With Republicans poised to regain the House and, if the political gods shine upon them, perhaps even the Senate, let’s turn our attention to two intriguing budget-related questions that will soon take center stage in Washington: Will Republicans, like their forebears a generation ago, plant the seeds of both their own destruction and President Obama’s …
Continue reading “Government Shutdowns and Their Consequences”
On the very day Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the United States would lead a renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace effort, Iran boasted that it had test-fired a surface-to-air missile. A day later, Iran began loading fuel rods into its Bushehr nuclear reactor, marking further progress on its quest for nuclear weapons. A day after …
America’s consumers are both the key to the economic recovery and the great unknown. They are saving much more than in recent years, which should bode well for the nation’s longer-term economic prospects but also could keep the economy in the doldrums for some time to come. That’s because, as columnist Robert J. Samuelson notes …
We take it as an article of faith in Washington that policymakers should extend President Bush’s tax cuts for the 98 percent of American households that earn up to $250,000 a year, at the very least. The economy, we seem to agree, is too weak to impose a tax increase on the vast majority of …
For those who hope a post-election Washington will get serious about our long-term fiscal problems before a deficit-induced crisis forces our hand, the news of recent days has been disappointing indeed. President Obama used his Saturday radio address to pledge his allegiance to Social Security, raising the age-old specter of a Republican plot to destroy …
Continue reading “Social Security and the Fiscal-Political Clash”
“Americans have been dreaming since our national birth,” H.W. Brands writes to start his new book, American Dreams: The United States Since 1945. “Americans in 2010 were collectively less confident than their grandparents had been in 1945 that reality would favor their dreams,” he acknowledges a few paragraphs later, because “the world was catching up …
Who said this? “I’ll never give a veto to any country over our security.” Was it Franklin Roosevelt? Or, perhaps, Ronald Reagan? Actually, that was John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, and he made that pledge in the same debate with President Bush in which he later suggested that pre-emptive U.S. military action should …
Continue reading “Only Israel can make its fateful life-or-death decision”