May 23, 2013
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Commentary
Commentary
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NYC, Population, Urban Policy
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was ecstatic last week, announcing that the city’s population had swollen to an all-time high. Unfortunately, the mayor remains completely dissociated from the many negative consequences already arising from the city’s population “boom.”More
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Education, History, Politics
In an address that otherwise reprised many of the noblest principles from this country's history, President Obama's remarks on education offered only a bleak vision of schools as training grounds for employers. Neither the principle that a good education is an essential requisite for developing active citizens nor the idea that education has intrinsic value independent of its utility in the job market made it into the speech.More
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Media, Politics
Former Senator George McGovern, a life-long advocate for social justice and the 1972 Democratic candidate for president who issued a clarion call to “Come home, America,” died earlier this week. His obituary in The New York Times reflected all too well the problem of image over substance in our politics and failed — even at the distance of 40 years — to put the consequences of the 1972 election in perspective.More
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Alternative models, Globalization
The current system clearly hasn't been so good for those to whom the benefits were supposed to trickle down. But the U.S. remains a mighty economic force, one that could push back effectively if it wished to, and cross-national cooperation could yield a mutual defense pact to protect countries from having to compete in a race to the bottom.More
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Budget deficit, Corporate influence, Economy
Having become disoriented in the fog of Corporate Uncertainty, I was trying to find my way when, suddenly, over the Fiscal Cliff I went. I plunged straight down — deeper and deeper into the abyss. I thought all was lost. But then I saw the Grand Bargain waiting for me, beckoning to me. For a moment, I rejoiced. The Grand Bargain hovered below me, ready to break my fall.More
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Federalism, Law
The Medicaid expansion portion of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act was most fundamentally a decision to reorder the relationship between the federal government and the states, a decision to subordinate the idea of nationhood to judge-made deference-to-states theory. If the court had not interfered, state officials were free to have rejected Medicaid expansion and to have accepted the consequences of a full cut off of existing Medicaid funding, and voters everywhere could have, as usual, decided how to apportion credit and blame between those state officials and their federal counterparts.More
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Budget deficit, Economy, Role of government, Taxes
A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on the long-term budget outlook for the U.S. from now to 2037 has reheated deficit hysteria in Washington. But the points of fiscal stress that the CBO highlighted were misleading, its alternative budget scenarios remarkably lacking in either range or nuance, and its focus on reining in "excess" growth in health care expenditures failed to emphasize appropriately the human cost that would be involved.More
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Aging, Population
Of all the fantasies indulged in by a society speeding toward self-destruction, none is as consequential as the idea that continuing growth — both in population and size of our economy — has a happy-ever-after ending. Yet, when overpopulation is discussed at all, it is discussed as a problem limited to the developing world. Indeed, a growing chorus of “pro-natalist” or population growth ideologues insists that, in the U.S. and other parts of the developed world, population stability or decline represents a demographic crisis that needs to be reversed.More