We must repeal the 17th amendment in order to rebalance American federalism.It once made some sense to centralize governance functions to make them more effective, just as it made sense to make manufacturing and production processes bigger to take advantages of economies of scale. Now good sense that recognizes technological change should clearly point us […]

The origins of Groundhog’s Day.

With the news that French forces have retaken not only Gao but Timbuktu, a colleague asked me this morning if I was surprised by the speed of French success. Here, in essence, is what I answered.No, I’m not at all surprised about the initial success of the past 18 days. The French force is the […]

Last week I erred by identifying the now-rescinded FICA tax cut from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent as part of the Bush-era tax cuts; it wasn’t. A reader pointed out that this was a 2010 Obama Administration decision, part of the broader stimulus program.  I had forgotten that. Everything else I said about it stands, but while […]

Over the past week or so, I have had recourse to critique the American mainstream, elite press for not doing justice to the situation in the Sahel on behalf of their readers. Over the past few days, the Algerian angle of the evolving situation has come to the fore, and here the MSM has done […]

When I wrote about the situation in Mali a couple of days ago, little did I know just how much get-up-and-go this story would acquire. In just about fifty hours, from the time I left off writing on Tuesday to the present, at least five significant developments have widened the aperture of this episode—some of […]

As often happens, my colleague Walter Russell Mead, with his team of intrepid assistants ever at the ready, has beaten me into print—or electrons, as the case may be—over what is going on in Mali. He takes his cue from the extraordinary story in yesterday’s New York Times. Pardon me for repeating any of Walter’s […]

We must fix the health care system (and no, folks, we have not already done that).If we can get the plutocrats back on their heels by cordoning off the impact of television on our moneyed politics, reforming the banking/financial sector and the tax structure, we might then be in a position to really and seriously […]

When, on Tuesday morning, I finished reading David Brooks’s column in the New York Times, I scribbled two words at the bottom of the newsprint. First let’s hear how his typically excellent column, this one on the nature and scope of the debt we are amassing and are refusing to responsibly address, ended: The country […]

We must get rid of the IRS and the present tax system that goes with it. Next to money-leaking corporate and union lobbyists paying for politicians’ political ads and the inside-baseball influence of financial-sector plutocrats, nothing tilts the playing field in favor of the wealthy like the IRS code. So it needs to be the […]