In 2008, I found myself in the Crystal City office of Doug Holtz-Eakin, the top economic adviser to Republican presidential nominee John McCain. When talk turned to Social Security, he said a version of what just about every serious fiscal analyst says these days: This is not that hard of a nut to crack. Sure [...]
0 minutes. Presidential debates come and go. But tonight’s GOP debate, the fourth in a series too numerous to bear, is a special treat. “We are all gathered under the wings of Air Force One,” says NBC’s Brian Williams, referring to the great phallus of American presidential might that sits in the hangar at the [...]
Barack Obama had three weeks to plan his first move of the fall political season. When he announced it, that move appeared to be an aggressive one. And then it blew up in his face. Midday on Wednesday, his aides announced that the President intended to give a joint address to Congress about the economy [...]
Weeks before the debt-limit showdown came to a head, White House chief of staff Bill Daley held an unannounced retreat for his senior staff at Fort McNair, an Army base near the southern tip of the District of Columbia. The agenda for the June confab was wide-ranging, including a lecture of sorts from the presidential [...]
While the President is away, his surrogates do not play. Instead, they spent their Sunday morning’s this week on the Sunday shows trying mightily to fill the late August void with little new to say. “There are specific things that we can do right now that will accelerate our economy,” said David Axelrod, a top [...]
Share of Americans who tell Gallup they are satisfied with the way things are going in the country, the lowest rating on record since 1979, except for a few weeks at the end of 2008 when satisfaction bottomed out at 7%.
Source: White House
Education Secretary Arne Duncan came out swinging this week, when he attacked Rick Perry’s education record in Texas, saying that he feels “very, very badly for the children there.” But a few hours later, Duncan had moderated his attack line, in an interview with TIME’s Andrew Rotherham. When I asked Duncan about this dire assessment [...]
Things are bad, but they are much worse if you didn’t go to college. Below is a quick rendering of the U.S. unemployment rate, as a percentage of total working population, for people over the age of 25 with different levels of educational attainment. As you can see, this economic collapse has only made the [...]
