The Mind as Passion
Once upon a time, American intellectual life featured a ritual known as the Partisan Review symposium. It was a solemn event, combining elements of high Mass and a boxing match. Here is how it worked: Every year or so, the tribal elders, gathering in the journal’s offices in New York, would prepare a list of…
The Coming Bush Bust
Neoconomy: George Bush’s Revolutionary Gamble with America’s Future by Daniel Altman (PublicAffairs, 290 pages, $26.95) Innovation and its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What to Do About It by Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner ()Princeton University Press, 256 pages, $29.95) Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican…
Man-Made Disasters
BANGKOK, THAILAND — On December 26, when the tsunamis struck Asia, I was in Thailand. Like nearly everyone in Bangkok, I turned to any television I could find. The local Thai channels captured the breadth of the devastation, showing grim photos of southern beaches that looked like someone had swept away all the vegetation and…
Breach of Faith
At the Muslim Al-Noor school in Brooklyn, New York, all girls wear the hijab. Heads covered with white cloth scarves fill the classrooms, and long blue or green robes hide any Western-style clothing worn underneath. A few are modest beyond what’s mandatory, wearing chador-style coverings that expose only the eyes, but the robes and headscarves…
New Labor?
For a life-and-death debate about the future of the labor movement, the current conflict over the structure and role of America’s unions got off to a singularly inauspicious start. A week and a day after John Kerry’s — and the unions’ — defeat at the hands of George W. Bush, the Executive Council of the…
Is Moore Less?
Late last December, in a particularly dim installment of end-of-year political punditry, the assembled talking heads on the Sunday-morning Chris Matthews Show were debating who deserved the title “biggest noisemaker of 2004.” The choices Matthews offered them were Mel Gibson, Jon Stewart, and Michael Moore. Andrew Sullivan mused a bit about Gibson. Then Cokie Roberts…
Hired Education
M. Michael Wolfe, a gastroenterologist at Boston University, admits he was duped by the Pharmacia Corporation, the manufacturer of the blockbuster arthritis drug Celebrex. (In 2003, the company was purchased by Pfizer.) In the summer of 2000, The Journal of the American Medical Association asked Wolfe to write a review of a study showing that…
Almost Heaven?
In April 2004, several members of the West Virginia House of Delegates flew to Minnesota to speak at a national meeting of the Council of State Governments. The legislators were eager for support from other states to bolster their ongoing effort to force drug companies to lower prices. Specifically, the West Virginia delegation wanted the…
Unusual Suspects
On the morning of September 24, 2003 — five weeks after the suicide bombing of a United Nations compound in Baghdad killed 23 people, including top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, signaling an intensified phase of Iraqi insurgency — a group of American soldiers burst into Selwa’s villa near the banks of the Tigris River…
State Corporate-Tax Follies
If you’re unhappy with the mess George W. Bush has made of the federal corporate income tax, you’ll be less happy to learn that things are even worse in the states. Last September, my group published a study showing that America’s biggest and most profitable corporations now shelter more than half of their U.S. profits…
It’s Medicare, Stupid
Of the nation’s two giant entitlement programs, only one is in real trouble. It’s Medicare, not Social Security. As our special supplement makes clear, the Social Security system isn’t in a crisis. The system has been in surplus for years now, and those surpluses have been used to cover part of the government’s annual budget…
You Better Think!
On February 12, the 447 members of the Democratic National Committee are to elect a new chairman to replace Terry McAuliffe. Four days later, an important new book — John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, by Richard Parker — is due to hit bookstores. These two events actually have a lot to…
Dossier: Loose Nukes
Russia’s estimated stockpile includes 18,000 assembled nuclear warheads at some 150 to 210 sites … Additionally, it retains an estimated 603 metric tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and 170 metric tons of separated plutonium … A working nuclear bomb requires at least 16 kilograms of uranium or 4 kilograms of plutonium … Only 3…
We’ve Already Tried Private Accounts!
President Bush wants to “privatize” a portion of the Social Security program. As part of that debate, we should remember that our experience with 401(k) plans provides some evidence about how well such a program might work. The results to date are not encouraging and should serve as a blinking yellow light. 401(k) plans, which…
Another Mistaken Racial Stereotype
President Bush has decided there’s a crisis within the Social Security system. Among the many ways in which his supporters justify the need for immediate action, there’s this one: Social Security is a bad deal for African Americans. It’s hard to miss the irony here. The same conservative coalition that has promoted racist federal judges,…
We’re All in This Together
Savings are low, debt is mounting, the dollar is weak, and the economy is projected to grow more slowly in this century than the last. But that’s not the half of it. What we really have to worry about, according to a chorus of prophets, is the prospect of Americans living too long. This failure…
Social Security and the New Fiscal Policy
The most profound, and profoundly disturbing, innovation in budget policy during the administration of George W. Bush has been to discard the old-fashioned notion that presidents who propose a tax cut or new spending should also propose some way to pay for it. That practice, apparently, is just soooo 20th century. Observers of this administration’s…
Are Voters Paying Attention?
In the wake of his 2004 victory, President Bush seems poised to challenge the axiom that Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Democratic Party leaders will be making a very serious mistake if they believe that Americans will rush to the barricades to fight the president’s privatization proposals. Blocking his radical attack…
Privatization and the English Language
The art of building consensus out of the “vague and confusing medley” of individual opinions, Walter Lippmann wrote in The Phantom Public, consists in narrowing issues to a few simplified alternatives that can be reduced to “symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.” It would be hard to go any…
Bipartisanship Remembered
Amid the clatter over “saving” Social Security, it’s instructive to look back 22 years — to a time when an imperiled program was saved by a true bipartisan compromise. Then, as now, a newly emboldened GOP was rewriting the agenda in Washington. But then, unlike now, each side sacrificed for long-term gain. As the 1980s…
Bush’s Bridge Too Far
The epic social security battle of 2005 will boil down to two questions: which side will do a more effective job getting its message out to voters, and which party can enforce the tighter discipline in Congress. Seemingly, the circumstances favor the Republicans, who have the bully pulpit of the White House, almost infinite financial…
Bush’s Numbers Racket
The word from President Bush and his minions is that Social Security is on its last legs, facing imminent danger of bankruptcy. Fortunately, Bush is prepared to rescue this antiquated program by offering workers the opportunity to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in private accounts. He would like us to believe that…
A Battle Progressives Can Win
President Bush claims the 2004 election gave him a mandate to pursue his No. 1 second-term priority, the partial privatization of Social Security. But the voters don’t think so. Only 35 percent of Americans think Bush has a mandate “to allow workers to invest some of their Social Security taxes in the stock market,” while…
Our Best Anti-Poverty Program
Why does the United States and every other developed nation have a system of social-insurance pensions? The simple answer is that social insurance is intended to ensure basic income to those no longer able to work. These include the elderly, the disabled, orphans, and widows and widowers with small children. “Ensure” means that incomes must…
Why We Need Social Security
For nearly three-quarters of a century, Americans have taken Social Security for granted. Now we had better learn how it works, what it has done, and what the true facts are regarding its future — or else we are going to lose it. Superficially, Social Security resembles traditional employer pensions: Americans pay into the system…
A Worldly Economist
An ode to Robert L. Heilbroner, who died on January 4.
