Republicans appear to have learned at least one thing from the finance crisis–and it is that bailouts are very unpopular. You know the kind of bailouts of big private financial companies pushed for by the Republican president George W. Bush? Now Republicans are trying to make Democrats unpopular by tarring any Democratic bill dealing with [...]

If today’s drug laws were in force during the 1970s, Barack Obama might not be President. In his autobiography, Obama admitted to experimenting with marijuana during his high school years in the ’70s. He then went on to college and law school with the help of student loans. Last year, New York City arrested and [...]

Today, starting at 11 pm, the House Financial Services Committee will begin hearings on the collapse of Lehman Brothers and its role in the financial crisis. The hearing will be broadcast live on C-SPAN 3. Expected to testify: a who’s who of the world of financial regulation. Former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, Dick Fuld, [...]

Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee Kent Conrad (D-ND) evidently won his battle and is hoping to begin budget markup on Wednesday or Thursday.  But there are no plans to include reconciliation instructions — which means every bill in the Senate for the next year will require 60 votes to pass. Democrats in the House [...]

When talking about ending the prohibition on Marijuana, it is almost impossible to wrap your head around the totality of problems and issues it touches. The externalities, long reaching negative effects, and indirect consequences create an enormous web that touches countless aspects of our society. The amount that Marijuana prohibition costs us as a society [...]

And now it can be told: Yes, Virginia, health insurance CEOs are making huge amounts of money while their firms rapidly increase premiums and work diligently to find ways to not pay for their customers’ care. From the Washington Post: The chief executive of UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, reaped almost [...]

Recently, there has been some inside-the-beltway chatter about a value added tax. The policy reason behind it is basically that it could raise a lot of money. The foolish political logic behind it is that liberals won’t like it because it is very regressive, but in desperation, to increase revenue, they will somehow convince conservatives [...]

CBS polls the tea parties and finds they’re old, white, pissed off, likely to vote and don’t think they pay too many taxes. They like Fox News, and they don’t like Ron Paul: Weirdly, Ron Paul does better at more traditional GOP outings.  He won the CPAC straw poll handily this year, and lost to [...]

Thomas Ferguson is a professor of politics and economics at University of Massachusetts at Boston. The author of the “Investment Theory of Party Competition,” he believes that business elites, not voters, are the dominant force in political systems. Together with Joi Chen, he has released an analysis of the Brown/Coakley election, and concludes that the [...]

The newly passed health care law is not popular, and Republicans are starting to line up behind a political strategy of calling for its repeal. While true repeal seems like a legislative impossibility, the political strategy might work. When forced to choose between the false duality of this new health care law or no law, [...]