Those who saw mass migration from Mexico as a threat and those who did not all agreed on one thing: It was unstoppable without dramatic action by the federal authorities. They turned out to be wrong about that. The title of a new report from the Pew Hispanic Center, "Net Migration From Mexico Falls to Zero -- and Perhaps Less," says it all.
Instinct tells us to fear poison. If our ancestors were not cautious about what they put in their mouths, they would not have survived long enough to produce us.
Unfortunately, a side effect of that cautious impulse is that whenever someone claims that some chemical -- or food ingredient, like fat -- is a menace, we are primed to believe it. That makes it easy for government to leap in and play the role of protector.
A modern knowledge economy thrives on highly trained workers. The way to get them, obviously, is through education -- from basic reading skills for some, to mastery of algorithms for others. It thus would seem a basic public good to provide that learning at little or no cost to students, which most advanced countries do. But America has turned post-high-school education into a taxpayer-subsidized business -- a business not unlike real estate at the height of the housing bubble.
I don't know how many times I've seen liberal commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line at a unionized auto factory that could carry him through to a comfortable retirement.
With the Republican primary contest over and the general election underway, Mitt Romney faces a voting public whose disdain for him has reached levels that pollsters describe as "historic."
Just 49 percent of homeowners in America now believe their home is worth more than they paid for it. Rasmussen Reports has asked that question for years, and it has never before fallen below the 50 percent mark. This represents a sea change in personal finances that challenges core assumptions about the way our economy works.
Lavishly paid executives have a new 1 percent number to ponder. It's not about their perch on the top branch of U.S. incomes. It's the lousy 1 percent rise in Citibank's quarterly revenues, which helped prompt the bank's stockholders to reject CEO Vikram Pandit's $15 million pay package. That they were earning a meager 1-cent-a-share quarterly dividend did not improve their mood.
A cornerstone of capitalism is that by richly rewarding successful managers who build up businesses, we all prosper. That makes sense but for one thing: Corporate America has learned to fix the game so that their honchos walk away with fortunes, whether their companies do well or not.
Some 20 million Americans in primaries and caucuses will take part in selecting the Republican presidential nominee. One person will choose the vice presidential nominee.
This has long struck me as absurd: One person choosing someone who, as a result, might become president for as long as 10 years. But just about everyone in politics says it's the only proper way.
Over the last 25 years, presidential nominees of both parties have engaged in conscientious consultation and have mostly made pretty good choices. No more picks at five o'clock in the morning to meet a convention deadline.
We spend too much time waiting for orders -- and money -- from Washington.
To quote "Adelaide's Lament" from "Guys and Dolls," "You can feed her all day with the vitamin A and the bromofizz/ But the medicine never gets anywhere near where the trouble is." That's the sense one gets from the recent tone-challenged courting of women voters.
How much will Obamacare -- call it the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act if you like -- cost over the next 10 years?
More than you've been led to believe, reports Charles Blahous of George Mason University's Mercatus Center. To be specific, he projects it will add $1,160 billion to net federal spending over the next 10 years and at least $340 billion to federal budget deficits in that time.
Blahous was appointed by Barack Obama as one of two public trustees of the Social Security and Medicare programs. He worked on these issues in George W. Bush's administration and submitted his Mercatus paper for anonymous peer review.
Animal rescue once sent me a fabulous mutt. She was usually obedient and heartbreaking in eagerness to please. But I couldn't get her into the basement. I'd go down the stairs waving an entire bag of treats. With a pained look of indecision, she would not follow. During an earlier life, clearly, bad things had happened to her in a cellar.
Any doubt that Mitt Romney would win the Republican presidential nomination vanished when Rick Santorum left the race. It also marked the end of Romney's time as the defining figure in the overall contest for the White House.
Now that Rick Santorum has "suspended" his campaign, we can stop pretending and can say what has been clear for weeks: Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee for president. The general election campaign has begun.
In some quarters, it is assumed that Barack Obama will be re-elected without too much difficulty. There are reports that staffers at Obama's Chicago headquarters consider Romney's candidacy a joke.
One suspects the adults there take a different view. For the fundamentals say that this will be a seriously contested race, with many outcomes possible. Obama's job-approval numbers in the realclearpolitics.com average of recent polls hover at 48 percent positive, 47 percent negative. That's on the cusp between victory and defeat.
When George W. Bush made his first public appearance in many months to discuss economic policy in New York on Tuesday, his utterances may have revealed more than he intended. "I wish they weren't called the 'Bush tax cuts,'" he said of the decade-old rate reductions that bear his name. But does he really believe, as he seemed to suggest, that Americans want to let those cuts expire from a desire to spite him? Or is there a deeper Bush somewhere within who would prefer not to be associated with fiscal profligacy and ideological overreach?
I'm suspicious of superstitions, like astrology or the belief that "green jobs will fix the environment and the economy." I understand the appeal of such beliefs. People crave simple answers and want to believe that some higher power determines our fates.
The most socially destructive superstition of all is the intuitively appealing belief that problems are best solved by government.
Opinion polls suggest that Americans are dissatisfied with government. Yet whenever another crisis hits, the natural human instinct is to say, "Why doesn't the government do something?"
The most dreadful disasters make us wonder how we would respond were we in the middle of it. That's especially true of those events that slowly evolve from concern to horror. On the Titanic, almost three hours elapsed between the thud of the iceberg and the final plunge into the icy Atlantic.
Time for a postmortem on the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Yes, I know Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich are still out there saying interesting things. And that Rick Santorum says it's only halftime and argues he can somehow overtake Mitt Romney by carrying his home state of Pennsylvania.
How many times have you heard Barack Obama talk about "investing" in education? Quite a few, if you've been listening to the president at all.
As Mitt Romney assumes the role of presumptive Republican nominee, polls suggest a competitive general election matchup between the former Massachusetts governor and President Obama. Typically, both candidates poll in the mid-40s, while 10 to 12 percent remain uncommitted to either side.
