Washington Post

Of all the critiques made of President Obama’s performance in the first debate, the most telling, I think, was leveled before the debate — 2,000 years before, more or less. The criticism came in the form of a question, but then, that’s how rabbis talk.

“If I am not for myself, who shall be for me?” asked Rabbi Hillel — the first of three questions that he believed people needed to ask themselves if they were to lead decent lives.

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Suppose the growth of the U.S. economy slows to a trickle. I don’t mean in the next quarter or next year or even over the next decade. I mean from this time forth.

That’s the prediction of Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon in a new paper that’s become the subject of widespread commentary.

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Will the questions in the presidential debates reflect the concerns of the Beltway and financial elites, or those of the 99 percent?

Plenty of questions would, of course, rightly reflect the concerns of both groups: questions about war and peace, the deployment of American forces, the right to marry, school quality. But a number of questions related to the top 1 percent’s rise over the rest of our citizenry are simply not part of standard Beltway discourse, and asking them would require some outside-of-the-box thinking from the debate moderators. Herewith, a few helpful suggestions.

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Which is the more redistributionist of our two parties? In recent decades, as Republicans have devoted themselves with laser-like intensity to redistributing America’s wealth and income upward, the evidence suggests the answer is the GOP.

The most obvious way that Republicans have robbed from the middle to give to the rich has been the changes they wrought in the tax code — reducing income taxes for the wealthy in the Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts, and cutting the tax rate on capital gains to less than half the rate on the top income of upper-middle-class employees.

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Here’s a bit of advice to America’s teachers: If you want the nation’s opinion leaders and CEOs to like you, don’t congregate in groups. Everyone, it seems, loves teachers individually. But when they get together, they become a menace to civilization.

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So much for Democratic Party harmony.

Just a few days after a convention that displayed the party as one big happy family, a civil war has erupted in Chicago between the Democrats’ disparate wings.

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