Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Group Therapy

by Joseph Joyce Group Therapy Pop quiz:  which U.S. policymaker said last week: “We can’t solve everyone else’s problems anymore” in response to foreign criticism of U.S. handling of what issue? a—Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, responding to criticism by foreign central bankers of the Fed’s tapering of its asset purchases; b—Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, […]

Roger and George [Will]*

Despite the UAW’s attempt to do for the South what it has done to Detroit, the South can continue to practice entrepreneurial federalism. Capital is mobile. It goes where it is welcomed and stays where it is well treated, so states compete to create tax and regulatory environments conducive to job creation. Liberals call this […]

Jared Bernstein Gives Us The Best Graph on the Employment Effects of Minimum Wage Increases

They say sample size matters. A handful of sample points in a study doesn’t tell you much, because they could just be showing random variation. This is also true not when you’re looking at many studies. You need to look at lots of research that uses different methodologies and data sets to get a confident feel […]

Dear Ms. Boonstra: It’s too bad that you don’t live in Kentucky. Or Rhode Island. Or New York State. Or California. Or Arkansas. Or that Michigan’s state government now has a Republican governor, a Republican-controlled House, and Republican-controlled Senate. And, yes, that healthcare.com didn’t work until December. [UPDATED]

Congratulations, Republicans.  You’ve finally found a case in which the failure of the federal ACA website amounted to the failure of Obamacare itself. At least for what turned out to be a very difficult two months for one particular woman, Julie Boonstra, a resident of Michigan Republican Rep. Tim Walberg’s district. Which, contrary to your […]

The Supreme Court and Politics–Especially the current conservative majority’s appropriation of the First Amendment in the service of Republican Party electoral victories

Dan Crawford emailed me this morning with a link to Linda Greenhouse’s op-ed in today’s New York Times, titled “Law and Politics,” and asked me to post about it.  A more apt title for the op-ed, which a headline writer rather than Greenhouse (whose bailiwick is the Supreme Court) titled, would be “The Supreme Court […]

Iran and live call

Today at 11:00 a.m. (EST), join three contributors to the new Foreign Affairs ebook Iran and the Bomb 2: A New Hope—CFR Senior Fellow Elliott Abrams, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Suzanne Maloney, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Vice President George Perkovich—for a discussion about the continuing negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 over Iran’s […]

The Conservative Case for a Minimum Wage Hike

Most conservatives disparage minimum-wage laws with straightforward economic reasoning, based on Econ 101 textbook theory: demand curves slope down. If you institute a price floor, raising the price of labor, you’ll get less labor demanded — less jobs. This hurts poor people, especially entry-level folks like teenagers. At first blush, the argument’s got legs. And […]