Annie Waldman is a reporter at ProPublica covering health care.
Sharon Lerner covers health and the environment and the agencies that govern them, including the Environmental Protection Agency.
How mortifying: one crude, ham-fisted con artist, swelled by arrogance, ignorance, and stupidity, is all it took to topple this “naked” beacon of democracy. Figure even worse with a Putin in charge.
When governments depend on internal taxation, bargaining is required. Taxes are not simply extracted; they are negotiated, enforced, justified, and institutionalized.
Why the real numbers of people killed are almost certainly much higher and why this matters with the conflicting estimates of the death toll in occupied Iraq 20 years ago.