Next Social Contract: Latest Articles

Audacity on steroids. How else to describe the Obama administration's fiscal 2010 budget proposal, unleashed on an American public so staggered by the events of the last few months that they cannot comprehend the magnitude of the plans Mr. Obama and his still-inchoate Cabinet have for the nation.

There was good news and bad news in the recent filings Chrysler and General Motors made with the federal officials overseeing their multibillion-dollar rescue.

The good news was that, if the federal government can see its way clear to adding another $21 billion or so to the more than $17.4 billion they received in bridge loans in December -- including a cool $7 billion by the end of March to forestall their insolvency -- the companies are confident that they will be able to retool, return to… more

Picture the scene: a dignified Ted Kennedy stands beside President Barack Obama on a brisk, late winter day in the Rose Garden. Mr. Obama laments the events that caused him to withdraw the nomination of his anointed healthcare-reform czar, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, as Health and Human Services Secretary. Reaching back to the lofty rhetoric of his campaign, he implores his audience to look past his own lapse in judgment and seize the opportunity to implement sweeping national reform that puts health insurance within… more

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the 1980s, he sought a truce in the Cold War, a breathing spell that would provide time for reformers to engage in "perestroika," or "restructuring," of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the Bush administration's hyperactive militarism and manic overextension, the U.S. needs a similar breathing spell in foreign policy that will permit concentration on rebuilding, not just reviving, the U.S. economy and its social contract. The Soviet Union

On January 11, 1944, in his annual State of the Union Address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for an economic bill of rights. The rise of totalitarianism, he said, had taught the lesson that "necessitous men are not free men" because the miserable and the desperate "are the stuff out of which dictatorships are made." According to Roosevelt, "In our days these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of