As the Bush Administration continues its relentless push to starve the agencies of government, its tax cuts are choking off federal payments to states and cities for federally-mandated programs like Medicaid, special education, the President’s "No Child Left Behind" law, and hundreds of others. While there is plenty of pain to go around, the haphazard mess that is the current American health care system may suffer most.
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Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance
Words, Words, Words
If any of these answers comes as a surprise, it is because Americans have increasingly substituted labels for analysis. Turn on talk radio, or one of the numerous television shows where political pundits scream at each other and you will hear terms like liberal or right-wing used to dismiss a point of view with which the commentator disagrees. What you won’t often hear is a reasoned discussion of the merits or flaws of that point of view.
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Lessons Unlearned
America’s attention is focused on Iraq these days, so the Bush Administration’s recent announcement that it plans to privatize 800,000 federal jobs, beginning with air traffic controllers, got very little attention.
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The Government We Deserve
There is an old saying to the effect that people get the government they deserve. I used to believe that–before the current administration took office. Now I’m not so sure.
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Bush Trade Policy
Bruce Bartlett, a reliably conservative columnist whose commentary on economic matters appears regularly on the editorial page of the Indianapolis Star, recently delivered a scathing analysis of what passes for trade policy in the Bush Administration. After accusing the administration of ?incredibly poor judgment in trade policy ever since taking office,? Bartlett pointed out that the steel tariffs imposed by Bush have backfired badly, by costing jobs in industries that use steel. Bush?s agricultural subsidies, said Bartlett, ?doomed a multilateral trade agreement.?
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