John Edwards trial: How the prosecution stumbled. Scout: get notified every time Congress proposes legislation with keywords you care about. Remnants of Bush Administration. Tax reform: Why it's so hard - Mar. 27. Bruce Bartlett, who worked for President Reagan, doesn't see Republicans accepting some of the things Reagan did to make tax reform work in 1986. And Obama , he adds, has only taken baby steps. Tax reform. Politicians tout it as fiscal nirvana. It will spur economic growth, curb deficits, reduce income inequality, you name it. But all the happy talk belies the truth about tax reform, which Bruce Bartlett knows a thing or two about, having worked as a senior policy analyst for President Reagan in 1986.
Bartlett's latest book -- "The Benefit and The Burden: Tax Reform -- Why We Need It and What It Will Take" -- was written to help citizens understand the tax policy process so they can demand more of their politicians. CNNMoney asked Bartlett for his views on the prospects for real tax reform today. What's the one thing Americans need to know about tax reform that their politicians aren't telling them? What's the biggest lesson of the 1986 tax reform? Voters blame president for gas prices, experts say not so fast. Today’s oil prices are the product of years and decades of exploration, automobile design and ingrained consumer habits combined with political events in places such as Sudan and Libya, anxiety about possible conflict with Iran, and the energy aftershocks of last year’s earthquake in Japan.
“This notion that a politician can wave a magic wand and impact the 90-million-barrel-a-day global oil market is preposterous,” said Paul Bledsoe, strategic adviser to the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former Clinton administration official. The price of gasoline is a hardy perennial in presidential campaigns. Jimmy Carter struggled with high gas prices, which had doubled since the Iranian revolution. And during the 2008 presidential race, Barack Obama said in a campaign speech that “here in Ohio, you’re paying nearly $3.70 a gallon for gas — 21/2 times what it cost when President Bush took office.”
What can the president control? (Related: A rule of thumb for gas prices and the economy) Wonkbook: A rule of thumb for gas prices and the economy. There's a lot of hot air blowing around Washington over gas prices (see how I did that?) , so let's take a moment to go through what we actually know -- and what we don't -- about their relationship to the president, the economy, and the campaign. A woman pumps gas into a vehicle in this March 2 file photo in Los Angeles. (FREDERIC J. BROWN - AFP/GETTY IMAGES) There's not much the president can do about gas prices.
Presidents -- and, more to the point, presidential candidates -- don't like to admit that, of course. Gas prices can hurt the economy, of course. Finally, there's less evidence than you may think that gas prices determine elections. So gas prices matter. Top stories 1) The President doesn't have much to do with the price of gas. Nor is it clear that the price of gas has much to do with elections. @sethdmichaels: real talk: gas prices are higher now because the economy is doing better and we haven't done enough to reduce the amount of oil we use.
Top op-eds Economy Health Care.
How Blue America Subsidizes Red America. A very neat Aaron Carroll chart shows that, on average, conservative states feature more "dependency" on federal programs than do liberal ones. You can slice this kind of data in a variety of ways, but you always end up with the same aggregate pattern. It happens to be the case that the richest parts of the United States (think the San Francisco Bay area or Connecticut) favor Democrats and also that conservative areas of the country are overrepresented in the Senate. Transfers, on average, flow away from high-income and underrepresented areas and toward low-income and overrepresented areas. I think the overall pattern is best described as a coincidence and not a pattern of large-scale hypocrisy but there are two important points to make about it. One is that high-income people living in low-income states are generally very conservative in their political ideology but probably benefit more from federal income support programs more than they realize.
Good things about American Politics. Progressives. Stats on Conservatives. Political Corruption. Arianna Huffington: Country in Crisis: Looking to America's Mayors to Rise to the Challenge. On Wednesday, I'll be speaking at the winter meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors in Washington (a winter meeting in Washington? Doesn't Miami have a mayor, too?). Given the state of politics these days, going to Washington to give a speech about anything having to do with national affairs would normally be a depressing prospect.
But, in fact, while the conference might be in Washington, what's being discussed, explored, championed, shared, and imagined is all about what's going on outside of Washington. And by "Washington" I mean our broken national political system, not Washington's local government, where, as it happens, there are some exciting things going on under Mayor Vincent Gray. The juxtaposition between our national leaders and our local leaders has never been more stark. On a national level, we're paralyzed and polarized. The institutions whose failure led to the biggest economic crisis since the Depression are still broken. Contrary to popular belief, politicians often keep campaign promises. I keep running into the same reaction: Who cares? It’s a fool’s game to spend too much time analyzing campaign policy proposals. Everyone knows that politicians make all kinds of crazy promises during elections that they jettison as soon as they take office.
At least everyone thinks they know that. But it’s not true. In an article for the January-February issue of the Washington Monthly, political scientist Jonathan Bernstein argues that the evidence on this point is clear: “Presidents usually try to enact the policies they advocate during the campaign.” We can all think of exceptions, of course. Bernstein relies on two studies from the 1980s to make his point. More recent evidence supports this view, too. Even the elder Bush’s famed betrayal on taxes shows the importance of campaign promises. Reasonable people disagree about whether the conservative backlash to Bush’s compromise was a significant factor in his 1992 loss. Bush’s experience surely serves as a deterrent.
Politico Tapping Into Facebook's Data Gold Mine. Politico, the politics-focused media outlet, is teaming up with Facebook to take a look at Facebook users' opinions of Republican presidential hopefuls. It's all happening during the lead-up to the next primary, being held Jan. 21 in South Carolina. Every time a Facebook user posts about a candidate, Facebook's team will pick it up and determine whether the mention expresses favorable sentiment about the candidate. To do that, they'll be armed with new software that researchers use to determine opinion from text. They'll analyze every mention from Thursday until the primary. In turn, they'll hand that data over exclusively to Politico, whose journalists will add insight and commentary. The first round of data is already available. “Social media has forever changed the way candidates campaign for the presidency,” says John F. Sentiment analysis won't be the only element of the arrangement. Why Do Nations Fail?
As Arab dissidents know all too well, it has to do with how societies are politically organized. Editor’s note: The Region, a journal of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, recently discussed job markets, property rights, global warming, and the Arab Spring with MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who is a member of the Hoover Institution’s John and Jean De Nault task force on property rights.
Below is an excerpt from that interview. The entire interview can be found here. Region: [Let’s discuss] your work with James Robinson on transitions in political economy. Acemoglu: Yes, for the last 15 years, most of my research is exactly what you could call, broadly, political economy. Region: Perfect. Acemoglu: My professional research didn’t start with political economy, although when I originally began to study economics in high school and college, I was interested in what today you would call political economy—the interaction of politics and economics.
Photo credit: The Region Region: Ah, yes. What Happens to Leftover Campaign Funds When a Candidate Drops Out? Image credit: REUTERS/ADAM HUNGER/LANDOV After a disappointing performance in the Iowa Caucus, Rick Perry is reassessing his campaign. Some members of her own party are urging Michele Bachmann to call it quits. [Update: He's still in. She's out.] One thing's for sure — disappointed candidates can't console themselves by putting the dough toward a new yacht. The Federal Election Commission has strict rules about what federal candidates can and can't do with leftover campaign money, and the biggest commandment is that they can't pocket it for personal use. Here's what a campaign committee is allowed to do with any lingering cash: it can donate the funds to charities or political parties; it can contribute $2,000 per election to other candidates; and it can save the money in case the candidate chooses to run again.
In reality, though, there's rarely a giant pot of money for losing candidates to play with. The Magazine - Campaign Promises. January/ February 2012Campaign Promises What they say is how they'll govern. By Jonathan Bernstein George W. Bush had a problem. As he prepared to sweep to his party’s presidential nomination with the endorsements of several GOP governors, and to run a moderate general election campaign against Al Gore, he didn’t need to worry about social conservatives, thanks to a solid record on their issues and a great story to tell about his personal path to religion. The solution was obvious, and for the U.S. budget, fateful: Bush ran on a radical regressive tax cut, thereby destroying the rationale for the Forbes campaign and leaving the Texas governor a clear path to the nomination.
The lesson: we can be governed now by measures that were adopted years ago, in some cases decades ago, based on what some candidate said in reaction to the particular dynamics of some now-obscure nomination battle. Or, to be more blunt: presidents usually try to enact the policies they advocate during the campaign.
The Black Vote. The Super PAC Economy. If the first 10 amendments to the Constitution went before today’s voters, how would they fare? Change of Heart About the Bill of Rights? … Is it possible that some of our constitutional rights aren’t the dreamboats we think they are? Maybe they’re even cheating on us. For example, the Supreme Court has ruled that rich knuckleheads have the constitutional right to make unlimited political contributions. We’re Having a Steamy Affair With Rights… President Obama, sworn defender of our constitutional rights, has said, “In the United States, health care is not a privilege for the fortunate few; it is a right.”
And so far, Chief Justice John Roberts is backing him up. Meanwhile Duty Sits Home Waiting for Us to Text About Hooking Up Later, Maybe, if Nothing Else Is Going On… NARAL defends the constitutional right to abortion. NRA defends the constitutional right to something similar, ex post facto. Reactionary troglodyte Tea Party embraces the Constitution—says it means government wronging rights. And… The Dark Money Shuffle. In the spring of 2011 Greg Mortenson was smoking hot and on a roll. His memoir, Three Cups of Tea—advertised as “the astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his remarkable humanitarian campaign in the Taliban’s backyard”—had spent the previous 50 months on The New York Times paperback, nonfiction bestseller list. The book’s white-knuckled account of the perils and privations he’d overcome to build schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan inspired donors to contribute more than $70 million to his charity, the Central Asia Institute (CAI), and turned Mortenson into an international celebrity.
His compassion and courage were extolled by Nicholas Kristof, Thomas Friedman, Christiane Amanpour, and other prominent journalists. For three years running Mortenson was shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize. But on April 17, 2011, 60 Minutes aired a profile of Mortenson that cast him in a different light. A Washington, D.C. The available evidence suggests otherwise.
The Obama Administration. Tea Party & OWS. Welfare (TANF) Ezra Klein. News Reports Spur Legislators to Discuss Ending Insider Trading in Congress. Bill de Blasio’s win in New York’s Democratic primary isn’t a local story. It’s part of a vast shift that could upend three decades of American political thinking. By Peter Beinart Maybe Bill de Blasio got lucky. Maybe he only won because he cut a sweet ad featuring his biracial son. Or because his rivals were either spectacularly boring, spectacularly pathological, or running for Michael Bloomberg’s fourth term. But I don’t think so. The deeper you look, the stronger the evidence that de Blasio’s victory is an omen of what may become the defining story of America’s next political era: the challenge, to both parties, from the left.
To understand why that challenge may prove so destabilizing, start with this core truth: For the past two decades, American politics has been largely a contest between Reaganism and Clintonism. For a time, small flocks of pre-Reagan Republicans and pre-Clinton Democrats endured, unaware that their species were marked for extinction.