Obamacare isn’t dead, but the NYT is already writing its obituary. Two years ago, governors who filed lawsuits challenging the healthcare bill’s constitutionality were dismissed as Red State extremists and ideologues with names like “Butch” Otter. Hadn’t they read the Commerce Clause, the bien pensant press would ask.  What kind of Flat Earthers were these […]

The world’s eyes are riveted on the car crash in Europe, but the troubles in China could be even larger.  An IMF report out this week adds yet another voice to the chorus warning that some very important pieces of China’s boom rest on shaky foundations.  As the NYT reports: In the 125-page report on […]

“Talkin’ about my generation”: the Who song once expressed the hope and self confidence of the Baby Boomers as they reached biological if not emotional maturity.  It was an attack on the older generation, a defense of the young, but it includes an ominous refrain: “Hope I die before I get old.”  Already, perhaps, the […]

The scariest thing in the world has nothing to do with Greek debt plans, Italian bond yields or even American pension funds.  It is not the prospect of war in the Persian Gulf over the Iranian nuclear program. The scariest thing in the world is the prospect that the identity wars are spreading from Europe […]

New Yorkers are getting an uncomfortable look at the ugly realities behind what we like to think of as the country’s bluest, most European and most enlightened city.  A series of trials now underway in the Bronx reveal the harsh truth of embedded corruption and contempt for the public at the heart (if that is […]

A word of warning to financial criminals: you are risking more than your own freedom — the health and well-being of your family may be in jeopardy as well. A 60 Minutes special on CBS paints a harrowing picture of the pain and shame endured by the Madoff family in the years following the unveiling […]

A tiny tax on tea destroyed the first British empire by driving the 13 colonies into revolt; will a tiny little tax on financial transactions split the European Union? The Tobin tax (first proposed by economist James Tobin in 1972) is a small tax that would be levied on all financial transactions and would, proponents […]

The decay of American political parties continues as the real money and power in politics shifts inexorably away from party organizations to informal and ad hoc groups.  The combination of citizen grassroots movements, decentralized party structures and the vast sums of money short-circuiting the official party structures is changing the way politics works.  As this […]

If we want things to stay as they are, some things will still have to change. City government is one of those things.  While at the level of rhetoric, Democrats continue to embrace the blue social model and liberal urban Democrats in particular sing the praises of public sector unions and bureaucratic government structures, reality […]

Rhode Island is looking more and more like Greece, and not in a good way.  That is one message of this important piece by Mary Williams Walsh in the New York Times.  Years of blue social policy have wrecked local and state government finance in the country’s smallest state, and now the bills are coming […]