Commentary

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 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. Voters, we were told, were not savvy enough to figure out the respective roles of federal and state officials and apportion credit or blame accordingly.

A recent CBO report on the long-term budget outlook has reheated deficit hysteria. But the points of fiscal stress the CBO highlighted were misleading, its alternative budget scenarios lacked range or nuance, and its treatment of "excess" growth in health care costs cavalier.

Of all the fantasies indulged in by a society speeding toward self-destruction, none is as consequential as the idea that continuing growth has a happy-ever-after ending. But even if ever-increasing population were survivable, is it really desirable? Can't we figure out any adaptations to enable an aging society to be economically and socially robust?

The Governor has a 69 percent approval rating, totes around an adoring press corps, and has been described as the tamer of New York's dysfunctional legislature. But preventing a repeat of the state's usual gerrymandering process in this redistricting cycle was just not important enough to Cuomo. So he has broken his promise to veto cynical plans to reproduce the status quo.

As the Supreme Court looks ready to restrict or eliminate race-based affirmative action in its 2012-13 session, supporters of such preferences have a tool not yet deployed: race-based affirmative action as a means to compensate for the disproportionately negative impact of current-day "legacy admissions" policies on minority applicants.

Do all cultures celebrate cheating as much as we do? I’ll concede in advance the danger of falling into the this-is-the-worst-it-has-ever-been trap, and even acknowledge, on a moment’s reflection, that our time and place has no patent on pretense, disingenuousness, and deceit. But we are still in staggeringly bad shape.

Apple's lack of any sense of obligation to support American workers — indeed, the lack of any national loyalty at all — is appalling. Yet that’s not even the truly frightening part of the recent New York Times story. Most troubling is the broader, underlying narrative conveyed and ultimately encouraged by the story: there is nothing that America as a nation can or should do to alter the trajectory of events.

Our article on how German automakers treat their workers in the U.S. less well than those in Germany highlighted a critical national choice: create structures that help to level the playing field between management and labor, or surrender to the pernicious idea that nothing can or should be done to restrict an employer race to the bottom.

...can keep Congress and the press from shortsightedly focusing on "balanced" budget reductions despite a stalled economy and both long-term and short-term experience with the folly of austerity. It's like one of those arguments where you may think you're making headway, but where you get to the end and you might as well have saved your breath. Can anything prevent Democrats from seeking to give up hard-won gains?