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National Journal | December 5, 2012 IF THE AMERICAN economy were an automobile, you would say the transmission is failing. The engine works, but not all wheels are getting power. To put the matter less metaphorically: The economy no longer reliably and consistently transmits productivity gains to workers. The result is that many millions of Americans,…
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National Journal | September 27, 2012 AT A salon dinner in Washington recently, the subject was inequality. An economist took the floor. Economic inequality, he said, is not a problem. Poverty is a problem, certainly. Unemployment, yes. Slow growth, yes. But he had never yet seen a good reason to believe that inequality, as such—the widening gap…
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Reason Magazine | June 2012 Review of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, by Charles Murray, Crown Forum, 400 pages, $27 UNLESS you live in a cave, you know the controversial work and reputation of Charles Murray. Losing Ground, published in 1984, proposed eliminating welfare as we knew it and became the template for conservative welfare reform. The…
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The Daily | June 3, 2012 WHEN President Obama came out in favor of gay marriage recently, he placed the decision in a Christian framework, invoking the self-sacrifice of Jesus and the Golden Rule. Not surprisingly, some Christians disagreed. “Folks were so determined to make Obama a Christian,” one minister was quoted as saying. “But Christians…
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Salon.com | May 15, 2012 IT IS A beautiful spring day in Washington, D.C., around 5 p.m. I am arriving at the august Peterson Institute for International Economics. Today, however, the place is not a think tank but a chapel, and the important words to be uttered are not “trade-weighted exchange rates” but “I do.” My…
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The Washington Post | May 13, 2012 President Obama came out in support of gay marriage Wednesday. Yet, only a day earlier, voters in North Carolina had approved a constitutional ban on gay marriage and other domestic partner arrangements — even though a majority told pollsters they favored allowing gay marriage or domestic partnerships. If that seems confusing, it…
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The New Republic | May 11, 2012 When he first campaigned for the White House, Barack Obama vowed to be a fierce advocate for gay rights, but it hasn’t always been clear if he intended to keep his promise. Indeed, we gay folks had gotten used to grousing about the President. We noticed the way he…
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The New York Times Book Review | October 7, 2011 Years ago Irving Kristol, the prime mover of American neoconservatism, said to me, in typical aphoristic style: “The orthodox are always right.” What he meant, I think, is that the enduring truths of traditionalism may at times be hard to grasp, but they endure for a…
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The Daily | July 24, 2011 TEN Republicans are in the running for the presidential nomination. It looks like a big, competitive field. But don’t be fooled. More than a century’s worth of history suggests that only three candidates — former governors Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, and Jon Huntsman — are electable in 2012. Of…
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Attacking countries we aren’t at war with is the new normThe Daily | May 23, 2011 IT HAS been a bad few months of a bad few years of a bad few decades for the central principle of international relations. Consider an odd headline about an American attempt to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, an al Qaeda propagandist…