Starving for Your Job
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pages, $27.50) I opened Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat expecting another paean to globalization, and though it surely is that, this book is also a well-reported, original, and nuanced discussion that every…
The Liberal Project Now
Liberalism is at greater risk now than at any time in recent American history. The risk is of political marginality, even irrelevance. And the reason is not just a shift in partisan control of the federal government. There has been a radical change in the relationship of ideology and power in America. Only by renewing…
The Death and Life of American Liberalism
“I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” — Jon Lovitz playing Michael Dukakis, Saturday Night Live, October 1988 Why are we losing to these guys? On nearly every major issue, public-opinion polls show that the Bush administration and the Republican Congress are well to the right of the country. Yet George W.…
Dossier: Black Gold, Texas Tea
In early May, the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline was $2.18 … A year ago, it was $1.89 … Also in May, a barrel of light crude oil was quoted at $52 … When that price increase was announced, the stock market promptly fell nearly 30 points … Around that time, Venezuelan…
Little Magazine, Big Ideas
The American Prospect began with a small circulation and great ambitions. Our aim was to rethink ideas about public policy and politics and thereby to restore plausibility and persuasiveness to American liberalism. The first issue appeared in spring 1990, a historical moment in some respects like today: Democrats had lost successive presidential elections, there was…
The Easy Money
The Internal Revenue Service estimates that some $350 billion in taxes owed to the federal government is evaded or otherwise unpaid every year. That sum, also known as the “tax gap,” nearly equals the current federal budget deficit. Of this $350 billion, enforcement efforts eventually recover about $43 billion — and much more could be…
Bush’s Tax-Deform Panel
The president’s advisory panel on Federal Tax Reform is mouthing some surprisingly attractive lines about improving our tax system. A panel appointed by Mr. Big Deficits points out that “we have lost sight of the fact that the fundamental purpose of our tax system is to raise revenues to fund government.” Mr. Loophole’s appointees argue…
Talking Taxes
George W. Bush has made tax cuts the touchstone of his presidency, supporting new ones each year, with the economy in growth and in recession, with record budget surpluses and record deficits, in peace and in war. Most of his fellow Republicans have sworn blood oaths never to raise taxes. They even managed to gain…
A Tax Plan for Progressives
For four years President Bush has touted his tax cuts as an economic cure-all, but middle-income workers have instead watched helplessly as the tiny tax cut they received has gone to pay for higher property taxes, tuition increases, and exploding medical costs. While the conservatives’ tax initiatives have wreaked havoc on people barely living on…
2001: Demystifying Terrorism
In October 2001, I wrote a piece for the Prospect [see “Excusing Terror”] in which I criticized “the politics of ideological apology” — the excuses that some on the left were making for terrorism. No one was justifying terrorism, but we were often asked to “understand” it. I argued that terrorism as a political strategy…
The Book Club
TODD GITLIN Professor of journalism and sociology, Columbia University Narrowly squeaking in under the 15-year limit is Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, by Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall (1991), which doesnft bring good news to liberals but is valuable for precisely that reason. Edsall has been…
1996: The Civic Enigma
More than a decade ago, I began to explore changes in Americans’ civic engagement and social connectedness (for which I borrowed the term “social capital”) and the impact of those changes on our communities and our democracy. My initial findings, suggesting a remarkable decline in social capital nationwide, appeared in a 1995 article called “Bowling…
Back from the Dead
On April 13, the U.S. House of Representatives undertook its annual drill of voting to permanently abolish the federal estate tax, our only tax on inherited wealth. In 2003, the House passed identical legislation. Last time, Congress’ projected 10-year cost of repeal was $162 billion; now, it’s a cool $290 billion. The lopsided vote for…
1994: Boasting on Demand
“Are we really on a cliff by the sea, poised perilously above the waves and the rocks? Or are we in fact down by the beach, on a gentle slope of soft and agreeable sand?” “Can’t We Go Faster?” TAP, September 1997 I claim the best record of any economist to survive the…
1992: Staircase to Nowhere
Back when I wrote “The Rich, the Right, and the Facts” for The American Prospect in September 1992, I was trying to get two ideas across: The middle-class society of the postwar era was unraveling, and the right was lying about it. It was a very straightforward exercise. My favorite figure was the graph showing…
The DeLay Wannabes
Amid all the turmoil over House ethics rules and Tom DeLay’s expanding assortment of scandals, the embattled majority leader’s Republican minions quickly resorted to the old “everybody does it” defense. “The things that Tom has been criticized about in one way or another every member of Congress could be criticized about,” declares Majority Whip Roy…
1995: Blacks and the Republican Party
In “The Future of Black Representation” in Fall 1995, Carol Swain warned that racial redistricting was helping Republicans. She’s still warning Democrats. Can the Republican Party successfully attract a growing percentage of the black vote? Barring new embarrassing blunders, such as the Trent Lott fiasco of a few years ago, the answer is an unequivocal…
Labor’s Civil War
By harold meyerson On Tuesday, May 3, 167 of the AFL-CIO’s 426 employees reported to work to find that their positions had been eliminated. Whole divisions were being scrapped, publications abolished, programs terminated. Some departments were being consolidated, and 61 new positions being created within them, but the house that Federation President John Sweeney had…
A Life of One’s Own
The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton University Press, 384 pages, $29.95) Many of us, when we pause to reflect on the larger questions, tend to think of our lives as vast projects that we are responsible for planning, organizing, and living out to completion. We often think, in fact, that a…
1992: A Kinder, Gentler Globalization
In December 1992, according to Bob Woodward’s The Agenda, President-elect Bill Clinton was about to announce Laura Tyson’s appointment as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, when Tyson mentioned she and Robert Reich had debated in The American Prospect whether the nationality of a firm was important. Suddenly recalling the debate, Clinton said, “You…
Lightning, Camera, Action
By J. Hoberman Can photographs, motion pictures, and television create social change? Or would it be more accurate to say that these camera-based forms construct a social reality? Michael Moore notwithstanding, the ultimate test case appeared 90 years ago: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released throughout America in the spring of 1915, remains…
Public Broadcast(igation)
For many years, conservatives have warned us that someday the commissars of political correctness would run amok and impose their opinions on us with our own tax dollars. What they didn’t tell us is that they would become those commissars, and that their politically correct orthodoxy would be the Republican Party line. But that’s exactly…
Philosophy 101
Here in Washington, “progressives” — the preferred term of art these days — have been feeling pretty good lately. George W. Bush’s Social Security privatization plan is still stuck in neutral, if not reverse. Tom DeLay, perhaps this town’s most important Repub-lican on an emotional level, is under fire. Poll after poll shows that the…
The Prince and the Dissident
As a former aide-de-camp to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei and one of the founders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Sazegara was once at the radical, sharply anti-American vanguard of that country’s Islamic revolution. Operating from Khomenei’s exile headquarters in Paris during the 1970s, the U.S.–educated student revolutionary was so close to the theocrats plotting to…
Bolton From the Blue
About halfway through Senator Richard Lugar’s droning opening statement in the May 12 confirmation hearing of John Bolton to become the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a yawn made its way around the press table. And it lingered — until Lugar ceded the floor to the incalculable senator from Ohio, George Voinovich, when…
Perfectly Legal
The troubles House Majority Leader Tom DeLay faces for allowing a lobbyist to pay for overseas trips in violation of House rules provide a perfect example of Los Angeles Times op-ed page editor Michael Kinsley’s famous dictum: The real scandal is what’s legal. And the congressional rules that may yet ensnare DeLay suggest another truism:…
1991: How We Found — and Lost — a Majority
Stanley B. Greenberg’s Fall 1991 article, “From Crisis to Working Majority,” was widely considered a key manifesto for the 1992 Clinton campaign. Bob Woodward reported that Bill Clinton said he had read it three times. On the eve of Bill Clinton’s announced candidacy for president, I reviewed a wave of provocative books about the “deepening…
The Democracy Solution
Not long after George W. Bush delivered his June 2002 speech severing relations with Yasir Arafat, a White House reporter wondered whether Natan Sharansky had become one of the president’s speechwriters. By the time of President Bush’s second inaugural, in January 2005, reporters no longer had to guess at Sharansky’s influence. The previous November, the…
1992: As I Predicted, Only Worse
In December 1992, according to Bob Woodward’s The Agenda, President-elect Bill Clinton was about to announce Laura Tyson’s appointment as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, when Tyson mentioned she and Robert Reich had debated in The American Prospect whether the nationality of a firm was important. Suddenly recalling the debate, Clinton said, “You…
Their Babies Are Everything
Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas (University of California Press, 312 pages, $24.95) In the American pantheon of evildoers, “welfare moms” easily outrank rotten CEOs, corrupt defense contractors, and media moguls who sell sex and sensation. No group has been as demonized,…
1990: Welfare Then and Now
Well before Bill Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it,” the first issue of The American Prospect included a long article by Kathryn Edin and myself [see “The Real Welfare Problem,” Spring 1990] urging liberals to rethink welfare. Our argument rested on two facts. First, both Edin’s research and national surveys showed that…
