Now and then a
moment occurs that clarifies the nature of American politics like a
flash of lightning over a prairie landscape. Such a moment occurred on
Sept. 9 during President Obama's televised address to a joint session
of Congress about healthcare. As the president explained that illegal
immigrants would not be eligible for benefits under the plan he
supported, Joe Wilson, a conservative Republican member of Congress
from South Carolina, shocked the chamber and the television audience by
shouting, "You lie!"
We are a full year removed from the September 15, 2008, bankruptcy
of Lehman Brothers, which sent the global financial system into a
tailspin, and yet just 10 days removed from one of the most dismal
unemployment reports in 80 years.
On the one hand, this is no
kind of celebratory one-year "anniversary," if you want to call it
that, and it was certainly no kind of Labor Day either. And they are
related.
The bursting of the housing and credit bubbles has left the United States
with a huge debt overhang. As a result of the buildup of private sector
debt and the economic crisis, households and firms are finding it difficult to
service debt and lay a foundation for a sustainable recovery.
New America Foundation's Economic Growth Program hosted
leading economists and public intellectuals to discuss the following questions:
"Any argument that Lehman's collapse served the positive purpose of
letting the world financial system participants know there was a risk
to be had, that message lasted 24 hours," said Doug Rediker, Director of New America Foundation's Global Strategic Finance Initiative and former Lehman Brothers investment banker. "We may now have the inverse
message: There are banks that are too big to fail."... Original Article
The public's faith in President Barack Obama's plan for health care
reform is fading. Proposals ranging from the public insurance option to
reimbursing physicians for end-of-life counseling are mired in a debate
that's as overheated as August temperatures. Even the seemingly
self-evident idea that the nation has a moral duty to make sure all
citizens have basic access to health care is up for grabs. But there's
one aspect of health care reform that California voters support almost
universally: better medical evidence.
On September 9, 2009,
author and journalist Sam Tanenhaus came to the New America Foundation to
discuss his new book, The Death of
Conservatism. Tanenhaus, Editor of the Book Review and Week in
Review at The New York Times and
biographer of Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley, Jr., traced the
intellectual history of "movement conservatism" from the philosophies of Edmund
Burke to the presidency of George W. Bush. Along the way, he argued,
conservatism's goals shifted from conservation and… more
It might be called the "World's Scariest
Chart." It is a snapshot of the
fragile foundations of the American economy and the epic boulder it now finds
itself trapped beneath. The graph shows total debt outstanding in the United States,
both secured and unsecured, as a percentage of GDP. In 1981 it was a manageable
168 percent, in 1996 253 percent, and by the first quarter of 2009 with the
collapse of the housing and credit bubbles it had reached a staggering 373
percent of GDP.
