As U.S. soldiers pull out of Iraq this December, and with 33,000 more scheduled to leave Afghanistan by the fall of 2012, American land forces may find themselves the victims of their own success. The budget deal signed by the president in August promises big cuts in defense dollars, and the burden of leaner budgets is expected to fall on the troops. A key Pentagon review published last year signaled that the future belongs largely to the Navy and the Air Force; Libya seems a proving ground for the use of U.S. air and naval power (combined with that of their NATO peers) fighting to overthrow ... Read More
U.S. Evaluating Government Programs More Than Ever
September 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Whatever else comes of Barack Obama's legacy on health care, financial reform or the federal deficit, his administration has seeded a little-recognized but critical shift in the way government funds and runs social programs. The insight sounds fairly obvious, although academics will recognize it as much more: The government is now trying to use evidence. According to a new report commissioned by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts in the U.K. (because the Brits would like to figure out how to do this, too), the Obama administration is instituting "the most sweeping ... Read More
German Conservatives Discover Populism In Euro Crisis
August 31, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A visceral disgust for handing out cash to "save the euro" has seized German leaders like a gag reflex in the declining weeks of summer. The idea of paying for the mounting debts of euro-zone countries like Spain and Greece has suddenly struck a number of people in Chancellor Angela Merkel's circle as insane, if not criminal. Christian Wulff, the normally quiet and uncontroversial German president, wondered out loud during a keynote speech last week whether the European Central Bank really should be starting a second round of massive debt purchase in the form of Greek and other European ... Read More
Budget Hawks, Enviro Doves Offer Budget Cuts
August 24, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Heartland Institute and Friends of the Earth don't agree on much of anything. Heartland, based in Chicago, is a free-market think tank widely viewed with suspicion by environmentalists. Friends, as its name suggests, is a progressive environmental advocacy group that's fought for action on climate change. Neither of them, though, can stand the federal government's flood insurance program. It spends billions of dollars offering insurance to property owners at rates much kinder than they'd find on the private market. And it encourages the development of watersheds where no one should be ... Read More
Welfare Rates Almost Unchanged During Recession
August 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Not surprisingly, participation in government support programs like food stamps and unemployment insurance has soared in the United States during the recession. Those services kicked in, as the very concept of a social safety net implies, just when people have needed them the most. But there is one odd exception to this trend: Caseloads for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — the program created by the signing of welfare reform 15 years ago this week — have barely crept up nationwide since 2007. In 13 states, caseloads have dropped even as local unemployment as much as ... Read More
The Real Cheating Scandal of Standardized Tests
August 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last week, Montana became the leader of what is likely to be a number of states that will rebel against the provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind law by refusing to raise test score targets as required by the law. The list of states and cities plagued by allegations of cheating on standardized tests is likely to grow beyond Washington, Baltimore, Atlanta, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. What are we to make of the Obama administration’s willingness to waive some of the most extreme penalties under the No Child law but to only offer the rather hollow response of calling for enhanced ... Read More
Rescuing Endangered Languages Means Saving Ideas
August 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Endangered languages don’t seem as self-evidently valuable as, say, endangered species essential to the functioning of a healthy ecosystem. If the world loses Chuj, a particularly endangered Mayan language of Central America, or Itelmen, a language with fewer than two dozen native speakers on an isolated peninsula in the far east of Russia, people will still be able to communicate. They’ll just do it in Spanish, or maybe Russian. And history will move on. Human language, though, encapsulates more than just different ways to say to “hello.” “The debate about the universality of ... Read More
Saving Gas Via Underpowered Death Traps
August 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
After the Obama Administration unveiled new fuel-economy standards last week for cars, light trucks and SUVs – setting an average goal of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 – perennial critics of the policy pounced on one of its feared side effects. “This will take away consumer choice,” warned Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the free-market think thank National Center for Policy Analysis, “and force all but the wealthiest drivers into small, underpowered death traps.” The center’s press release even links to a terrifying chart illustrating, along a steep diagonal line, ... Read More
Would Debt-Ceiling Circus Occur With Women in Charge?
August 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Congress did finally pass a deal to raise the debt ceiling in the 11th hour (or just 12 hours before default). But no one seems to be cheering the resolution for this reason: The unsightly process that got Congress to this point has revealed an institution so dysfunctional just 2 percent of Americans have anything nice to say about its recent behavior. Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike have instead overwhelmingly summed up the debt-ceiling debate in a new Pew survey with bitter words like "ridiculous," "disgusting," "stupid" and "childish." On the website of Foreign Policy ... Read More
