Roundup: Media's Take

Robert J. Samuelson: Where are the Clinton and Bush Apologies for Our Budget Crisis?

Robert Samuelson writes a weekly economics column that usually runs in The Post on MondaysHere’s a fantasy of mine that might help solve the long-term budget problem. Retired presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush would tour the country together and apologize. They would apologize for not tackling Social Security and Medicare when they had the chance. They would say things that would offend their political bases: Bush would concede that we’ll ultimately need higher taxes to balance the budget; Clinton would support real Social Security and Medicare cuts to minimize draconian reductions in other government programs and steep tax increases.This exercise would elevate public rhetoric to the level of private knowledge. Clinton and Bush know, as does almost anyone who’s examined the budget, that lower retirement benefits and higher taxes are essential to bringing government revenues and spending eventually into balance. But practicing politicians cannot utter these twin truths together without calling forth the full wrath of their own true believers, who remain in resolute denial — or are simply dishonest.

Martin Feldstein: The Tax Reform Evidence From 1986

Mr. Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Ronald Reagan, is a professor at Harvard and a member of The Wall Street Journal's board of contributors. Congress's Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction is struggling to find $1.5 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years. This is a unique opportunity to use tax reform to reduce future budget deficits while lowering individual tax rates.The Tax Reform Act of 1986, enacted 25 years ago last Friday, showed how a tax reform that includes lower rates can change incentives in a way that grows the tax base and produces extra revenue. The 1986 agreement between President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O'Neill reduced the top marginal tax rate to 28% from 50%. A conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat could agree to a dramatic reduction in top rates because the legislation also eliminated a wide variety of tax loopholes....To measure that response, I studied a sample of individual tax returns (stripped of all identifying information) for more than 4,000 taxpayers provided by the U.S. Treasury Department. Because the sample contained the tax return of each individual for the years 1985 through 1988, I could compare the taxable income of individuals in 1985 with their taxable incomes in 1988, two years after their rates were lowered.

Russ Roberts: Occupy Wall Street and Washington's History of Financial Bailouts

RUSS ROBERTS is Professor of Economics and Mercatus Scholar at George Mason University. He is also Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University....The protesters are right about one thing: Washington has been coddling Wall Street. But they have missed the most important way that Wall Street lives off the rest of us. Programs like the Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2008 are red herrings. TARP did send $700 billion to Wall Street, but most of it has been paid back.There is a much more important, albeit quieter, favor Washington has been performing for Wall Street over the last 25 years: When large financial institutions get into trouble, policymakers make sure that their creditors receive 100 cents on the dollar.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue

Barbara Ehrenreich, TomDispatch regular, is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (now in a 10th anniversary edition with a new afterword).As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided -- to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1%. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee?

Andrew Sullivan: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Goddamn Hippies

A lot of us have to confess something about the Occupy Wall Street protests: we have a hippie problem. As a post-boomer, I’ve been trained to giggle at them my whole life. And anyone who has had to listen to an unsought diatribe about corporations in a line at Target, or has a friend who’s been trying to talk you into going to Burning Man for a decade, will know what I’m talking about. The crustier edges of the fringe can be as smug as they are alienating—from replacing applause in Zuccotti Park with silent finger-wiggling to the occasional, asinine assertion that the U.S. government is a greater evil than al Qaeda.

James Traub: Is there a place for Christians in the new Middle East?

James Traub is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a fellow of the Center on International Cooperation. "Terms of Engagement," his column for ForeignPolicy.com, runs weekly....We tend to forget that it was the Middle East that taught the world how the three Abrahamic faiths could get along with one another. In his masterful new book, The Great Sea, historian David Abulafia recounts how a polyglot Mediterranean culture of Jews, Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians, and Catholics arose in the coastal cities of Constantinople, Salonika, Tunis, Jaffa, and Alexandria. This last, in the 1920s, had 25,000 Jews in a population of about 500,000, as well as Greeks, Italians, Maltese, and others. Abulafia writes that Omar Toussoon, a leading member of the Egyptian royal family, patronized all these groups equally while working hard to improve the economic fortunes of the city's Muslim masses.

Gerry Adams: Basque Peace Move An Essential Step

Gerry Adams is president of Sinn Féin. The decisive and positive terms of ETA's response to Monday's "Declaration" in Donostia-San Sebastian by the International Conference group is to be welcomed, as is the response of the Spanish government and others. It has taken many years of patient work to get to this point and every effort must be made to build momentum into the process. I first became involved in the efforts to build a peace process in the Basque country at the time of our own peace agreement in 1998. An Irish priest, Fr. Alex Reid, who I have known for almost 40 years, had played a key role in creating the Irish peace process and he was asked by a priest in that region to bring his expertise to bear. In the years since then, Sinn Féin leaders, including myself, have traveled regularly to the region and met representatives from the Basque country and the Spanish state. It is obvious that many of those in the Basque region who we met are committed to peace and that they have consciously sought to learn from the Irish experience...

Yoani Sanchez: The Deaths of Dictators: Neither History Nor Their People Will Ever Absolve Them

Yoani Sanchez, a University of Havana graduate in philology, emigrated to Switzerland in 2002, to build a new life for herself and her family.  Ceausescu was in his helicopter, Saddam Hussein was hiding in a hole, Tunisia's Ben Ali fled into exile, Gaddafi fled in a convoy and ended up hiding in a drainpipe. The autocrats escape, they leave, they don't sacrifice themselves in the palaces from which they dictated their arbitrary laws; they do not die seated in the presidential chairs with a red sash across their chests. They always have a hidden door, a secret passage through which they can scurry away when they sense danger. Over decades they build their secret bunkers, their protected "ground zeros" or their underground refuges, because they fear that the same people who applaud them in the plazas can come for them when they lose their fear. In the nightmares of the dictators, the demons are their own subjects, the abyss takes the form of mobs who want to bring down their statues, spit on their photos. These despotic gentlemen sleep lightly, alert to the cries, the hammering on the door... they live with premonitions, often of their deaths.

David Pilling: China Fears the Spirit of 1911

David Pilling is the Asia editor of the Financial Times. The Japanese organisers of an academic conference to celebrate China’s 1911 revolution were taken aback a few days ago when, after months of preparation, the event was abruptly cancelled. They were not the only ones to be caught by surprise. The Beijing world premiere of an opera depicting the life of Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Chinese republic, was also suddenly stopped for “logistical reasons”. Though many events commemorating the revolution of 100 years ago have proceeded as planned and though a giant portrait of Sun was erected in Tiananmen Square in October, several other celebrations associated with 1911 have been mysteriously curtailed. China’s Communist party has a difficult relationship with history. The party represents an awkward, one could say irreconcilable, confluence of change and continuity. On the one hand it wants to be seen as the guardian of the revolution that began in October 1911 and ended with the abdication of Puyi, the last emperor of China, in February 1912. On the other, it stresses its own permanence, and continuity with thousands of years of imperial rule.

Jim Lacey: War With China?

Jim Lacey is professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps War College. He is the author of the recently released The First Clash and Keep from All Thoughtful Men. The opinions in this article are entirely his own and do not represent those of the Department of Defense or any of its members.‘The two economies [the United States and China] are linked with each other and with the rest of the world in a manner unparalleled in history. This mutual dependence can be an immensely powerful deterrent, in effect a form of mutually assured economic destruction.” So concluded the RAND Corporation in a study released last week.

Simon Jenkins: Europe's Defunct Idealism Is Like Munich All Over Again

Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian as well as broadcasting for the BBC.   Europe's financial crisis is acquiring the stench of Munich. No, it is not Nazi Germany. But it is the same ceaseless meetings and pretend deals, the same flying here and there and getting nowhere, the same refusing to acknowledge catastrophe on the horizon, hoping someone else will take a tough decision. In 2008 the financial spotlight was on Washington. Banks were rescued, but not the American economy. Now the spotlight is on Europe. Again the talk is of saving banks, and none of saving economies. Britain's banks have been given another £75bn, which makes £275bn over two years. No one seems to have a clue where this stupefying sum has gone. Most has allegedly vanished overseas, covering bad debts, fuelling commodity prices, depressing the pound and increasing inflation. Meanwhile, Britain's economy has ground from slow to stop.

Steve LeVine: The CIA May Be Repeating its Afghanistan Mistakes in Libya

Steve LeVine is the author of The Oil and the Glory and a longtime foreign correspondent. For six months -- ever since the rebel movement took shape in Benghazi -- one of the liveliest guessing games in Libya has been deducing the whys of Qatar's deep intervention in the uprising. After all, for the last decade or so, Qatar ruler Hamad Bin Khalifa al-Thani's main preoccupations have been the accumulation of a fabulous natural gas fortune, and the creation of a wondrously successful all-news TV channel.

Gordon Robison: Obama Toes the Bush Line on American Foreign Policy

Gordon Robison teaches political science at the University of Vermont. A number of US actions over the last few weeks — the Al Awlaqi killing, the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, even the State Department's slightly crazed pursuit of a diplomat who published a book it did not like — all lead back to the same basic question: why, when it comes to foreign policy, is US President Barack Obama so much like George W. Bush? The most recent example of the Obama administration's mirroring of its predecessor is the alleged Iranian terror plot. This focuses on an Iranian sleeper agent who has supposedly been lying low in Texas for almost three decades, failing to make a living as a used car salesman. According to the Justice Department he agreed to act as a middleman, using Iranian government money to hire a Mexican drug gang to assassinate the Saudi ambassador by blowing up a Washington restaurant. An odd-sounding plot supposedly ‘foiled', even though it was far from fruition. Law enforcement officials who may have crossed the line into entrapment in their eagerness to announce yet another high-profile terror arrest. A suspect who looks more like a deluded loser than a terrorist mastermind. Where have we seen all of this before?..

Michael Lind: Occupation and Realignment

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."Will the worldwide “occupy” demonstrations make 2011 the new 1968?The liberal left must hope not.  The global wave of left-wing radicalism that peaked in 1968 was followed by a generation of right-wing reaction in the United States and Europe.  The rise of counterculture frightened the “silent majority” in the U.S. and Europe into supporting politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who, running campaigns based largely on patriotism and traditional values and “law and order,” used their power to undermine the labor market regulations and social insurance programs that had protected the socially conservative working classes who voted for them....Instead of provoking a conservative backlash, or being co-opted by the existing progressive identity-politics machine, the Occupy Wall Street movement could indirectly benefit the American center-left by re-creating an American radical left.

Gideon Rachman: America Must Manage Its Decline

Gideon Rachman is a journalist who has been the Financial Times chief foreign affairs commentator since July 2006. Recently I met a retired British diplomat who claimed with some pride that he was the man who had invented the phrase, “the management of decline”, to describe the central task of British foreign policy after 1945. “I got criticised,” he said, “but I think it was an accurate description of our task and I think we did it pretty well.” No modern American diplomat – let alone politician – could ever risk making a similar statement. That is a shame. If America were able openly to acknowledge that its global power is in decline, it would be much easier to have a rational debate about what to do about it. Denial is not a strategy. President Barack Obama has said that his goal is to ensure that America remains number one. Even so, he has been excoriated by his opponents for “declinism”.

Mikhail Gorbachev: A Farewell to the Nuclear Sword of Damocles

Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the U.S.S.R., founded Green Cross International, an independent nonprofit and nongovernmental organization working to address the interconnected global challenges of security, poverty eradication and environmental degradation. Twenty-five years ago this month, I sat across from Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, Iceland, to negotiate a deal that would have reduced — and could have ultimately eliminated by 2000 — the fearsome arsenals of nuclear weapons held by the United States and the Soviet Union. For all our differences, Reagan and I shared the strong conviction that civilized countries should not make barbaric weapons the linchpin of their security.

Michael Medved: Romney’s Nixon Problem

Michael Medved hosts a nationally syndicated daily radio talk show heard by more than 4 million listeners. He is also the author of 12 nonfiction books, most recently The 5 Big Lies About American Business. A ghost from 1968 haunts the campaign of Mitt Romney—and no, it’s not the memory of his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, who stumbled as a leading GOP contender 43 years ago. For the younger Romney, the more worrisome blast from the past involves the campaign of Richard Nixon, who ultimately won the nomination by default but never managed to inspire real enthusiasm from the party faithful. As with Mitt, nearly all Republicans considered Nixon acceptable as a standard bearer as the former vice president positioned himself in the safe center of the party. But grassroots activists felt far more excitement about candidates like Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater and California Gov. Ronald Reagan on the party’s right, or New York Gov.

Yascha Mounk: Germany's Not That Sorry Anymore

Yascha Mounk, the founding editor of the Utopian, is a political theorist at Harvard University. He is working on a book about German-Jewish relations since 1945....To explain Germany's response to the crisis we must start from the fact that the country has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last 20 years. In the postwar era, leaders from Konrad Adenauer to Willy Brandt realized that, for Germany to be readmitted to the fellowship of civilized nations, it had to atone for the recent past. Germany thus paid reparations to Israel, concluded peace treaties with its eastern neighbors, and, above all, entered an unwavering alliance with former foes like Britain, France, and the United States.But the contrite Germany of the postwar era has been long gone. Since Germany's reunification, the need to atone for Auschwitz has been replaced by the desire to draw a definitive finish line underneath irksome talk of the Third Reich.The first decisive step in this direction was taken in 1998 by Martin Walser, a famous novelist, when he called Auschwitz a "moral baseball bat" wielded by sinister outsiders intent on harming Germany's interests. Germany's assembled political and cultural elite feted Walser's speech with standing ovations.

Robert Reich: The Rise of the Regressive Right and the Reawakening of America

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. ...Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today’s Republican right aren’t really conservatives. Their goal isn’t to conserve what we have. It’s to take us backwards. They’d like to return to the 1920s — before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act. In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.

Eric X. Li: China's political system is more flexible than US democracy

Eric X. Li, chairman of Chengwei Capital, is a Shanghai scholar and entrepreneur. He is also affiliated with the Fudan University School of International Relations and Public Affairs. Eric Li’s Chunqiu Institute recently hosted a dialogue between Francis Fukuyama (“The Origins of Political Order”) and Zhang Weiwei (“The China Wave”) on the "China model."...Many argue that Western democratic regimes are superior because the rotation of political parties by voting allows the flexibility required for the government to make policy changes that meet the demands of changing times and thereby better reflect the will of the people. In contrast, China’s one-party system is rigid, and the CCP’s monopoly on power disconnects it from the people.