a specific political battle. A battle over power.

This battle was initiated by our founding fathers, and today we see it becoming increasingly polarized, threatening to tear our nation apart. What is the battle? It boils down to a turf war between our states and the federal government. Who should make decisions? Where should power be consolidated? Should government be big or…

By Isaac Dubovoy

Where does your retirement money come from? For most people, the answer is through a 401(k). However, some North Dakotans rely on pension plans funded by their employer. Rural and urban areas alike use pension plans to fund retirement for a large number of government employees. The expected goal of these plans is to give people financial security. Yet, it is challenging to achieve security when pension plans often carry large debts.

Before the pandemic, North Dakota’s pension plans were funded at about 70 percent. The state’s two largest pension systems, the North Dakota Public Employees Retirement…

By Austin Cherkas

With the 2020 Presidential Election looming ever closer, voters must decide between republican President Donald Trump and democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. These two candidate appear to be polar opposites, but at least one theme ties them together (and highlights their differences): redistribution.

Redistribution is the planned movement of resources between groups in an economy. Both Trump and Biden champion policies of redistribution, albeit with different targets. In fact, redistribution is not just prominent in this election but in every election. …

By Elisha Kwaku Denkyirah and Raymond March

One of the great challenges in doing empirical research is trying to determine what might have happened under different circumstances.

Take the question of whether or not legalizing recreational marijuana leads to higher crime rates. There are strong arguments suggesting a rise in marijuana use could lead to either an increase or decrease in delinquent behavior, including crime.

While examining crime rates before and after a state (or several states) legalize recreational marijuana can provide suggestive evidence, the only way to be assured of marijuana’s effect on crime is to know what would…

By Jeremy Jackson

This is the fourth entry in a multi-part series on Capitalism Mythbusters.

It is becoming increasingly common for people to attribute the economic system of free exchange, also known as capitalism, with the erosion of community and civil society. In this line of thinking, the elevation of the rugged individualism often associated with the capitalist mindset leads to exploitation as the system benefits the “haves” at the expense of the “have nots”.

This argument contains several dimensions that cannot all be tackled in one blog post. In this post, I will focus on the relationship between free…

By Jeremy Jackson

This is the second entry in a multi-part series on Capitalism Mythbusters.

Malcolm X once said “You can’t have capitalism without racism” (Malcolm X Speaks, 1965). This straightforward quote reveals a popular perception that free markets — and the ideologies that support them — lead to societies with lower tolerance for racial minorities.

This belief also applies to views of intolerance against the LGBTQ community. …