John Cole spent 18 years as editorial cartoonist for The (Scranton) Times-Tribune, and now draws for various statesnewsroom.com sites.
Category: Opinion
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Sometimes the greatest gift a sports team gives its fans isn’t a win
Thank God for the Phillies.
A couple of weeks ago, while staying with my father as he navigates the relentless progression of Alzheimer’s, I found myself thinking about something former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell once said. I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like this: You could be waiting for your car outside the old Le Bec-Fin, standing next to the valet, and if a game was on, someone would inevitably ask, “What’s the score?” Just like that, two strangers from entirely different worlds had something to talk about.
That observation has stayed with me for years because Philadelphia sports have always been one of our city’s great equalizers. We may disagree about politics, science, climate, taxes — just about everything. But ask someone about the Phillies, the Eagles, the Sixers, or the Flyers, and for a few moments we’re on the same team.
But I realized there’s a footnote to Rendell’s point. Philadelphia sports don’t just connect strangers. They reconnect family members with Alzheimer’s.
The author, 10, gets ready to hop on her bike as her father looks on in this photo from 1984.Courtesy of Cyndi Reed Rickards My father’s ability to stay with a conversation now lasts only a few minutes before the disease pulls him somewhere else. Time together has become a matter of fleeting moments rather than long talks.
Then the Phillies came on with a Pittsburgh Pirates series.
Instead of trying to sustain one long conversation, we simply watched the game unfold. Every pitch offered a new beginning. Every at-bat was another opening. A strikeout. A stolen base. A diving play in the gap.
The author dancing with her father at her wedding.Courtesy of Cyndi Reed Rickards “What do you think?”
“Can they get out of this inning?”
“Who’s up next?”
“How fast was that pitch?”
Unlike so much that depends on sustained attention or memory, baseball is wonderfully episodic. Each pitch stands on its own. Every inning is a reset. Even when memory fades, the present moment is enough.
Phillies designated hitter Kyle Schwarber at bat against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Citizens Bank Park on June 29.Yong Kim / Staff Photographer The June 29 collapse against the Pirates, blowing a 5-0 lead, was painful for Phillies fans. But as much as that final score stung, it hardly mattered to me, because for nearly two hours, my father was engaged.
We talked. He reacted. He stayed with the game and, more importantly, with me in conversation. We weren’t talking about Alzheimer’s, or doctor’s appointments, or everything that’s been lost. We were just a father and daughter watching the Phillies, the way countless Philadelphia families have done for generations.
I left with a deeper appreciation for what sports can be. More than entertainment, they’re shared rituals. Conversation starters. Bridges across generations and time, they’re one of the few places where a disease that steals memory can’t quite steal the moment.
Sometimes the greatest gift a team gives its fans isn’t a win. It’s a reason to stay connected, one pitch at a time.
Go Phils.
Cyndi Reed Rickards is a former Jersey girl and proud Narberth resident who has remained a devoted Phillies and Eagles fan on both sides of the river. She learned from her dad at an early age that no one does heartbreak like a Philadelphia sports fan — and that Dallas will always suck.
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Getting ‘legal status’ in America is harder than most people think. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by ICE before he could.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Tuesday in Houston. He arrived in the U.S. from Mexico 35 years ago, built a construction business, and became one of five people killed by federal agents carrying out President Donald Trump’s plan of mass deportation.
As I read and listened to commentary from sources outraged by the killing, I kept bumping into their description of Salgado Araujo. Not that he was a hardworking father and loving husband who had sent his three U.S. citizen children to college, but that he was “on his way to obtaining legal status,” or was “applying for proper authorization.”
I know enough about immigration law to ask: What did that even mean? How could a man who had been in the U.S. for more than three decades as an undocumented immigrant be working to adjust his legal status?
During a news conference Wednesday, Ronaldo Salgado spoke eloquently about his father, heartbroken that the man who “wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people” did not deserve to be reduced to a headline. But Salgado also said this:
“After nearly 35 years of working to give us the American dream, he made the choice to begin the process of obtaining his American dream through a work permit. We dotted every ‘i,’ crossed every ‘t,’ filled every document, attended every appointment. He was close to obtaining his legal status.”
You may think this matters little. Salgado Araujo is dead, killed by a government that, in its misguided zeal for immigration enforcement, has already taken the lives of three U.S. citizens — Ruben Ray Martinez, Renee Nicole Good, and Alex Pretti — so clearly, legal status is meaningless.
Ronaldo Salgado (right), son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, speaks as his brother, Lorenzo Jr., holds family photographs during a news conference Wednesday in Houston.David J. Phillip Yet, in the fight to rein in the government’s abuse of power and fix America’s broken immigration system, public opinion is important. Confusion around immigration is already rampant; muddling the debate further only makes things harder.
Even a cursory look at the social media chatter around what happened in Houston finds people debating with incomplete or just plain wrong information. There are comments about how Salgado Araujo should have come here “the right way,” or how he should have tried to “become legal” sooner, or even how, until an immigrant is a citizen, they’re “considered illegal.”
Of course, there are people who will reflexively blame the Trump administration for everything, just as there are those who will unquestionably toe the MAGA line. But too many Americans are simply uninformed about how the system works, and may be skeptical of the media painting the portrait of another saintly immigrant dying at the hands of ICE.
These people may reasonably ask: If Salgado Araujo was close to obtaining legal status, why hadn’t he done so before? The answer is that he most likely couldn’t.
For someone like Salgado Araujo, with blue-collar roots in Mexico and no connection to the United States other than the drive to look for the American dream, it is virtually impossible to come here permanently.
Follow me into the weeds a bit.
Yes, the U.S. has a Diversity Visa program, in which a potential immigrant could apply and, through a lottery system, be given permanent legal residence, but Mexico does not qualify since the program is designed for countries with low rates of migration to the U.S.
If Salgado Araujo had an immediate family member (spouse or parent) who was either a legal permanent resident or a U.S. citizen, they could petition for him to immigrate. If he had a sibling, they could also petition for him to come, but there is a wait time of at least 10 years because of annual visa caps. Perhaps when people refer to immigrants getting “in line,” they mean that decade-plus-long queue.
Regardless, once Salgado Araujo was in the U.S., that “line” disappeared completely.
Attendees light candles during a vigil for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national fatally shot by a federal immigration agent in Houston.Mark Felix Let’s say Salgado Araujo had married a U.S. citizen. Since he entered illegally, he could not adjust his status inside the country. He would have to leave the U.S. and effectively risk being banned from reentry for up to 10 years. You can petition for what’s known as a hardship waiver, but they are difficult to obtain.
He could have also waited for one of his children to reach adulthood and petition for him to immigrate, but the potential to be barred for a decade remains.
Salgado Araujo’s son said his father was going to obtain a work permit, which is far from legal status. I spoke with immigration law experts who said one possibility could be to apply for asylum, which would grant a work permit while the case is adjudicated, or there are work permits available for someone who receives humanitarian parole.
To be clear, I do not know what happened in Salgado Araujo’s case. I was unable to reach the family before this column went to press. But it’s clear they were going through a fraught immigration process — one that, given the existing state of the law, would likely have been unsuccessful.
That is why it’s important that people understand the immigration system better.
People like Salgado Araujo — who have built their lives here and just want to go about their business and contribute to their communities — are exactly the kind of immigrants most Americans want to allow to stay.
It was the government under Trump that killed Salgado Araujo. But it’s America’s immigration system that made sure he never had a chance.
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Philly’s public toilets are important in lots of ways. We need more of them.
I am a toilet scholar, and I live in West Philly. No surprise, then, that my interest was piqued when I read about, Philly Phlush, the city’s cheekily named new public bathroom program. Starting in 2023, the city promised to build six stand-alone, single-user “Portland Loos.” I was even more interested the next year when I heard that one of these new public toilets would be opened near my house in Clark Park.
By that time, I had been looking into the history of public bathrooms in the United States for more than five years, digging through archives and pouring over digital records, including countless Philadelphia Inquirer articles from over the past century.
My research revealed that public bathrooms in Philly (and everywhere else) mattered because they were a prerequisite for making the city accessible. That meant where city leaders placed these facilities was critical and reflected which residents and communities they cared about the most.
But also, I knew that the state of public bathrooms is a kind of real-time test of how far governments are willing to go, or not go, in the service of the most basic needs of their citizens. Really, public bathrooms uncover who is included and excluded at a given moment. These same dynamics made clear why that Portland Loo in my neighborhood said something about what Philly is currently doing right, and what other cities can learn from it.
The story of public bathrooms, toilets built and maintained by local governments and generally open to all, started 150 years ago as the United States was set to celebrate another milestone, its 100th birthday. Like other cities, Philadelphia was getting bigger and denser as the 19th century ended. Bricklayers heading to a ball game or a job, the faithful in search of a charismatic preacher, and nickelodeon patrons went further from home each day for work, worship and fun. As they did, they needed bathrooms. But many quickly realized that the existing network of privately-operated toilets in restaurants, department stores, hotels and saloons were not extensive enough, or clean enough, to support the growth of the city. Temperance groups, ethnic clubs, women’s organizations and business associations in Philadelphia, as in other cities, pressed for municipal leaders to filled in the gaps with new, publicly-financed “comfort stations,” as the first public bathrooms were called.
Cities responded, and not begrudgingly. Local officials held ribbon-cutting ceremonies and bragged to reporters about the marble countertops and hand-crafted mahogany doors in the new facilities.
Few of these comfort stations reached into working-class, immigrant or Black neighborhoods. The sparkling new facilities were meant for salesmen, bankers and bakers, train travelers and female shoppers. These people comprised “the public” that turn-of-the-century city officials had in mind when they allocated funds for well-appointed, away-from-home toilets.
But they weren’t the only people who showed up at the stall doors and urinals of newly-built public bathrooms. As early as 1905, police officers and civil servants complained that the costly new comfort stations attracted an unanticipated crowd of drinkers, smokers, slackers, vagrants and sex-seekers. They pushed for more surveillance and more arrests, and they learned, without openly admitting it, what officials would learn again at the end of the 20th century: it is difficult to arrest your way out of a problem. In the face of failure, municipal leaders shifted gears; they pulled back funding and cut back on maintenance for public bathrooms, making these places unacceptable to the middle-classes.
Eventually, they took a final, drastic step to keep the unwanted away. City officials across the country closed public bathrooms to stop men and LGBTQ people from having sex in the relative privacy of stalls and out-of-the-way facilities. They closed them to prevent angry teens and drunken adults from also taking advantage of the privacy of these places and smashing sinks and pulling down towel dispensers. By the 1980s, as Reagan-era budget cuts ripped holes into the social safety net and drained the coffers for public housing, cities closed even more public bathrooms to try to “disappear” the unhoused, and bathroom-less, from downtown streets and up-and-coming financial districts.
But in the drive to edit the public, municipal leaders made the city inaccessible for workers, students, families and shoppers, as well as those deemed undesirable.
With no public bathrooms near Independence Mall or Rittenhouse Square, the private sector that had failed decades before once again took over. But only to the advantage of some. Those who could paid for bathrooms, first with coins slipped into lock boxes drilled onto toilet stall doors, and later with credit cards for lattes and iced coffees for a “free” trip to the bathroom. Those who couldn’t afford the “latte tax” or lived in an area without a Starbucks or a Bass Pro Shop had only the street, bushes and the spaces between cars “to go.”
Toward the end of the 20th century, American cities experienced something that they hadn’t dealt with since before the American Revolution: open defecation and public urination, all day long and not just when the bars emptied in the early morning hours. This forced the hand of policymakers. They once again had to fund public bathrooms or face capital and population flight. But they didn’t put funds into public toilets to make the city more open or accessible; they did it, largely, to contain the unhoused and their bodies and to clean up central business districts and keep commerce flowing.
That’s what Los Angeles did. That’s what Albuquerque, N.M., and Cambridge, Mass., did. They built new public bathrooms—not the ornate facilities of the past, but functional ones, like Portland Loos with steel toilets, or hard plastic porta potties. These new toilets, unlike their early 20th century predecessors, weren’t meant for middle-class tourists visiting the Constitution Center, suburban lawyers in town for a trial, or even for Walnut Street shoppers. They weren’t there to solve the housing crisis or to deal with the problems of addiction or cuts in spending on mental health—some of the key factors leading to jumps in homelessness. They were there to contain the failures of the system and the bodies of the poor and unhoused, and to make the city look and smell better for everyone else.
Philly joined in this trend but with a twist.
The first Philly Phlush toilet opened in Fotterall Square, a revitalized park with basketball courts, walking trails and movie nights on 11th Street in North Philadelphia. The second was located at 15th and Arch Streets in Center City across from Love Park, not far from bustling Suburban Station. The third was the one in my neighborhood, just north of the corner of 43rd Street and Woodland Avenue.
Made By History sponsors. FOR USE ON MADE BY HISTORY STORIES ONLY.Inquirer Staff By placing public toilets in North and West Philly, Philadelphia did something markedly different from most other cities. It sited its bathrooms not just so they could control people considered problematic, but to meet the needs of city residents in their neighborhoods. These toilets outside of Center City promised to make parks and squares available to parents and kids; they made it easier to stroll through a farmer’s market, watch a film on a summer’s night and play basketball all day long without the risk of discomfort, embarrassment or even arrest.
Philly, and every other city, should fund and maintain public bathrooms. The more the better. They should put them where people are and where they live. They should maintain them, because infrastructure needs ongoing care, and everyone needs clean spaces to attend to their bodies away from home.
Public bathrooms can’t solve every problem created by decades of government neglect, and they shouldn’t be expected to. But they can address the health and safety of city residents right now. Even more, away-from-home toilets, situated both in business districts and neighborhoods, are fundamental building blocks to a city open and equal to all, to a Philadelphia that shows through investment and maintenance that it cares about the people who visit and live here.
Bryant Simon is the academic chair of the Honors Program and a history professor at Temple University. He is the author of the forthcoming book, For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.
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Letters to the Editor | July 13, 2026
Social democrats
I respectfully disagree with Allan Lichtman’s op-ed regarding socialism in the Democratic Party.
Democratic socialism involves a respect for private property tempered by a generous, taxpayer-funded welfare state. By contrast, the current wave of progressive candidates believes in confiscation of wealth, class struggle, and an abiding hatred of “Zionists,” whatever that means. They are in spirit closer to left-wing populists than to social democrats of the Nordic variety.
The fear that these candidates will cause permanent damage to the party and the country is rational.
Michael A. Livingston, Philadelphia
. . .
As a lifelong Republican who has become politically homeless due to a racist cult hijacking my party, I read the piece by Allan Lichtman on the state of the Democratic Party with great interest. After the 2024 election, I was convinced the Democratic Party would take the wrong message from the results. Mr. Lichtman’s column confirms I was right. Somehow, the party has concluded that the path to victory is to move even further to the left. They are now being wooed by the siren song of socialism. Never mind that only the most enthusiastic voters in any party vote in primaries. James Carville knows that rational Republicans like me and centrist independents will never vote for a socialist. Ever. He knows we will never vote for a man with a Nazi tattoo. Ever. He knows the vast majority of the electorate finds the idea of “seizing the means of production” terrifying. He knows the vast majority of the electorate knows Hamas is a terrorist organization. Mr. Carville knows what Mr. Lichtman seems not to. These are wholly unelectable candidates on a national scale to the vast majority of the electorate. Mr. Carville is warning the party they are embracing these unelectable candidates at their own peril. He knows the truth. The party that should see people like me as gettable is choosing instead to leave us politically homeless?
Kenneth Rayca, Cinnaminson
More perfect union
As a retired social worker and active community volunteer, I have seen hardship. And although I am of modest means by most people’s standards, I am able to afford my housing, medical care, food, and a sense of security. I know how fortunate I am. I know because I see my neighbors suffer in crisis numbers like never before. They are at our community fridges, food pantries, and shelters in record numbers. Our cities are on fire, and floods rain down.
True leadership is not about power and greed. It does not measure value by creed, origin, race, or wealth. It is about knowing that every living person and creature has value and meaning, contributing to the health and well-being of our nation, world, and planet. I pray, as our esteemed Liberty Medal-winning Pope Leo XIV does, for a “recommitment” to American values.
Marilyn Frazier, Ambler
Join the conversation: Send letters to letters@inquirer.com. Limit length to 150 words and include home address and day and evening phone number. Letters run in The Inquirer six days a week on the editorial pages and online.
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American Caligula: Trump’s assassination paranoia threatens us all
America’s current plight was nailed recently in an analysis by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Jeffrey Frankel, who dedicated an entire paragraph to the notorious despot who was bankrupting the world’s greatest superpower, “building luxurious villas and hosting huge parties.”
Frankel described how this strongman “blamed his troubles on his predecessor … He reveled in gold coins. He insisted that people worship him as god. He grafted busts of his head onto statues of gods. He humiliated senators by making them kiss his feet.” The mad king declared war over a narrow body of water, and also had an unseemly sex life.
Of course, you all know the Harvard scholar was writing here about the Roman emperor Caligula, who ruled the ancient regime during the tumultuous four years from 37 A.D. to 41 A.D., and whose obsessions with large public works, humiliating his political enemies, self-deification, and perversion have sparked two millennia of speculation about his cognitive state.
Why, yes, this does all sound very familiar. Donald Trump has never pushed his favorite horse for a top government position — as Caligula is said to have done with his trusted steed Incitatus — but he did send Pete Hegseth to the Pentagon, which is close enough. Professor Frankel’s riff on the notorious Roman is found in a February essay about Trump, “Caligula Reincarnated,” in which he argues that Trump’s “bizarre words and actions” are reaching the same depths of irrationality.
I agree, and it’s important to note that in the five months since that essay, there’s a new parallel between Caligula’s doomed and dangerous reign and the 47th American president, and it’s becoming a huge danger to civil liberties here at home and to peace abroad: fear of assassination and the paranoia that flows from that.
The last months of Caligula’s reign were marked by his mental deterioration and his panic that the many enemies he’d made in a short time on the throne — the once-allied lawmakers he’d publicly humiliated, or the political enemies that he’d prosecuted — would attempt to murder him. The emperor accelerated the most repressive aspects of his regime, even as he schemed to move the seat of power to Alexandria for his own safety.
In recent days, Trump has begun wobbling down this same bumpy, ancient Appian Way. It’s been reported that a Trump murder threat by Iran, which has seen a top general and its supreme leader killed on orders from the American president or his allies, was relayed to the White House by Israeli intelligence. That prompted a remarkable public moment in which the U.S. leader mused about his own death.
“I speak about it a lot because the life of a president is very dangerous,” Trump told reporters during a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. “I don’t really care, because I’m doing my job … I like being No. 1 on TikTok better. But I’m No. 1 on the list for killing,” which sounds, oddly, like a boast from a TV reality star still obsessed with his ratings.
There are several things to unpack here. First, you probably know this truism: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there’s not someone who’s out to get you. Famously, Caligula was assassinated (as were his wife and young daughter) just before his planned move to Alexandria by his own trusted guards.
Similarly, Trump has been the subject of at least four assassination attempts, including one at a 2024 Butler, Pa., campaign rally in which shots apparently grazed his ear and killed an attendee. This unfortunate situation has felt inevitable as Trump’s toxic, divisive, and often hateful rhetoric lights a spark under a nation where violence was already as American as cherry pie.
But political violence is morally abhorrent and never solves anything. The healing of America from the bad place we’re in right now depends on Trump’s continued health, so he can someday be brought to justice for his corruption and his crimes against humanity. A Trump assassination wouldn’t be just wrong, but it would trigger a wave of repression under JD Vance that would also drive the final nail in the coffin of U.S. democracy.
Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents after an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13, 2024.Evan Vucci Still, the actual danger to Trump’s life — which the Secret Service learned of through a tip from some of the same Israeli intelligence officials who worked to goad the U.S. into this botched Iran war in the first place — remains hypothetical. The threat to the liberty of all Americans from the president’s spiraling paranoia is real and already underway.
To begin with, Trump has already used the assassination tip as an excuse to ratchet up tensions in the Persian Gulf, where the fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran’s new hard-line rulers had already imploded — bringing new death and destruction while dragging down the world economy. The president, who sounded blasé about his own mortality on Wednesday, has changed his tune.
Trump wrote Saturday in a Truth Social post that “1,000 missiles are locked and loaded” if he is killed by Iranian agents, adding, “Orders have already been given, and the US Military is ready, willing, and able, for a one-year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran.” There are many reasons here to worry — not only over the escalation of a war that was pointless from Day One, but also over the likelihood that Iran will be blamed if anything happens to Trump, regardless of who is actually responsible.
But the assassination paranoia is coming out in other, insidious ways. Alarm bells went off this week when Trump flew to the summit in Turkey in his new Air Force One — the $400 million “gift” airliner from Qatar that U.S. taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade, even as Trump plans to keep it for his presidential foundation in 2029 — but ditched it to fly home in an older Air Force model.
The New York Times put five top reporters on this story because Americans deserve an explanation of how and why our tax dollars were spent on this project — exactly the kind of free-press accountability the founders envisioned when drafting the First Amendment. Their sources told them that despite the massive expenditures, on top of the initial corruption, the former Qatari jet lacked key defensive features like advanced anti-missile capabilities — which explains why Trump switched planes after the Iranian assassination tip was delivered.
Staff lay a carpet on the tarmac before President Donald Trump exits Air Force One upon arriving for the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on Tuesday.Alex Brandon The White House was livid at the article, which it seemed to interpret not as accountability journalism but as a breach of security. Embattled FBI Director Kash Patel was yanked off an airport tarmac where he was flying to Chicago to mainly watch his girlfriend in a country music festival and was summoned for urgent meetings.
Late Friday, federal agents banged on the doors of several Times reporters and delivered subpoenas demanding that they testify before a grand jury on Wednesday, in what appears to be a pivot point for America’s already shrinking freedom of the press under a Trump regime.
“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, the Times’ lead attorney, said.
Let’s be clear: Trump is using these assassination fears — real or perceived — to drastically increase his assault on the civil liberties of American citizens, and this is likely to only get worse in the coming days.
While the FBI was out badgering journalists, workers back at the White House were erecting scaffolding on the North Portico of the presidential residence, part of an apparent security upgrade that is supposed to last for months. This is in addition to the failed push for $1 billion in taxpayer money to build a massive underground bunker beneath his new ballroom, meant to replace the already demolished East Wing.
Somewhere underneath all of that, Caligula is surely looking up from his fiery final repose with a knowing smile of recognition.
Scaffolding is visible under a covering with an image of the North Portico over the space as it is renovated at the White House in Washington on Thursday. The madness has been a slow train coming, but it’s starting to accelerate and may soon run off the rails. The assassination paranoia is a new layer on top of the president’s late-life obsessions with imposing his physical legacy on the nation’s capital and with clinging to absolute power — and thus forestalling the inevitable probes into his rank criminality — by any means necessary.
The increasingly unpopular Trump’s determination to prevent a free and fair midterm election — such as firing the entire Election Assistance Commission, while making extortionary threats for a new law that would make it harder for millions to vote — is not unrelated to his assassination-driven threats to Iran or the New York Times.
It is all moving in the same direction: building the foundation to declare a national emergency, the last refuge of every dictator from Caligula to Adolf Hitler to the strutting strongmen of the 21st century. If, heaven forbid, there is a fifth major assassination attempt against this president, it will surely reignite any smoldering embers of the Nazi’s 1933 Reichstag fire — a justification for the end of civil liberties.
Let’s not sing along to the age of paranoia. The lynchpin of American democracy remains the same as it ever was: the peaceful transfer of power. In the present crisis, that can’t come soon enough.
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Can child wealth-building programs disrupt cycles of poverty in Philly?
Michelle “MiMi” Gravley changed addresses frequently during her childhood in the 1990s, but rarely with a moving truck.
With her belongings in boxes and plastic bags, she would often find herself lodging at others’ houses in rooms her single mother could afford to rent. So it meant the world to Gravley, herself a single mother, last fall when she bought her first house, a rowhouse in North Philadelphia.
Gravley, 38, is no longer battling housing instability. But she has spent much of her adult life poor, including nearly two decades straight of government assistance, and wants a different fate for her three children. So she’s looking at wealth — specifically her house and her high-yield savings accounts — as something that can help her children avoid poverty as adults.
“I just want them to be OK,” Gravley told me, referring to her daughter, Buttons, 17, and her sons, Chippy, 14, and Boots, 11. “And when they have their kids, their kids is OK. And just, just breaking up generational curses.”
Gravley is one of the parents I spoke with recently in the Philadelphia area who wants to help their children build wealth to break the cycle of poverty in their families. Their goal is to bequeath something — whether it be modest savings or a piece of real estate — to help counter the pull of intergenerational poverty.
They face long odds: Only 16% of children who spend at least half their childhood poor go on to be economically successful, one study found. But there are emerging ideas and policies designed for children that some believe could improve those odds.
I’ve been a business reporter for more than a decade, with a keen interest in how wealth is built and deployed. I’ve had conversations with people from across the economic spectrum, from workers earning minimum wage to C-suite executives and billionaires. I closely follow developments about wealth and personal finance. And lately, I’ve been noticing growing momentum and innovation around wealth-building policies for children — some of which could impact the children or grandchildren of people like Gravley.
In my reporting, two relatively new wealth-building programs stand out. The first is baby bonds, which are government-run trust funds designed to benefit poor children. The other program is Trump Accounts, which are private investment accounts available to all children that allow nonprofits, philanthropic groups, and other entities to target contributions at low-income zip codes. Each has its pros and cons.
Because the creation of baby bonds and Trump Accounts are relatively recent developments (Connecticut approved the first statewide baby bond program in 2021; Trump Accounts were launched this year), there aren’t yet any long-term studies that directly assess their impact on poor populations. But advocates of early wealth accounts, as they are often called, point to supporting evidence from similar initiatives, including Education Savings Accounts. They also argue that structural changes in the economy necessitate a new kind of social contract with America’s young people.
Of her children’s financial future, MiMi Gravley says, “I just want them to be OK.”Aidan T. Gallo / Staff Photographer “Younger generations face economic headwinds that older generations have not — student loans, unaffordability of housing, starting a family, probably declining Social Security benefits,” said Ray Boshara, a senior policy adviser with the Aspen Institute and Washington University in St. Louis who helped design the framing for Trump Accounts and a similar precursor plan by former Sen. Bob Casey, 401Kids.
He added: “They face a transformed economy. So part of the real purpose of Trump Accounts, I think, is … to give them start-up capital at age 18 to counter these economic headwinds.”
Gaining steam
Across the country, efforts rooted in baby bonds or Trump Accounts are either active, forthcoming, or undergoing serious consideration.
Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have enacted or are considering some kind of legislation related to baby bonds. Only three jurisdictions have passed them (Connecticut, California, and Washington, D.C.). There are even private-sector baby bonds pilot programs underway.
The framework for baby bonds was proposed in a 2010 paper by Darrick Hamilton, founding director of the Institute of Race, Power and the Political Economy at the New School, and William Darity Jr., an economist and social scientist at Howard University and Duke University.
Connecticut launched its CT Baby Bonds program in 2023. It automatically enrolls children whose births are covered by Medicaid. The idea is straightforward enough: When participants turn 18 and complete a financial literacy course, they can claim at least a five-figure sum that can only be used for specified wealth-building activities, such as buying a home or starting a business.
Trump Accounts, also known as 530A accounts, were signed into law last year and took effect this month. Children who are enrolled in the program by their parents could potentially receive $1,000 from the U.S. government. When the enrollee turns 18, the account becomes a traditional IRA and can be used for a variety of purposes, though the tax consequences are lower if used for postsecondary education, a first home, or retirement.
Unlike baby bonds, Trump Accounts were not specifically designed for poor children. And one criticism is that wealthier families will likely contribute more than poor families, which would worsen wealth inequality. But what’s notable about them is that they allow third parties such as employers or philanthropists to contribute cash or stock directly to children in low-income neighborhoods.
For instance, the Dell family pledged funds for every American child in specific zip codes, while the Dalio family and financier Brad Gerstner pledged funds to children in Connecticut and in Indiana, respectively.
Attention in the Keystone State
It’s still early, but for now, the idea of helping poor children build a foundation of capital for the future appears to be drawing bipartisan interest. And in Pennsylvania, policymakers have started paying attention.
“Baby bonds have been a topic of a lot of focus because we all want to make sure that we are creating long-term economic mobility and really breaking the cycles of financial insecurity early,” said State Rep. Morgan Cephas, a Democrat whose district covers West Philadelphia. “So these are some models that we’ve been looking at … and are absolutely looking to do more.”
State Rep. Martina White, a Republican whose district covers Northeast Philadelphia, said Trump Accounts can be a “great tool for working families” and planned to look further into the concept of baby bonds.
Her initial preference, she said, would be to model baby bonds like a college endowment, in which the funding source for the program would come from interest or investment earnings, as opposed to directly from taxpayer dollars.
“I think that the fact that more legislative bodies and governments are looking into ways that we can provide the tools for working families to build their wealth — I think that’s phenomenal, and we should be doing more of that,” White said. “But also helping make sure that government is getting out of the way, too.”
Democratic State Rep. Morgan Cephas said baby bonds have been a focal point for her party “because we all want to make sure that we are creating long-term economic mobility.”Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer Although baby bonds haven’t been proposed in Pennsylvania’s legislature, the state does have an early wealth initiative through its Keystone Scholars program, which puts $100 into an account that Pennsylvania students can use toward their education costs.
Pennsylvania also passed a law, effective next school year, requiring high school students to take a personal finance course.
In Philadelphia, there aren’t any initiatives specifically targeting wealth building for children. But there are programs that aim to advance overall wealth access and accumulation. One of the latest is Philly Saves, which, upon implementation, would give workers a way to save for retirement if their current jobs don’t offer retirement plans.
Last month, Sens. John Fetterman and Dave McCormick made a joint appearance in Nicetown, where they urged parents to sign up for Trump Accounts. Fetterman seemed to anticipate that some listeners might be dubious about the program and presume it is politically partisan because of its name.
“Do not fall into that political trap,” Fetterman said. “This isn’t some radical thing. … Do this for your child.”
Even if early wealth initiatives arrive soon in Pennsylvania, it may be too late to have a big impact on older children because the accounts need time to grow.
For Gravley, that means early wealth policies could impact her children but will likely yield larger sums for her future grandchildren. Gravley said she welcomes them as long as there’s some kind of financial literacy involved.
“If you give these children … $10,000 with no instructions, good luck with that,” she said. “It has to be instructions with it, but I think it could be a big stepping stone.”
The case for early wealth building
Darity, the social scientist who helped conceive the idea for baby bonds, said early wealth accounts will have different maximum outcomes based on their design, even if they each grew at 1% above the inflation rate.
For instance, the baby bonds plan he coauthored would turn $60,000 into $72,000 over 18 years at that growth rate (no annual contributions allowed). A federal baby bonds plan proposed by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker ($1,000 deposit; maximum yearly government contributions of $2,000) would grow to about $41,000 at those terms. For Trump Accounts, a $1,000 deposit and maximum yearly private contributions of $5,000 would grow to $100,000 in 18 years.
While Trump Accounts have the highest growth potential, low-income families who don’t have thousands to contribute annually won’t have “a transformative sum of money at the end of the 18 years,” Darity said.
Because both programs are still so new, we’re decades away from seeing the results of any long-term studies on the efficacy of baby bonds or Trump Accounts once participants reach adulthood. But research into other programs suggests that external interventions in wealth building can have positive outcomes.
For instance, a long-term study of Oklahoma’s SEED OK program found that newborns who randomly received $1,000 in state funds had, by age 14, higher educational expectations, greater social-emotional development, and more family-contributed savings for college compared with those who didn’t.
A 2015 global study of roughly 10,000 households found that asset interventions — like giving impoverished families an income-producing asset, cash assistance, and skills training — had positive economic outcomes well after the program stopped.
Those findings are part of a growing body of evidence from other asset-building experiments that “already points in a consistent direction,” said William Elliott, founding director of the Center on Assets, Education, and Inclusion at the University of Michigan.
That direction, Elliott said, indicates that early wealth accounts should be a pillar of a new social contract with Americans — especially in an age when higher education debt can stall wealth creation.
“The current policy setup strongly favors those who already have wealth,” Elliott said. “And so you don’t have meritocracy happening. To get there, you can’t just give [people] a job anymore, because there’s a gap between wages and productivity. You also have to give them some wealth to make their effort and ability pay off.”
During an appearance in Nicetown with Sen. Dave McCormick, Sen. John Fetterman urged parents to sign up for child wealth-building accounts.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer The landscape in Philadelphia
There are more than 300,000 Philadelphians living below the poverty line, according to Pew Charitable Trusts — that translates to about $33,000 annually for a family of four. While the poverty rate here has declined to 19.7% from 26% over the past decade, Philadelphia still has the second-highest poverty rate among large U.S. cities.
Other figures show the prevalence of low-income households in our city.
About 44% of full-time workers in the Philadelphia region earned enough for a living wage for their family size in 2025, down from nearly 55% in 2021. The living wage for a single adult with no children in Philadelphia is $23.34 per hour, or about $48,500 a year, according to the Living Wage Institute.
Gravley, the only worker in her household of four, makes about $40,000 annually.
Raising Pennsylvania’s minimum wage above $7.25 may help workers locally; all of the commonwealth’s neighboring states have higher wage floors. But it could also be untenable for some small businesses.
For Gravley, her home is an asset that could help her family long term, but there’s little it can do to improve her economic prospects today. Despite holding three degrees — an associate in culinary arts, an associate in early childhood education, and a bachelor’s degree in leadership and organizational change — she still regularly grapples with the challenge of making ends meet.
As a program coordinator at Strawberry Mansion High School, Gravley said her expenses are usually about $2,200 per month, which means she typically has about $100 per month for the high-yield savings accounts she manages for herself and her children.
At one point she invested in the stock market but pulled out because she didn’t understand it.
It’s been this way for more than a decade for Gravley. As a recipient of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid benefits, she is making enough to cover needs, but financial security and financial growth for her family appear largely out of reach.
“[Welfare] helps, but it’s nothing programmed to get me out of the food stamp thing. Because you tell me to get the degrees and get the better job, and I’m trying to do that, or I did that, and it’s still not enough money. So where is the money?”
Jared Council is a business journalist based in Philadelphia. He was part of a team at the Wall Street Journal recognized as a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting for a series about the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. He is currently a program manager at Every Voice, Every Vote, a civic information and engagement program at the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
The Inquirer is one of two dozen news organizations powering the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative. Follow us at @PHLJournoCollab. This article is part of a national initiative exploring how geography, policy, and local conditions influence access to opportunity. Find more stories at economicopportunitylab.com.
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At Ankara summit, tantrums aside, Trump finally awakens to Ukraine’s tech brilliance
When dealing with President Donald Trump at a NATO summit, the European allies resemble desperate adults hovering around an unruly child who is clutching fireworks and matches.
So it was a relief that, despite his usual juvenile tantrums and threats at this week’s Ankara, Turkey, gathering — and his erratic behavior toward Iran — the president mostly kept his powder dry.
Indeed, POTUS had an unprecedented adult moment with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump finally recognized Kyiv’s stunning technological prowess in the production of drones that can now reach deep into Russia (some adviser must finally have convinced him that Ukraine had winning cards the United States lacked).
Trump actually heaped praise on Zelensky, in stark contrast to his shameful efforts in the past to humiliate the Ukrainian leader, saying he was “courageous” and had done “an amazing job” on the battlefield.
The president finally granted Zelensky’s years-old request to let Kyiv produce American Patriot missiles — the only available Western weapons capable of stopping the ballistic missiles Russia is using against Ukraine.
However, that’s the end of the good news.
The U.S. president’s ill-informed, incompetent, and, frankly, juvenile behavior on foreign policy, combined with his visible aging, presents a clear and growing danger to U.S. security. With his garbled and error-filled speech, his omnipresent ego, and his constantly shifting positions, he has become a global embarrassment.
Trump’s ineptitude helps our adversaries, from Tehran to Moscow to Beijing to Pyongyang.
Nothing shows this more clearly than Trump’s belated shift on Ukraine. Mind you, I offer two cheers for the dawning light, but how can anyone count on follow-through when the president changes his positions like he changes shirts?
Even if Trump keeps his word on the licensing of Patriot technology, setting up the complex production process is a lengthy operation that would probably take at least a couple of years (he hasn’t even bothered yet to notify the U.S. producers of Patriot interceptors, RTX and Lockheed Martin).
Similar licensing of Patriot missiles was only granted before to Germany and Japan, and it has taken them each years to scale up. I am confident that savvy Ukrainian techies can do so faster. But they need those interceptors right now, when Vladimir Putin is raining down ballistic missiles on Ukrainian cities because he knows they have no defense.
European allies, who need their own Patriots to defend against Russia, are willing to risk giving Kyiv more if the United States will pledge to backfill their needs quickly. Trump has made no such pledge, claiming they are in short supply in the U.S.
That is true, but do you know why? The U.S. and Gulf allies have wasted years’ worth of U.S. production of Patriot interceptors during the Iran war. They used hundreds, possibly thousands, of Patriots that cost $2 million to $4 million each to shoot down $30,000 Iranian drones.
Trump keeps hinting that the U.S. is interested in Ukrainian drone technology, but has still not taken up Zelensky’s offer to trade Ukrainian drone skills and wider joint production in return for Patriots.
POTUS claimed in Ankara that U.S. drone producers are building new factories for interceptors that will be up and running quickly “in the not-too-distant future.”
Bluster, bluster, bluster.
Lockheed, which produces the most advanced interceptor, the PAC3, has publicly announced its goal of producing 2,000 of these marvels a year … by 2030. That is a tiny fraction of what is needed.
Yet, this week, still short of drones and drone interceptors for the U.S. military, Trump announced at the Ankara summit that the ceasefire with Iran is ending. He appears to be plunging into a renewal of the Iran war. He is stuck in a trap of his own making because he relied only on his gut before entering the conflict.
POTUS never imagined that Tehran would respond to his attack alongside Israel by closing the Strait of Hormuz, even though he was warned by his military and civilian advisers. Then he claimed, totally contrary to the facts, that he had concluded a “peace deal” and started paying off the ayatollahs with billions in advance by letting them sell oil again. Now he is threatening a new war, which he clearly doesn’t want and for which he doesn’t have the proper weapons.
Trump knows he cannot win from the air. And, unless he is ready to invade Iran or occupy parts of that country indefinitely — which would be a disaster — he has trapped America into accepting some form of Iranian control over the strait.
That is why, in Ankara, with the rage of a spoiled child, Trump cursed the Iranians (whom he had praised only weeks ago) and pouted: “I’m not sure I want to make a deal. Let’s just finish the job.” This is not the language of a leader. This is the insincere threat of a 6-year-old throwing food at the wall to see if it sticks.
What is so terrifying about Trump is not his threats, which our allies and adversaries alike now tend to ignore, but his total incapacity to think in strategic terms. He talks big — “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon” — but has no strategy on how to achieve this.
And even when recognizing Ukraine’s achievements, he insisted that “President Putin wants [this war] to end. I will tell you that very strongly.” If he really believes this, at this late date, he definitely lives in an infantile fantasy world.
As a result, there is a huge risk that he will drag America into an uglier quagmire in Iran.
And he will throw away the chance that he, himself, helped create by pushing Europe to rearm: the opportunity to work with a stronger Europe and bolster NATO’s role positively to counter Russia, China, and Iran.
Lost in fantasy, he drives America’s allies away.
Ukraine will try to stay on his good side, but will proceed to revolutionize unmanned warfare in cooperation with Europe, and possibly, eventually, with Washington.
And U.S. adversaries like Iran will choose whether to take advantage of Trump’s childishness or try to assassinate him in revenge, helped by his own fecklessness. Fear of that latter possibility was what made the Secret Service insist Trump fly back from Ankara on the original Air Force One, rather than use one of his vanity projects, the upgraded luxury gift plane from Qatar, which had not been secured sufficiently to protect against possible attack.
Trump had insisted at first on luxury over security. Even when it came to his own safety, the child in him could not be curbed.
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Election denial | Editorial Cartoon
John Cole spent 18 years as editorial cartoonist for The (Scranton) Times-Tribune, and now draws for various statesnewsroom.com sites.
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How I stopped focusing on retirement and leaned into my ‘rewirement’
You’ve just retired, and in the blush of that found time, your life seems to be taking a decidedly positive turn. You are freer now than you’ve ever been. You can sleep later, take a leisurely shower, and plan trips whenever you want. There are no deadlines to meet, no meetings to endure, and no clients or other stakeholders to manage.
But there are also no appealing challenges for you to ponder or triumphs to celebrate. Eventually, in the honesty of your most objective moments, you know something is “off,” and you are starting to feel adrift. Your calendar has now opened to days of mostly blank space. Metaphorically, it is something between desert and forest. Dry and dark … and getting darker.
It is a particular derangement, a silent assault on your sense of identity, and you have no passport away from it. This life state called “retirement” has occupied you completely, and it is not what you might have expected. It feels more like an ending, a loss, an uncertainty, an inert state in which your energy is no longer directed toward anything challenging or meaningful.
As a psychologist and an executive coach, I have always eschewed the concept of retirement, and the word, too. Retirement — it just didn’t seem apt for anyone who, in the words of a global CEO whom I coached before he retired, “… still had a lot of juice left.”
Some years before I was approaching my own retirement, I started thinking about a more apt and ego-syntonic way to refer to it. Eventually, I hit on the neologism “rewirement,” and whenever I used it in conversation — especially with retirees or pre-retirees — it elicited immediate and positive reactions, strong resonant reactions, and even fervent reactions of gratitude for this term.
Many of the retirees had had demanding and truly successful careers, but they were now feeling flat and at odds with themselves. Uncertain. Unhappy. While they had no financial or physical or familial concerns to worry about, I detected a distinct, almost depressive angst that had been triggered and sustained by their status as a retiree. Their conversation dwelled on “what was before” with no trace of “what could be now.” While they weren’t clear about the concept of rewirement, they brightened at the sound of it.
Of course, not everyone falls into an emotional abyss after retirement. There are people who move through their adult development phases successfully and for whom that growth helps propel them into a state of rewirement upon their retirement — they just didn’t have a word for it. These rewired people serve as role models in that their postretirement journeys are characterized by self-compassion, humor, optimism, curiosity, resilience, and self-expression.
As I’ve come to see it, rewirement is the postretirement life phase during which the retiree identifies pursuits that foster a state of renewal. These pursuits may be new, or they may be “back-burner” dreams or interests that one finally has time to explore.
This state of renewal is sustained by a sense of meaning and contentment. This is comparable to or may even transcend the sense of accomplishment experienced in their previous work-related role.
I am reminded of the former global business executive who became a fine art photographer, the nonprofit leader who joined a community group in which members mended the clothing of low-income and homeless people, the psychotherapist (and former priest) who became a chaplain to hospital patients, and the human resources professional who became a master gardener.
The factors that identify the difference between these successful rewirements and those who get stuck in a conflicted or discontented state of retirement await the scrutiny of research. There is much to discover here.
However, in the meantime, I highlight the concept of rewirement as a possible neutralizer to the quotidian malaise that can seize us in retirement. I see it as a mental compass that can help us progress to renewal. And I’ve also identified three guideposts for those seeking a new sense of meaning as they transition out of their careers.
Identifying the ‘aspirational self’
This is based on one overarching question: What’s my aspirational self now? Exploring the answer to this question involves a concerted reflection about what pursuits one aspires to focus on now in this newfound time they’ve been calling retirement. In short, it’s the identification of the pursuits that will yield challenge and be meaningful in postretirement. This may be clear and even obvious for some, but it can be difficult for others; serious discussion with people who know us well (e.g., colleagues, close friends, partner, executive coach) can help clarify the path forward.
Regardless of how we address this fundamental question, the answer will significantly inform efforts toward achieving rewirement — efforts focused forward on possibilities vs. getting stuck in feelings of loss, despair, emptiness, or even unrequitedness. This is a time to build, not mourn.
Being more discerning about time
Greater discernment about time can prove especially difficult because we are habituated to our daily routines and priorities. Our routines and priorities are deeply ingrained. We trust and value these habits. They have abetted our success.
However, true rewirement necessitates an abandonment of certain habits — especially those that could interfere with what we really want to pursue during this life phase. For example, pleasing others and an inability to say no, even to requests for spending time and doing things we really don’t want to do anymore, are particular blockers to rewirement.
The necessary behavioral shift here is to deny requests for our time that are not in the service of achieving our aspirational self. While it may sound egocentric, asking yourself the question “Does this really deserve my time given what I’m trying to do now?” is a proactive habit to cultivate on the path to rewirement.
Being more discerning about relationships
Achieving rewirement often requires a difficult reflection about the quality of our relationships. Who’s supportive? Who’s not? Who’s a time drain? Who fuels our progress, happiness, and sense of meaning in postretirement? If we have a partner, do we need to have a courageous conversation with them about how we can successfully navigate this next life phase together?
Like habituated work habits that can block progress toward rewirement, certain relationships may also need to be changed or even let go in rewirement. As a successfully rewired business leader once told me: “I realized I had to prune my relationship portfolio as if it were a business. There were so many people from the past with whom I had little in common now.”
Ultimately, to achieve a successful rewirement, retirees may need to change some habits, they may need to manage their time differently, and they may need to adjust some relationships. However, as difficult as these efforts may be at first, they should be rewarded — rewarded because they support the retiree’s tilting toward what can be now vs. slipping into the emotional abyss of what was.
Sigmund Freud maintained that a human life is primarily about two spheres: love and work, and if there’s trouble in one sphere, or surely if there’s trouble in both, that’s a scenario for a depression.
As a sturdy and adventuresome bridge between work and love, a retiree’s personal renewal — fostered by their rewirement pursuits — is a reliable antidote to depression.
Yes, you are freer in retirement, but you can be even freer — and happier — in a state of rewirement. It is an oasis in the desert. Moonlight in the forest. So, are you in your rewirement now? And if not, what will it take to get you there?
Karol M. Wasylyshyn is a consulting psychologist happily in the midst of her evolving rewirement.