September 13, 2011
I have a new report up at The Heritage Foundation on efforts to tinker with the Medicare Part D drug benefit program: Over the past several years, one small corner of America’s vast entitlement superstructure — the Medicare drug benefit — has been working well, satisfying program participants, and holding cost...
September 9, 2011
National Review Online has convened a panel to respond to the president’s jobs speech last night. Here was my response: Let’s get this straight: The president, now in his third year in office, is worked up with righteous indignation because Congress hasn’t done enough on jobs. Really? During his first two years in...
September 7, 2011
The New York Times Room For Debate series has a new question up, asking, “Can the Middle Class Be Rebuilt?,” in which I offer this response: The United States, and our Western capitalist partners, have entered a new economic era. Intense global competition has suppressed wages in some industries that had...
September 2, 2011
I have a new column up at e21 on the ups and downs of the upcoming budgetary “super committee”: As Congress gets set to reconvene after Labor Day, all eyes have turned toward the so-called “super committee” — the special budgetary panel created by the debt limit deal. That’s understandable because the...
September 1, 2011
On May 19, I participated in a public forum in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, called “How Should Washington Control Medicare Spending?” My remarks focused on why a market-based reform of Medicare would be far superior to government-imposed cost controls. A transcript of the event is now available...
August 29, 2011
I have a new Op-Ed with James Wootton of Partnership for America in the Washington Examiner: President Obama says he wants a grand bargain on the budget with no ideological “lines in the sand.” Yet he insists that the costliest and most controversial program in decades — the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act...
August 9, 2011
Let’s start by partially agreeing with Paul Krugman’s weekend column in the New York Times, in which he correctly calls out Standard and Poor’s for displaying an unusual degree of chutzpah in downgrading the creditworthiness of the United States government. After all, this is the same firm that was — at best...
August 4, 2011
Yuval Levin and I have a new article up at The Weekly Standard on why the debate over spending cuts versus tax increases doesn’t get to the root cause of the still-looming debt crisis — namely, spiraling health-care costs: Simply put, our coming debt crisis is a health care cost crisis. In 1971, the government spent 1...
August 2, 2011
I have a new post up on The Corner detailing why the debt deal is only a patch, and the real fights are still to come: Fittingly, the “deal” that has emerged from the protracted, months-long stand-off on the debt limit isn’t so much a deal as it is a (very) temporary truce between the parties. Because, while...
July 30, 2011
I have a new piece up on National Review Online making the case for how the debate over the debt limit ought to proceed now, in the wake of the House passage of Speaker Boehner’s plan. Here’s an excerpt: It’s been apparent for days now that Senator Reid and his Democratic colleagues aren’t going to simply pass the...