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”
“Reducing defense spending was one of the most popular options for cutting the national deficit,” the nonprofit AmericaSpeaks reported recently after tabulating the results of its June 26 “National Town Meeting” on the budget deficit (a project on which I was involved behind the scenes). Eighty-five percent of participants at the 19 primary town meeting …
“Washington’s traditional approach to balancing the budget,” former Reagan White House official Peter Ferrara writes in today’s Wall Street Journal, “is to negotiate an agreement on a package of benefit cuts and tax increases. President Obama’s deficit commission seems likely to recommend just this strategy in December. The problem is that it never works.” Wow, …