Don't mess with it.
Barack Obama has picked up a few primary victories in states where Democrats often have a difficult time: Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia.
The biggest problem Obama will have will be the purple states -- states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, and others that barely went red or blue in 2000 and 2004. If McCain makes the case that Obama is too much a lockstep liberal and big-spending statist, the battleground states will make all the difference -- and McCain's maverick track record gives him the inside track for the center.
Republicans made up 6% of voters in Missouri's Democratic primary, 7% in Virginia's and 9% in Wisconsin's. (Most states make it harder to vote in the other party's contest.) The overwhelming majority cast their ballots for Sen. Obama, according to exit polls.
"Very rarely do you hear me talking about my opponents without giving them some credit for having good intentions and being decent people," Obama recently told U.S. News & World Report. "There's nothing uniquely Democratic about a respect for civil liberties. There's nothing uniquely Democratic about believing in a foreign policy of restraint. . . . A lot of the virtues I talk about are virtues that are deeply embedded in the Republican Party."
The U.S. spends more than $12 billion a month on operations in Iraq.
War is costly. But the Iraq war might be more costly than many people predicted. Former Clinton administration economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes estimate the final tab on Iraq will be an eye-popping $3.2 trillion.
It's one thing to focus on costs, but what about benefits? Was the war worth the cost? Have there been any advantages? Should the war in Iraq be judged on purely economic terms?
When I confronted Stiglitz about ignoring the potential benefits of the Iraq war during a 2006 BBC debate, he countered that the paper is merely the first in a conversation, hinting that assessing benefits is more difficult. Yet his paper makes no such hedges, concluding bluntly, “Expenditures on the Iraq war have no benefits [for America].”
Elsewhere, Stiglitz and Bilmes claim that the only clear beneficiaries of the war are “oil companies” and “certain defense contractors.” No mention of the Kurds or the Shiites. No mention of the widespread winds of change in Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This is willful ignorance, not the “cool, hard analysis of the kind for which economics has long earned a reputation” that the authors pretend.
If we could go back in time and invest the hundreds of billions spent in Iraq on something more productive, we'd be in better economic shape today. Alternatively, if we could take the vast sums we're currently spending in Iraq and somehow frictionlessly transmute that into some kind of better-designed domestic stimulus, that would help the economy over the short run. But in terms of actually available policy options (the time machine would be handy, though) bringing the war to an end, though strategically vital and good for America's long-term economic outlook, doesn't seem to me to be something likely to help the country with our short-term economic challenges.
It's going to take a lot of this.
Barack Obama promises $4,000 credits to help pay college tuition. Hillary Rodham Clinton backs $25 billion for home heating subsidies.
USA Today took a look at the actual economic policies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and especially at the bottom line. They wonder who will pay the bill for the latest Democratic Party giveaway. The real answer: the taxpayers. Both candidates essentially offer the same discredited statist solutions that now burdens Europe. Neither have honestly addressed the costs to taxpayers, nor how it will add to both the deficit spending and the federal intrusion into markets that do better at producing results.
Both are counting on savings from reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq and rolling back some of President Bush's tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire after 2010, to pay for their new programs. Both expect that expanded use of electronic health records and other advances in medical information technology will defray some of the cost of moving to a universal health-care system.
Neither, however, has proposed a fix for the biggest near-term strain on the federal budget, the alternative minimum tax, or explained how they propose to balance the cost of their campaign promises with the looming expense of the aging baby boomers.
Some churches are shrinking, others are growing as U.S. habits change.
Traditionally, Americans have been a deeply religious people. But more and more Americans are becoming fickle about the religion they adhere to -- or abandoning religion entirely. Nearly half all U.S. adults have switched to a faith other than the one in which they were raised, or have dropped affiliation with organized religion altogether, according to a new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
A startling number of the people I know who are serious about their faith do not worship in the church in which they were raised. Even if they remained Protestant, they are affiliated with a different Protestant denomination than the one in which they grew up. You could say that this is the consumerist mentality evidencing itself, but many of these converts known to me did so not for lifestyle reasons, but for serious theological reasons.
In the minds of many Generation Xers, religion is associated with institutions, organizations, traditional conceptions of religion. But spirituality is associated with a personal search and finding purpose and meaning in one's existence.
But for many that's not true, there's a divorce between traditional language and spiritual yearnings, and I think that's a 20th century problem. There are some Generation Xers in organized religion, but the vast majority don't find the traditional language meaningful. They feel there is a discrepancy or cultural lag between institutions and their personal concerns.
