As changes unfold in Saudi Arabia and Israel, it increasingly appears that Jerusalem and Riyadh may be looking beyond this administration. (We don’t care about Obama; we care about Washington, former Saudi diplomat Abdullah al-Shammari was recently quoted as saying.) It’s ironic that as the Middle East devolves and the U.S. needs friends in the region–regardless of their imperfections–relations between Washington and its two oldest allies are so strained.

There are many reasons for the upset, but the most important is Washington’s emerging relationship with Iran. And right now, it looks unlikely that the U.S. can balance relations between its new friend and its old ones. Read More »

While the Supreme Court weighs King v. Burwell–the lawsuit questioning the federal government’s authority to provide financial assistance to people who buy insurance in the 37 states using federally operated insurance exchanges–many have focused on potential responses to the outcome. Language in the budget resolution unveiled this week appears to lay the groundwork for the House of Representatives to address this ruling through budget reconciliation procedures.

Section 2002 of the budget conference report lays out special procedures for budget reconciliation in the House. Read More »

The wall-builders are winning.

Throughout modern history, Americans tend to turn inward during times of economic insecurity. It’s easy to blame people from other parts of the world for our own troubles, and it’s convenient for politicians of both parties to stoke those fears for their gain. In recent years, this brand of isolationism has been most visible in widespread Republican opposition to comprehensive immigration reform. But as Barack Obama’s sweeping Trans-Pacific Partnership trade legislation comes closer to a vote on Capitol Hill, it appears that Democrats can be determined wall-builders too. Read More »

Ed Rogers, a prominent lobbyist. put it the best.  He wrote in the Washington Post, “I’m embarrassed by our campaign finance system. And as a long-time participant in the system, for me to get here, it must be pretty bad.”

It’s not just pretty bad.  It’s really bad.

We can quibble over how it got this bad.  Maybe it was the Citizens United case.  I think it was the initial McCain-Feingold bill.

But in any event, the campaign finance system is now completely in control of the super-wealthy on both the left and the right. Read More »

Hillary Clinton called for the end of the “era of mass incarceration” on Wednesday, delivering a message that will especially resonate with women across the country.

That’s because, when our criminal justice system is profoundly “out of balance,” as Mrs. Clinton put it, when incarceration is excessive, and when there is a fundamental lack of trust between the state, including law enforcement officers, and the communities served, the result is that families and communities are torn apart. The social and economic power of women—including the power to control their own reproductive destiny and mother their children without fear—is jeopardized. Read More »

Have average wages for American workers grown since 1972? Absolutely – and only a reliance on measures with well-documented flaws can show otherwise. First, look around you: Americans at all income levels own more cars, have more air-conditioned homes, travel more, are more likely to attend college, and live longer than they did in the 1970s.

Reliable data sources show the same thing. Total hourly compensation, adjusted for inflation, has grown 69% since 1972. Wage growth is a little lower, because non-wage compensation (especially health insurance) grew rapidly from the 1940s until the early 1990s. Since 1975, the first year for which Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) data are available, average weekly wages have grown 42%. Read More »

When I was studying economics 45 years ago in college, one of the big debates was between Milton Friedman, who argued that the Fed should increase the money supply by a constant percentage each year, and a lot of Keynesians who wanted the Fed to have discretion to vary the money supply and interest rates, depending on the condition of the economy (the level of unemployment and the rate of inflation). Although the Fed, under the leadership of chairmen and members from both political parties, has never adopted the “rules-based” approach advocated by Mr. Friedman, the rules vs. discretion debate lives on.

It’s latest incarnation is captured by the current debate over whether to enshrine the “Taylor rule” into law, as two House members, Rep. Bill Huizenga (R., Mich.) and Rep. Scott Garret (R., N.J.), proposed last year. Briefly stated, the Taylor rule (named after Stanford economist and former Treasury Under-Secretary John Taylor) sets out a formula for determining the federal funds rate – the rate banks charge each other for overnight lending, which the Fed can normally control through its purchases and sales of government securities; the formula factors in the inflation rate and the shortfall between the current level of GDP and “potential GDP,” or what GDP would be if the economy were at full employment. Read More »

The failure of the U.S. campaign to dissuade allies from joining China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank was greeted in some quarters as a sign of American decline. But this episode was not a crisis of American power, which remains unequaled.And while the threat that the bank poses to that power and to the international order it undergirds has been much touted, it is in fact overstated. In fact, the main portent of the episode is not Beijing’s overturning of the international economic order or the arrival of China as a U.S. peer but the United States’ continued struggle to transform its power into policy success. Read More »

Economic uncertainty and awareness of the widening wage gap between top earners and everyone else has made Americans sympathetic to unions, which suggests that attacks on unions may play with core Republican constituencies but are unlikely to win support among independents and swing voters in 2016. Read More »

The commission that oversees the Iranian press has banned the women’s magazine Zanan-e Emrouz (Today’s Women) over an article on unmarried young men and women living together. Cohabitation, or “white marriage,” as it is known in Iran, is a growing practice in the Islamic Republic. Read More »