As a former pro-life governor of liberal Massachusetts, whose signature achievement was the health care plan that served as a model for Obamacare, Mitt Romney has to work hard to convince conservative Republicans that he is really one of them. His support among Republicans has hovered around just ...

Welcome to the first of my weekly roundups of the upcoming U.S. elections. President Obama’s approval rating remains below 50% and the economy continues to be weak, but political futures markets still give him better than even odds of winning reelection. At the same time, they give Republicans a ...

Don’t read too much in to Mitt Romney’s narrow victory in the Iowa caucus. There’s no question that the relatively small state of Iowa has an outsize influence both on the presidential nominating process and—as a result—on the national political agenda. But that doesn’t mean that the roughly 120 ...

The hottest investment right now may be U.S. treasury bonds. Daniel Kruger reports this week that here was record demand for treasuries in 2010. At a recent auction for four-week bonds the government received a record $9.00 in bids for every dollar of bonds sold, even though the bonds pay no ...

President Obama ought to be in a lot of trouble. With the economy still as bad as it is after three years in office, his prospects for reelection should be bleak. But it still remains to be seen who will take the blame for our economic problems. And the fact is that as much as Americans disapprove ...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that Mitt Romney remains the likely Republican nominee in spite Newt Gingrich’s recent surge in the polls. The smart money over at the political futures market Intrade still likes Romney, giving him a 50% chance of winning the nomination, while give Gingrich just a 30 ...

Compare the covers of the different editions of the latest issue of Time. In most of the world, the cover of the magazine features a striking image of an Egyptian rioter in a gas mask. But the U.S. edition reduces the unrest to Egypt to small print and leads instead with a general series on “Why ...

It’s the economy, stupid. The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama’s re-election chances hinge on the state of the economy. While some of my readers are already convinced for some reason that Obama is an unimaginably bad president, most Americans have more mixed feelings toward him. But there’s ...

Obamacare is going to get its day in the Supreme Court. The court granted certiorari in—literally, informed the lower courts that it would hear—three cases challenging the Affordable Care Act on Monday. Its ruling in those cases next summer will help define the Roberts court’s legacy, and could ...

“We may have democracy or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, “but we can’t have both.”  That, in essence, was former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s message. Reich, who teaches public policy at UC Berkeley, delivered the Mario ...

White America is divided between those who are comfortable with the influx of immigrants from other countries and those who feel they threaten the American way of life. Obama’s race was a polarizing issue in the last presidential election and exacerbated an already existing divide between ...

Global emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide shot up in 2010. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that carbon dioxide emissions grew globally by 564 million tons, which is an increase of about 6%. It’s the biggest increase in emissions on record, almost as much by itself as the entire ...

Members of Congress aren’t like you and me—they’re substantially richer. Roll Call reported this week that the total net worth of Congress was more than $2 billion in 2010. That’s about 25% more than in 2008. That number doesn’t include the value of members personal residences or other non ...

We generally assume that if we use more energy-efficient machines we will use less energy. If we install energy-efficient light bulbs in place of incandescent bulbs, for example, it will take less energy to light our homes. But both economic theory and the historical evidence suggest that in long ...

After WWII, birth rates in the U.S. rose dramatically. During the war, relatively few couples could afford to have children, and many young men were on the front lines anyway. When the war was over and economy began to expand again, Americans began to have more babies, giving rise to what became ...