(June 14, 2019) Washington has given up on governing. It doesn’t fix programs that everyone knows have long been broken. It doesn’t respond to public anger at Big Brother breathing down our necks in schools, hospitals and the workplace.
(May 18, 2019) Fixing America’s decrepit infrastructure enjoys rare bipartisan support. But the recent announcement of a $2 trillion plan by President Trump, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was quickly doused by reality.
(April 13, 2019) Centrist politics don’t offer the passion of absolutist solutions. In the words of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.): “Moderate is not a stance. It’s just an attitude towards life of, like, ‘meh.’”
(March 18, 2019) Democrats are understandably fearful that the centrist message of Howard Schultz will appeal to voters. Schultz, they say, will ensure that Donald Trump is re-elected!
(February 22, 2019) Bad habits are hard to change, and even harder when America no longer has a meaningful public culture. Tocqueville talked about it this way:
(February 13, 2019) Americans elected Donald Trump in 2016 on his pledge to “drain the swamp.” Two years later, they turned to Democrats to demand what Nancy Pelosi called “a new dawn.”
(February 9, 2019) America’s current governing system, created after the 1960s, dictates governing choices out of a huge legal machine, programmed with about 150 million words of federal law.
(February 4, 2019) This essay, adapted in part from Try Common Sense, was prepared for a February 19, 2019 forum co-hosted by the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University and Common Good.
(January 31, 2019) The daily detonations from the White House are diverting our attention from deeper flaws in modern American government. Donald Trump was elected for a reason: many Americans are fed up with Washington.
(January 27, 2019) For decades now, Americans have slogged through a rising tide of idiocies. Getting a permit to do something useful, say, open a restaurant or fix a bridge, can take years.
(June 4, 2018) Civil service reform is long overdue, but you wouldn’t know it from the hue and cry over President Trump’s recent executive orders proposing modest reforms.
(October 23, 2017) New York is at the cusp of a major infrastructure building boom, but an obsolete New York statute from the 19th century called the Scaffold Law has already wasted $200 million on one project — the new Mario Cuomo (Tappan Zee) Bridge.
(May 11, 2017) Rebuilding America’s decrepit infrastructure requires a new permitting system. Approvals today can take a decade, sometimes longer. Delay dramatically adds to costs and prevents projects from getting off the drawing board.
