Charles Peters

I’m delighted that Barack Obama has taken on the cost of college. It is outrageous, and I’ve long marveled at how Americans meekly accept one tuition increase after another. We need a revolution in our thinking about higher education, finding alternatives to the traditional college model with a mixture of quality, affordable online courses, like […]

As for the cost of a legal education, David Segal of the New York Times has recently described how existing law schools are controlling the accreditation process to keep out their lower-cost competitors, and John O. McGinnis and Russell D. Mangas argue in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that two years of law school, not […]

Another Journal op-ed that surprised and delighted me was one proposing a wealth tax. Capital assets are not touched by the income tax. A wealth tax, however, could get at all those stocks and bonds Mitt Romney owns, as well as his three luxury homes and Swiss, Cayman Islands, and other bank accounts. Ronald McKinnon, […]

Here’s a clue to the political orientation of the Fox News audience: Bob Beckel is the token liberal—and a very moderate one at that—on a Fox panel show called The Five. Dana Perino, the former Bush press secretary and another member of the show’s panel, recently told a reporter that when viewers stop her in […]

Mitt Romney is advocating a cut across the board in the number of federal employees. He is right in thinking that the government workforce can be reduced, but across the board? No. Some agencies are understaffed. Consider the IRS: “The imbalance between the [Internal Revenue Service’s] workforce and its duties is unmanageable,” according to the […]

One cut that could be made in the national security budget is to our nuclear arsenal. It is far larger than we need, as articles by Philip Taubman in the New York Times and Walter Pincus in the Washington Post have recently pointed out. Indeed, both Taubman and Pincus contend that the current stockpile of […]

One of Obama’s proposals for government reorganization involves moving NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, from the Department of Commerce to the Department of Interior, which would seem to be a more natural home. Why, you may ask, was it not placed in Interior in the first place? At the time when NOAA was […]

“Even for those making seven figures or more, cuts are ‘a blow,’ ” writes James B. Stewart of the New York Times. Here Stewart is quoting Michael Driscoll, a former trader who is trying to explain why Wall Streeters find reduced bonuses disturbing: “The effect is psychological. To a large extent, Wall Street keeps score […]