The Londoner

It's Official: Taxpayers Will Lose Big on the GM Bailout President Obama inspects a Chevrelot Silverado during a visit to the DC Auto Show, Jan. 31, 2012 in Washington, D.C. Obama touted his bailout of General Motors and Chrysler three years ago. When the Treasury Department sold its last remaining shares in insurance giant AIG recently, it announced that it had earned a profit on the controversial bailout that began in 2008. That will not be the case for General Motors. Treasury has finalized a plan to sell its remaining stake in the nation's biggest automaker over the next 15 months, beginning with GM buying back 200 million shares from the Treasury by the end of this year. That will leave the government holding about 19 percent of GM's shares, which it plans to sell throughout 2013 and perhaps into 2014. The government's final exit from GM will mark the start of a new era for the carmaker, which

A Fiscal Deal Is Emerging—But Is It Any Good? An agreement on the "fiscal cliff" may be near. On Friday, House Speaker John Boehner endorsed the idea of higher tax rates on upper incomes--a real concession that allowed serious negotiations to go forward. Over the weekend, he and President Obama spoke by telephone. On Monday, they met at the White House. They could reach an agreement within the next few days—not a detailed blueprint for legislation, mind you, but an agreement on the basic principles. Of course, all the usual caveat apply. Talks could break down all over again, congressional delegations could throw a fit, and so on. The terms are still murky and, presumably, under discussion. The details will make a huge difference. But the broad outlines, first reported by  Ezra Klein  in the  Washington Post  on Monday afternoon, are coming into view. [Update: For details on the latest White House counter-offer, leaked to reporters on Mon

Untouchable Why Hillary Clinton is the Teflon secretary. Washington can be a cruel and unforgiving place. Want a friend? Harry Truman once said. Get a dog. Or maybe he didn't say it . But it's a good point: In this town, nobody gets a free pass from the press, the pundits, and the pols. Nobody, that is, until Hillary Clinton. At the end of her tenure as secretary of state, she alone has emerged virtually unscathed -- the lone superstar of the president's first term. A recent poll has her numbers well above the president's and exceeded only by -- you guessed it -- her husband Bill. And those high favorability ratings have remained pretty consistent since 2008. There's no denying that Clinton has done a very good job as the nation's top diplomat. But to read the media adulation, you'd think she was about to be admitted into the secretary of state

Birth Control In United States Lost amid the shock and horror of Friday's news was a remarkable op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who should no longer be called a "rising star" of the GOP. He commands attention by virtue of being smart, good at his job, and not a white guy. So it's significant that he chose to use his platform to break ranks with many social conservatives in his party by calling for over-the-counter sales of birth control pills. Of course, Jindal did so by couching his argument in a hyper-partisan defensive posture, lashing out at "Democrats [who] demagogue the contraceptives issue and pretend, during debates about health-care insurance, that Republicans are somehow against birth control." Jindal recognizes that the vast majority of Americans support the use of contraception, and that the issue of access to contraception is a loser for Republicans. So he proposes to take the

Deficit solution must preserve the American dream For families still struggling to get by, the holiday season is a time for hope that the coming year will bring new opportunities. While our economic recovery has seen significant progress, there is still much more to be done to get Americans back to work and expand our middle class. However, a serious impediment to doing so exists in the form of the fiscal cliff. That combination of automatic tax increases and arbitrary spending cuts, if allowed to hit on January 1, would significantly undermine Congress’s ability to invest in moving our recovery forward, creating new opportunities, and working toward sustained job growth. If we don’t prioritize spending or bring in sufficient revenues, programs that expand our economy and protect the most vulnerable are at risk. Indiscriminate cuts to those kinds of programs would damage the economy even furthe

America: Too many guns, too little will to change Newtown, Connecticut, joins a rollcall of towns whose names become synonymous with violent death. The President has a fight on his hands Share +More This column, readers should be warned from the outset, is an exercise in futility. Not a single argument in it is new. It, and the myriad similar ones which have appeared these last 24 hours, might have been published a year ago, five years ago, even 20 years ago. In fact, they were – but in the interim, nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed. And that is the real tragedy and disgrace of Friday's mass shooting in Connecticut. The simple truth is that for all the ink spilt and outrage voiced, such incidents have become more, not less frequent since I first arrived in the US in 1991. That October, I was writing my first rampage story, about an unemployed merchant seaman named George Hennard who drove his pick-up

What the cliff means, and why America’s deficit woes are so intractable WHEN the dust from November 6th’s election settled, the re-elected Barack Obama and the re-elected Republican leaders of Congress had less than two months to avert the “fiscal cliff”, a collection of tax increases and spending cuts scheduled for the beginning of the new year. They proceeded to fritter most of it away by disparaging each other’s offers. When John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, met reporters on December 7th, he moaned, “This isn’t a progress report, because there is no progress to report.” Now, with less than three weeks to go, the pace has at last picked up. Mr Boehner and Mr Obama (pictured above) have talked twice in the past week, and representatives of both have exchanged offers. Publicly they say they are still far apart, but that is to be expected: serious negotiations seldom take place in front of cameras.

America is changing in ways that are important and unsettling for the future of American democracy; and America's elected officials and democracy experts seemingly are too politically timid or too theoretically limited to sound the alarm. However, candidly examining the realities and vulnerabilities of American democracy is an uncomfortable but necessary enterprise. Election 2012 and the looming legacy stage of the Obama presidency provide timely impetus and urgency to such inquiry. As Fareed Zakaria explains in The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2007): Silenced by fears of being branded "antidemocratic" we have no way to understand what might be troubling about the ever-increasing democratization of our lives. We assume that no problem could ever be caused by democracy, so when we see social, political, and economic maladies we shift blame here and there, deflecting problems, avoiding answers, but never talking about

Jonathan Rauch’s (Mostly) Failed Agenda for Hurting Workers – and What Would Work College of the Ozarks’ “Hard Work U” Program I see lots of attention being paid to this article by Jonathan Rauch on the economic crisis of America’s working class. He’s looking at the right problem, but he’s looking at it all wrong. As a result, he misunderstands both the cause and the needed remedy. Rauch is right that the bottom half of workers have a long-term problem: the economy still produces lots of wealth for the top half, but not so much for the bottom. Unfortunately, Rauch mostly thinks of this in terms of moving wealth from the top half to the bottom – not, to be sure, through government transfer programs, but through wages. Unfortunately for Rauch, transferring wealth from one social class to another is not the purpose of wages. The purpose of wages is to compensate workers for their work. The value of wages therefore reflects the value of their work (excep

I n fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students. We’ve all heard plenty about the “college bubble” in recent years. Student loan debt is at an all-time high—an average of more than $23,000 per graduate by some counts—and tuition costs continue to rise at a rate far outpacing inflation, as they have for decades. Credential inflation is devaluing the college degree, making graduate degrees, and the greater debt required to pay for them, increasingly necessary for m