On the Contrary
It’s a summer of stupid lawsuits. Food “addicts” are suing McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and KFC, claiming that the fast-food industry creates cravings for unhealthy food and fails to provide consumers with nutritional information. (They might as well sue their parents for failing to provide them with common sense.) A female passenger is suing Delta…
Forget Retirement. Get to Work.
A popular myth is that because we live longer, we should work longer. But while Americans indeed enjoy longer life spans, a great many are not happy to be in the paid workforce. They are working not for the social or intellectual stimulation but out of plain economic need. They are working because America’s pension…
The Taxonomist: What If We’d Already Privatized Social Security?
Late in the fall of 1999, presidential candidate George W. Bush began talking up the idea of investing the Social Security Trust Fund in the stock market. What would have happened if his wish had immediately come true? Bush’s idea was — and apparently still is — that invested in stocks, Social Security could earn…
Retirement at Risk
Marking the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, America finds itself in an interwar funk. We go about our business as in peacetime, even as we seem to be drifting, inexorably, toward a new and more perilous Mideast conflict. While a few foreign-policy barons are in fierce debate, most Americans would rather not think…
The Origin of Specious
Stephen Jay Gould, who died of cancer at the age of 60 this past May, defined a place in American culture likely to remain vacant now that he is gone. He was, of course, the country’s foremost opponent of creationism and champion of Darwinism, with a unique ability to bring the HMS Beagle and baseball…
The Scandal Beyond Enron
The Enron implosion briefly focused public attention on the vulnerability of ordinary Americans’ pension coverage. But the remedial legislation passed by the Republican House actually makes workers even more vulnerable. The bigger scandal is not the occasional loss of entire retirement savings in cases such as Enron’s but the inadequate coverage and systematic erosion of…
Social Security: The Right Fix
Last year, President Bush appointed a commission to design a Social Security reform that included voluntary individual accounts. Appointees chosen for the commission were all sympathetic to this partial-privatization approach. Before signing on, they also accepted the commission’s charge of restoring long-term financial soundness without increasing payroll taxes. In December the commission presented three plans…
Dangerous Medicine
Thirteen dangerous prescription drugs have been withdrawn from the market in the last decade — but not before hundreds of patients died and thousands were injured. Yet no congressional committee has investigated why the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved these dubious medicines or why they were not withdrawn right away. In fact, just this…
Emily’s List Hissed
In early August, a months-long whispering campaign against Emily’s List hit the pages of Roll Call. In an article headlined “Making Enemies,” four anonymous Democratic consultants and operatives took turns criticizing the 17-year-old political action committee (PAC) — the largest source of Democratic hard money around — for wasting Democrats’ time, money and effort by…
The Crossover Candidate
Minutes before the candidates’ forum began on a sweltering day at the South DeKalb Mall, incumbent U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) was just “Cynthia” to her beloved DeKalb County voters, kissing elderly ladies and hamming it up for the cameras. “Ding a ling! Ding a ling!” she shouted, announcing the free ice cream for kids.…
Politics with People, Reinvented
Senator Paul Wellstone, who died today along with his wife Sheila, his daughter Marcia and five others in a plane crash in Minnesota, was perhaps more than any other individual the very heart of American liberalism. His death leaves a gaping hole in our politics — liberal politics, American politics — that will be very…
Perils of Preemptive War
On June 1 at West Point, President George W. Bush set forth a new doctrine for U.S. security policy. The successful strategies of the Cold War era, he declared, are ill suited to national defense in the 21st century. Deterrence means nothing against terrorist networks; containment will not thwart unbalanced dictators possessing weapons of mass…
Money Where His Mouth Is
Afghan women acquired an unlikely ally last November, when first lady and “Comforter in Chief” Laura Bush became feminism’s newest convert. In a radio address, Mrs. Bush bemoaned the plight of Afghan women and declared a U.S. commitment to restoring their rights. Four months later, on International Women’s Day, the first lady embraced even more…
Stray Crats
On Dec. 6, 2001, under rhetorical pressure from Speaker Dennis Hastert (“Support our president, who is fighting a courageous war on terrorism.”) and real pressure from the administration and corporate America, members of the House of Representatives passed a bill granting the president fast-track trade-promotion authority by a single vote: 215-to-214. The bill would not…
Book Review:
The Left Behind series By Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins. Tyndale House Publishing, $14.99 each Nicolae Carpathia, the man who turned the United Nations into a one-world government with himself as dictator, has just decided on genocide. In his palace in New Babylon, capital of the world, Carpathia — alias the Antichrist — barks instructions…
America Alone in the World
The horrors of September 11 confronted the United States with an extraordinary challenge and an extraordinary opportunity. The challenge was to increase our “homeland security” by measures that might have averted disaster, had they been implemented before the attacks, and that would minimize the risk of similar assaults in the future. The opportunity was to…
A Party of One
Tony Wilson, narrator and protagonist of the fictionalized documentary 24 Hour Party People, is a hard man to pin down. Club owner, record label boss, self-proclaimed “serious journalist,” daring entrepreneur, terrible businessman, style guru, buffoon, manipulator, facilitator, wide-eyed fan: He’s here and he’s there, a creature of contradiction. The people around him, when grasping for…
9-11, One Year Later
September 11 will be commemorated this year as a day of national and private grief, but it is also a political anniversary. One year ago, the postCold War era came to an end and a new phase in our country’s history began. What this new phase will be — whether the September 11 attacks will…
Comment: Democracy and Dread
Marking the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, America finds itself in an interwar funk. We go about our business as in peacetime, even as we seem to be drifting, inexorably, toward a new and more perilous Mideast conflict. While a few foreign-policy barons are in fierce debate, most Americans would rather not think…
