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Vol. 7 No. 28September 1996
Features
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Delivering for Young Families: The Resonance of the GI Bill
The problem isn't that old folks get too much money from government -- it's that young families get too little. Recalling the GI Bill and the politics of generational solidarity. -
Devil in the Details
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Fighting the Establishment (Clause)
The Rutherford Institute portrays itself as merely interested in defending the rights of religious Americans. A closer look reveals a more sweeping and questionable agenda. -
Damage Report
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Motor Voter or Motivated Voter?
The Motor Voter law was supposed to dramatically increase turnout and give marginalized groups more voice in politics. Unfortunately, getting these groups to register doesn't do any good if you don't give them reason to vote. -
Who Won the Cold War?
Is it high time for liberals to apologize to the anticommunist right, which correctly gauged the red menace from the start? Sorry, the credit belongs to a brave band of liberal cold warriors beginning with George Kennan. -
Is God a Republican?: Why Politics Is Dangerous for Religion
The Christian Coalition has made a dangerous gamble by associating faith with the Republican Party. If God blesses us only as Republicans or Democrats, both politics and religion are in trouble. -
State of the Debate: Peddling Krugman
Paul Krugman criticizes supporters of government activism as nothing but policy peddlers and economic illiterates, but describes himself as a liberal. What is MIT's prodigy really up to? -
Back from the Dead: Neoprogressivism in the '90s
The conservative revolution turned out to be less than a mandate. Can the various factions that call themselves progressive get behind a common vision? -
Starting Small, Thinking Big
Society needs to help the very young, long before formal schooling begins, or the battle for the next generation will be lost. -
Private Heroism and Public Purpose
Working- and middle-class voters remain economically anxious. But in the absence of a convincing narrative that connects to their lives, many are concluding from their condition that the only remedy is rugged individualism. -
Take the Initiative, Please: Referendum Madness in California
Ballot initiatives were supposed to make government more responsive to the people. In California, a series of referenda has had just the opposite effect. -
On the Politics of Virtue
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Is God a Republican?: Why Politics Is Dangerous for Religion
The Christian Coalition has made a dangerous gamble by associating faith with the Republican Party. If God blesses us only as Republicans or Democrats, both politics and religion are in trouble. -
How Low Can You Go?
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Vol. 7 No. 27July 1996
Features
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The Starbucks Solution: Can Voluntary Codes Raise Global Living Standards
Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and Levi Strauss say they will do the right thing all over the world. That's better than if they made no commitment, but it may not be much. -
Social Compact, Version 2.0
Responsible companies promise to uphold higher values. Yet the new economy makes it harder than ever for companies to take on a broader social role -- that's why we invented government. -
Children in the Digital Age
There's trouble in Cyber City, and pornography is the least of it. -
Return of the Native
Isolationism is rising among Republicans along with antigovernment fervor. Is Bob Dole -- as Newt Gingrich says -- another Bob Taft? -
Back to Class
Are Americans really just unrealistic whiners? -
How Low Can You Go?
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The Economics of Despair
Young adults today earn half of what they would have made 20 years ago. Herewith an explanation, and a prescription, by three labor economists. -
Was Welfare Reform Worthwhile?
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Social Change One on One: The New Mentoring Movement
The evidence is in: Mentoring kids from single-parent families has dramatic benefits. So why aren't we doing more of it? -
Of Our Time: Taking Care of Business
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Computer Clubhouses in the Inner City: Access Is Not Enough
A new kind of learning community shows how children from any neighborhood can become "technologically fluent." -
Below the Beltway
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Drift or Mandate?: The 1996 Elections
The voters' decision in November will determine whether the late 1990s usher in America's "fourth Republic."
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Vol. 7 No. 26May 1996
Features
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Saving Their Assets: How to Stop Plunder at Blue Cross and Other Nonprofits
Huge nonprofit corporations are now being converted to for-profit companies, to the immense benefit of corporate insiders. But they can't take charitable assets with them. A victory in California shows what the public should insist upon. -
The Fleece Police
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Straight From the Sixties: What Conservatives Owe the Decade They Hate
Apocalyptic intemperateness, paranoia, a loathing of compromise, a demonization of the enemy -- where have we run into this before? -
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files II
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Goldwater's Glitter
Conservatives hail Barry Goldwater as a forerunner; liberals appreciate his belated moderation. But Goldwater wasn't the paragon a new biography makes him out to be. -
Rewarding Work: Feasible Antipoverty Policy
A higher minimum wage and the earned income tax credit fit like puzzle pieces, each compensating for the other's flaws. Together they are our best bet to fight poverty. -
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files II
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Social Security on the Table
Must we destroy Social Security in order to save it? -
Toward a More Perfect Union: New Labor's Hard Road
The labor movement has new life, but faces immense obstacles. Here's what it can accomplish. -
Of Our Time: After Solidarity
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Connecting with E.M. Forster
A futuristic fantasy from early in this century offers us a hellish version of life on the Internet. -
The Corrosive Politics of Virtue
Decrying moral failure is an old American tradition that goes back to the Puritans. But the moral diagnosis is wrong -- and it brings pernicious political consequences. -
Cooked to Order
When two economists showed that a higher minimum wage would have little adverse effect on jobs, did the fast food industry try to spike the data and poison their reputations? -
Devil in the Details
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The Biggest Deal: Lobbying to Take Social Security Private
Privatizing Social Security would create an enormous financial bonanza. So guess who's spending millions to change public perceptions and national policy. -
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files II
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"F" Is for Fizzle: The Faltering School Privatization Movement
Entrepreneurs promised they could rescue public schools and turn a profit too. Reality intruded. -
Welfare Reform as I Knew It: When Bad Things Happen to Good Policies
"I'll look forward to reading your book on why it failed this time," Senator Moynihan told me on my first visit as cochair of the Clinton working group on welfare reform. Herewith, the first installment.
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Vol. 7 No. 25March 1996
Features
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Animal House Meets Church Lady
One moment it's frat-boy humor; the next, it's the old verities. Limbaugh, P.J. O'Rourke, and other comedians of the right love to have it both ways. -
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files
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The Surrender of Economic Policy
As long as the big choices in macroeconomic policy are off the table, other efforts to raise living standards will not make much difference. -
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files
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How Low Can You Go?
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The Crusade That's Killing Prosperity
The Federal Reserve's crusade against the ghost of inflation has driven unemployment much higher than the official numbers suggest. It's not technology that's keeping down wages -- it's the policy of America's politically insulated central bank. -
Devil in the Details
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Restoration Fever
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How the West Is Won: Astroturf Lobbying and the "Wise Use" Movement
How corporate developers have used grassroots organizing to disguise their attack on environmental protection -- and how activists in one state stopped them. -
Storylines: Get Me Rewrite
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Wither the Democrats
The Democrats still haven't found a way to tap America's discontent. Some new political books suggest how they can. -
We'll Talk About That: Can Liberals Do Radio?
Liberals do movies, rock and roll, talk TV, even local talk radio. So why no liberal Rush? -
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files
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Passions of Crime
Getting tough on crime has always been popular. Now there's also big money in it. Crime policy today is a study in irrational passions and rational interests. -
Orbit of Influence: Spy Finance and the Black Budget
America's huge budget for electronic reconnaissance might have come in for scrutiny after the Cold War. But the few in Congress who are supposed to watch over the world of spy finance are also big beneficiaries of it. -
Global Villagers: The Rise of Transnational Communities
A new breed of immigrant community is breaking down national borders and confounding traditional notions of citizenship. -
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files
Couch-Potato Democracy? -
The Ultimate Self-Referral: Health Care Reform, AMA-Style
Why did the American Medical Association support Newt Gingrich's proposals on Medicare? Not for the reasons the media suggested. -
Unsolved Mysteries: The Tocqueville Files
Robert Putnam Responds
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Vol. 7 No. 24December 1995
Features
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Come the Devolution
You say you want a devolution? Then pay very close attention to the details, most of which stick the states with more liabilities -- and fewer resources. -
Racial Redistricting Redux
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Toxic Cash: How Lobbyists Poisoned the EPA
Despite some eleventh-hour heroics by environmentalists, the Republican Congress has been offering lots of goodies to industry polluters -- thanks largely to the corporate lobbyists who wrote much of the legislation. -
Of Our Time: Fearful Symmetry
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How Low Can You Go?
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The Strange Disappearance of Civic America
A year ago the author set off a national debate with his article, "Bowling Alone," which reported a pervasive decline in voluntary association and mutual trust among Americans. Now he sifts through the plausible explanations. -
The Strange Disappearance of Civic America
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Orwell's Poor and Ours
Orwell depicted the poor unsentimentally, but with compassion and economic realism. Today's conservative critics, who blame poverty on an absence of values, do neither. -
Devil in the Details
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The Inflated Case Against the CPI
A consensus seemingly has emerged that the consumer price index exaggerates inflation. But before we change the numbers, we had better look closely at the arguments. They don't hold up. -
Cosmopolitics
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Does Liberalism Cause Sex?
Conservatives say liberalized access to contraceptives and sex education in the schools have led to more unprotected teen sex and teen births. But let's look at the evidence. -
The Populist Road to Hell: Term Limits in California
It sounded like a good idea, but if California is any indication, term limits are a recipe for political chaos and increased special interest influence. -
Moving From the 'Hood: The Mixed Success of Integrating Suburbia
In theory, dispersing the poor to better suburban schools, jobs, and housing was a bipartisan alternative to housing projects and ghetto unemployment. But, surprise, nobody wanted them in the neighborhood. -
Children's Crusade
They're at it again -- conservatives are masquerading as the patrons of the young. Before you buy it, think carefully about how much kids and young adults depend upon activist government. -
Dear Brother Sweeney: An Open Letter to Labor's New Leader
Get out of Washington, hire the idealistic young, and turn Labor back into a movement. -
Carol M. Swain Responds
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