The Economist

One Year of The One | The Economist

... Yet roughly once a week since that day, he has ordered the assassination of suspected terrorists. These assassinations, carried out with Hellfire missiles fired from hovering drones, are often messy. According to the New America Foundation, a think-tank, it took 15 attempts to kill Baitullah Mehsud, a Taliban leader in Pakistan who was finally blown to scraps in August. Hundreds of people, some of them
Peter Bergen, Katherine Tiedemann | November 2, 2009

Health-care Reform: Pay or Play? | The Economist

Len Nichols of the New America Foundation, an influential think-tank, argues that while an individual mandate requiring people to purchase insurance is a good idea, the employer mandate is not: pay or play is, he insists, “essentially a tax on low-wage labour”. Original article
Len Nichols | July 9, 2009

America's Debt is Barack Obama's Biggest Weakness | The Economist

Those exceptions would add $2.5 trillion to the deficit over ten years, reckons Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-partisan watchdog. “This is like quitting drinking, but making an exception for beer and hard ...
Maya MacGuineas | June 10, 2009

The Ungovernable State | The Economist

Only a minority of Californians bother to vote, and those voters tend to be older, whiter and richer than the state's younger, browner and poorer population, says Steven Hill at the New America Foundation, a think-tank that is analysing the options for ...
Steven Hill | May 14, 2009

Tree-huggers v Nerds | The Economist

“Environmentalists have never been a well-mannered lot”, says Terry Tamminen, who has advised Arnold Schwarzenegger on climate change. ...
Terry Tamminen | February 12, 2009

Waiting for God-Only-Knows-What | The Economist

But as Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group, notes, such spending is at most $30 billion a year, ...
Maya MacGuineas | January 8, 2009

Blame and Retribution | Economist

According to Steve Coll of the New Yorker, America’s ambassador in India looked into building a nuclear bunker in the embassy. With hindsight, it is not ...
Steve Coll | December 4, 2008

Len Nichols in the Economist | 'In Need of Desperate Remedies'

Not everyone buys industry’s arguments about rising health costs imposing a competitive disadvantage on firms. Conventional economic theory maintains that firms should be indifferent to whether they pay employees cash wages or benefits. The two are seen as fungible, and are both tax deductible. So if the cost of health benefits rises, employers ought to be able simply to cut wages--or pass on those costs as higher prices to customers.

This theory is correct over the long term but falls apart in the short term, argues Len Nichols… more

Len Nichols | October 16, 2008

Peter Bergen in the Economist | 'A Radical New Strategy'

. . .[R]adical Islam is facing rebellion from within. The same verdict is reached in the New Republic by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, also respected analysts, who chart a swelling tide of former jihadists now critical of al-Qaeda's promiscuous violence. Such critics, they say, have joined mainstream Muslim leaders in “a powerful coalition countering al-Qaeda's ideology”. LINK
Peter Bergen | June 5, 2008

The Economist on Gregory Rodriguez's Book and Latino History

In 1519 a group of Spanish soldiers who had been sent to explore Mexico heard an extraordinary rumour. A sailor, Gonzalo Guerrero, had drifted there on a wrecked ship eight years earlier and was living among the Indians. He had married an Indian woman, with whom he had raised three children, and was tattooed and pierced. Odder still, he intended to stay put. Hernán Cortés, the leader of the expedition, was furious. "It will never do to leave him here,"… more

Gregory Rodriguez | November 10, 2007