Author: Michael Barone

Time is money. And the Millennial generation, which is now making headlines for its low savings rate, seems to have missed that lesson completely. Astoundingly, a new study by Moody’s Analytics says most adults under age 35 have a savings rate of negative 2 percent! In fact, Millennials are taking on so much debt, and […]

Americans are divided politically along cultural, not economic, lines. Partisan preference is highly correlated with views on non-economic issues and only loosely related to economic status. This is the norm rather than the exception in American political history. Party preference has run along regional, racial and ethnic lines more than the divisions along economic lines […]

Even as Republicans are about to regain a majority in the Senate after eight years in the minority, the conventional wisdom around Washington is that Democrats are likely to win back that majority again in 2016. That’s certainly possible, but it’s short of a slam dunk. Superficially, the field of Senate seats up in 2016 […]

Last spring, you may remember, the French economist Thomas Piketty was all the rage in certain enlightened circles. His book “Capital” shot up to the No. 1 spot on bestseller lists, and many economists praised his statistics showing increased income and wealth inequality. Piketty argued that, absent a world war, returns to capital will exceed […]

“When the facts change, I change my mind,” economist John Maynard Keynes said when charged with inconsistency. “What do you do, sir?” As President Obama threatens to stretch his power to faithfully execute the law to a breaking point by effectively legalizing some 5 million illegal immigrants, perhaps I owe readers an explanation of my […]

If you’re a political junkie — or at least if you’re a conservative political junkie — you’ve probably seen the map. It’s a map of the United States showing the congressional districts won by Republicans in red and those won by Democrats in blue. It looks almost entirely red, except for some pinpoints of blue […]

Looking back on the 2014 election cycle, I see two largely unnoticed turning points that worked against Democrats and in Republicans’ favor. The first came in response to the October 2013 government shutdown. This was blamed, as shutdowns usually are, on Republicans, partly because of their skepticism about big government, and partly because media professionals […]

Some observations on the election: (1) This was a wave, folks. It will be a benchmark for judging waves, for either party, for years. (2) In seriously contested races, Republican candidates were generally younger, more vigorous, more sunny and optimistic than Democrats. The contrast was sharpest in Colorado and Iowa, which voted twice for President […]

Before the election results are in, and keeping in mind that there may be some unpleasant surprises for one party or the other — or both — it’s possible to assess how the Democratic Party has fared under the leadership of President Obama. To summarize the verdict: not so well. By one metric it has […]

Sherlock Holmes famously solved a mystery by noticing the dog that didn’t bark in the night. Dogs that are not barking at night — nor in prime time — provide some useful clues to understanding the significance of this year’s election. Contrary to the disparagement of some liberal pundits, this election is not about nothing. […]

On Oct. 27, 1964, 50 years ago Monday, a movie actor and television host delivered a 30-minute speech on primetime national television in support of the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater. There were no visual diversions, and the production values by today’s standards were primitive. Few if any viewers realized it, but they were watching […]

You probably haven’t read much commentary about this year’s elections to the House of Representatives. There’s a good reason for that: The majority in the Senate is up for grabs, but it’s clear to everyone who follows these things that Republicans will continue to control the House. But there are lessons to be learned from […]

Francis Fukuyama picked an auspicious publication date for his latest book, “Political Order and Political Decay.” The news is full of stories of political decay: the Centers for Disease Control and Ebola; the Department of Veterans Affairs’ health service; the Internal Revenue Service political targeting. Europe gives us the dysfunctional euro and no-growth welfare states. […]

What should we do about immigration policy? It’s a question many are asking, and some useful perspective comes from an article in Foreign Affairs by British-born, California-based historian Gregory Clark, unhelpfully titled, “The American Dream Is an Illusion. The dream to which Clark refers is the idea, promoted by Emma Lazarus’s poem at the Statue […]

Iraq, immigration, inversion. On all three of the issues referred to, President Obama finds himself forced by events to do something he dislikes — and he’s in trouble with much of his Democratic Party base for doing so. Obama seemed ill at ease before the camera and teleprompter on the evening of Sept. 10. Sending […]

“Twentieth-century technology,” writes economic historian Joel Mokyr in the Manhattan Institute’s excellent City Journal, “was primarily about ‘large’ things.” Large in physical size, that is. Mokyr’s examples include the diesel engine and the gas turbine, shipping containers, communications satellites launched by giant rockets, oil-drilling platforms, massive power stations, giant steel mills and huge airplanes. Most […]

“If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart,” President Obama told Democratic mega-contributors last month in one of the 400-plus fundraisers of his presidency. But not to worry. “The world has always been messy,” he said. “In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity […]

Some time ago I contrasted the reaction a conservative would get if he were in the same room with the two most consequential politicians of the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. If you were in a room with Bill Clinton, he would discover the one issue out of 100 on which you agreed; he […]

“The tax system should be simplified and work for all Americans with lower individual and corporate tax rates and fewer brackets.” That’s from the Obama administration’s 2009 proposals for tax reform, straight from whitehouse.gov. “Because our corporate tax system is so riddled with special interest loopholes,” the document goes on, “our system has one of the […]

“About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop.” So supposedly said Elihu Root, New York lawyer and secretary of war and of state, and U.S. senator from 1909 to 1915. Today it seems that many liberal “would-be clients” are in desperate need […]

Continued violence in Ferguson, Missouri, brings back memories of the urban riots of the 1960s. As it happens, I had a front-row seat back then, as an intern in the office of Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh during the six-day riot in July 1967. At one point I was alone in the so-called command center with […]

Just about everyone noticed Hillary Clinton’s scathing comments on President Obama’s foreign policy in her interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. But almost no one has noticed where Clinton hasn’t been seen. That’s on the campaign trail or at fundraisers for Democrats running for the Senate. Obama hasn’t been on the campaign trail much either, […]

Politicians have ranges of positions of varying widths that they find acceptable. Hillary Clinton, like her husband, has a very wide range of stands she finds acceptable, depending on timing and circumstances. President Obama’s range of acceptable positions has been far narrower. This is reflected in their attitudes about military action in Iraq. Clinton was […]

The standard thing to say about the various Republican primaries this year is that the tea party movement has lost one race after another. That’s a defensible conclusion but also an oversimplification. I see more turbulence and undercurrents among Republican primary voters than usual. The evidence is that incumbents — both those the mainstream media […]

Earlier this week, I was thinking of writing a column about the lying and duplicity of Obamacare backers who argued that the difference between provisions providing subsidies in states with state-run health exchanges and providing no subsidies in states with federal exchanges resulted from inadvertence or a typographical error. Typical among them was MIT health […]

“Pare down the parasitic fringe” of government. “Favor a gospel of work” instead of aristocratic entitlement. “Rationalize finance” and “reverse the Parkinson’s law of bureaucracy.” All that sounds like rhetoric from the Tea Party or reform conservatives who assail what they call crony capitalism. But it’s not a contemporary criticism. Those are phrases from a […]

Words mean what they say. That’s the basis for the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Halbig v. Burwell invalidating the Internal Revenue Service regulation approving subsidies for Obamacare consumers in states with federal health insurance exchanges. The law passed by Congress, Judge Thomas Griffith explained, provided for subsidies […]

“Why do you think President Obama’s job rating is falling, even though the economy is recovering?” the interviewer asked. It’s a fair question, even though the economy declined 2.9 percent in the first quarter, even though most jobs created in June were part-time, and even though labor force participation remains low. The fact is that […]