Fall 2024

Bush’s Budget and the Gutting of Social Security

In The Right Man, a memoir of his experience as a speechwriter in the Bush White House, David Frum claims that after September 11, “There was no more domestic agenda. The domestic agenda was the same as the foreign agenda. …

“Children and economists,” Robert Lekachman once said, “may think that the men at the head of our great corporations spend their time thinking about new ways to please the customers or improve the efficiency of their factories and offices.” After …

Successive U.S. governments have relied on a simple catechism: the World Trade Organization equals free trade, which equals development. With this rationale the nation has been led into regional (NAFTA) and international (WTO) trade agreements. These so-called “free trade” agreements …

The right’s allergy to active government has become the dominant theme in American politics. Bill Clinton’s ability as a politician was not to challenge that theme, but to operate within it. So, by 1994, Clinton and the Democratic Congress were …

Starting in the early 1980s, fashionable opinion held that unfettered free markets, a reduced role for the state, and integration into the global economy provided the best formula for development. International financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary …

Last summer, J. Brian Atwood, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), the government agency responsible for foreign aid, announced he was stepping down. Freed from the Clinton administration’s Panglossian view of the world, he delivered a …

When Thailand devalued its currency in July 1997 it started a world financial crisis that continues to spin out of control. After a year of turbulence, what can we say about the crisis? Beware of experts. Before the crisis, money …

The collapse of the Asian economies was one of the great economic surprises of the last half-century. Countries recently celebrated as “economic tigers” are now recipients of a $121 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and are seen …

This fall President Clinton made “fast-track” negotiating authority—whereby Congress must vote yes or no on trade agreements presented by the president, with no amendments allowed—his top legislative priority. The prospects for passage looked good. Every major newspaper supported it; the …

“When smart people,” Robert Lekachman once said, “say stupid things, the question arises, why is their perception of reality so blurred?” I recalled Lekachman’s query when reading a recent New York Times article in which Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs claimed …

In his 1997 inauguration speech President Bill Clinton said: “Our hopes, our hearts, our hands are with those on every continent who are build- ing democracy and freedom. Their cause is America’s cause.” That, unfortunately, is not true. The despots …

When I read Jeff Isaac I fell into depression. Twenty years of my life—and thousands of others’—wasted! In the depth of my despair, however, I had a revelation. Isaac was right. “A new `activist public policy,’ centered around the problem …

Last spring and summer, as Newt Gingrich and his followers gleefully set about dismantling what remained of the American welfare state, there were many stories in the press about the debut of the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard. For those …

REPORTER: What happened to the Republican revolution of the late 1990s? DISSENT: First we should clarify what we mean by the Republican revolution. From 1994 to 2000 Republicans made massive cuts in government spending, transferred power from the federal government …