“I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did.” … Read more
Deficit reduction proposals from both Democrats and Republicans have been disappointing, and predictably so. In terms of the ratio between spending cuts and revenue increases, Democrats came up with a plan farther to the right than either Bowles-Simpson or Gang of Six plans, both of which were bipartisan plans. The Democrats, in their attempts at compromise with … Read more
If elections in favor of a particular party don’t indicate support of that party’s platform (The anti-tax Tea Party was a huge motivator last year, and the GOP candidates almost unanimously opposed tax increases), then what’s the point of democracy? Sure, we’d like our politicians to have entirely neutral, rational reasons for everything they do, … Read more
When the US spends so much money on everything and still doesn’t see results, the question should be: are we spending it right? Does government spend money as carefully as we would our own? It doesn’t look like it. That being said, the super committee shouldn’t be hesitant to slash across the board, without worrying … Read more
I also think, perhaps idealistically, that the cycle that Jay talks about can be broken by true courage and true leadership, instead of the pandering that we’ve seen. And while I fully agree that the political climate is disconcerting, there are some glimmers of hope for a productive deal. Areas like farm subsidies should provide … Read more
The one thing that the Super Committee has made painfully clear is how out of touch our Congress really is. Grover Norquist, K Street, and a handful of billionaire bank rollers now have as much power as the American public. Polls have shown again and again that Americans support tax increases to take care of budgetary problems. By the way, … Read more
The question is increasingly less, “Should we stay in Afghanistan?” as it is, “Can we stay in Afghanistan?” Needless to say, the toll that war wages is tremendous (financial, psychological, etc). As an idealistic college student, it’s easy to support measures to shrink the military budget to pay for more economy-building jobs (such as teaching and construction, … Read more
With President Obama’s pledge to end the war in Afghanistan in 2014 and with the war in Iraq nominally over, it is necessary to begin predicting and planning for the new power dynamics of a post-U.S. Middle East. Analysts have already pinpointed the Islamic Republic of Iran as the nation poised to fill the power vacuum. … Read more
Of all U.S. engagements in recent years, Afghanistan has been uniquely exploited for political purposes, both by the Bush administration and by Democrats-Obama among them-eager to appear sufficiently ‘hawkish.’ Although we are today vastly removed, temporally and psychologically from the immediate context of the invasion and cannot appreciate the security and political calculus behind the … Read more
For US policymakers, the War in Afghanistan is largely a function of two patently flawed options. On the one hand, significant reductions in American military presence would leave the Afghan state to fend for itself, a task that the government has proved unmotivated in and incapable of performing. Many members of Karzai’s government have intimate … Read more