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If the Supreme Court strikes down the Voting Rights Act, many will argue that we should abandon the civil rights model of elections and opt for a national law setting uniform election standards that would protect every voter. I’m all for protecting every voter. But I would hate to lose what Section 5 provides – ...

Statement of Professors of Constitutional Law: The Second Amendment and the Constitutionality of the Proposed Gun Violence Prevention Legislation Several proposed reforms to the nation’s gun laws, including universal background checks and restrictions on high-capacity ammunition magazines and assault weapons, are now pending before Congress. Concerns have been raised that these measures might violate the ...

The first months of President Barack Obama’s second term promise to be full of big political fights on issues ranging from comprehensive immigration reform to the problem of gun violence to addressing America’s fiscal woes. Last week’s decision on recess appointments by three Republican-appointed judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, however, proves there’s ...

Shakespeare’s Polonius offered this classic advice to his son: “neither a borrower nor a lender be.”  Many of our nation’s Founding Fathers emphatically saw it otherwise.  They often lived by the maxim: always a borrower, never a lender be.  As tobacco and rice planters, slave traders, and merchants, as well as land and currency speculators, ...

We have just come off an election with surprisingly low voter turnout. Turnout fell more or less steadily from 1960 until 1996, when slightly less than half of the voting-age population went to the polls. But then it ticked up: 51 percent in 2000, 54 percent in 2004, and 58 percent in 2008. In 2012 ...

Testimony by CEPR Co-Director Dean Baker before a joint session of the New Mexico State Legislature labor and education committees on public pension funds.  ———————————————————————————————————– Thank you for inviting me to discuss the return assumptions used by the state pension plans in assessing their funding situation. I recognize that this is an important issue that ...

The global economy this year will exhibit some similarities with the conditions that prevailed in 2012. No surprise there: We face another year in which global growth will average about 3 percent, but with a multispeed recovery—a subpar, below-trend annual rate of 1 percent in the advanced economies, and close-to-trend rates of 5 percent in ...

Nearly 12 years after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began, a war-weary America is getting ready to leave. But there will be little in the way of a peace dividend for the US economy once the fighting stops. The direct costs of the war are already $700bn. The original mission was to root out al-Qaeda ...

“We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class,” President Barack Obama said in his second inaugural address Monday in Washington, D.C. It sounds like a remarkable, even wishy-washy, bromide. In fact, it’s the backbone of a bold and somewhat revolutionary new economic policy. Many people suspect there ...

Some scientists contend that we should label the era we live in theAnthropocene, because we humans (anthropoi) have fundamentally altered our global ecosystem. Economists might, for similar reasons, consider labeling the current economic era the Walmartocene. The world’s largest retail company (and second-largest business), having easily survived recent skirmishes with workers,shareholders and the law, just announced that it ...