New York Times

“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” Tim Wu, ...

“Some of the core elements of the social safety net have eroded,” said Jacob Hacker, author of “The Great Risk Shift” and a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley. “Unemployment insurance has been weak for a long time, but right now it seems to be quite anemic relative to the need,” he said. “The social safety net in general has not been kept up to date with the changing nature of the work force… more

By his final budget for 2013, Mr. McCain estimated he would cut $114 billion -- he does not say how -- to reach balance. He would still be about $200 billion short, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. But that estimate does not include the costs of the $700 billion financial bailout package already passed by Congress (its proponents say much of the price tag will be recouped by the government in the long run) or any additional economic stimulus… more

But the extra spending, a sore point in normal times, has been widely accepted on both sides of the political aisle as necessary to salvage the banking system and avert another Great Depression.

“Right now would not be the time to balance the budget,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan Washington group that normally pushes the opposite message. LINK

Most Liberal | 9:15 p.m.Senator John McCain suggested that Senator Barack Obama had the “most liberal big spending record in the United States Senate.” A moment later, Mr. McCain said that his Democratic rival has proposed “$860 billion in new spending.”

This is the same assertion that Mr. McCain has been making in recent weeks on the campaign trail. Where does he get that figure? The McCain campaign said it is based on adding up all of the programs that Mr.… more

America's financial landscape is changing before our eyes. The absorption of major Wall Street investment banks by commercial banks threatens to create colossal universal banks that are too big to fail and might need to be bailed out in the future. Meanwhile, the structure of public and private finance in the United States chronically fails to address four problems: the almost 10 percent of Americans without a bank account; the concerns of all Americans about the security of their savings; the growing indebtedness of the country to… more

The studies, policy analysts say, underscore the need for the government to address the growing unaffordability of care, despite the distraction -- and cost to taxpayers -- of a proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial sector.

“This makes clear the cost of doing nothing is high and growing,” said Len Nichols, a health economist at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan policy group in Washington that advocates universal medical coverage.

While policy analysts acknowledge that finding any new money to expand coverage may prove difficult, some also… more

The new fund, assuming it is approved by Congress, could pull the United States deeper into a form of capitalism in which the most powerful financial entities are not risk-happy investment banks, but more cautious state-sponsored entities. While not necessarily a third economic way, this general approach presumes that the government -- in addition to the private sector -- plays a crucial role in deciding how best to deploy a nation’s investment capital.

“This gets to the point of state capitalism and defining what the role of the… more

The growing tally of international weapon deals, which started to surge in 2006, is now provoking questions among some advocates of arms control and some members of Congress.

“Sure, this is a quick and easy way to cement alliances,” said William D. Hartung, an arms control specialist at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute. “But this is getting out of hand.” LINK

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 started out with the best of intentions. By clearing away the thicket of conflicting rules and regulations at various federal agencies, it set out to encourage universities to patent and license results of federally financed research. For the first time, academicians were able to profit personally from the market transfer of their work. For the first time, academia could be powered as much by a profit motive as by the psychic reward of new discovery...

...“Bayh-Dole tore down the taboos that… more