Author: Lance Garrison
Twelve departing lawmakers tell us what Congress is really like.
Twelve departing lawmakers tell us what Congress is really like.
Twelve departing lawmakers tell us what Congress is really like.
Even the insiders are fed up with Washington. To understand why, we put the same eight questions to House and Senate members in both parties who are on the way out, looking for patterns and prescriptions to get a handle on the place. Corruption, money, perks, frustrations, solutions — hear what they said about it all. Featuring Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-Ind.), Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.), Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.), Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.), Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.),…
Twelve departing lawmakers tell us what Congress is really like.
More than 30 years ago, the economists Rudiger Dornbusch (one of my mentors) and Sebastian Edwards wrote a classic paper on what they called “macroeconomic populism.” Their motivating examples were inflationary outbreaks under left-wing regimes in Latin America, but it seemed clear that the key issue wasn’t left-wing governance per se; it was, instead, what happens when governments engage in magical thinking. Indeed, even at the time they could have included the experience of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, which killed or “disappeared” thousands of leftists but also pursued irresponsible economic policies that led to…
Here is a brutal fact for the college class of 2024: There aren’t enough college-level jobs out there for all of you. Some of you will snag them. Others will have to settle for jobs that don’t require a college education. And history shows that many of those who start out in a job that doesn’t require a college education are still toiling in that kind of job a decade later.One mystery is why college grads’ lifetime earnings are so much higher than those of people with just a high school degree or less, if indeed so many college grads…
To the Editor:Campus protests, some involving violence, are not new. Columbia was one of the centers of student activism during the Vietnam War, peaking in 1968, when protesters seized several university buildings.But the worst moment was on May 4, 1970, when Ohio National Guard troops killed four unarmed student antiwar protesters at Kent State University.That was then — when protests were about U.S. government policies around a totally misguided deadly war.But now we have a far different reality in which we’re seeing what amounts to an internecine clash of worldviews among different factions of students and faculty.University leaders across the…
Gail Collins: Bret, I have a feeling we’re going to be spending a good amount of time talking about the adventures of Donald Trump.Bret: By “adventures,” you mean “affairs.”Gail: But just to start with something we’re in disagreement about …. Joe Biden has, in my opinion, been doing a great job building his re-election campaign. He’s been strong on the environment, on creating jobs — long a gray spot in his record — and trying to support the rights of working men and women to get decent pay and benefits.Go Joe!And — take it away, Bret!Bret: Well, to quote the…
I have a snapshot embedded in my memory of groups of students milling about the grounds, which were littered with the debris of the confrontation, many of them proudly sporting bandages from the injuries inflicted by the violent sweep of the Tactical Patrol Force. Psychedelic music blared from some window, and a lone maintenance man pushed a noisy lawn mower over a surviving patch of grass.The sit-ins had been ended, and order was being restored, but something frightening and beautiful had been unleashed, a faith that mere students could do something about what’s wrong with the world or at least…