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, …
President Obama must decide this fall whether to confront not just congressional Republicans but a growing number of Democrats on a key matter of public policy – President George W. Bush’s tax cuts for those at the top. His decision will have enormous implications for fiscal policy, with hundreds of billions of dollars in potential …
As recent developments illustrate, we are in a vicious cycle of fiscal incoherence: our leaders speak cynically, if not dishonestly, about our fiscal problem, fueling public ignorance that presents more opportunity for our leaders to speak cynically and dishonestly, fueling even more public ignorance. Such ignorance can only impede efforts to convince Americans, in the …