(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! Perhaps Democrats should ask instead why Trump was elected in the first …
(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. Its one virtue, at least to people in Washington, is that …
(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. Small businesses get nicked for noncompliance of …
(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. These reforms, for example, would eliminate the ability of civil servants …
(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 …
(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. Lengthy environmental review usually harms the …
(April 28, 2017) Americans think Washington is broken. That’s why they elected a tough-talking outsider as president. But fixing Washington requires more than one person; it requires a new operating system that allows people to make sensible choices. The parties …
(April 2, 2017) President Trump has signaled that one of his next big initiatives will be to jump-start a trillion-dollar program to rebuild America’s fraying infrastructure. As a former builder, Trump would seem to be uniquely qualified to oversee this …
(March 31, 2017) A new White House office of innovation, led by Jared Kushner, has been created to apply business techniques to make government work better. Leaving aside state enforcement powers, much of what government does is deliver (or subsidize) …
