Unapologetically Moderate: My Search for the Rational Center in American Politics

Beginning in the 1980s, for reasons I have not been able to completely divine, we took a sharp turn away from practicality and toward ideology. The partisan divide gradually became a chasm, compromise a dirty word. Increasingly our political debate has devolved into sound bites and slogans as the two major political parties’ platforms have ignored

Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum in their book That Used to Be Us describe the Democrats’ and Republicans’ “war on math,” noting that both sides ignore irrefutable financial realities. It is an apt description of the state of our politics today.

Obsession over “end times” is nothing new. Most cultures have as part of their belief system some ultimate fate of the human race, with most foreseeing a calamitous end. The beliefs are so widely held that we have a word for such systems: eschatology.

The federal deficit for last year (i.e., the amount by which all federal expenditures exceeds revenues) was about $600 billion, or about 6 percent of GDP.

But I have also found that notwithstanding the hysterical polarization so prevalent today there is a great center to the American people.

The basic facts regarding how the system works, including its long-term funding challenges, are plainly disclosed by Social Security’s annual report. See http://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/index.html. If people are misinformed about the status of Social Security, it is because they have not taken the time to inform themselves, not because someone has li

More often than not, the great public policy issues of our time are complex and the solutions not easy. In a world where the public is hungry for easy answers and the 24-hour media all too eager to provide them, I have tried to swim against the tide. I have asked my readers to lay aside preconceived notions and think harder about the issues facing

GDP, roughly speaking, is the value of all of the goods and services produced by the U.S. economy—our gross income, if you will. Looking at our debt and deficits as a percentage of GDP also allows us to make more accurate comparisons of our conditions to other countries and to previous periods in history. As of the end of the government’s most rece

When you add a 5 percent increase in expenses to a 3 percent decrease in revenues to a historic 2