Mark Schmitt

“Obama’s budget proposal came as a slap in the face to many nonprofits, which had thought they had a friend in him because of his early work as a community organizer.” This is in the course of a completely gullible story in The New York Times by Stephanie Strom, about nonprofits complaining mostly about the […]

My column in the March issue of TAP argued that President Barack Obama‘s primary mission was to change the culture and assumptions of American democracy, but he had acquired a second mission, which was to change the culture of capitalism. But the sicknesses and erroneous assumptions in the two cultures were intertwined, and even though […]

It only took twelve years, but the New York Times has discovered the fundamental problem with the 1996 welfare reform: It doesn’t work in a deep recession! This should not be news. While the law was hailed as ending the “entitlement” to welfare, that did not mean that individuals lost an automatic entitlement to benefits, […]

John McQuaid makes a marvelously concise point about the different ways in which the last two presidents relate to the media. As John summarized it even more concisely in his Twitter feed, “Obama and Bush each see the establishment media agenda in conflict with his own. To Bush it’s ideologically hostile; to Obama, trivial.” Like […]

There was an air of a lost era, of the days of the Roosevelts and Henry Stimson, about Senator Claiborne Pell, who passed away a few days ago, and who Tim Fernholz eulogized appropriately the other day. Like his colleague John Chafee — who was several degrees below Pell in the social register but still […]

I’ve been watching the news of Bernie Madoff’s apparent Ponzi scheme with a certain fascination — it’s easier to understand than CDOs — but also a certain distance. I don’t know anyone who hangs out at the Palm Beach Country Club. And most of the charities affected did not involve causes of much interest to […]