Cascading Medicaid Cuts Hurt the Poor and Burden the States
Health care for the poor is in trouble and so are the states that are charged with providing an increasing share of it. As federal aid to states from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is phased out, most states have been forced to curb Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides health care for the poor and disabled. Despite his strong rhetorical support for Medicaid, President Barack Obama's 2012 budget proposes to reduce the federal share of the program by more than $6 billion. As a national topic of discussion, Medicaid has been shuffled to the back burner by ...
Thinking About Ronald Reagan: On 100th Birthday, He's Remembered for Good Reason
On the eve of Ronald Reagan's election as president of the United States in 1980, a radio reporter asked him what it was that Americans saw in him. Reagan hesitated and then replied: "Would you laugh if I told you that I think maybe they see themselves and that I'm one of them?" Thirty years and four presidents later, Americans still see themselves in Reagan. In a Gallup poll in 2009 they ranked Reagan as the best president, just ahead of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. This highly generous assessment is based on more than likeability. Reagan left the world safer and the United ...
Schwarzenegger's Legacy: Last Action Hero Awaits History's Judgment
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the movie action-hero who became governor of California, walked off stage in Sacramento on Monday, leaving behind a $28-billion budget shortfall for his successor, Jerry Brown, a job approval rating of 23 percent, and many critical media reviews of his governorship. Even Schwarzenegger acknowledged that he had failed to "blow up the boxes" of state government as he promised to do when he took office more than six years ago. "It's true that we did not blow up all the boxes I intended to blow up," Schwarzenegger told The Wall Street Journal. "It was more difficult than I ...
A 'New Realism' About Bipartisanship May Be Key to States' Fiscal Rebound
Holiday cheer is in short supply this year in the nation's state capitols. Although revenues are gradually returning to pre-recession levels, there are dismal expectations of new budget gaps in the 2012 fiscal year as federal stimulus funds disappear and program costs soar. Worse yet, the short-term struggles of states to balance budgets while maintaining adequate services conceal deeper structural problems. Recently, in an alarmist page-one story, the New York Times worried that states will be overwhelmed by mountains of accumulated debt and quoted financier Felix Rohatyn as saying that ...
How a Vegetarian, a Grocer Named Ahmed and Many Others Put Turkeys on the Needy's Tables
Ten years ago Wendy McCaw purchased the Santa Barbara (Calif.) News-Press, a onetime Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, from the New York Times. She subsequently became involved in a bitter and still-ongoing legal dispute with editors and reporters whom she fired for refusing to inject her opinions into news stories. Long before these events, Ms. McCaw was at the center of another controversy when she commissioned an editorial opposing donations of Thanksgiving turkeys to the local food bank. Ms. McCaw is a vegetarian who believes that everyone should be a vegetarian. The editorial was written ...
Can Obama Emulate Reagan and Clinton -- and FDR?
As a biographer of Ronald Reagan, I've been asked if Barack Obama can recover from the catastrophe of the midterm elections to win a second term, as President Reagan did in 1984 when he carried every state except Minnesota, plus the District of Columbia. In a post-election press conference after the Republicans won the House last week, Obama took note of what Reagan had done and also of the comeback by President Bill Clinton, who was reelected in 1996 two years after the GOP captured the House for the first time in 46 years. Obama might also have mentioned the president with whom he claims the ...
Republicans Score Big in the States and Win Leg Up on Redistricting
Republicans took a stranglehold of the congressional redistricting map this week by winning at least 19 state legislative bodies and 10 governor's races in states now held by Democrats. Many of the gubernatorial victories had been anticipated, but the legislative outcomes exceeded even the high expectations of GOP strategists. "This was an election of historic proportions in the states," said Tim Storey, political analyst for the National Conference of State Legislators. "It puts the Republicans in the position of being able to dominate redistricting to a greater degree than anytime since ...
The Conservatives Come Back From the Dead
Soon after Barack Obama's inauguration, Sam Tanenhaus opined in The New Republic and later in a stylistic book, "The Death of Conservatism," that liberalism had won a lasting political triumph in the 2008 elections and that conservatives were the wave of the past. Tanenhaus, who edits the influential Week in Review section of The New York Times, was expressing post-election conventional wisdom when he declared that conservative doctrine had "not only been defeated but discredited" by Obama's election. In Tanenhaus's view Republicans then compounded their predicament by opposing the American ...
California Voters to Decide on Pot, Global Warming, Fiscal Affairs
California's long-running love affair with "direct democracy" will be tested in the November election as entrepreneurs and interest groups seek voter approval of nine initiatives, two of which have national implications. Proposition 23 would suspend California's unique global warming law, which seeks to cut the state's greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The eyes of the world are on this proposal, says former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, as oil-producing nations wait to see if the United States is serious about developing alternative sources of energy and reducing ...
Legalized Marijuana in California: Polls Now Show a Close Call
A landmark California initiative that would legalize marijuana and allow local governments to tax drug proceeds is coming under fire from many sides these days, including some advocates of medical marijuana use. Despite leading in three of four public opinion surveys, the fate of Proposition 19 on the November ballot remains up in the air. The initiative, billed by its advocates as a "common sense" approach to marijuana control, appeared to be sailing to victory in late September when the venerable Field Poll found it leading by 7 percentage points among likely voters. Since then, however, ...
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