David P. Goldman is a senior editor of First Things.

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A Depressing Double Dip

Barack Obama won the presidency by making his mantra, “Yes, we can.” It seems downright un-American to say, “No, you can’t,” but it is getting harder and harder to avoid the conclusion that the American economy is the little engine that couldn’t… . Continue Reading »

26 Aug 2010

The Publicly Employed and the Under-Employed

Here’s a Rooseveltian way to address unemployment now at 1930s levels: Let’s create a National Infrastructure Corps to make urgently-needed repairs to roads and bridges, and put to work the disproportionately blue-collar army of unemployed. According to Shadow Government Statistics, a website that constructs alternate data measures, 22 percent of the workforce is under- or unemployed, right up there with the worst of the Great Depression… . Continue Reading »

12 Aug 2010

Fed Proposals to Counter “Deflation” Are Misguided

Senior officials of the Federal Reserve now warn that the United States faces a Japan-style deflation and a prolonged period of stagnation like Japan’s “lost decade” of the 1990s. TheNew York Times’ website reports: On Thursday, James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, warned that the Fed’s current policies were putting the American economy at risk of becoming “enmeshed in a Japanese-style deflationary outcome within the next several years.” … Continue Reading »

30 Jul 2010

The Suppurating Mess That is Pakistan

If Pakistan’s intelligence service continues to plot terrorist attacks with the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the mass of documents released yesterday by Wikileaks allege, who is responsible for covering this up for so many years? The answer, I argue in this morning’s Asia Times Online, is everybody… . Continue Reading »

26 Jul 2010

American Culture and American Intelligence

“Intelligence,” both in the national security as well as the ordinary sense of the term, is limited by the culture from whence it stems. Dana Priest’s and William Arkin’s Washington Post account of chaos in the American intelligence community, “A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control,” has prompted a round of finger-wagging at both the Bush and Obama administrations… . Continue Reading »

22 Jul 2010

Americans Who’ll Never Work Again

How many Americans will never work again? Perhaps a lot. A close look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey raises some alarming questions about the prospects of significant parts of the American population. Thirteen percent of Americans twenty-five years and over without a high school diploma were unemployed in June … Continue Reading »

8 Jul 2010

Petraeus Redux

Whether Gen. David Petraeus fainted upon receiving travel orders to Afghanistan”as he did in last week’s Senate hearings”is not clear from the news reports, but President Obama managed a double-whammy by replacing Gen. Stanley McChrystal with the “king of the conservative lecture circuit,” as the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg dubbed the ambitious general… . Continue Reading »

24 Jun 2010

“The Horror, the Horror” on the High Seas

Suicide, or as the participants doubtless dubbed it, a “martyrdom operation,” was the evident goal of the Hamas supporters on the Mavi Marmara. It is hard to draw any other conclusion from the available facts, including the Israeli military’s video footage of the raid. If you attack soldiers with deadly weapons, you expect to be shot… . Continue Reading »

2 Jun 2010

Godfather Obama Makes an Offer Israel Can Refuse

What happens when the godfather makes you an offer that you can, in fact, refuse? Veteran Israeli politicians expect the Obama administration to give Israel an ultimatum later this year to make peace with the Palestinian Authority … Continue Reading »

13 May 2010

Who Will Bail Out the Bailer-Outers?

Just when we were told that the governments and central banks of the world had put the financial crisis behind us, the governments of Europe found it necessary to commit more than a trillion dollars to support of the financial system … Continue Reading »

10 May 2010