Stories by Yuval Levin
Infrastructure Dangers Ahead
How conservatives can construct a better agenda.
Jan 16, 2017
A big federal investment in infrastructure is one of the few things that Donald Trump has specifically said he wants to pursue early in his presidency. It is not as high a priority for most congressional Republicans, to put it mildly. In fact, their work so far on the coming legislative year suggests that House and Senate leaders hope they might push infrastructure off the agenda by getting started early on health care and tax reform. Two major initiatives, both pursued through reconciliation Read more
Be Prepared
How to respond if the Court ends Obamacare subsidies.
Mar 09, 2015
Few people expect much to happen on health care in the 114th Congress, certainly not President Obama. He plans to continue bending and twisting his interpretation of Obamacare’s many complex provisions as necessary to keep it afloat and to avoid dealing at all with opposition to the law among the public or the Republicans who now run Congress. But King v. Burwell could upend the president’s plans. That’s the case, now on the Supreme Court’s docket, contesting the legality of subsidy payme Read more
Getting There
How to transition from Obamacare to real health care reform
Sep 22, 2014
Obamacare—or at least the version of it that the president and his advisers currently think they can get away with putting into place—has been upending arrangements and reshuffling the deck in the health system since the beginning of the year. That’s when the new insurance rules, subsidies, and optional state Medicaid expansions went into effect. The law’s defenders say the changes that have been set in motion are irreversible, in large part because several million people are now covered by insu Read more
The Obamacare Opportunity
An opening for a genuine alternative.
May 05, 2014
Obamacare’s defenders are doing their best to sustain a triumphant mood these days. In the wake of the late-March surge in exchange enrollment, many proponents of the law have insisted it can no longer be rolled back. As the president put it in his April 1 Mission Accomplished speech announcing the enrollment figures, “The Affordable Care Act is here to stay.” But just as conservative assertions that the law would collapse of its own weight were premature, so too are today’s liberal proclamat Read more
Unwinding Obamacare
Jan 27, 2014
Obamacare is no longer a theoretical proposition. It is now being implemented, if with some notable exceptions for the portions of the law the Obama administration finds particularly inconvenient. Millions of Americans are experiencing its consequences directly, and millions more are forming their opinions of it based on what they are hearing of its effects. Those opinions are generally not positive. The fact that many of the law’s congressional supporters are now running scared for fear of vote Read more
Done Being Born
Israel after Sharon and his generation.
Jan 27, 2014
Although he has, in most respects, been gone from the scene for the better part of a decade, Ariel Sharon’s death this month has nonetheless hit Israel hard. His military career was among the most exemplary in a nation that has seen far more than its share of great warriors. And by the end of his political career (if not at every point throughout it), Sharon was widely respected and admired. The sudden end of his premiership in 2006 left many in Israel with a sense of missed opportunity and unex Read more
Updating Reagan
Sep 30, 2013
Republicans these days are eager to replay the Reagan revolution. It is not hard to see why: In the 1980s, the GOP was the party of ideas, and the vision that Ronald Reagan and his supporters brought to Washington proved immensely popular with voters and profoundly improved American life. But in their effort to repeat Reagan’s particular policies, rather than his more impressive feat of developing policies that applied conservative principles to the problems of his day, today’s Republicans risk Read more
Going, Going, Gone
The arguments that justified Obamacare are already being discredited. Here’s how to replace it.
Sep 02, 2013
In the continuing debate over Obamacare, both the law’s champions and its critics are now focused largely on the mechanics of implementation. This is understandable. The insurance exchanges are supposed to launch October 1, most of the law’s other major provisions take effect January 1, and every week seems to bring fresh news of some delay or dysfunction for critics to highlight and defenders to justify or dismiss. The technological architecture of the exchanges appears to be behind schedul Read more
The Soft Underbelly of Obamacare
Aug 12, 2013
For opponents of Obamacare, it almost seems like the law offers too many targets to choose from. Its effects on premiums and costs look to be highly unpopular, its perverse incentives are already harming employment, its state exchanges will hand out costly subsidies without the necessary checks against fraud, the promises of its champions—from keeping costs down to keeping the coverage and doctors you have—are proving empty, its lawless implementation is anathema to our system of government, and Read more
Grand Old Opportunity
Apr 01, 2013
As they seek to revive their political fortunes in the wake of last year’s disastrous election, Republicans risk a dangerous misunderstanding: Since Democrats did well last November and Republicans generally didn’t, some on the right have concluded that the Democrats must be onto some secret formula for success in an altered political environment, and that the task for Republicans is to find elements of their opponents’ agenda or style they can comfortably co-opt or uncomfortably accept. There Read more
Small Ball
Why our fiscal debates amount to nothing
Jan 14, 2013
For fiscal hawks of all political stripes, the last two years have been awfully frustrating. Budget politics has been front and center almost constantly, yet we have made almost no progress toward reducing our deficits and debt. Ever since Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections, they have sought to resist and reverse the flood of spending that had characterized President Obama’s first two years in office and to lay out an ambitious long-term path toward Read more
The GOP’s Payroll Tax Opportunity
Dec 10, 2012
Despite the outcome, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney did many things right during the course of this year’s campaign. Perhaps most notably, polls suggest that he was able to convince a plurality of Americans that the GOP’s plan for smaller government was better for promoting long-term economic growth than the president’s statist approach. But there was one line of attack Romney was never able to overcome, and which may well have cost him the working-class voters he needed to win: The Read more
In Praise of Half Measures
Dec 03, 2012
As soon as the presidential election was over and the exit polling results began to pour in, some on the right (and many outside it) started arguing that the Republican party needed to change its tune on immigration. To avoid being left behind by the country’s changing demographics, the argument goes, the GOP must vastly improve its appeal to Hispanic voters, and the way to do this is to hop on the bandwagon of “comprehensive immigration reform,” which means a path to citizenship for the estimat Read more
The Real Debate
The 2012 election is about far more than our pocketbooks.
Oct 08, 2012
Everybody knows that this election is supposed to be all about the economy. Employment, income, growth, and America’s credit rating are too low, while spending, borrowing, deficits, poverty, and gas prices are too high, and voters must decide whether President Obama is responsible for all of that or whether Mitt Romney could do better. Polls certainly suggest that these questions are highest on voters’ minds. And yet, even as both parties acknowledge the centrality of the economy, both seem a Read more
Medicare Jujitsu
How Romney and Ryan are turning the Democrats’ favorite campaign attack against Obama
Aug 27, 2012
In the wake of Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, conservatives and liberals seemed almost equally happy. To the right, the pick represented a bold decision to make a forthright case against President Obama’s vision for the country and to champion solutions to the problems that the president has only made worse. Romney had put his party’s best policy thinker and one of its best communicators on his ticket and was raring to make his case to voters. To the left, it seemed li Read more
More Mediscare
Aug 20, 2012
The oddly convenient academic study has long been a weapon in the Democratic party’s arsenal of election-season demagoguery. Do you need to say that conservative policies would sink the republic? Here’s a paper by scholars from a respected university, published in a respected journal, and released just as your campaign was turning to the issue in question, which happens to say just what you had in mind. It might all fall apart on closer inspection, but in the heat of a campaign it’s a perfect fi Read more
Our Age of Anxiety
Romney’s challenge is to address the deep uneasiness in America and point the way to a comeback.
May 28, 2012
There is something very strange about the 2012 presidential race so far. The election comes at a time of extraordinary public unease, which clearly demands some response from the political system, and especially from the men running for the highest office in the land. But the two presidential candidates are both running campaigns oddly detached from what is rightly worrying voters. If you were to judge the state of the country by listening only to the Obama campaign, you would conclude that Read more
A Tale of Two Budgets
Paul Ryan draws the contrast Republicans will need this fall.
Apr 02, 2012
Last spring, when House Republicans passed Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s ambitious fiscal agenda, it would have been easy to make two basic guesses about the proposal’s lasting impact: On the one hand, it seemed that the budget’s focus on the immense scope of the fiscal calamity heading our way would put the deficit and debt at the center of our politics for the rest of Barack Obama’s term. But on the other hand, it looked like the Medicare proposal in the budget would be highly controve Read more
Mind the Gap
The rich get richer and the poor are broken.
Mar 19, 2012
Charles Murray’s profound and important new book has, for the most part, been received as merely the latest volley in the inequality debates. Its champions have tended to praise it for shedding light on overlooked aspects of the gap between rich and poor, while its critics have faulted it for ignoring some elements crucial to any proper understanding of the causes of inequality in America—and especially for paying too little attention to working-class wage stagnation. Murray has made it easy Read more
In Praise of the House
Jan 02, 2012
On the night Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in November 2010, John Boehner laid out the new Congress’s key priorities: to restrain the growth of government, cut spending, reform how Congress works, and end the uncertainty in the economy to help get Americans back to work. But then he offered a cautionary note to voters: “While our new majority will serve as your voice in the people’s House, we must remember it is the president who sets the agenda for our government.” Read more
Grand Old Reform Party
Dec 05, 2011
In 2010, Republicans won control of the House by offering to resist the Obama agenda. But their victory left open the question of whether they would also confront the grave fiscal challenges facing the country, and move beyond mere opposition to present an alternative governing vision to that of the Obama Democrats. It was by no means obvious that they would do so. The key component of any effort to avert fiscal catastrophe in the coming decades, and to create the kind of stability in the Ame Read more
Liberals Playing to Type
Nov 21, 2011
In April 2008, days after saying that voters in western Pennsylvania were inclined to cling to religion and guns out of bitterness, Senator Barack Obama sat down for an interview with the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to try to fix some of the damage his remark had done to his presidential campaign. With exceptional frankness, he told the paper’s editors that what troubled him most about his off-handed comment was that it risked confirming some damaging stereotypes about liber Read more
The Medicare Monster
An entitlement problem too big to ignore
Sep 26, 2011
It is gradually dawning on Washington that a meaningful reform of the Medicare program will be unavoidable in the coming years. Medicare is at the center of both our health care dilemma and our fiscal crunch, and it will be very difficult to avoid a calamitous debt crisis without making changes to the program’s basic structure. Medicare’s problem is not just overspending. In a sense, the program’s travails mirror (and severely exacerbate) those of our economy and welfare state more generally Read more
‘We Don’t Estimate Speeches’
Jul 04, 2011
On June 22, the Congressional Budget Office released its annual “Long-Term Budget Outlook.” To call the document grim would be a grave understatement. It describes a massive wave of debt that threatens very soon to drown us—and that, thanks to the weak economy and the continuing growth of spending, is coming at us very fast. In last year’s outlook, which was alarming enough, the CBO projected that our national debt would be 91 percent of GDP in 2021. The agency now says debt will be 101 perce Read more
Beyond Mediscare
May 30, 2011
Do House Republicans want to kill the elderly? If you listen to the left these days, you’d certainly think so. Last week, a liberal advocacy group called “The Agenda Project”—which claims to advance “rational, effective ideas in the public debate”—released an ad showing a look-alike of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan pushing an old woman in a wheelchair off a cliff. “Is America beautiful without Medicare?” the ad inquires of viewers. “Ask Paul Ryan and his friends in Congress.” Nor Read more
Fight to the Debt
May 23, 2011
Normally in Washington, the agenda for spring and summer is set by the president’s budget and the priorities of congressional leaders. But this year will be different. House Republicans have proposed an ambitious platform, in the form of the budget produced by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan and passed by the full House last month. But the Democrats who control the Senate and the White House, and who therefore effectively run things, have no discernible policy agenda. What substance th Read more
The Radical Gradualism of Paul Ryan
The status quo is far more ‘extreme’ than the Republican budget
Apr 18, 2011
Late last month, Senator Charles Schumer of New York led a conference call in which Senate Democrats briefed reporters about the ongoing budget battle. At the outset, unaware that his comments were already audible to reporters on the line, Schumer provided some marching orders, advising his colleagues to describe Republican proposals as radical. “I always use the word extreme ,” he said. “That’s what the caucus instructed me to use this week.” It was no surprise, therefore, that when House B Read more
The Central Front
Why health care is the essential issue for 2012.
Apr 04, 2011
Even as they engage in heated battles over the budget and try to define a new agenda from their perch in the House of Representatives, conservatives clearly understand that the key to turning things around—to averting a debt crisis and defending the ideal of limited government—is winning the 2012 election. Only with a new president can they halt and reverse the leftward leaps of the past few years and address the increasingly dire consequences of six decades of welfare-state expansion. It Read more
Debt Be Not Proud
Jan 17, 2011
As the 112th Congress begins its work this month, it must take up some unavoidable unfinished business left behind by its predecessor. In their frantic, sloppy struggle to advance big-ticket items on the liberal agenda, the Democratic leaders of the 111th Congress not only failed to produce a budget for the current fiscal year, they also failed to address the fact that the federal borrowing necessary to fund their spending binge was quickly nearing the legal debt limit. That means the new Con Read more
Overruling Obamacare
Dec 27, 2010
In October 2009, at one of her weekly press conferences, Nancy Pelosi was asked by a reporter “where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” Pelosi shook her head and replied: “Are you serious?” When her spokesman Nadeam Elshami was later asked to clarify the answer, he responded, “That is not a serious question.” But it has turned out to be a pretty serious question after all. On December 13, U.S. District Court judge Read more