The Economist

One Year of The One | The Economist

Erin Drankoski — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:24:00 -0500

... 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

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

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:53:00 -0400

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

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

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:04:00 -0400

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 ...

The Ungovernable State | The Economist

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:10:00 -0400

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 ...

Tree-huggers v Nerds | The Economist

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:40:00 -0500

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

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

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:47:00 -0500

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, ...

Blame and Retribution | Economist

Communications — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:03:00 -0500

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 ...

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

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:30:00 -0400

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 of the New America Foundation, a Washington, DC-based think-tank. In competitive global markets, firms usually cannot pass on health costs as easily as price increases since rivals overseas do not pay nearly as much via taxes to support state health systems. LINK

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

Communications — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:55:00 -0400

. . .[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

The Economist on Gregory Rodriguez's Book and Latino History

Communications — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 14:33:00 -0500

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," he scowled.

What Cortés took to be a slight against Spanish civilisation, Gregory Rodriguez hails as a vision of America's future. Guerrero was the first Mexican settler and his children were the first mixed-race Mexicans. But only narrowly: Cortés himself soon took an Indian lover, as did many of his men. Gradually Spaniards and Indians (and later blacks) blended to create a mongrel nation. Mexico became a counterpoint to the caste society that developed in its northern neighbour. Then it began to permeate and change that society.

By 2001 Latinos, most of them Mexicans or descended from Mexicans, had become the second-biggest ethnic group in America. This worried African-Americans, who were thus relegated to third place. It also alarmed some… more