The Feed

Generations of Americans have worked together to build our nation’s Social Security system. Each citizen contributes through a lifetime of work, and each is entitled to claim an assured benefit to see him or her through retirement and old age, or in the event of a serious disability or the death of a working parent ...

Now that Mitt Romney has selected Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), head of the House Budget Committee, as his running mate, he has insured that this campaign will feature arguments about the budget and deficits. Ryan jumped right in last weekend, hammering away at “debt, doubts and despair” that put the country on an “unsustainable path.” Democrats are ...

Since the New Deal, despite several attempts, no state in our nation has shifted to a system for seating state court judges that makes these judges more vulnerable to politics. But that might well change this year. This November, ballot measures in three states would politicize state courts in an unprecedented way, calling into serious ...

When I was a student, my English-major friends warned me that economists were people who didn’t have enough personality to become accountants. It seemed like a terrible accusation at the time. Today, I worry less about the personality than the efficacy of both professions. The accounting systems we currently have in place are seriously flawed. ...

A wave of disenfranchising legislation that has washed through state houses across the country since the 2010 elections has the potential of taking away the right to vote from eligible citizens in ways this country hasn’t seen since the era of the civil rights movement (see the Lawyers’ Committee’s Map of Shame). Proponents of these laws have justified them by ...

The record drought and crop failures will create shortages, especially of corn, and will increase the prices of many foods that either contain the stuff or use it to feed livestock. That, in turn, will cause an uptick in the rate of inflation. And higher prices will give the inflation hawks in the Federal Reserve more ammunition ...

Mitt Romney’s choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as a vice presidential candidate has raised the decibel level of the anti-government movement dramatically. We started Rediscovering Government at the Roosevelt Institute to balance such ahistorical and destructive views, and Ryan’s is among the most extreme. If we are to think the best of Ryan, it is this: He ...

Mike Grunwald has a post at FP summarizing his new book, The New New Deal. The basic argument (of both the post and the book) seems to me clear and unassailable: the President’s “stimulus package,” or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is an under appreciated success for two reasons. First, as to recovery, the jobs stimulus averted ...

The possibility that economic theory is ‘performative’ – that the theory creates the reality – has long fascinated me. I talked about it in my Tanner Lectures earlier this year. Donald Mackenzie of Edinburgh University has long related the concept to the financial markets. It was with what I thought was some dramatic hyperbole that I described ...

Mitt Romney aired an ad last summer titled “Bump in the Road.” It attacked President Obama’s record on mass unemployment by linking it to a comment he made about there being bumps in the road to economic recovery. A group of people stood on a road in a desert, holding signs explaining their years of unemployment, their ...