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
The True Costs of “Charging it†in America
American consumers gained a few basic protections this week regarding their credit and debit cards, but they’re only the beginning of the reforms needed here. One of the largest issues remains untouched and unmentioned: The big credit and debit card networks, along with the large banks that issue most cards, impose “interchange†or “swipe†fees on merchants of 1.5 percent…Continue reading
The Perverse Politics that Now Surrounds Economic Policymaking
The most remarkable aspect of our current economic predicament is the politics surrounding it, which are now as dysfunctional and perverse as Bear Stearns or AIG just before they tanked in 2008. The latest illustration is the partisan analysis of the effectiveness of last year’s stimulus, one year after its passage. While every cable TV loudmouth with economic opinions calls…Continue reading
The New Dominos as the Economic Crisis Enters its Latest…
The dislocations from the worldwide, economic meltdown aren’t over by a long shot. Nearly two years after Bear Stearns’ collapse, the crisis continues to generate a stream of nasty twists and turns. Moreover, most of these developments have global dimensions, almost all of them are highly complex and only partly understood, and many require rapid responses that must be carried…Continue reading
Cutting Payroll Taxes to Create Jobs
Looking for ways to jumpstart job creation, the White House and Senate heavyweight Chuck Schumer have both come around to the same idea, cutting the payroll taxes that employers pay on new hires. The economic sense of this idea is straight-forward: If you want to induce businesses to hire people whom, under current economic conditions, they wouldn’t otherwise take on,…Continue reading
The Serious Economic Measures that Congress Won’t Consider
What amounts to a small miracle for Washington just happened: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a new report on the effectiveness of different policy approaches for boosting growth and jobs, and the findings affirm basic economic logic. They also support the particular policy ideas that we urged on the administration at the White House Jobs Summit and, before that,…Continue reading
America’s Path and the Rise of the Rest
The perennial question of America in decline is back. It’s the subject of new books and the cover story of the Atlantic Monthly, where James Fallows does his usual credible job with it. As usual, the forces animating the current sense of national malaise about the future seem to be everywhere, from the chronic disrepair of our infrastructure and the…Continue reading
The World Is Watching and, Oops, There Go Our Interest…
Here’s a piece of dry financial data that could herald big changes in our politics and economy: Over the last five weeks, yields on 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds have risen nearly two-thirds of a point. The interest rates the U.S. government pays are rising across the board, and quickly, and it’s not because the Federal Reserve is tightening credit —…Continue reading
Two Thoughts for President Obama on his Way to Copenhagen
With the President getting ready for Copenhagen, the EPA did what Congress would not: Put in place a policy to ultimately reduce carbon emissions. The EPA finding that greenhouse gases (GHG) pose a danger and thus trigger a process to reduce the risks through direct regulation has become the president’s only “deliverable†in Copenhagen. More important, the only forces that…Continue reading