The New Republic

It's hard to think of a fiscal argument that's been refuted as quickly and spectacularly as the one President Bush made on behalf of his tax cut last year. (Sure, in 1993 just about every Republican economist and politician argued that President Clinton's tax hike would destroy the economy, but that prediction took several years to be disproved, by which time almost everybody had forgotten about it.) Just six months ago Bush insisted we could pass a huge tax cut, save the entire Social Security surplus, READ MORE >>

Here's a name you probably haven't heard in a while: Christie Todd Whitman. She's head of the Environmental Protection Agency, remember? In her first few months in office Whitman revealed herself on several occasions to be out of the policy loop--the worst sort of ignominy in Washington--and has since gracefully disappeared from sight. Tom Ridge's fate has been less kind. One year ago he was a wildly popular governor lauded for his pragmatic leadership and was mentioned prominently as a vice presidential READ MORE >>

Harvey Pitt is not a household name. Until recently, the only people who regularly came across him were those in scrapes with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). For such individuals, however, Pitt was the man to see. He was considered the sharpest securities lawyer in the country, and while not everybody could afford his fees, those who could were generally pleased with the results. When the SEC charged Ivan Boesky with insider trading, he hired Pitt, who engineered a lighter-then-expected sentence. READ MORE >>

Now that a consortium of major newspapers has reported that George W. Bush would have won the Florida recount, his legitimacy is supposedly beyond dispute. "Even Gore partisans," asserts a Wall Street Journal editorial, "now have to admit that the former Vice President was not denied a legitimate victory by the Supreme Court." And this conclusion is not confined to Bush's amen corner. READ MORE >>

YOU COULD TELL, in the days following September 11, that lefties were looking for reasons to oppose U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan. At first they flailed about for a rationale but, in the last couple of weeks, they seem to have settled on one argument: By interfering with humanitarian relief efforts, the U.S. military response is exacerbating the famine in Afghanistan. READ MORE >>

Do economic conservatives really believe in the unadulterated free market, or do they believe in the interests of the rich? Usually it's hard to tell. Since the two imperatives often go hand in hand—unregulated capitalism naturally produces great inequality—the distinction between supporting laissez-faire and supporting the wealthy is usually invisible. But from time to time an issue comes along that pits one against the other, creating a kind of natural experiment to distinguish supporters of laissez-faire purity from supporters of the affluent. READ MORE >>

Prior to September 11 the White House and Congress were gearing up for an intensely partisan battle over the federal budget. The available surplus was suddenly gone, and with popular--and needed--spending on education and defense in jeopardy, each party blamed the other. According to the White House and some congressional Republicans, the fault was Democrats' unseemly attachment to the Social Security lockbox, an accounting fiction that masked the fact that we were still running massive surpluses within Social Security, surpluses that could be tapped to pay for defense and other spending. T READ MORE >>

Robert L. Johnson came to the Bush administration's attention when it needed him most. The cause of the White House's duress was an annoyingly munificent collection of millionaires, headed by Bill Gates Sr., who had banded together to oppose President Bush's plan to abolish the estate tax. In newspaper ads and press conferences, they held forth on the obligation of the wealthy to give back to society. So effectively did they seize the moral high ground that even the most fervent opponents of the estate tax resigned themselves to it. READ MORE >>

It has happened with the brutal logic of film noir: The protagonist's early mistake puts him in a tight spot. He escapes, but only by plunging into a deeper deception. His escalating series of lies and crimes cut off, one by one, any path to deliverance until, finally, he is caught. READ MORE >>

The debate over the Bush tax cut has been shrouded in a fog of cant and untruth. But every so often the fog clears, just for a moment. One such moment occurred in early March, when the Republican leadership in Congress held a rally in support of the president’s tax cut. As is often the case with such events, the rally organizers needed bodies as a backdrop, a visual cue indicating the support of the populace. And so they contacted Washington’s business lobbies, many of whom have pledged themselves to the tax cut effort. But the congressional leadership understood that a visual backdrop of A READ MORE >>