Sometime, while I wasn't paying attention, trickle-down economics got respectable.
— Timothy Noah
When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong.
Health care probably contributes a lot more to the common wealth than finance.
Everyone agrees that animals should not be exposed to unnecessary pain. But neither should scientists be hamstrung by the requirement to use anesthesia in every animal experiment that might cause pain.
Moderates tend more than ideologues to be other-directed types who respond to external pressure.
The worst an ex-con is likely to do if given the right to vote is vote for a Democrat.
Republicans don't seem to mind taking inflation into account when the subject is tax rates.
Ultimate success for a carbon tax would mean so complete a shift to renewable energy that the tax would stop raising much revenue at all.
Stock prices relative to company assets are no better at signaling the likelihood of future earnings growth than they were the day the Titanic sank, and risk management is a good deal worse.
Was President Obama's endorsement of gay marriage crassly political? God, I hope so.
Being superintendent or the superintendent's chief of staff is important work, but there's no chance it's as difficult as being a teacher, and I hesitate to say that it's as important.
Deciding which ideas to save and which ideas to discard is one of society's most important tasks.
I've come to the conclusion that the government needs to impose price controls on tuition increases - and so, I think, has President Obama.
A thriving middle class is a necessary precondition for a free representative government.
The argument most commonly made in the filibuster's favor is crudely partisan: 'Our side may be in the majority now, but someday it will be in the minority, and when that happens we'll want to block the other side's extremist agenda.'
President Obama seems to think that you win by demonstrating that you're a more reasonable person than your opponents. It didn't work too badly, I'll grant, as an electoral strategy in the 2012 election.
There is no better example of social and economic policy discussion as an idle pastime for the rich than the World Economic Forum at Davos. These guys make the millionaire schmoozers at the Aspen Ideas Festival look like short-order cooks.
You know what isn't class warfare? Progressive taxation, as in, say, expecting billionaires to pay at least as much in taxes as their secretaries. Ideally, in fact, they should pay more.
We live in an era of mind-blowing scientific discovery, virtually none of which ever makes the front page, even as every trivial twist and turn in the rococo political drama has a secure place as the lead story.
The typical family of four with employer-based health insurance is not the same as the typical family of four. It's better-off.
I recognize that Republicans see a moral difference between a dollar taken away from a millionaire in government benefits and a dollar taken away from a millionaire in taxes.
The Reagan years really were a bonanza for the rich; you didn't imagine that.
Federal law prohibits anyone convicted of a felony from owning a gun. Seems like kind of a good idea, no?
What the 1990s taught the Clinton veterans was that you could 'triangulate' with a GOP-controlled Congress.
Right now, as I'm typing this, some liberal somewhere is saying something unforgivable about Michelle Bachmann or Ann Coulter. I condemn you, whoever you are! But I'm not going to conduct a house-to-house search to find you.
One of my lifelong hobbies has been to collect 'aptronyms' - the newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams's term for people whose names were curiously appropriate to, or provided ironic comment on, their occupations.
When a conservative praises a liberal as 'morally serious,' he means that person is less liberal than most.
Being a teacher is back-breakingly difficult work. It is also extremely important work.
Creativity seldom thrives in an atmosphere of great discipline or scrutiny. That's one reason we tend not to want our leaders to get too creative.
If Romney were a chair, he'd be a squishy, expensively upholstered easy chair that bore the imprint of whoever last sat on it.
When the topic is growing income inequality, it's hard to prettify an imbalance between the rich and everybody else, so instead, conservatives try to argue that it doesn't exist.
The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.
Under Obama, income growth has been confined almost entirely to those at the top of the income distribution, continuing a pattern that began under President George W. Bush.
President Obama has his faults, but overall, I think, is a good president.
I won't dispute that bankers' privileged treatment in the 2008 crash merits populist scorn. But unfortunately, without a bank bailout, there probably would have been a worldwide depression.
Steve Jobs was the greatest manufacturer of consumer products of his age. His marketing vision put him on par with Henry Ford, and his grasp of the aesthetic component to industrial design far surpassed Ford's.
If the Pentagon truly confined itself to providing defense, then presumably we wouldn't need a whole separate government agency to provide 'Homeland Security.'
GOP candidates routinely sign a pledge never, ever to raise taxes. Democratic candidates aren't even asked to sign a parallel pledge never, ever to cut entitlements.
When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened 'the Reagan.'
Vote Republican if you like, but don't kid yourself that a Republican president would replace Obamacare with anything at all.
To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.
Wal-Mart uses technology to increase sales volume, but the more it does so, the more it drives down profit margins - its own and everybody else's. The same logic does not appear to hold for Goldman Sachs.
The thing to strive for is to get paid to talk about yourself.
What people want is big government that they don't have to pay for.
We all need to save money to send our kids to college, to buy our first house, and to retire. But the truth is that most of us don't save very much.
No man is an island. If you want to blame anybody for poisoning the world with that socialistic idea, blame John Donne.
Romney has become reluctant to say that human activity causes global warming, and even in his greener days he was always somewhat cagey about which remedies he'd support.
We Americans love our Constitution so much that we can't bear to change even the stupid parts.
Obama is an intelligent man whose life and work experience sensitize him to class distinctions.
Republican presidents talk about freedom. Democratic presidents talk about equality.
