There is a major national ad campaign, funded by the oil industry and other usual suspects, to convince the public that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and slow global warming will result in massive job loss. This ad campaign warns of slower growth and the loss of hundreds...

Those who like banks that are too big to fail will love the latest financial reform proposals circulating in the US Congress. The bill put forward by Barney Frank, the chairman of the House finance committee, does little to change the current structure of the financial system.

The "too-big-to-fail" banks...

A year after President Obama was elected, progressives can say that we got pretty much what we had a right to expect. President Obama ran as a centrist. In the campaign, he repeatedly talked about how he wanted to govern in a bi-partisan manner, with the Republicans as genuine partners....

Like termites, the American Bankers Association (ABA) does most of its damage in the dark. But the ABA is getting a brief period in the limelight this week as a result of the Showdown in Chicago.

The Showdown is a series of protests organized by a number of community...

Kenneth Feinberg, President Obama's compensation czar for bailed out banks, appears to have taken some genuine steps to rein in excessive executive compensation at the basket case banks that received the most TARP money. He cut cash salaries by 90 percent in some cases and reduced overall compensation for the...

Most of the economists and pundits who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble are telling us that the United States desperately needs for the Chinese government to keep buying its debt. This crew of failed analysts argues that without the support of the Chinese government, interest rates in...

The elites hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of ordinary people are moved to action, it changes the narrow political world where the elites call the shots. Inside accounts reveal the extent to which Johnson and Nixon's conduct of the Vietnam War was constrained by the huge anti-war...

We all know that the economy is now recovering. The stock market is up by more than 50 percent from its March lows and Alan Greenspan, the former Maestro, is now projecting a 3.0 percent growth rate for the third quarter. Banks are again reporting strong profits and the Wall...

The budget situation today looks hugely worse than it did two years ago. The reason for the deterioration is not that the country has suddenly embarked on a massive new round of social spending, undertaken another major military adventure or even emptied the coffers through tax breaks. The reason that...

The large number of people who protested against Barack Obama's health care plan in Washington last week drew an enormous amount of media attention. Clearly some of the leaders are certifiably crazy, questioning whether Obama is an American and likening him to Hitler. But many of the protesters had reasonable...

We all know that there are basic philosophical differences between liberals and conservatives. Liberals believe that the government can be used to improve the lives of ordinary people. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that the government should redistribute money to the wealthy. This philosophical difference has come through very...

Robert Rubin's reputation has taken a serious hit in the last couple of years. After getting glowing reviews for his stint as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, the world has now seen the fallout from the financial deregulation that he engineered and personally profited from to the tune of...

Suppose that a prominent member of Congress were to press for spending an additional $450 billion a year over the next three years on infrastructure projects. Suppose that they did this at a time when the unemployment rate was near 4.5 percent, the definition of full employment used by the...

I first met Ted Kennedy in the fall of 1995. The context was truly bizarre.

Alan Greenspan had testified to the Senate Finance Committee in the fall of 1994 that the consumer price index (CPI) overstated the true rate of inflation. He told the committee that if it lowered the...

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will release a new set of economic and budget projections for the next decade on Tuesday. These projections are likely to show a cumulative deficit over the next 10 years that is $2 trillion higher (at 1 percent of GDP) than the deficit CBO projected...

Politics in this country is routinely described as a battle between liberals who want a larger role for government and conservatives who favor a smaller role. This framing is completely wrong, but the conservatives insist on using it because it helps advance their agenda. Liberals tend to accept it because...

President Obama didn't think so back in the days when he was running for president and it may be time for progressives to start rethinking the question as well. To be clear, mandates, or something very mandate like, are an essential part of a universal health care plan. They are...

As a basic rule, politicians will say anything they can get away with. If an effective politician thinks that he can call his opponent a drug-dealing, serial-murdering gangster, and have the charge taken seriously by the media, then he will do it, even if there is no reality whatsoever to...

Apparently the Obama administration made a commitment to the drug companies that it would block efforts to reduce drug costs in the Medicare prescription drug program. This was apparently in exchange for a promise by Pharma to cut their prices to seniors by $80 billion over the next decade. While...

The right knows that they are supposed to hate Obamacare; the only problem is that they keep forgetting why. According to a study that they have been widely touting it promises to both increase coverage and reduce costs. Presumably these are not the reasons they oppose President Obama's plan....