Reconciliation: How the Democrats Can Run the Table
Congressional Democrats will take office in January with the broadest mandate since the post-Watergate midterms in 1974—twice the popular-vote margin the Contract-with-America Republicans won in 1994. The work begins with dismantling most of what Donald Trump and his corrupt, incompetent administration have done over the past two years. Much of what Trump wrought came through his One Big Beautiful (sic)… Continue reading
While the President Promotes U.S. Interests Abroad, His Opponents Deny…
Most of Washington is stuck "in what we call the reality-based community . . . people who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. . . . When we act, we create our own reality.â€Â Karl Rove, 2004. Rove’s famous comments came to mind this week as…Continue reading
The Mid-Term Elections and the Failure, Yet Again, of Trickle-Down…
This week’s seismic shift in the Congress will not change the problems facing its members and the President. This is the third consecutive election to bring large losses for the party in power, all for the same reason. For a decade, neither party has been able to deliver the rising incomes and economic security that matter most for average Americans.…Continue reading
Lesson in Economics for the National Deficit Commission
The French statesman Georges Clemenceau famously called war “too serious a matter to entrust to military menâ€; and in the same spirit, national budgets in a democracy are too important to leave to economists. But no sensible government would wage war without listening to generals and admirals, and the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — aka the National…Continue reading
Are We Better Off Now than We Were Two Years…
To borrow a construction from the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, there’s a dog that hasn’t barked in this election. In a campaign dominated by the economy, Republicans have never invoked some version of Ronald Reagan’s devastating query from 1980, “Are you better now than you were four years ago?†It turns out, there’s good reason for their reticence: By every basic…Continue reading
The Troubling View from the IMF Meetings
The International Monetary Fund held its annual Washington meeting last weekend, so I spent a balmy Sunday discussing the potential pitfalls for the U.S. and world economies. I attended as an American representative on the IMF’s advisory board for the Western Hemisphere; and in that group and beyond, almost no one could see a clear path to worldwide prosperity. Yet,…Continue reading
The New Fight over Access to Higher Education
As President Obama focuses this week on education, it seems an appropriate time to examine recent criticisms of the fastest-growing segment of American higher education, the private for-profit colleges, universities and institutes. From 1995 to 2008, the student bodies of private for-profit institutions increased from 240,000 to 1.8 million, a jump of 750 percent. With my Sonecon colleague, Dr. Nam…Continue reading
The Illogic of the Current Economic Debate
In early June of 1992, I sat in the living room of the Governor’s mansion in Little Rock with Bill and Hillary Clinton and a half dozen other advisors, hashing out the economic program he was preparing to take to the country. Clinton had just won the California primary and sealed the presidential nomination, but he was running third in…Continue reading
Why We Learned So Little from the Collapse of Lehman…
On the second anniversary this week of Lehman Brothers’ spectacular collapse, it’s instructive — okay, frustrating and dispiriting — to see what policymakers learned from it. Based on what unfolded then and the trillions of dollars lost, you would expect that even conservatives could now acknowledge that unregulated financial markets are not always the optimal arrangement. Yet, that’s not how it’s…Continue reading