Garry Wills' article in this week's New York Review of Books is stark and chilling. "A One Term President?" Wills is talking about Afghanistan and argues that Obama should pull U.S. troops out, even if it risks any chance of his being re-elected. "I'd rather see him as a one-term president than have him pass on another unwinnable war to the person who will follow him in office." Whether Hillary would have risked a one-term presidency to stop the wars is an open question as well, but I think Wills is shining his spotlight on the wrong question. The problem isn't Obama, but the depth of the problems he faces and the efforts by Republicans to destroy his presidency.

When Obama and Hillary were battling for the Democratic nomination, many commentators spoke in...

The papers were filled with headlines on Saturday that the House passed a comprehensive health care bill, by a narrow 220-215 margin. Predictably, only one Republican voted for it, and he will be gone soon, as he holds a historically Democratic seat in Louisiana. 

The action now shifts to the Senate, where the two main committee bills are still being reconciled, and then the reconciled bill will be presented and filibustered. Joe Lieberman has already announced that he will filibuster any bill with a public option in it -- other Democrats might as well -- assuring that such a bill cannot get the 60 votes needed to bring it to a vote. Because of the overuse of fillibusters, the minority rules in the Senate blocking any hope for a public option.

So will we get a...

Productivity is up over 9.8 percent in the third quarter of 2008; which is mostly good news. When a recession starts, stunned companies keep paying their bills while they sell less output. Not until they idle factories and lay off workers does labor productivity improve: Workers produce more per hour than ever before.

That raises profits, raises wages, and raises spirits.

Productivity gains kept earnings from falling during the Great Recession -- earnings were up over 2 percent this year. The fact that workers are saving costs by doing the work of two or three people -- after their colleagues have been ditched -- is the good news.

The bad news is that unemployment rose to 10.2 percent after the economy lost 190,000 more jobs in October. The consensus prediction was for a "mild"...

Adam Smith warned that adults exploit young people's optimism by paying them too little for the risks of being soldiers and sailors.

The same warning about exploitation has entered the debate about student loans.
Private loan companies, with the collaboration of colleges and the government, exploit students' trust that college will improve their lives.

Over two-thirds of college students in 2008 borrow to pay for tuition (up from 58 percent in 1996), and their average debt load is $23,186. Graduates also had $4,100 in credit card debt in 2008, up from $2,900 four years...

What is the most important thing a government can do with its citizens?  Collect taxes? Build roads? Public education? All important; but the power to take away liberty, through punishment and imprisonment, is the most fundamental power and democratic governments have a special responsibility to be rational and accountable in using it.

The United States uses this power a lot. We have 5 percent of the world's population, but 23 percent of the world's incarcerated.

And the most severe form of punishment is irrevocable, putting people to death. Unlike most countries in the world, the United States allows the death penalty and uses it.

In my previous post, I praised the award of the Nobel Prize in economics to Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win that prize, for her work recognizing the value of community ownership and governance, with practical applications in many different settings. Surely this represents a proud moment for the economics profession. Oh, wait -- Ostrom isn't an economist, but a political scientist. And therein lies a tale about the Nobel Prize in economics (actually "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.") The original Nobel Prizes are given in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. In 1969, the Swedes instituted this separate economics prize, but it isn't part of...

The Nobel Prize in Economics this year was the first to go to a woman.

Elinor Ostrom is an excellent choice. The London Guardian praised Prof. Ostrom's work in environmental economics, especially in turning standard economics models on their pointy heads.

I praise the awardee and question the existence of the award. The economics profession, and the world, might be better off without the award and the misleading notion that economics is a science in the same way that physics and chemistry are.

But first to Elinor Ostrom and why she deserves attention. Most economists believe that expanding private property rights is everywhere and in all cases a good thing. They cite...

Health Care Reform 3: What We'll Get

Despite their efforts to kill it -- discussed in previous blogs -- the Republicans won't be able to stop some version of health-care reform from becoming law. Tuesday, the Finance Committee will vote on an amended version of Montana senator Max Baucus's bill. Last week the Congressional Budget Office importantly assessed that his bill, which proposes new taxes on high cost health insurance plans and cuts in Medicare, will pay for subsidies for low and middle income people to buy insurance. The CBO estimated that the bill won't add to the deficit and might even reduce it modestly. That quieted the criticisms about cost and maintained...

In my last post, I argued the U.S. has a hard time getting major social legislation like health care passed because we don't have a parliamentary system and have -- for mostly good reasons -- multiple checks on central government authority. Yet, those checks can be dizzying and depressing. As the old saying goes: "Laws are like sausages. You should never watch them being made." So the inability to act, especially in the Senate, is partly by design, and partly because of what is happening to the Republican party.

Politicians -- schooled by Newt Gringrich -- aim to make government not work. Their most obvious tactic is filibustering -- which can only be stopped by 60 votes (cloture). This means when Republicans...

Are you tired of health care reform yet? Fox News wants you to be. True the U.S. Senate Finance Committee has yet to get a bill out, combine it with a Health Committee bill, and send it to the Senate floor. If the bill gets that far it has to go to a conference committee with the House, which will already have blended its own three separate bills. Then a conference bill gets sent back to the House and Senate for debate, amendment, and, with hope, passage.

Sounds bleak for health-care reform? Wrong! The good news is we will likely get a major health bill signed into law. The bad news is it will be incomplete -- like Social Security was back in 1935. Welcome to the U.S. Constitution and our nation's history of major social-policy reform, accompanied now not only by years of...