Features

It’s not only the pope who believes the U.S. should lift its embargo. A growing number of Cuban Americans think the old hard-line strategy to oust Castro just isn’t working.

Works Discussed in this Essay: The Paradox of China’s Post-Mao Reforms, edited by Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar. Harvard University Press, 424 pages, $49.50. After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics and “Thought Work” in Reformed China, by Daniel C. Lynch. Stanford University Press, 424 pages, $49.50. About Face: A History of America’s […]

Speaking to a German radio interviewer last July, Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui sparked a diplomatic fire storm with three seemingly innocuous words: Taiwan, he announced, would henceforth treat contacts with mainland China as “state-to-state” relations. The Chinese government responded to this announcement with a furious barrage of invectives and a rapidly escalating chorus of threats […]

Y our taxonomist and my friend, Robert McIntyre, has offered us a lesson on the merits of paying down public debt [“In Praise of Debt Reduction,” September 11, 2000]. Everyone knows Bob’s work on tax policy is invaluable, but his class on fiscal policy is one I’d rather cut. Bob begins with the reasonable point […]

One problem the Republican leadership faces in boasting about the accomplishments of the 1999 congressional session is that one of them was the repudiation of the primary “success” they were trumpeting proudly in 1997. That was the year the Republican Congress passed—and lamentably got Bill Clinton to sign—the wildly misnamed Balanced Budget Act. It was […]

I f I understand Max correctly, our main points of disagreement seem to be the following: A couple of times, he challenges the truism that paying off debt now will make it easier for future taxpayers to maintain or enhance public programs–just as Reagan’s big debt buildup in the 1980s made it harder to maintain […]

Hawkish conservatives today must secretly reserve a special affection for the late Idaho Democrat Frank Church; after all, he provided them with the cudgel they’ve since used to batter liberal critics of the U.S. intelligence community. As chair of the Senate’s 1975 intelligence investigation, Church famously characterized the Central Intelligence Agency as a “rogue elephant […]

On June 10, amid much hoopla, the House of Representatives voted by a margin of 279-136 to repeal the federal estate tax–along with the federal gift tax and the so-called generation-skipping transfer tax. While the legislative initiative was orchestrated by the House Republican leadership, 50 Democrats joined as co-sponsors, and 65 voted for the bill. […]

Department of Stunning Revelations Ashcroft vows to let laws prevail Headline in The Boston Globe, January 17, 2001 Key to pardon is access: Many who get presidential action have connections Headline in The Washington Post, January 22, 2001 Amazon Man Has there ever been a more compulsively didactic politician than the […]

I t would be bad enough if the Republicans’ tax plans were merely extravagantly regressive, rewarding the rich and leaving a big budget hole for everyone else to fill. But they appear just when the income gap has grown wider than it has been in more than a century. It’s a double whammy. Al Gore […]