Yossi Klein Halevi
10/14/2010

Halevi considers Israeli Defense Minister Barak’s attempt to persuade the Netanyahu government to extend a freeze on settlement building. For all the ambivalence toward the settlements, Halevi says there is good reason why the Israeli government should heed Defense Minister Barak’s advice and extend a settlement freeze. A freeze would prove that the obstacle to Middle East agreement isn’t the settlements–blueprints exist for resolving the settlement issue in a comprehensive peace agreement–but eather the more basic refusal of the Palestinian leadership to accept the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty over any part of the land.

Halevi is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a contributing editor of the New Republic.

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George F. Will
10/7/2010

Representative Jeb Hensarling is serving on Obama’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and its 18 members are approaching their fiscal goals rather like Sumo wrestlers: with a lot of mutual staring but no contact as yet. Budget-balancing (excluding debt service) and finding ways to “meaningfully improve the long-run fiscal outlook” are the commission’s main goals. But Hensarling says this creates a harmful distraction from the real problem: long-term debt incurred from Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. A record number of American citizens are concerned about deficits. Thus, when the commission gives its report in December, Congress will be populated with members potentially emboldened–but not legitimized–by their lack of political future.

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

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Daniel Gross
10/6/2010

Despite stories about consumer savings on the rise, the nation’s total indebtedness has also continued to rise, as have some measures of consumer debt. Gross points out that any decline in personal debt is “driven less by Americans giving up on credit cards than on credit card issuers giving up on Americans.” Lenders are writing off some debt as uncollectable. Still, the recovery is maturing, powered not merely by government stimulus and business investment, but also by increasing total consumer credit. This will be the root of our short-term salvation from the recession.

Gross, author of  “Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation”, is the economics editor and columnist at Yahoo! Finance.

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Arthur Laffer
10/5/2010

If voters in Washington state pass Initiative 1098 (creating a new income tax on high-income earners), it will go from being one of the fastest-growing in the country to one of the slowest-growing. Those who want to punish the rich for their success should bear in mind that states with the highest tax rates and those that have introduced state income taxes have seen standards of living substantially underperform compared to their no-tax counterparts. If Washington’s most famous billionaires are really worried about their state’s finances, they’d write personal checks to the government and leave everyone else alone.

Laffer is the chairman of Laffer Associates and co-author of “Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status” (Threshold, 2010).

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Donald Luskin
10/4/2010

Thankfully, we’re not repeating all the mistakes of 1937, but Congress and the Obama administration are flirting dangerously with one of them by failing to extend the expiring low tax rates for all Americans. What’s worse, we’re close to repeating the mother of all policy errors, the one made not in 1937 but in 1930, the one that started the Great Depression. We’re on track to resurrect the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Once the election has passed, Luskin hopes cooler heads will prevail on both sides of the aisle. But sometimes in the heat of politics cooler heads do not prevail. If that happens now with issues as critical as those we face, then the economy and the stock market will be doomed to repeat the tragedies of the 1930s.

Luskin is chief investment officer at Trend Macrolytics LLC.

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Mackubin Owens
10/1/2010

The strain of a prolonged conflict has led some military officers to believe they’re better than the society they’re serving, warns Owens. The lack of trust between the civilian leadership and the military has its most detrimental effect on strategy making and military effectiveness. Success in today’s conflicts requires healthy civil-military relations. The good news is the new military tandem in place in the aftermath of Gen. McChrystal’s sacking–commander of US Central Command Gen. Mattis and Afghanistan commander Gen. Petraeus–understands the importance of professionalism and trust in fostering healthy civil-military relations.

Owens is professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, RI, and editor of the journal Orbis.

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Steve Moore
9/29/2010

Blame Congress, not presidents Bush or Obama, for our perilous fiscal situation, says Moore. A strong case can be made that the people most responsible for the gigantic deficits we face today are the House and Senate Majority Leaders Pelosi and Reid. Congress controls the purse strings. When Pelosi and Reid rose to their present jobs in January 2007, the deficit was $161 billion. It had been on a downward trajectory from $413 billion in 2004. Three years later, the Pelosi-Reid Congress had added $1.2 trillion to the deficit. Of course, Bush sponsored or signed many of these deficit-raising bills, such as the bank bailouts and effective tax rebates of 2008. But the Democratic Congress passed them.

Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

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Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
9/29/2010

Inflicted on us relentlessly since the 1970s, the most mischievous and misleading trope in American politics is the idea that our energy supplies are in danger, that foreigners are out to get us, that a crisis is upon us. The endless invocation of an alleged energy crisis is used to sell deep-water drilling because it’s used to sell everything, writes Jenkins. We seem to get all the oil we want at a price we’re willing to pay. For three decades our economy enjoyed one of its greatest boom periods ever–a boom that ended, ironically, not because of oil shortages but because of overspending on giant houses far from town by people happily conditioned by the ubiquity and affordability of their energy supplies. Yet by properly pricing the risks of a deep-water blowout, we’re likely to get much safer drilling.

Jenkins writes Business World for the Journal.

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Robert Wright
9/29/2010

Wright says the route to peace in the Middle East may be pursuing a one-state solution, which could lead to a two-state solution. Palestine could force peace by giving up on violence as a tool of persuasion, giving up on the current round of negotiations, and holding demonstrations in which people ask for only the right to vote, stating that if they live under Israeli rule, and Israel is a democracy, they should be part of it. Such a peaceful approach would gain international support and would force Israel’s hand. Leaving the problem unresolved is only keeping Israel on the path to catastrophe.

Wright is a New York Times columnist.

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