Media

The best policy measures are those that solve two or more problems at once. So consider this idea: Let's tackle Washington's revenue challenges through tax hikes that mainly hit suburbanites and incentivize urban living. 

The need for more revenues is clear enough: federal taxes are near a 60-year low even as the Baby Boomers retire, China rises, infrastructure crumbles, and deficits stretch as far as the eye can see. Enough said on this point. 

Be careful what you wish for is good advice, and I'll be the first to admit that progressives may rue the day they celebrated historic changes to the Senate's filibuster rules.

Like when President Paul Ryan is packing the courts with pro-life judges in 2023. 

Detroit's debts are a fraction of the $18bn lawyers pushing for bankruptcy say they are, and their costs are "irrelevant, misleading and inflated," according to a report released Wednesday.

A former Wall Street investment banker is taking Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr to task for blaming the city’s financial collapse, in part, on escalating pension and retiree health insurance costs.

The official story about Detroit goes something like this: Decades of mismanagement and out-of-control spending have left the city with a crushing $18 billion in debt.

At the new Walmart superstore in the Chinatown district of Los Angeles, a Thanksgiving turkey costs a little over $30 (£19). The shop is kind enough to distribute ready-made holiday shopping lists to its customers, reminding them to buy cornbread mix and cranberry sauce, ground ginger and pumpkin pie. Yet not everyone can afford to stock their cupboards with each provision on the list – least of all Walmart’s own employees.

A progressive policy research center says that the nation’s largest retailer could easily afford to increase the wages of its employees, if it would choose to avoid “Wall Street financial maneuvers.”

Remember President Obama's big proposal to streamline how the federal government promotes business and trade? No, you probably don't. That's because the proposal disappeared without a trace last year after meeting resistance from various powers that be and getting forgotten by the very president who offered it. Welcome to the dispiriting world of government reform.

Modest Pension Benefits Play Little Role in Financial Crisis

DETROIT — In their push for bankruptcy, Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and other public figures are incorrectly looking at Detroit’s long-term debt—figures generated using aggressive and in some cases inaccurate assumptions—to the detriment of solving the City’s immediate cash-flow crisis and its long-term structural challenges, according to a report released Wednesday by Demos.