In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.
— Timothy Noah
When Democrats lose, they're pathetic. When Republicans lose, they're bitter and mean.
Washington is a place where politics and economics often aren't on speaking terms.
The pathological degree to which former Vice President Dick Cheney operated in secrecy led to government abuses that we'll probably spend years learning about.
Voters care only that student loans remain freely available and that they cost taxpayers as little as possible.
Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.
Just about everything I own was made in China. Just about everything you own was made in China, too.
The Pentagon got fed up with its recruits getting ripped off by payday lenders and in 2007 got Congress to make it illegal to extend such loans to members of the military. But civilians remain fair game.
Loopy as the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system is, it's better than what you'd probably get by putting such decisions in the federal government hands.
When businesses affirmatively like regulations, that's when to reach for your wallet.
Whenever a president nominates somebody to a high-profile post, there is always the risk that some skeleton, real or imagined, will emerge from the nominee's closet and doom the whole enterprise.
The embourgeoisement of China's proletariat may be the inevitable result of its industrialization, but 'inevitable' isn't the same as 'speedy.'
For any politician who didn't enter office a wealthy man, nothing says 'I take bribes' like a Rolex watch.
Conservatives often say that we should care not about equality of outcomes but about equality of opportunity.
The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.
The doomsayers of the 1970s were wrong about how quickly the world would run out of oil, but not about the dangers that hydrocarbon consumption posed to the global environment, especially with respect to climate change.
If corporations are people, as the Supreme Court wishes us to believe, they are stunningly unpatriotic ones.
In removing the friction involved in paying bills, electronic billing has substantially increased the friction involved in not paying them.
Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it; perhaps we even deserve it. But we don't acquire wisdom from it.
Why does Medicare have such difficulty accommodating a cut - no, wait, a trim to its annual spending increase - of two measly percentage points? Two words: baby boom.
The GOP doesn't seem particularly afraid of being perceived as blocking reform, despite efforts by the Obama White House to establish that narrative.
It's no surprise that Mitt Romney bent himself into a pretzel to disavow the portions of Obamacare that derive from his own reform in Massachusetts.
I'm an incompetent consumer. I have two settings: Buy and Don't Buy.
If we were to compile a list of the ways in which the United States has made both itself and the wider world a better place, then at or very near the top would be its commitment to universal education.
The intriguing aspect of food charges on airlines is that they create the perfect laboratory for any economist who wishes to study the question of how to price a good that possesses, by universal consensus, absolutely no objective value.
Customer service, they say, is dead. Actually, it isn't. It's just hiding behind a call center in Manila.
To cut the federal budget without cutting entitlements is like giving up chocolate-chip cookies and then deciding it's OK to eat the ones that don't have any nuts.
You have to let the market reward effort and skill. But a system in which inequality of incomes constantly increases over time is worrisome.
The hometown economic elite - rich local families or individuals whom people used to praise or revile, read about in the society pages, and gossip about incessantly - disappeared from most American cities decades ago.
The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster way back in the 19th century, and somehow it managed to survive.
Whenever the very rich hold views at odds with those of the entire population, the federal government tends to do the rich's bidding.
With its Medicaid expansion, Obamacare may turn out to be the most equality-promoting policy enacted in a generation.
The U.S. policy of hoarding crude oil never made the world, or even the U.S., a safer place.
Income inequality has gotten worse under President Barack Obama.
Democrats view elections as a means to an end, while Republicans view an election as an end in itself.
I'd never have guessed that, six years after Medicare introduced a drug benefit, it would still be forbidden to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. Health reform might fix that, but it probably won't.
Gun Owners of America is a lobby group dedicated to the proposition that the National Rifle Association is a bunch of accommodationist sissies.
If you want to slow medical inflation in the private sector, it makes sense to expand the government's investment in private health care.
Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president.
The chief purpose of a union is to maximize the income of its members.
Inequality doesn't create unhappiness.
The $100 bill may be America's most successful export.
The idea that the business world's needs get ignored in Washington is perpetuated by business so it can fulfill even more of its needs, real or imagined.
What I've come to believe is that psychological advice isn't worth much if it isn't rooted in personal experience.
Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout - that, in essence, you're telling the middle class, 'Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.'
Working people vote!
The war to rein in Wall Street excess is never over.
The federal government does not trample in jackboots those with whom it does business. It wraps them in cotton batting and, when they express ingratitude, apologizes profusely.
Presidential election results in 2008 and 2012 clarified that talk radio was not, in fact, running the country.
What type of 'person' is the for-profit corporation? A spoiled brat - all rights and no responsibilities, a traditional conservative argument would say.
