Dodd-Frank’s Achilles’ Heel
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on July 28th, 2014 11:08 pm by HL
Dodd-Frank’s Achilles’ Heel
Robert Samuelson, RealClearPolitics
WASHINGTON — Four years after Dodd-Frank became law, the question being asked is whether the country is safe from another financial crisis. It’s the wrong question. It presumes that major financial crises are routine events. They’re not. What happened in 2008-09 was the first in the United States since World War II. This sort of calamity requires much stupidity, incompetence and bad luck. With or without Dodd-Frank, the next one might be many years or decades away. The right question is: When a crisis occurs — as it probably will — does Dodd-Frank better prepare us to handle…
Kansas Experiment Blows Up Laboratory of Democracy
Joe Conason, RealClearPolitics
When Louis Brandeis wrote in 1932 that a “single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country,” he was suggesting that state innovations might advance reform on the federal level. The progressive Supreme Court justice surely wasn’t imagining anything quite like Brownbackistan. Under Gov. Sam Brownback, however, the old Brandeis metaphor is especially apt for Kansas, where a highly publicized “experiment” in extreme tax cutting has just blown up the entire laboratory. As Kansans peer…
Exonerating the Criminals
Richard Cohen, RealClearPolitics
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s anti-Semitism is getting the better of him. Once again, the Turkish prime minister has trotted out the Hitler analogy in relation to Israel and what it has done in Gaza. “They curse Hitler morning and night,” he said of the Israelis. “However, now their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.” Erdogan’s Hitler fetish is both revolting and inaccurate. Hitler murdered an estimated 6 million Jews, not to mention millions of Poles, Russians, Gypsies and, as a group, homosexuals; the Israelis have killed in the current Gaza operation over 1,000 Palestinians. The difference…
Absent on Immigration Reform
Eugene Robinson, RealClearPolitics
WASHINGTON — The Republican Party’s paralysis on immigration is so complete — and so utterly irresponsible — that President Obama has no choice but to act on his own. Just say the word immigration and most GOP members of Congress either change the subject or scurry away. Rather than tackle a suite of genuine issues whose obvious solutions would clearly benefit the nation, House Republicans prefer to pass yet more useless bills that seek — and fail — to take away people’s health insurance. Both parties agree that the rapid influx of more than 50,000 unaccompanied children from Central…
