41 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(11/02/11 3:00am)
The dismal state of the economy continues to cause many Americans significant hardship. Not even college graduates have been spared annual income for individuals with only a bachelor's degree fell by 3.5 percent last year. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that a significant proportion of Americans have looked for villains to blame for these difficulties. But the real problem is not some malevolent minority instead, public opinion has turned against the very policies that are needed to ameliorate our problems. In order to resolve the situation, we need to significantly reform this country's monetary architecture.
(10/19/11 2:00am)
The Eurozone crisis has played out like a slow-moving Greek tragedy. The European political elites who created the Euro in the 1990s were warned of problems inherent in their plans, but they ignored these warnings. Once the problems came to a head, European politicians dealt with each new problem in a haphazard way that temporarily postponed the worst, but was not enough to end the overall crisis. Unless this approach changes, the outcome could potentially be disastrous, not only for Europe, but for the world. The United States should intervene in hopes of precluding this dire possibility.
(10/11/11 2:00am)
Many claim that the 2012 presidential election will be the most important election in a generation, but doesn't everyone always say that about every election? Yes, but this time around it might actually be true.
(10/03/11 2:00am)
Microfinance the provision of small, group loans to poor people in poor countries is, depending on whom you ask, either the latest way for western capitalists to exploit third world laborers or the miracle cure that will allow the world's poorest citizens to successfully run their own business and thereby work their way out of poverty. The government of Andhra Pradesh, the Indian state where I spent the better part of last summer, clearly agrees with the former view. In 2007, after a spate of farmer suicides, the government nearly wiped out the state's entire microfinance industry by making repayment of microfinance loans illegal. Many of the development organizations that support microfinance, on the other hand, clearly believe that microfinance has significant potential. I met many people who sincerely believed that their microfinance efforts represented their best contribution in the fight against global poverty. However, by over-selling the benefits of microfinance, these organizations risk leaving other important problems unaddressed.
(09/21/11 2:00am)
The economic news this summer has been disastrous. Growth has stalled, unemployment has risen and the possibility of a double-dip recession has increased. America's GDP per person today is roughly the same as it was in 2005. By that measure, we are already six years into our lost decade.
(07/12/11 2:00am)
We must do something. This is something, therefore we must do it. This is a seductive fallacy, especially when the problem is as dire as climate change. Nonetheless, not all climate change policies are created equal. A simple carbon tax combined with a reduction in personal and corporate income taxes would be a good idea. On the other hand, subsidies for the production of alternative energy sources or a cap-and-trade system would not.
(07/08/11 2:00am)
Affirmative action plays an important role in Dartmouth and many other universities' admissions processes. This policy is obviously very controversial, as evidenced by its frequent appearance on these pages ("A Better Affirmative Action," July 5). Perhaps public school reform offers a way out of this controversy.
(05/23/11 2:00am)
Over the past two weeks, tens of thousands of Mexico City residents took to the streets to protest their country's continuing drug violence. In light of the obvious suffering caused by the continuing violence, we need to re-evaluate the war on drugs.
(05/11/11 2:00am)
America is a low-tax country, with one of the least progressive tax systems in the world. In order to permanently close the federal deficit, all we need to do is raise marginal tax rates on the rich. These are fairly common talking points for many politicians. There's only one problem: None of them are true.
(04/25/11 2:00am)
Our long-term federal budget is completely unsustainable. The problem is so large and the possible solutions so contentious that this matter will likely constitute the single biggest issue in future federal elections. As such, it is important that we frame our choices very clearly. The question is not whether we will help the poor, as some pundits have wrongly framed the issue, but how quickly we will allow health care spending for the elderly to rise, and how we will go about allocating this spending.
(04/12/11 2:00am)
Dartmouth students have many complaints about Dartmouth Dining Services: The food is too expensive, the food is bland, the service is slow and, to top it off, College administrators make changes without bothering to seek out our opinions. While some of these complaints are unfair, others especially the first are entirely valid. Fortunately, the solution to these problems is straightforward: We students should be permitted to spend our Declining Balance Account at restaurants in Hanover.
(03/28/11 2:00am)
Most first-world countries subsidize the heck out of their farmers. The United States alone spends about $20 billion per year on direct subsidies money taken directly from your pocket and given to farmland owners. Add in other indirect subsidies such as irrigation funding, nutrition food aid, export credits, tariffs and other trade barriers and that figure rises to $180 billion per year. In other words, you will be paying up to $600 annually in farm subsidies for the rest of your life. Given that Congress is debating whether to cut education spending including funding for this College why don't we cut farm subsidies instead?
(03/02/11 4:00am)
Last week, Montgomery Fellow Dan Barber gave a lecture on food ("Barber discusses food production," Feb. 23). Barber is a chef and co-owner of the Blue Hill restaurant chain in New England. His extraordinary culinary skills are indisputable many food critics consider him one of the best chefs in America. But unfortunately, his understanding of basic agricultural reality was lacking. Perhaps because he is a chef and not a farmer, Barber seems to know far more about cooking than about agriculture.
(02/16/11 4:00am)
I used to think that Africa was rather homogeneous and that all of its nations faced similar problems. As a result of this misconception, I was willing to contemplate the one-size-fits-all "solutions" to Africa's problems that I often heard in debates about global poverty. But a trip to East Africa last summer proved that I could not have been more wrong.
(02/01/11 4:00am)
Last Friday, the Hop screened "Waiting for Superman,'" (2010) a provocative documentary about the American school system. Directed by Davis Guggenheim, who previously directed "An Inconvenient Truth," (2006) the film argues that America's public education system is broken and that disadvantaged children bear the brunt of the consequences. Although I agree with most of the film's findings, I draw slightly different conclusions from the same evidence whereas the film finds fault with teachers' unions, I believe that the real problem is a lack of choice in the American school system.
(01/19/11 4:00am)
Jared Loughner is alleged to have killed six people and wounded 13 others including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the target of the attack in a shooting rampage outside a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona on Jan. 8. Minutes after the news broke, left-wing bloggers and pundits began trying to pin the blame for the shootings on right-wing politicians and commentators. Unfortunately, few people have raised the more important question: How did a deranged man such as Loughner get his hands on a semi-automatic handgun in the first place?
(01/05/11 4:00am)
America is a nation of immigrants, or so they say. For most of the last century, though, this truism been increasingly hard to square with the facts. It may have been true throughout most of the 18th and 19th centuries, but not the 20th or the 21st. Why did America stop being a land of opportunity for the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free"? The most important of a multitude of reasons is America's welfare state.
(11/22/10 4:00am)
The United States federal government is headed for a fiscal train wreck. It has made significant spending commitments primarily on defense, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid but does not have a tax system that will produce enough revenue to meet these commitments in the future. Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairs of President Barack Obama's Deficit-Reduction Commission, recently released a proposal that would avert fiscal catastrophe. Both political parties have rejected this plan. Unfortunately, neither party has been honest about what they would do instead.
(11/08/10 4:00am)
In the wake of last week's election results, it is now time for either despair or jubilant celebration, depending on your point of view. Many Democrats have convinced themselves that the blame for their defeats can be placed exclusively on high unemployment as well as a combination of Republican "misinformation" and "uninformed" voters. In contrast, many Republicans have convinced themselves that the American public has decisively rejected President Barack Obama and given Congressional Republicans a mandate to push their own agenda. As a result, both groups foresee two years of bitter partisan gridlock.
(10/25/10 2:00am)
Reading the op-ed pages of America's left-of-center newspapers, it would seem that the Republican Party is being overrun by angry, homophobic, anti-immigrant crackpots. For centrists like me who believe in the importance of having two sane national parties, this would be a terribly depressing prospect. But, just when one could be forgiven for thinking that all hope is lost, Fred Karger comes to the rescue.