David Coates

The Obama Administration has unfinished business: lots of it, actually. The President will no doubt seek re-election in November by emphasizing policy successes. He would do well, however, to seek re-election by also recognizing policy failures: recognizing them and committing his Administration to do better. To win re-election, that recognition...

The Republican Party likes to pretend (even to itself) that it doesn't have an industrial policy. It also likes to pretend that the U.S. economy is currently in such deep trouble because the Democratic Party does.

Not so. Both parties have industrial policies whether they acknowledge them or not.

As we await the verdict of nine Supreme Court Justices on the constitutionality of all or part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it is worth asking what the remaining Republican Presidential nominees would create in its place. We know that they would have to create something, because each is...

Ask any of the Republican presidential hopefuls in this long and drawn out primary season what in general is wrong with the economic policies of the Obama Administration, and they will each tell you that the economy is under-performing now because the current Administration intervenes in its workings too frequently...

The current frontrunners in the fight for the Republican presidential nomination vary far more in their personalities and leadership styles than they do in their problem analysis and policy prescription. Ron Paul apart, their explanation of what is going wrong in contemporary America, and what therefore needs to be done...

In the standard trilogy of core commitments currently being made by Republican presidential candidates, the cutting of taxes and the pruning of government is invariably accompanied by the promise to deregulate business -- and indeed to re-regulate labor. The Obama administration stands condemned, not simply for its tax-and-spend propensities, but...

One consequence of the Republican party's current propensity to select its presidential nominee by the political equivalent of American Idol is that we are regularly exposed to sound-bite answers designed to differentiate one candidate from another. Both the brevity of the answers, and the enthusiasm for differentiation come, however, at...

In any wars of words in an election season, truth is often an early casualty. The war of words between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich is no exception. The two Republican front-runners are currently telling each other carefully fabricated stories about their own pasts that cover tracks...

In Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the world discovered by Alice was one in which every aspect of reality was inverted. Big things were small. Small things grew big. The Cheshire cat faded into a grin. One side of a mushroom made you grow. The other made you shrink....

It is likely that 2012 will be long remembered as a watershed year in America politics. It certainly needs to be. Neither the country nor the world can afford much longer the gridlock that is presently immobilizing Washington. We all know that. Here we are, beset with a string of...

"At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress" (Theodore Roosevelt, 1910)

Economists are the new public intellectuals of the...

We live in troubled and ironic times. The times are certainly troubled. The IMF's Managing Director has recently spoken with some justification of a looming "lost decade" for the global economy -- warning of "dark clouds" blocking the capacity of the world's leading economies to deliver a renewed...

The current wave of mass protest against Wall Street excess has completely reframed the public conversation in the United States. The "deficit problem" with which Washington was consumed in the first half of 2011 has not vanished from the political agenda, but its resolution will now have to be achieved...

The current wave of mass protest against Wall Street excess has completely reframed the public conversation in the United States. The "deficit problem" with which Washington was consumed in the first half of 2011 has not vanished from the political agenda, but its resolution will now have to be...

Bipartisanship in Washington is rare these days, but it does occasionally surface. It did this week, when the Senate passed the "Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act" (S.1619) -- the one sponsored by Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and co-sponsored by 22 other Senators, including five Republicans. If ever passed by...

Thus far 2011 has not been a good year for progressives. The daily sight of the White House seeking elusive accommodations with Tea Party-inspired Congressional Republicans has not been an edifying one. Prior to and during the debt ceiling crisis, all the drive, all the issue framing, all the assertiveness...

Maybe it's because of what I see every morning from my kitchen window -- the view over coffee of my former neighbor's foreclosed and rapidly deteriorating home -- that the Obama administration's housing policy so depresses me. Or maybe what depresses me is the housing policy itself.

The house...

Labor Day looms, and with it the official end of summer. Labor Day -- the day we celebrate the strength and importance of American labor. But in truth, on this Labor Day what will there be to celebrate -- certainly not the strength and importance of American labor.

Things, after...

With Congress in recess and our lawmakers now back in their districts, there is presumably a slight chance of meeting one of them in the street. If, like me, your representative in the House is not of your political persuasion -- mine, Virginia Foxx, most definitely is not -- it...

In the famous Monty Python parrot sketch, Michael Palin's understandable outrage at being sold a Norwegian Blue that was actually "stone dead" as he put it, does not get him a new bird. What it does get him -- from the John Cleese character who originally sold it to him...