Constitutional Federalism Revisited: Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority

Constitutional federalism is the basis on which the United States government was created. However, the concept of constitutional federalism has not yet been clearly defined, and as a consequence, conflicting viewpoints on federalism have arisen. These conflicting viewpoints are best illustrated by the law concerning the commerce clause. With the recent expansion of the commerce clause, the United States Supreme Court was faced with defining constitutional federalism, in order to evaluate the legitimacy of commerce clause legislation. The task of defining constitutional federalism, however, only served to create a dispute over federalism among the Supreme Court Justices. In 1985, the Supreme Court renewed the continuing debate over the definition of constitutional federalism in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority

A topographic mechanism for arcing of dryland vegetation bands

Banded patterns consisting of alternating bare soil and dense vegetation have been observed in water-limited ecosystems across the globe, often appearing along gently sloped terrain with the stripes aligned transverse to the elevation gradient. In many cases these vegetation bands are arced, with field observations suggesting a link between the orientation of arcing relative to the grade and the curvature of the underlying terrain. We modify the water transport in the Klausmeier model of water-biomass interactions, originally posed on a uniform hillslope, to qualitatively capture the influence of terrain curvature on the vegetation patterns. Numerical simulations of this modified model indicate that the vegetation bands change arcing-direction from convex-downslope when growing on top of a ridge to convex-upslope when growing in a valley. This behavior is consistent with observations from remote sensing data that we present here. Model simulations show further that whether bands grow on ridges, valleys, or both depends on the precipitation level. A survey of three banded vegetation sites, each with a different aridity level, indicates qualitatively similar behavior.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figures, 2 table

Understanding Baby Boomers’ Retirement Prospects

This chapter assesses Baby Boom retirement prospects by comparing the outlook for this cohort with experiences of previous generations. We simulate the impact of aging using the Social Security’s Model of Income in the Near Term and project retirement incomes for a representative group of individuals born between 1926 and 1965. We conclude that Baby Boomers can expect to have higher real incomes in retirement than current retirees and lower poverty rates. Yet the gains in family income are not equally distributed, so, for instance, never-married Boomer women will be relatively better off, and high school Boomer dropouts will be relatively worse off than current retirees. And when we compare Boomer retirement incomes to their own pre-retirement living standards, we find that post-retirement incomes are not predicted to rise as much as pre-retirement incomes. In addition, certain population subgroups will remain economically vulnerable, including divorced women, never-married men, Hispanics, high school dropouts, those with weak labor force attachments, and those with the lowest lifetime earnings