Second Act
Barack Hussein Obama can begin his second term liberated by the confidence that he is already a landmark figure in American history. His task is not to manufacture a legacy but to leave his successors...
View ArticleThe Urgency of Economic Growth
If you care about deficits, you should want our economy to grow faster. If you care about lifting up the poor and reducing unemployment, you should want our economy to grow faster. And if you are a...
View ArticleOld Boomers, New Boom
An old joke about business management consultants is that if a client company is centralized, they tell management to decentralize; and if it’s decentralized, they straight-facedly urge centralization....
View ArticleThe Tea Party's Ghost
The deficit that should concern us most right now has to do with time, not money. Money can be recouped. Time just disappears.And time is what Washington is wasting now on an utterly artificial crisis...
View ArticleEnding the Permanent Crisis
This has to stop.Ever since they took control of the House of Representatives in 2011, Republicans have made journeys to the fiscal brink as commonplace as summertime visits to the beach or the...
View ArticleBudget Wars: A Case for Hope
There are, believe it or not, grounds for hoping that the sequester, stupid as it is, might open the way to ending our nation's budget stalemate.Hope is in short supply right now, but the case for...
View ArticleThe End of Majority Rule?
The National Rifle Association is facing attacks from Gun Owners of America for being too soft on gun control. This is like a double cheeseburger coming under severe criticism for lacking enough...
View ArticleThe Fixes Are In
Not long after a Senate subcommittee found that JPMorgan had misled and bullied federal regulators in an effort to conceal massive trading losses, the House of Representatives began to consider bills...
View ArticleThis Time Is No Different
The blood runs cold when one fully appreciates how vulnerable Western policymakers are to slogans and magical thinking. The Reinhart-Rogoff case is the latest, and certainly will not be the last, in...
View ArticleThe Economic Whodunit
The policy mystery of our time is why politicians in the United States and across much of the democratic world are so obsessed with deficits when their primary mission ought to be bringing down high...
View ArticleObama Needs to Hope Again
If a president finds himself in the role of a political scientist, he has a problem -- even when his political science lesson is 100 percent accurate.When President Obama was asked by Jonathan Karl of...
View ArticleGreat Exhortations
More than any other recent U.S. president, Barack Obama has succeeded in puzzling the pundits.
View ArticleObama's Wake-Up Call
President Obama got roughed up by the pundit classlast week. The question is what lessons he draws from the going-over. Here's one he should take: The nation's political conversation has grown stale...
View ArticleIs Democracy in Trouble?
We know American politics are dysfunctional. But after a week of scandal obsession during which the nation's capital and the media virtually ignored the problems most voters care about -- jobs,...
View ArticleThe Obama Riddle
You wonder if President Obama sometimes finds himself singing a variant on Kermit the Frog's anthem about the burdens of being green: It's not easy being Barack Obama.This is not simply or even...
View ArticleLawyer Up the Prey
In the wake of extraordinarily sloppy record-keeping during the mortgage spree that created our national housing bubble, many of the banks that have subsequently foreclosed on millions of homes have...
View ArticleA Dying Concept
One of the interesting questions that resulted from the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case in 2010, which assigned political personhood to corporations, is whether this corporate...
View ArticleThis Time Is No Different
The blood runs cold when one fully appreciates how vulnerable Western policymakers are to slogans and magical thinking. The Reinhart-Rogoff case is the latest, and certainly will not be the last, in...
View ArticleThe Economic Whodunit
The policy mystery of our time is why politicians in the United States and across much of the democratic world are so obsessed with deficits when their primary mission ought to be bringing down high...
View ArticleObama Needs to Hope Again
If a president finds himself in the role of a political scientist, he has a problem -- even when his political science lesson is 100 percent accurate.When President Obama was asked by Jonathan Karl of...
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