Think Tank West

He’s still months away from officially becoming president, but on education Barack Obama is already indicating that his brand of change is much more about high-flying rhetoric than sober reality. Whether it’s choosing a private school for his kids, or promising to expend billions to “modernize” public schools, so far Mr. Obama is turning out to [...]

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The 111th Congress and the new Obama administration should scrap “E-Verify.” The federal government’s inchoate immigration background check system is the culmination of 20 years’ failure to create a tolerable “internal enforcement” program for U.S. immigration law. Rather than building on past failure, the new Congress and president should pull the plug on E-Verify and [...]

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Lots of scuttlebutt today involving the name “Richard Holbrooke.”  An emblem of the Democratic Party foreign policy establishment, Holbrooke is revered by some for his ruthlessness and ability to crack heads.  A dedicated global interventionist, Holbrooke is high on the list of “people antiwar Democrats don’t want involved in an Obama administration.”  In addition to [...]

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Last week Rahm Emanuel said to a prestigious audience, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do things you could not do before.” And that’s just the strategy that bestselling author Naomi Klein accuses right-wingers of employing. Weaving a convoluted yet superficially simple tale of world events, she [...]

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Pollsters debate whether the 2008 election is a fundamental realignment of American politics, with liberals and Democrats now in the driver’s seat. But some ask, how can it be a realignment when the largest public opinion poll, the election-day exit poll, found liberals still a small minority of voters? Twenty-two percent of those polled identified [...]

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Len Burman, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, suggests  I was “careless” in a recent Wall Street Journal article when I said, “the Tax Policy Center (TPC) estimate of corporate rate cuts . . . is also nonsense because it’s entirely static. The estimate assumes raising or lowering corporate tax rates has no effect [...]

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Paging Naomi Klein. In her book The Shock Doctrine, the left-wing polemicist claimed that right-wing governments — which she defined very broadly — take advantage of crises, or “shocks,” to implement their dastardly policies of free trade, privatization, and tax cuts. Well, one government has now announced its intention to take advantage of an economic [...]

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A few months ago, Barack Obama told a gathering of the American Federation of Teachers that he opposes private school choice programs, adding: “We need to focus on fixing and improving our public schools; not throwing our hands up and walking away from them.” It’s not clear whether or not the president-elect will be able [...]

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Recent reporting on the weakness of behavioral profiling in airports has overlooked a key dimension of the problem with it. According to this story in USA Today, interviewing or patting down 160,000 people with (unreported) indicia of suspicion at airports has resulted in 1,266 arrests. It has failed to find wrongdoing 99.3% of the time. [...]

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Things went badly for Detroit’s automakers in Washington this week. What was to be a decisive lobbying blitz planned months in advance proved reminiscent of GM’s efforts to market the Chevy Nova in Latin America. Both were all show, no va! The arguments against a bailout under any circumstances are well-established. A lot has been [...]

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