Robert Reich

I poked around Washington on Friday, talking with friends on the Hill who confirmed the worst: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging health-care bill. You know why, of course. They don’t want a public option that would compete with private insurers and […]

Has Ben Bernanke suddenly become a deficit hawk? In remarks to the House Budget Committee, he sounded like one, calling on Congress to come up with a plan to restore fiscal balance over the long term: “Unless we demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal sustainability in the longer term, we will have neither financial stability […]

As president of General Motors when Eisenhower tapped him to become secretary of defense in 1953, “Engine Charlie” Wilson voiced at his Senate confirmation hearing what was then the conventional view. When asked whether he could make a decision in the interest of the U.S. that was adverse to the interest of GM, he said […]

Symbolic analysts — the workers who make up the creative and knowledge economies — have been hit by the current downturn, just as everyone else has. But over the long term, symbolic analysts will do just fine, as long as they stay away from job functions that are becoming routinized. They will continue to benefit […]

What’s the administration’s specific aim in bailing out GM? I’ll give you my theory later. For now, though, some background. First and most broadly, it doesn’t make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any […]

America now has a full-blown industrial policy. But it’s an odd one — a combination of lemon socialism and taxpayer-financed regulation. Consider GM and Chrysler. To what purpose are our taxpayer dollars being put as we bail them out? Apparently only to help them survive, even as pale shadows of their former selves. Steve Rattner, […]

“Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the better” is a favorite slogan in Washington because compromise is necessary to get anything done. But the way things are going with health care, a better admonition would be: “Don’t give away the store.” Many experts have long agreed that a so-called single-payer plan is the ideal, […]

What are we to make of yesterday’s report from the trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds that Social Security will run out of assets in 2037 — four years sooner than previously forecast — and that Medicare’s hospital fund will be exhausted by 2017 — two years earlier than predicted a year […]