U.S. News & World Report

It has become an axiom of American politics that government will always and everywhere screw up if it gets hands-on control of a private industry. In reporting President Obama's big plans for General Motors and Chrysler on Tuesday, even the nominally liberal and learned New York Times bought into the notion, observing that, "In the past, the United States government had briefly nationalized steel makers and tried to run the railroads, with little success."

"Everybody's making nice, and that's fine," says Len Nichols, director of the health policy program at the New America Foundation. "I'm all for making nice." Of course, at some point people will have to move beyond making nice and get down to ...

Now is clearly not the time to balance the budget--even the most adamant deficit hawk knows that. But economic recovery will not be as simple as merely running up the government's credit card and calling it a day. Certainly, the U.S. economy is in very bad shape--but so too is the fiscal health of the country.

As Ted Widmer, another former presidential speechwriter (from the Clinton White House) told me, Obama began his new job with, "All in all, ...

Even before President Bush announced that billions of dollars in aid from the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Recovery Program will soon flow to America's automobile manufacturers, a third wave of relief-seekers was already washing up on the shores of the Potomac.

The remarkable enthusiasm around Barack Obama's election makes the thought of running against him in four years daunting. But potential Republican challengers are already jockeying for that right. The GOP's path back to power is murky and its coalition fractured, but one thing should be crystal clear: Sarah Palin will not be the party's nominee in 2012, or even a serious contender.

...Analyst Ray Boshara of the New America Foundation also thinks that the stock market remains a key to boosting our future standard of living. Here's why: Unless rising Asia becomes disappearing Asia, excess global labor supply will continue to push down hard on wages. "We are not going back to the 1950s," Boshara says. "The return from labor has been diminishing. Families have to earn income not just from a job but from assets."

But rather than Social Security privatization, Boshara is a proponent of "baby bonds."… more

...[Ambassador] Haqqani, speaking at the New America Foundation, said that Pakistan's powerful military establishment did not play any political role behind the scenes of Musharraf's resignation. However, he said, military chiefs did refuse to block impeachment moves against Musharraf that had been gaining strength in Pakistan's parliament—a rebuff to Musharraf and a sign that the coup-prone Pakistani military may be accepting a new role for itself. LINK

(USNews.com's Capital Commerce Blog)--I am currently in the middle of reading the fabulous Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. It's chock full of interesting economic ideas that Republicans can use to better appeal to working-class voters and families. Among them: massively expanding the tax credit for children, a "GI bill" of tuition tax credits for stay-at-home parents who want to get back into the workforce,… more

..."Without a doubt, they had accomplished something just short of miraculous by winning a war against a superior adversary, securing the support of a historic enemy, and then running roughshod over the interests of both in the treaty that ended the war," writes historian Ted Widmer in his forthcoming book, The Ark of Liberties. "But it was a curiously nonidealistic way to advance America's famous idealism..."  LINK