Ruth Marcus
11/17/2010

Marcus was surprised not to read any fiscal regret in Bush’s “Decision Points.” In fact, not only does Bush take credit for a budget surplus that was already in place when he took office, but he also claims the surplus didn’t really exist. Bush does admit that he left a legacy of “run-away entitlement spending” but blames that on congressional resistance. Between Bush’s tax cuts, the war, and the Medicare prescription drug plan, President Bush inherited a healthy budget and “left it in tatters,” says Marcus.

Marcus is an editorial writer for The Post, specializing in American politics, campaign finance, the federal budget and taxes, and other domestic issues.

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Noah Shachtman
11/17/2010

Shachtman considers whether the TSA’s tech-centric approach to security makes any sense at all. The TSA is asking for public cooperation in unduly intrusive and revelatory x-ray images in exchange for incremental, uncertain security improvements against particular kinds of concealed weapons. Now pilots and travelers are rebelling against scanners that douse them with radiation and reveal their private parts. TSA has long hewed to an unthinking, unbending approach to security that prompts Shachtman to cast doubt on both the efficacy of the new measures and the agency.

Shachtman is a contributing editor at Wired magazine and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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Warren E. Buffett
11/17/2010

Buffett writes an open letter to the American government to thank it for working so hard and efficiently to save the economy from meltdown in 2008. He gives a nod to Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair, who worked courageously, as well as President George W. Bush, who led through the crisis before the election of President Obama. Buffett notes that the crisis followed a bubble and now there is a fog of panic. People are second-guessing the government’s actions, yet the government was remarkably effective in that dark time.

Buffett is the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, a diversified holding company.

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Syed Kamall
11/16/2010

Without risk capital, Europe will go nowhere, says Kamall. He regrets that stricter EU rules for hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers will be expensive for the economy. From 2018 fund managers for businesses in the EU will have to meet stricter guidelines monitored by the new European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). These fund managers will have to comply with strict disclosure rules about their business strategies and hold larger amounts of capital, which reduces their revenues. Kamall argues that European investors must not be isolated from the financial action in the rest of the world. While protection against default or negligence is desirable, nobody wants protection against risk itself.

Kamall is a conservative member of the European Parliament for London.

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Rob Bovett
11/16/2010

The best way to end methamphetamine production is to require a prescription for pseudoephedrine, a nasal decongestant found in some cold and allergy medicines and a main ingredient in meth. Oregon did so four years ago and has virtually eliminated meth labs there while also showing the steepest crime decline in the 50 states. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has proposed legislation to require prescriptions for products with pseudoephedrine across the nation, and Bovett says Congress should enact it without delay.

Bovett, the district attorney for Lincoln County, Ore., was the primary author of Oregon’s anti-methamphetamine laws.

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Bruce Ackerman
11/12/2010

A lame-duck session of Congress is not necessary during times of ordinary legislation. In 1932, the 20th Amendment to the Constitution limited the time for a lame-duck Congress to 7 weeks, during which time it was understood that lawmakers were not to convene except in extraordinary cases, such as war. Since the 1990s, however, lame-duck congressional sessions have become the norm, and often big legislative decisions are made during these sessions. Besides the “utterly undemocratic” fact that defeated politicians are acting as representatives of the American people during a lame-duck session, Ackerman warns that this encourages politicians to escape voter scrutiny by putting put off major legislation until a lame-duck session. Congress should enact legislation prohibiting lame-duck sessions of Congress except in emergencies.

Ackerman is a professor of law at Yale and the author most recently of “The Decline and Fall of the American Republic.”

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Paul Krugman
11/12/2010

Krugman says he didn’t have much hope when President Obama created a bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, but when it released an outline of its proposal it was worse than he and cynics expected. The co-chairmen are proposing a mixture of tax cuts for the wealthy and tax increases for the middle class, resulting in a transfer of wealth upward without any effect on deficit reduction. It also proposes raising retirement age for Social Security as life expectancy increases, but Krugman says that is impractical for laborers, whose life expectancy is not increasing at the same rate as knowledge workers. It seems the commission has been hijacked by a Republican ideological agenda. He doubts anything can be salvaged from the proposal.

Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

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Bjorn Lomborg
11/12/2010

The upcoming climate summit in Cancun promises more proposals that ignore economic reality, writes Lomborg. World-wide public spending on research and development for clean energy technologies is a paltry $2 billion a year. Increasing this to $100 billion a year could be a game-changer. Not only would it be almost twice as cheap as the $180 billion a year cost of fully implementing Kyoto, but the effect of this kind of spending would be hundreds of times greater. Lomborg argues that this should not be our only response to global warming. We should also invest considerably more in adaptation to global warming’s effects and research geo-engineering technologies as a potential backstop.

Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank, and author of “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming” (Knopf, 2007). His new film, “Cool It,” opens in US theaters nationwide today.

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Emil W. Henry, Jr.
11/11/2010

Although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played a central role in causing the recent economic crisis, they are absent from the reform plans of Congress and the Obama administration. So these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) remain mired in conservatorship, as extensions of the federal government. Eliminating the GSEs and moving their activities to the private sector should be fairly easy: the Treasury Department can stop rubber-stamping their debt issuance at any time. Secretary Geithner can immediately reshape the mortgage markets by withholding his approval of new debt issuances by the GSEs. That’s the best way to begin curtailing the GSEs, and it can be done unilaterally.

Henry, the CEO of Henry, Tiger, LLC, was an assistant secretary of the Treasury from 2005 to 2007.

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