Six months into a second term and the Obama White House is on the defensive and floundering: Benghazi, the IRS’s investigations of right-wing groups, the Justice Department’s snooping into journalists’ phone records, Obamacare behind schedule, the Administration’s push for gun control ending in failure. Should the blame fall mainly on congressional Republicans and their allies ...
The tempest about the Tea Parties and the Internal Revenue Service is a gift for the Republican Party — and one that obscures the real issues. Why, for example, has the IRS been so indulgent of far bigger, flagrantly partisan tax-exempt groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and Charles and David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity? Such groups spent hundreds of millions ...
On Tuesday, with some fanfare, the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington rolled out a report, “Too Big to Fail: The Path to a Solution.” Focused on how to “resolve” big financial companies — a technical term for the details of handling the failure of such institutions — the report is elegantly written and nicely laid ...
As we move toward the fifth anniversary of the great financial crisis of 2008, people should be outraged that cutting Social Security is now on the national agenda, while taxing Wall Street is not. After all, if we take at face value the claims made back in 2008 by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and former ...
Everyone can agree it is unacceptable for the IRS to target particular organizations based on political ideology. If that’s what agents at the IRS were up to, they were wrong and there should be consequences. The real problem, however, is not that the IRS is overly aggressive but that it has sat by idly while ...
‘SHELBY COUNTY, ALA. V. HOLDER’ Shelby County is a largely white suburb of Birmingham, Ala., that has challenged the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).4 Originally proposed by President Lyndon B, Johnson and enacted by Congress in 1965, the VRA was passed in response to discriminatory practices impacting voters. While the VRA ...
ext summer will mark the 100th anniversary of the chain of diplomatic missteps that led to World War I. In light of recent economic blunders, this also should be the opportunity to revisit the war’s aftermath, when miscalculations seeded the conditions that led to World War II. In 1919, at the Versailles Peace Conference, France and the ...
Many of you soon-to-be college graduates are determined to make the world a better place. Some of you are choosing careers in public service or joining nonprofits or volunteering in your communities. But many of you are cynical about politics. You see the system as inherently corrupt. You doubt real progress is possible. “What chance ...
Gattopardo constitutes change that keeps things the same. Gattopardo is relevant for understanding the economics profession’s response to the financial crash of 2008. This paper explores gattopardo economics as it applies to the issues of the macroeconomics of income distribution; the global financial imbalances; and inflation policy. Gattopardo economics adopts ideas developed by critics of ...
Have you heard about HR 807, the “Full Faith and Credit Act,” passed last Thursday by the House of Representatives? That’s what I thought. So let me explain why you should be against it. Republicans, especially House Republicans, have been using the national debt ceiling as a kind of cudgel to gain advantage in the ...
