Posts By Author » Michael Barone

Spending Cuts May Be Answer to Slow Economic Growth
7 Mar 2013 12:02 am

The Dow set a new high on Tuesday, but the larger economy is a different story. What if today’s sluggish economic growth turns out to be the new normal? That’s the unsettling question asked by some of our most creative economic thinkers.
And the people asking it are not necessarily partisan opponents of the Obama administration. They argue that economic growth rates were disappointing even before the financial collapse and recession of 2007-09.
Take Tyler Cowen, author of the e-book (belatedly published in print) “The Great Stagnation.” Economic growth is the product …

For Obama, Politics Always Trumps Governing
4 Mar 2013 12:02 am

Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate? It’s not an entirely unfair question.
Even as Barack Obama was warning of the dreadful consequences of the budget sequester looming on March 1, he spent days away from Washington, apparently out of touch with Democratic as well as Republican congressional leaders.
In the meantime, Obama fans were lobbing verbal grenades at none other than The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.
His offense: He’s continuing to make it clear, as he did in his book “The Price of Politics,” that it was Obama’s then-chief of …

Discord and Disarray Won’t Help Obama Legacy
28 Feb 2013 12:02 am

Barack Obama is said to believe that he can win the political fight over the sequester. That’s certainly the conventional wisdom.
And there is some evidence to support it. When you ask voters who will be to blame if the sequester occurs, Obama or “congressional Republicans,” they’re much more likely to say they’ll blame the latter.
Obama also comes out on top when you ask whether they will blame “Obama and congressional Democrats” or “congressional Republicans.”
There’s reason to wonder, however, whether reaction after something happens will be the same as what people …

Calvin Coolidge Gets New Deal in Revisionist History
25 Feb 2013 12:02 am

For years, most Americans’ vision of history has been shaped by the New Deal historians. Writing soon after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others celebrated his accomplishments and denigrated his opponents.
They were gifted writers, and many of their books were bestsellers. And they have persuaded many Americans — Barack Obama definitely included — that progress means an ever bigger government In their view, the prosperous 1920s were a binge of mindless frivolity. The Depression of the 1930s was the inevitable hangover, for which FDR administered the cure.
That’s one …

GOP Has Trouble Settling on Candidates Who Can Win
21 Feb 2013 12:02 am

One of the interesting things about recent elections is that Republicans have tended to do better the farther you go down the ballot.
They’ve lost the presidency twice in a row, and in four of the last six contests. They’ve failed to win a majority in the U.S. Senate, something they accomplished in five election cycles between 1994 and 2006.
But they have won control of the House of Representatives in the last two elections, and in eight of the last 10 cycles.
And they’ve been doing better in elections to state legislatures …

For Dems to Win House, Obama Must Rise in Polls
18 Feb 2013 12:08 am

Barack Obama has said that he wants to help Democrats win back a majority in the House of Representatives. He says he looks forward to Nancy Pelosi being speaker again.
If he does work hard to elect House Democrats, it will be a change from 2010 and 2012, when he didn’t do much at all for them.
But let’s say he does. What are the chances of success?
Certainly not zero. Democrats need to gain 17 seats to win a House majority of 218. That’s fewer than the number of seats that changed …

Obama’s Gangster Government Operates Above the Law
14 Feb 2013 12:02 am

Presidents’ State of the Union addresses are delivered in the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol. The classical majesty of this building where laws are made symbolizes the idea that we live under the rule of law.
Unfortunately, the 44th president is running an administration that too often seems to ignore the rule of law.
“We can’t wait,” Barack Obama took to saying after the Republicans captured a majority in the House and refused to pass laws he wanted. He would act to get what he wanted regardless of …

Congressional Hearings Show Obama Treading Dangerous Global Path
11 Feb 2013 12:02 am

There were two extraordinary disclosures in Thursday’s testimony of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
One is that there was no communication between them and Barack Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the seven hours of Sept. 11, 2012, when Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were attacked and murdered in Benghazi.
This is a vivid contrast with those photos we’ve seen of the president and his leading advisers watching the video of the attack on Osama …

At last, Republicans Make Their Case to Main Street
7 Feb 2013 12:02 am

The House Republicans, in serious trouble with public opinion as they blinked facing the “fiscal cliff” over New Year’s, seem suddenly to be playing a more successful game — or rather, games — an inside game and an outside game.
The inside game can be described by the Washington phrase “regular order.” What that means in ordinary American English is that you proceed according to the rules.
Bills are written in subcommittee and committee and then go to the floor. When the House and Senate pass different versions — likely when Republicans …

Fewer Dollars and Babies Threaten Social Programs
4 Feb 2013 12:10 am

Our major public policies are based on the assumption that America will continue to enjoy growth. Economic growth and population growth.
Through most of our history, this assumption has proved to be correct. These days, not so much.
Last week, the Commerce Department announced that the gross domestic product shrunk by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. And the Census Bureau reported that the U.S. birth rate in 2011 was 63.2 per 1,000 women age 15 to 44, the lowest ever recorded.
Slow economic growth and low population growth threaten to …

Better Tools for Immigration Reform Than in 1986
31 Jan 2013 12:02 am

Yesterday, as Barack Obama called for a bipartisan immigration bill in Las Vegas and Sen. Marco Rubio called for one on Rush Limbaugh’s program, the chances for passage look surprisingly good.
But in some quarters — mostly from the right, but also from liberals like blogger Mickey Kaus — comes a complaint that deserves to be addressed.
We tried this once already, they say, in the 1986 immigration act. We were told that in return for legalization of illegal immigrants we would get tough border control and strict enforcement against employers who …

Republican Annihilation Is Not Likely
28 Jan 2013 12:02 am

These days, our political parties are defined by their presidents. Their policies and their programs tend to become their respective parties’ orthodoxies.
And the perceived success or failure of those policies and programs tends to determine how the parties’ candidates, even those who don’t support many of them, do at the polls.
This has been especially true in the past two decades, in which fewer Americans have been splitting their tickets or changing their minds from election to election than was the case from the 1950s to the 1980s.
For years, white Southerners …

Obama Inaugural: Full of Audacity, but Little Hope
24 Jan 2013 12:02 am

Commentators both left and right agree that Barack Obama’s second inaugural speech Monday was highly partisan, with shoutouts to his constituencies on the left and defiance of his critics on the right. Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and made brief reference to Abraham Lincoln’s sublime Second Inaugural (“blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword”). But there was not much in the way of “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”
There were more references than in many inaugural speeches to specific programs and policies. …

GOP Puts Spotlight on Feckless Senate Democrats
21 Jan 2013 12:02 am

Have the House Republicans come up with a winning strategy on the debt ceiling and spending cuts? Or just a viable one? Maybe so.
They certainly need one that is at least the latter, if not the former. Barack Obama is up in the polls since the election, as most re-elected presidents have been. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows him with 52 percent approval and 44 percent disapproval. Other public polls have similar results.
In contrast, the NBC/WSJ poll reports that only 26 percent have positive feelings about the …

Ivory-tower Obama Can’t Abide Views He Doesn’t Share
17 Jan 2013 12:06 am

To judge from his surly demeanor and defiant words at his press conference on Monday, Barack Obama begins his second term with a strategy to defeat and humiliate Republicans rather than a strategy to govern.
His point blank refusal to negotiate over the debt ceiling was clearly designed to make the House Republicans look bad.
But Obama knows very well that negotiations usually accompany legislation to increase the government’s debt limit. As Gordon Gray of the conservative American Action Network points out, most of the 17 increases in the debt ceiling over …

History Suggests That Entitlement Era Is Winding Down
14 Jan 2013 4:43 am

It’s often good fun and sometimes revealing to divide American history into distinct periods of uniform length. In working on my forthcoming book on American migrations, internal and immigrant, it occurred to me that you could do this using the American-sounding interval of 76 years, just a few years more than the Biblical lifespan of three score and 10.
It was 76 years from Washington’s First Inaugural in 1789 to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural in 1865. It was 76 years from the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865 to the attack at …

History Suggests That Entitlement Era Is Winding Down
14 Jan 2013 12:02 am

Dodd-Frank’s Problems — and Potential Solutions
7 Jan 2013 12:02 am

Over the next year, we will probably see much controversy over the implementation of Obamacare. Health insurance is something that almost every adult has some acquaintance with, and there seem to be glitches aplenty in the legislation, much delay in issuing regulations and some possible changes resulting from litigation.
We’re likely to see or hear less about the operations of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation legislation, passed four months after Obamacare. Most of us don’t work at banks or financial institutions, which will have to grapple with its myriad provisions and the …

If Demography Is Destiny, Good News for Texas, D.C.
3 Jan 2013 12:02 am

Demographics buffs get a special Christmas present every year courtesy of the Census Bureau: its annual estimates of the populations of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
This gives demographers a chance to see where the nation is growing and where it is not, and to get an idea of the destination of immigrants and of the flow of people into one set of states and out of another.
Nationally, the Census Bureau estimates that the United States has grown from 308 million people when the Census was conducted in …

When Government Offers to Help, It Often Makes a Mess
31 Dec 2012 12:02 am

There’s a natural human impulse to help people who need a hand. In the political world, that often translates to an impulse to have government help people who need a hand. Who wants to argue with that?
But experience tells us that it’s not always easy to help. Individuals’ good intentions go awry. Government programs sometimes produce unintended consequences that make things worse for the intended beneficiaries.
Consider what could be called the three H’s: health care, housing and higher education.
Over the last generation and more, government has stepped in to help …

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