The Government Should Create Jobs
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on December 1st, 2009 5:31 am by HL
The Government Should Create Jobs
Paul Krugman, New York Times
If you’re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings, and the average duration of unemployment the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s. Paul Krugman You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a…
Seven Stories Obama Doesn’t Want Told
John Harris, Politico
7 stories Obama doesn't want told By: John F. Harris November 30, 2009 05:45 AM EST Presidential politics is about storytelling. Presented with a vivid storyline, voters naturally tend to fit every new event or piece of information into a picture that is already neatly framed in their minds. No one understands this better than Barack Obama and his team, who won the 2008 election in part because they were better storytellers than the opposition. The pro-Obama narrative featured an almost mystically talented young idealist who stood for change in a disciplined and…
Government Spending, Taxes and the Constitution
John Tamny, Forbes
The U.S. Constitution's 10th Amendment is arguably the most important of all the amendments in the brilliant document that helped shape the United States. The 10th amendment made plain that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”What the 10th amendment tells us is that the powers of the federal government are quite limited, and that any powers not enumerated to Washington in the first nine amendments automatically revert to the states. This was the…
Afghan Success Requires Commitment for Long Haul
Pierre Atlas, RCP
President Barack Obama will announce his long-awaited Afghanistan strategy in a prime time address Tuesday night. Much of the speculation and debate thus far has focused on the number of troops the commander-in-chief will dispatch to Afghanistan. However, no strategy– regardless of the number of troops involved–will likely succeed if we are not willing to see it through to completion.Neutralizing or defeating the Taliban will require a well-designed and implemented counterinsurgency strategy that could take years, not months. The term “counterinsurgency” conjures up images of…