The Triumph of Muddle-Nomics
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on October 6th, 2014 11:08 pm by HL
The Triumph of Muddle-Nomics
Robert Samuelson, RealClearPolitics
WASHINGTON — I have been reading Martin Wolf’s “The Shifts and the Shocks,” a detailed analysis of the 2008-09 financial crisis and its aftermath. Wolf is the chief economic columnist of the Financial Times, an English paper with a global audience. He and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman are probably the world’s most influential economic commentators. What Wolf says matters because he is hugely well-informed and respected. By and large, he rejects the standard American explanation of the financial crisis, which blames greedy bankers, incompetent government regulators and naive…
The Problem With the Secret Service
Carl M. Cannon, RealClearPolitics
Two U.S. Secret Service directors have retired in the past 18 months. It’s a good start. The vaunted reputation of the agency—previously an elite unit of the Treasury Department—has always been better than its track record. The Secret Service knew it, too, but this image of competence was cultivated partly as a deterrent. After September 11, 2001, things changed because edifices and agencies that symbolically projected American power were themselves possible targets, so the nation’s security systems were hardened. Or so we thought. Now Americans learn that despite…
In Texas, an Undue Burden
Ruth Marcus, RealClearPolitics
WASHINGTON — I was in the jittery Supreme Court chamber on a summer morning in 1992 when the right to abortion was on the line. As the justices took their seats, no one except court insiders knew whether the session would end with five votes to overrule Roe v. Wade, or with something more restrained. The answer was the latter. The right to abortion survived, but it was downgraded from a fundamental constitutional right to one that could be infringed so long as the restriction at issue did not impose an “undue burden” on a woman seeking an abortion This muddled outcome led abortion rights…
