That may seem like a trick question, given the recent surge in inflation and continuing dislocations caused by the pandemic, not to mention the decades-long stagnation of earnings for middle- and lower-income families. But it’s not a trick question. It’s a real puzzle.…READ MORE
Review of The Steal by Mark Bowden and Mathew Teague and How Civil Wars Start by Barbara Walter
How you label the events of Jan. 6, 2021 — an “insurrection,” a “riot,” an “assault,” an “attempted coup” — says a lot about how you view American politics. Like a Rorschach test, the dramatic images of that day evoke horror and revulsion in some, indifference or even approval in others.…READ MORE
Since Joe Biden’s election, Democrats have compared their challenge with the one Franklin D. Roosevelt and his party faced during the New Deal: enact policies that simultaneously address pressing problems and broaden Democrats’ coalition of allied voters and supportive groups. The lodestar is Social Security — a breakthrough that transformed retirement for the better and forged enduring bonds between working Americans and the Democratic party. Famously, FDR told an adviser that the design of Social Security wasn’t about economics but “politics all the way through.” The goal, the president quipped, was to ensure “no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”…READ MORE
The Issue: Making good public policy isn’t just a matter of getting effective programs passed. It is also a matter of passing policies that create supportive political dynamics: policies that cannot only be enacted, but also entrenched and perhaps even expanded over time. If policymakers want to tackle complex, deep-seated problems that require long-term solutions, they also have to achieve the instrumental goal of building politically robust policies. In an era of political gridlock and polarization, this can be difficult.…READ MORE
The tradition of foreign thinkers commenting on American democracy is long and distinguished. And for the most part, it’s provided good public relations. Neither French political analyst Alexis de Tocqueville nor British public intellectual James Bryce was fully sold on the American experiment. Yet both celebrated its revolutionary promise, if not all its present realities.…READ MORE
The filibuster is in trouble. President Joe Biden has come out in favor of reforming it, and Democrats in the Senate are weighing alternatives. But the strongest sign that its days are numbered is that the Republican leader Mitch McConnell is threatening Armageddon if the other party touches it.…READ MORE
Missouri is one of the reddest states in the nation, with Republicans holding all branches of government and both of the state’s Senate seats. Yet earlier in the month, a robust majority of Missourians backed a ballot measure to adopt the Medicaid expansion that state and national Republicans have fought for almost a decade. The vote was no pandemic fluke.…READ MORE
As economies reopen across the United States, tens of millions of Americans who can’t work remotely have become armchair actuaries, forced to figure out for themselves just how risky clocking in to their jobs might be. Of course, for many, the calculation is largely hypothetical. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that declared virus-plagued meatpacking plants “essential infrastructure,” pressuring employees to return to work. The president also promised that his order would “solve any liability problems” plants might face.…READ MORE
Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren released the much-anticipated financing details of her Medicare for All proposal. And they look good — too good, critics say. She has managed to outline a plan that could, in theory, finance generous universal care without a middle-class tax increase.…READ MORE
On Nov. 8, 2016, in an elegant townhouse in Northwest Washington, current and former Obama administration officials gathered to celebrate the election returns. By the end of the night, they were wondering what they could say to their career staffers as a radically different ruling class descended on Washington.…READ MORE
It is a measure of the chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency that just months after the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, nobody in Washington seems to remember it. Congressional Republicans transitioned seamlessly from backing the president as he inflicted gratuitous harm on the economy in pursuit of his unpopular border wall to acquiescing as he declared a phony emergency to usurp Congress’ constitutional power of the purse. Now, they are back in their familiar role of defending his efforts to thwart an independent investigation into the links between his 2016 campaign and a hostile foreign power bent on subverting U.S. elections.…READ MORE
President Trump is running for re-election on the strength of the economy, and why not? The unemployment rate is lower than it’s been in five decades. The stock market is booming. Overall economic growth has been steady.…READ MORE
How much money do you have saved in your 401(k)? In 50 years, no one will ask. Even better, no one will have to provide the usual answer: way too little. Our 40-year experiment with 401(k)s — tax-favored investment accounts for retirement sponsored by employers — will be seen as an unfortunate interregnum, a massive waste of taxpayer dollars to bolster the retirement security of the rich while undermining the retirement security of the rest.…READ MORE
The tax cuts passed by Republicans late last year have received no shortage of criticism. But the case against the cuts goes much deeper than even the fiercest opponents of the legislation seem willing to take it.…READ MORE
Tax experts are in widespread agreement that the GOP tax cuts are bad policy — a giveaway to the rich paid for by the middle class and poor, with little upside for the economy. But Congress writes legislation that experts hate all the time. What’s really striking is that the people Congress is supposed to represent also hate the GOP tax cuts, with only around 30 percent of Americans expressing approval.…READ MORE
Much of the debate over the Republican House and Senate tax plans has centered on how they will shift income toward the affluent. But there is a second kind of redistribution in the plans — from Democratic blue states to Republican red states.…READ MORE
A review of Elisbeth Rosenthal’s An American Sickness
A few years back, the future of American health policy appeared to hinge on how similar medical care was to broccoli. It was March 2012, and the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) was before the Supreme Court. Justice Antonin Scalia zeroed in on its controversial requirement that all Americans purchase health insurance. Yes, everybody needs health care, Scalia conceded, but everybody needs food too. If the government could make people buy insurance, why couldn’t it “make people buy broccoli”?…READ MORE
A century ago, the Austrian sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid described the government’s budget as “the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.” His point was that we distinguish reality from spin by looking at what leaders do — by the policies they create and how they pay for those policies — not how they dress up their ideas. Major policy initiatives serve as x-rays that reveal the spine of a political coalition.…READ MORE
For the first time since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Democrats are debating the next big steps in federal health policy. What they’re beginning to see is a path toward universal health care that looks very different from that embarked on seven years ago. This path depends on Medicare rather than the expansion of private insurance. And for those most eager to take this route, it depends on achieving something that has proven impossible in the past: replacing the patchwork quilt of American health insurance, including the employment-based health plans that cover more than 150 million people, with a single government insurance program.…READ MORE
The Affordable Care Act has faced a rocky six months. First, major national insurers scaled back their participation, leaving about one in five peoplebuying coverage through health exchanges with only one plan to choose from. Then this week, the Obama administration announced that exchange plans would post an average premium increase of more than 20 percent(though most enrollees would be insulated from the full increase by subsidies for their coverage).…READ MORE
You’ve heard of a beautiful failure. What about an ugly success? That may be the best way to describe the Affordable Care Act. It has covered millions of Americans—just this year, 250,000 Louisianans signed up for Medicaid in the six weeks after the state expanded the program under the law. And the ACA has widened health coverage without spiking costs; indeed, expenditures are way below initial expectations.…READ MORE
This week, Aetna announced it would stop selling insurance plans in all but four Obamacare exchanges, the state-run markets set up under the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Aetna, which now covers more than 800,000 people in 15 exchanges, said it had been hemorrhaging money on the plans. (A fight with the government over an acquisition of the insurance company Humana may have played a role, too.)…READ MORE
Everywhere you look, in the year of Donald J. Trump, observers are talking about a national party realignment or a Republican death spiral. Our two-party system has not undergone a major realignment since the South became solidly Republican. There has not been a major-party demise since the Whigs collapsed on the eve of the Civil War.…READ MORE
HOW can America’s leaders foster broad prosperity? For most Republicans — including Donald J. Trump — the main answer is to “cut and extract”: Cut taxes and business regulations, including pesky restrictions on the extraction of natural resources, and the economy will boom.…READ MORE
Political conventions used to be celebratory affairs. But in Cleveland this week, the most reliable source of good cheer has been Republicans’ collective fantasy of putting Hillary Clinton behind bars.…READ MORE
The Affordable Care Act has used up at least four of its nine lives. It was almost stillborn after Democrats lost their 60-vote Senate majority in early 2010. It survived a brush with death in the Supreme Court in June 2012—and yet another in that fall’s election. And just last week, of course, it was upheld by the Supreme Court in the most ringing affirmation yet.…READ MORE
This tax day, hope for a more powerful Internal Revenue Service.
For decades, one of America’s two major parties has done everything in its power to cut taxes, especially on the wealthiest, and to demonize the agency in charge of collecting them. (Hint: it’s not the Democrats).…READ MORE
Andy Grove, the Silicon Valley pioneer who died last week at age 79, was many things: a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Hungary and refugee of Cold War Eastern Europe, a keen scientific thinker with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, an innovator who became CEO of Intel, and a bestselling management theorist. As Wired put it after his death, Grove was “a titan of tech” who was “routinely mentioned as part of the same pantheon that includes Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs.” Yet the side of Grove’s success that has received scant notice—even though Grove himself repeatedly acknowledged it—is the huge debt that he and the industry he led owed to U.S. public policy.…READ MORE
At a debate among the Republican presidential candidates in March, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas boiled down his campaign message to its essentials: “Here’s my philosophy. The less government, the more freedom. The fewer bureaucrats, the more prosperity. And there are bureaucrats in Washington right now who are killing jobs and I’ll tell you, I know who they are. I will find them and I will fire them.”…READ MORE
With a string of major wins in Tuesday’s primaries, Hillary Clinton finally seems to have a secure hold on the Democratic nomination. Yet her struggle to define herself in the race remains a top challenge of her campaign.…READ MORE
The shocking crisis in Flint—where state cost-cutting mandates led to lead-tainted water that has poisoned thousands of children—has become a metaphor for American political dysfunction. Yet it should also be a reminder of how much Americans’ health and well-being depend on effective public policies. Rather than see Flint as another case of government failure, reinforcing distrust and cynicism, Americans should instead see it as a call to action. Using the power of government, American society once solved problems like those now plaguing Flint and too many other communities. And it could do so again, if it overcame the widespread amnesia about the enormous benefits of active, responsive government.…READ MORE
According to the news media, 2014 was the year that the GOP “Establishment” finally pulled Republicans back from the right-wing brink. Pragmatism, it seemed, had finally triumphed over extremism in primary and general election contests that The New York Times called “proxy wars for the overall direction of the Republican Party.”…READ MORE
In the 1990s, two young French economists then affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, began the first rigorous effort to gather facts on income inequality in developed countries going back decades. In the wake of the 2007 financial crash, fundamental questions about the economy that had long been ignored again garnered attention. Piketty and Saez’s research stood ready with data showing that elites in developed countries had, in recent years, grown far wealthier relative to the general population than most economists had suspected. By the past decade, according to Piketty and Saez, inequality had returned to levels nearing those of the early 20th century.…READ MORE
In the face of congressional gridlock, President Obama has started taking more and more matters into his own hands. In recent months, he has announced new gun control measures, put in place limited immigration reform and made fixes to the Affordable Care Act — all without Congress. Many liberals who once worried about presidential overreach have applauded his robust use of presidential power.…READ MORE
It should be the best of times for the left. Instead, discredited austerity policies still reign, and it’s the far left and the far right that are making the most of the crisis. Centre-left progressives seem to have lost their ability to provide a clear alternative to either current conservative nostrums, or the “third way” many of them staked out before the fall.…READ MORE
Five years after the onset of the financial crisis that badly damaged the US economy, the nation remains mired in chronic joblessness. The unemployment rate, stubbornly above 8 percent, actually makes the situation look better than it is. Many millions have given up looking for work and no longer figure in the statistics. Long-term unemployment remains at levels unseen since the Great Depression. Young Americans are entering the worst job market in at least a half-century. For both the long-term unemployed and new job seekers, this sustained absence from the workforce will have permanent effects on both their earnings and their well-being. And not just theirs. We have all lost, and continue to lose, from the prolonged mass idleness of potentially productive workers.…READ MORE
The parallels between Mitt Romney and his father, George — both businessmen, both Republican governors of blue states, both presidential candidates — make for tantalizing psychological comparisons. ¶ Is the younger Romney less concerned about economic fairness than was his late father, who helped create Michigan’s first income tax and famously returned a big bonus when he was chief executive of American Motors? Does Mitt’s cautious style reflect the bitter experience of George, whose 1968 presidential run collapsed after he used the term “brainwashing” to explain his early support for the Vietnam War?…READ MORE
OUR nation isn’t facing just a debt crisis; it’s facing a democracy crisis. For weeks, the federal government has been hurtling toward two unsavory options: a crippling default brought on by Congressional gridlock, or — as key Democrats have advocated — a unilateral increase in the debt ceiling by an unchecked president. Even if the last-minute deal announced on Sunday night holds together, it’s become clear that the balance at the heart of the Constitution is under threat.…READ MORE
