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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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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George F. Will
11/11/2010

President Obama’s presidency has indeed been “transformative” in the sense that it ushered in conservatism’s best year since Ronald Reagan’s election. Two major regulatory attempts by the federal government failed: campaign speech and cap and trade. This was followed by Americans awakening in 2010 to an extremely unstable financial future and realizing that local governments had been “looted” by the collaborative efforts between federal workers’ unions and elected officials. Hence the deadening of “card check” legislation, the darling of unionized public workers. And yet another boost for conservatism was NPR’s “self-immolation,” begging the question of just how important government funding for “public” broadcasting is and supplying conservatives with a starting point for cutting government.

Will is a twice-weekly columnist for The Post, writing about foreign and domestic politics and policy.

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Gail Collins
11/11/2010

After the midterm elections it is easy to draw parallels between many things in pop culture and politics. She likens the movie “127 Hours” about a real-life hiker who was forced to amputate his arm after being stuck in the desert to American politics; the cruise ship that is adrift to America itself. David Kennedy of Stanford University likened America today to the Gilded Age, and Collins says this fits, as the media was fragmented then and it produced some of the most sensationalist headlines. She says she is waiting for the next Teddy Roosevelt to ride to our rescue.

Collins is a New York Times columnist.

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Zoltan Hajnal
11/10/2010

Lost in the GOP’s euphoria over its midterm victory is the fact that it has almost become a whites-only party. Its strategy may win seats now, but it will lose over the long run, writes Hajnal. Republicans can’t win in the future without more nonwhite votes. If minorities didn’t give up on the Democratic Party last week, they are unlikely to do so without dramatic changes in the platforms of the two parties. A growing and resolutely Democratic nonwhite population is a serious threat to the Republican electoral calculus. Over the long term–as white voters become an ever-smaller fraction of the electorate and Latinos and other racial and ethnic minorities become a larger share–any campaign that appeals primarily to whites will be doomed.

Hajnal, an associate professor of political science at UC San Diego, is author of “America’s Uneven Democracy” (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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John R. Bolton and John Yoo
11/10/2010

The Senate should heed the will of the voters and either reject the New Start arms control treaty or amend it so that it doesn’t weaken America’s national defense. They look at the problems with the treaty, including how the low limits it places on nuclear warheads ignores the disparities between American and Russian global responsibilities and how America’s “nuclear umbrella” maintains international security. The Senate must ignore the resolution of ratification and demand changes to the treaty, which is within the Senate’s powers, because if 34 senators reject a treaty, no president can override them.

Bolton, the United States ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, is a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

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