February 26, 2019 The Topic: AOC and Population Control The News Story: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Is it OK to still have children?’ The New Research: Roots of Recession In a line that is not today as radical as it once was, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to her Instagram account over the weekend to […]
Read MoreReclaiming Family-Wage Jobs in an Age of Globalization In his 2010 examination of the welfare state, Never Enough, William Voegeli spilled a lot of ink exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of liberalism. But the Claremont scholar also chided his fellow conservatives for failing to see the beam in their own eyes: an obsession with tax cuts […]
Read MoreAmong members of the Baby Boom generation, any reference to the 1950s provokes wild mood swings, including reactions and responses than can break stereotypes. The self-avowed democratic socialist Harold Meyerson (born in 1950) regularly uses his Washington Post column to gush effusive praise on the United States at mid-twentieth century, pointing to a national industrial […]
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The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Needs Social Conservatism Jeffrey Bell Encounter Books, 2012; 322 pages, $25.95 For the past twenty years, the conventional wisdom espoused in Republican circles, by establishment types and by many who consider themselves conservative, is that candidates who want to win elections should avoid getting sidetracked into “divisive” social […]
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Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 Charles Murray Crown Forum, 2012; 407 pages, $27 Members of the notorious Baby Boom generation, including many like this reviewer who were born in the 1950s and reached adolescence in the 1960s, know from personal experience that the America they are passing on to their twenty-something children […]
Read MoreThe Great-Society Welfare State and the Fiscal Crisis Ever since Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, released his daring deficit-reduction plan in April, policymakers and policy experts have been touting “entitlement reform” as the key to controlling run-away federal spending. Even before the Republicans took control of the House of […]
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America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb: How the Looming Debt Crisis Threatens the American Dream— and How We Can Turn the Tide Before It’s Too Late Peter Ferrara Broadside Books/Harper Collins, 2011; $25.99, 432 pages When he wrote The Foes of Our Household in 1917, Theodore Roosevelt noted that “reforms are excellent, but if there is nobody […]
Read MoreWhy Policymakers Should Grow the Family, Not Just GDP Way back in 1995, more than a dozen years before the traumatic financial upheavals of 2008, The Atlantic had the audacity to puncture the perception of good times during the Clinton presidency, a perception fueled by endless news reports of a bullish stock market, rising industrial […]
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Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State William Voegeli with a foreword by Steven F. Hayward Encounter Books, 2010; 327 pages, $30.50 Government Is the Problem: Memoirs of Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Reformer Robert B. Carleson, Edited by Susan A. Carleson and Hans A. Zeiger American Civil Rights Union, 2009; 160 pages, $25.00 If the American Conservative, National Review, and […]
Read MoreThe Folly of the McNamara Approach to Family Planning When Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, passed away in 2009, the media recounted achievements that few in his generation could match. While charting his rapid rise in the Ford Motor Company and his leadership of […]
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