All the President's Men

I. All the President's Men
[Pence, Barr, Pompeo, Mulvaney] "Together they represent the four tent poles of the  modern GOP circus: the extreme Christian right, the stolid GOP establishment, the corporate Koch brothers wing and the allegedly anti-deficit, actually white nationalist Tea Party." "Pompeo warned that Trump would be "an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution." He subscribed to Trump's stonewalling agenda when he "attempted to defy Democratic subpoenas for information about the Ukraine mess, complaining his political opponents were intimidating and bullying State Department officials." [1]

Mick Mulvaney "peddles the budget-busting Trump tax cuts. "Now he's the guy who gave the order to halt congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine, as Trump dictated. He has also been subpoenaed to provide a libraryful of administration documents to the committees investigating impeachment."

II. The Burden of War on the Few
"The burden of nearly two decades of war -- nearly 7,000 dead and more than 50,000 wounded -- has been largely sustained by 1% of our population." "Under the military's current standards, 71% of Americans ages 17 to 24 do not meet physical or mental qualifications for military service. People often assume the draft was compulsory for an entire generation , but this was never the case. Of those killed in Vietnam, the war most inextricably linked to the draft, 69.3% were volunteers." "Our World War II military was 61.2% conscripted. In Vietnam it was 25%." "In the run-up to  the 2018 mid-term elections, 42% of Americans didn't know whether or not we were still at war in Afghanistan." [2]

"Here's what a reverse-engineered draft could look like: The Department of Defense would annually set a certain number of draftees for induction into the armed forces for two-year enlistments, which is half the typical enlistment of a volunteer. This number would be kept small as a percentage of the overall active-duty force, let's say 5%, or 65,000 people, which is roughly the size of the Coast Guard," "Which comes to a final aspect of the reverse -engineered draft: those whose families fall into the top income bracket would be the only ones eligible."

III. Child Care Expenses
Except for the very wealthy, childcare is very expensive. "In 28 states and the District of Columbia, one year of infant care, on average, sets parents back as much as a four-year public college, and nationally, childcare costs, on average, are between $4,000 and $9,600 annually, according to the advocacy organization, Child Care Aware." "Nearly 2 million parents had to leave work, change jobs, or turn down a job offer because of childcare obligations in 2016, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a left-leaning think tank" [3]

"The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that nearly 1.2 million people are employed in childcare in America, not including the countless number who are self-employed." In 2018, according to the Institute for Family Studies, only 28% of married mothers with children under 18 said that working full time was ideal." "A 2017 white paper from the U.S. Census Bureau that followed more than 2 million children for five years, found that  those who were less likely to repeat a year of school are those in family day care or with relatives or babysitters." "But wages for childcare workers have remained largely stagnant, increasing by just 1% from 1997 to 2013, and barely keeping pace with the rising coat of living, according to a 2014 report by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. During that time, the average weekly cost of care for children under 5 more than doubled, according to the same report."

Footnotes:
[1] Joan Walsh, "All the President's Men," The Nation (I omitted the date in my notes.)

[2] Elliot Ackerman, "Born into war," TIME, October 21-28 2019.

[3] Katie Reilly and Belinda Luscombe, "At what cost?" TIME, October 21-28, 2019.