Commentary

A perennial conceit of much of the press is “we don’t make the news, we only report the news.” A just-released poll, however — revealing overwhelming support for greater income and wealth equality — underlines how much real news has been ignored by reporters preoccupied with centrism and compromise as all-weather solutions.

The abandonment of the element of the Affordable Care Act that was designed to provide insurance against the staggering costs of long-term care, announced by the Obama administration last Friday, raises important questions about the wisdom of having a strategy of always going for a legislative "half a loaf," especially when doing so obliges you both to understate the real costs of dealing with problems and to oversell the promise and potential of your solutions.

Not so much, it seems, if you only want to become president of the United States. Ask Chris Christie.

Get ready for spending cuts beyond the debt ceiling agreement. That deal only calls for spending caps, not spending floors. The regular appropriations process must be completed by Oct. 1, or else government operations shut down. The GOP will insist that those bills impose additional cuts. Any Democratic assertion of resistance will have no credibility in face of documented pattern of surrender. Oops. Turns out that costs and benefits of giving in to debt-ceiling hostage-taking were hopelessly miscalculated.

You can’t go five minutes without reading press accounts that characterize the Obama-Boehner budgetary prescription — now’s the time to start on $4 trillion in debt reduction — as “ambitious.” Is there anything less ambitious than plans to guarantee that our children and our grandchildren will live less well than we do?

Andrew Cuomo describes the deal to extend rent regulation for millions of NYC tenants as one representing “significant progress,” but he left the trigger points at which apartments are deregulated worse for tenants than they were 14 years ago, when then-Gov. George Pataki first orchestrated legislative changes designed to destroy rent regulation over time. Pataki's basic scheme is untouched by Cuomo’s paltry efforts.

However much money AARP spends, and however many town hall meetings it holds, its rationalizations for shifting position just won’t stand scrutiny. AARP isn't hopping aboard a ship that was already sailing, but rather choosing to provide critical momentum and cover to resuscitate the benefits-cutting effort.

Today’s robbing of the NYC employees’ health insurance fund as a “realistic” means to pay to avoid layoffs will become tomorrow’s hysterically anti-union “health benefits costs are out of control” rallying cry.

Faced with evidence of the ineffectiveness of its foreclosure prevention efforts, the Administration shrugs its shoulders and says it has "limited levers." The limitations are not a necessary fact of life, but a function of the view that forcing financial institutions to modify mortgages would be an affront to the dignity and sovereignty of banks.

U.S. colleges and universities continue to be world leaders. Annual surveys of higher education consistently rank a disproportionate number of American institutions in the top 100. Yet U.S. primary and secondary schools do poorly compared to top-performing systems worldwide. It is time to reexamine the categorical separation of K-12 and postsecondary education.