Matt Miller releases a new book on letting go of the old ways of thinking to unleash a new prosperity.
Matt Miller: This reformed fiscal conservative has stopped worrying about the nation's ballooning deficit. You should too.
Report
New report details how transcending traditional local control in schools can create genuine autonomy and meet modern challenges.
When you look at what local control of education has wrought, the conclusion is inescapable: we must carry Mann’s insights to their logical end and nationalize our schools, to some degree. But before delving into the details of why and how, let’s back up for a moment and consider what brought us to this pass.
Anyone who’s spent time among the mighty – and the wannabes – from the White House to the corridors of the Fortune 500 knows that larger forces than mere Presidents shape the fate of nations. Even the shrewdest political leaders and seemingly omniscient CEOs are the playthings of external factors, though it’s not always clear [...]
A spectre is apparently haunting America — the spectre of “populism”. “New populism spurs Democrats on the economy,” cried the front page headline in The New York Times the other day. Republicans rail against unseemly “class warfare,” while centrist Democrats fret that hard-edged populist appeals will spook suburban voters. Read more here.
New Census data show that the top 1 percent of U.S. earners now take home a greater share of national income than at any time since the height of the go-go 1920s. The top 300,000 earners together receive almost as much income as the bottom 150 million. Democrats inhale these facts and breathe out fire. [...]
John Edwards says we need to raise taxes to fix health care, and you can bet that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will eventually say so too. Their red-blooded Republican foes will counter that raising taxes is always and everywhere evil, because it hurts the economy. Read more here.
In 2003, back when Continental Airlines (Charts) was losing its shirt, Gordon Bethune, its salty CEO, got sick of hearing that upstarts like JetBlue (Charts) had created a new business model that would bury the industry’s dinosaurs. So he had his CFO recompute Continental’s earnings assuming the company had (like JetBlue) a much younger workforce [...]
Not long ago an investment banker worth millions told me that he wasn’t in his line of work for the money. “If I was doing this for the money,” he said, with no trace of irony, “I’d be at a hedge fund.” What to say? Only on a small plot of real estate in lower [...]
Matt Miller is a senior fellow at American Progress. He is also a weekly columnist for the Washington Post’s online edition; the host of “Left, Right & Center,” public radio’s popular political week-in-review program (named by iTunes as one of its “best podcasts”); and a contributor to MSNBC and CNBC. Miller’s first book, The Two [...]
If you think low voter turnout is killing American democracy, listen to our local rabbi’s wife. No kidding. Didi Carr Reuben’s idea (which I may reprise every presidential season until Americans rise as one to demand its enactment) is simple and sure to work: Turn the election into a lottery. The stub [...]
OK, I'll admit it: When I was 18, in 1980, after voting for John Anderson in the primary, I cast my first general election vote for Ronald Reagan. Call it a youthful indiscretion. Yes, Jimmy Carter's been great out of office, but back then I couldn't stand the whole weak, sweater-clad malaise thing he seemed [...]
It’s tax time, which means it’s time for conservatives to roll out their perennial complaint that the well-to-do are being asked to pay too much. They’re dead wrong, as every reasonable citizen will conclude in a moment, but first let’s hear them out. "You’re getting to the point where there are more [...]
It may look as though the White House buckled, but anyone with a strategic eye can see that Condi Rice will finally tell the 9/11 commission the truth: Richard Clarke wanted higher gas taxes, President Bush rebuffed him, and now Clarke is bitter. Welcome to the gas attacks. Prices are high and the blame game [...]