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

A good place to begin to try and understand the federal government’s finances is a report issued by an obscure federal agency known as Financial Management Services.

Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population

This has been the result of a

percent deficit, you end up with about a 10 percent deficit, which is, of course, where we find ourselves today and is clearly unsustainable. This perspective certainly suggests that if we want to balance the budget by returning to historic norms, we have some work to do on both sides of the ledger. David Walker, former U.S. Comptroller General and

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.

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

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

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

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