Mitch McConnell is livid. "Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin, can even begin", he repeated, "to imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like". He was reacting to the threat of Democrats ending the filibuster, the… Read More »
Our biennial elections bring the usual lamentations about the inequities in our jury-rigged democratic system. But we chuckle over Churchill's soothing words about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others and move on,with no action begun to fix the serious faults that threaten this democracy.
Move on straight to the next election, that is. Even before the midterms, there seemed as much media preoccupation with 2016 as with the midterms. The country is in the grip of a perpetual campaign that has displaced governing.
Largely to blame is the Supreme Court's string of decisions that equate money and free speech as justification for their legislating virtually unlimited contributions to political campaigns and candidates by corporations, unions… Read More »
The year of the protester has stamped the concept of the 99% and the 1% indelibly into the national consciousness. A new survey by Pew Research says 66% of Americans believe there are "strong conflicts" between rich and poor, up from 49% just two years ago.
Doubtless you’ve seen statistics such as “the top 1% of Americans earn 21% of all income” expressed many ways (even right here). Less explored is how big is the income gap between the two?
First, what income level qualifies for membership in the 1% elite?
Few studies are all that current, but an analysis of 2005 IRS data says the top 1% consists of any household earning $343,927 on up. About 1.4 million households can make that claim, and the 21%-or-so of all U.S. income they take in year after year led to their… Read More »
Republicans realize they have a problem arising from their seeming indifference to those on the lower economic rungs. Since the 2012 election they
Dorothea Lange's iconic
face of the poor
have been looking for ways to moderate their disdain for programs that deal with poverty while not ruffling the more extreme elements of the Party that advocate deep cuts.
Which explains the proposal put forth by Rep. Paul Ryan, at once the Party’s fiscal guru and a victim as vice-presidential candidate of those very same non-inclusive policies. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed describing his plan, Ryan says “I've learned I was wrong to talk about 'makers and takers'”.
Simultaneously, Arthur Brooks, the president of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, acknowledged the problem in a New York Times op-ed and asked members of either party to give reasonable consideration to the ideas of the other before segueing into an introduction of the Ryan plan.
With Republicans looking ever more likely to gain control of the Senate in the upcoming election, and thus control of the entire Congress, in Ryan’s plan we may be looking at reforms the Party actually intends to make.
Ryan wants to replace 11 sources of aid to those in poverty — those that deliver food stamps, housing assistance and cash welfare, for example — with… Read More »
Joe Biden is steeped in Senate doctrine, having served there for 36 years. He has stressed "unity" as his goal for America and yearns to forge bipartisan agreement across the aisle. He does not want to do
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With Donald Trump running away with the Republican party and its establishment in a tizzy over how to upend him, the usual quadrennial 
irritations over how we vote for president have been muted. But as the election itself approaches, we'll soon be in dudgeon that another four years have passed and we're still stuck with the same clunky system.
Start with the primaries. The states and the political parties are free to mostly do as they please, so instead of a single primary day in all the states, the dates are scattered across the calendar, making the candidates zig-zag frenziedly around the country. Two states — Iowa and New Hampshire — jump ahead of… Read More »
President Obama made a compelling speech to announce the executive actions he will take on immigration. The argument here is that it would be preferable were his speech delivered sometime around next March. Given this Congress, it's just a matter of deciding when is the best time.
That Congress, with its current approval ratings as low as 7%, has utterly failed to deal with the nation's
decades-long immigration problem is beyond argument. That the executive actions President Obama's is taking are morally the right thing to do is also beyond dispute. The problem of illegal immigrants has grown huge — some 11 million estimated to be in the U.S. — largely because of the failure of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, to face the issue for decades. The last immigration bill dates to the Reagan administration, 28 years ago, when some three million gained legal status after passage…
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The Supreme Court believes that the existence of corruption in the federal government is overblown and in a second case recently (first Citizens United, now McCutcheon) has lifted the sluice gates to allow virtually unlimited amounts of
money to flow into elections.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his Citizens United opinion that the government’s interest in the influence ofmoney is “limited to quid pro quo corruption”. In a subsequent case, the Court’s majority opinion found that "independent expenditures, including those… Read More »
Entitlement spending is following an unsustainable trajectory. It consumes 65% of the federal budget, up from 21% in 1955, and 20% of the entire economy, says Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post. Such facile comparisons can be asymmetric, however; a closer look might show 1955’s safety net to be unacceptably Dickensian.
But popular though they are, the big three — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — swallow 46% of federal funds and with 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day, they are slated to consume 61% by 2030. Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under… Read More »