March/April 2012

It turns out that the terrible train collision in China last year was caused by a failed signal mechanism. It had not been properly tested because the leader of the responsible agency had focused on the “speed of the railway project construction” at the expense of safety, according to the Wall Street Journal’s report on […]

I continue to worry that the wrong cuts will be made in the Pentagon’s budget—that too many of the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan will be lost just as those of Vietnam were. Pentagon generals like to think big and emphasize preparation for major wars with all the big-ticket items loved by military contractors and […]

Speaking of constants, see “The Amoral City Government,” the headline of a recent column by Colbert King in the Washington Post. Sadly, it could have appeared on a great majority of days in the thirty-three years since Marion Barry took over as mayor in January 1979. When are the people of Washington going to wake […]

Like the vote buyer who is running for sheriff in West Virginia, Gerard E. Evans, the Washington Post reports, has regained his top spot among Maryland lobbyists after serving a prison term for fraudulent practices.

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 […]