You should be reading a local newspaper

During winter break of my freshman year at Duke, the Senate voted to approve the Affordable Care Act—“Obamacare”—and by March, the president had signed it into law. I knew a lot of students who followed every up and down of the law—public option or no public option, employer mandate or no employer mandate? Excitement and interest on campus was high, fueled in part by the fact that for about nine months, news surrounding Obamacare dominated the major networks.

It’s not surprising to me that the issue was so resonant on campus; so many students, and indeed so many Americans, feel a sense of profound sadness that our nation is alone in the developed world in not guaranteeing its citizens very basic healthcare. Add in Duke’s pre-med frenzy, and you’ve got the perfect storm for a current event guaranteed to dominate our school’s attention. When the Supreme Court ruled on Obamacare during the summer, I could tell from my Facebook newsfeed that a lot of Duke students cared about that, too.

This is the odd thing: We are a school of people who were obsessed with Obamacare, but very few Duke students could tell you what N.C. Senate Bill 4 is. I’ll make it easy for you: It was a bill, passed by the N.C. Senate and supported by the House and governor, that would turn down all of the money appropriated by Obamacare to provide healthcare to poor and working class North Carolinians.

I know for a fact that Duke students care about the uninsured, but if they don’t care about the uninsured in North Carolina, where are all the uninsured people that they care about? The issue here isn’t that Duke students are reading the local newspapers of their hometowns or following the politics of another state— it’s that the realm of state politics is completely foreign to Duke students altogether.

I’m sure many of you know that extending unemployment insurance benefits was part of the latest debt ceiling deal, but how many of you know that North Carolina is voting to cut our maximum unemployment insurance benefit by a third, which would in turn mean that North Carolina loses federal unemployment benefits?

Duke students generally only learn about North Carolina politics once it makes it into “The Colbert Report.” Well I’ve got a secret for you: There are actually whole publications that amalgamate the most important developments in state politics. The Raleigh News and Observer’s Under the Dome blog, for instance, is my favorite place for quick reads.

Our Constitution is designed to make the 50 states extremely important; they are given huge powers that the federal government lacks, and indeed, the way tons of federal laws work, from No Child Left Behind to the drinking age, is by threatening to take away a state’s federal funding if the state doesn’t change its own laws. If you follow national news, but not state and local news, your ability to understand what’s happening around you will be severely limited. For example, in Obama’s first term, the stimulus plan prevented job losses by spending federal money on some key projects, a well-tested strategy of “counter-cyclical spending” historically favored by both Democrats and Republicans. North Carolina and other states, however, were concurrently shrinking the size of their governments. In North Carolina, we’ve seen massive tax cuts for the wealthy along with huge cuts to education. If the federal government employs one policy, and the states employ the exact opposite policy, the results would be very different from if the federal and state governments had done the same thing. If you’re not satisfied with the unemployment rate or the number of people in poverty, only by looking at federal and state policies together will you be able to piece together what’s working and what’s not.

Figuring out the trajectory of our country based only on federal policy would be like trying to guess the trajectory of a ball while ignoring gravity.