Reihan Salam

This week, various political luminaries gathered in Dallas, Texas, to celebrate the presidency of George W. Bush, who presided over one of the most tumultuous periods in modern American history. Among liberals, Bush is considered a uniquely awful president, having led the United States into the ill-fated invasion and occupation of Iraq and having passed into law deep tax cuts that contributed to America’s present-day fiscal crunch.

Conservatives are more conflicted. Some dismiss him as a big-government conservative who failed to heed the wisdom of Goldwater and Reagan. Others, including many who served in the Bush administration, believe that as time passes, he will be lauded for his achievements. The complicated truth is that for all his flaws, George W. Bush had a better understanding of the challenges facing Republicans than most Obama-era conservatives. His rocky tenure is best understood as a testament to how difficult it will be to modernize the GOP.

Many hero-worshipped Bush during the early days of the war on terror, seeing him as a humble Christian leader who was always willing to take the hard road rather than the easy one. But as the public turned against the Iraq War, and as his efforts on behalf of Social Security reform and immigration reform engendered a fierce political backlash, a growing number of conservatives came to see Bush as an apostate who expanded Medicare and the federal role in education while failing to roll back the growth of government. The Bush administration’s response to the 2008 financial crisis alienated conservatives even further, as the ominously named Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), engineered by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, struck many as a hardly-any-strings-attached Wall Street bailout. The Tea Party movement arose in no small part as a repudiation of Bush and his fitful efforts to transform the GOP.

Bush administration veterans, meanwhile, remain convinced that their president has gotten a bum rap. Keith Hennessey, who served as director of the National Economic Council during Bush’s second term, recently described Bush’s keen intelligence, and in doing so worked the former president’s liberal detractors into a frenzy. Among my friends and acquaintances who served in the Bush White House, the general view is that while Bush had solidly conservative instincts on domestic policy matters, he was hemmed in by the demands of the war on terror and the recalcitrance of Republican lawmakers. When the administration pressed for reform of Medicaid and, later on, changes in the way employer-sponsored health insurance would be treated in the tax code, congressional Republicans hardly ever gave him in inch. President Bush had little leverage, as he needed congressional Republicans to approve military spending and to defend his administration in the endless controversies over enemy combatants and surveillance that sapped its strength.

One of the ironies of the Bush presidency is that for all its failures, it was rooted in a clear-eyed diagnosis of the challenges facing Republicans. The end of the Cold War and the success of the Clinton-era Democrats’ centrism had badly undermined the GOP, which by the late 1990s risked irrelevance. Newt Gingrich’s efforts to shrink government were successfully countered by President Bill Clinton’s protean progressive centrism, and so George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, identified an alternative way forward.

One of the central questions surrounding the Boston Marathon bombings is whether they portend a larger wave of terror attacks by homegrown Islamic radicals. The culprits, two brothers of Chechen origin, one of whom was a naturalized U.S. citizen, had both lived in the country for more than a decade. While the older brother is reported to have been sullen, resentful and ill at ease in his adopted country, the younger brother was by all accounts a well-mannered kid, whose main vice was marijuana. Many fear that if these two men could turn viciously against the country that gave them refuge, the same might be true of at least some small number of their co-religionists.

I grew up in a Muslim household in New York City’s polyglot outer boroughs, and the Tsarnaev brothers strike me, in broad outline, as recognizable figures. The younger brother’s Twitter feed, which has attracted wide attention, reads like dispatches from the collective id of at least a quarter of my high school classmates. Also recognizable is the brothers’ lower-middle-class but gentrifying Cambridge milieu, which bears a strong resemblance to the neighborhood in which I was raised. So like many Americans of Muslim origin, I’ve been struggling to understand what exactly went wrong in their heads. How could a “douchebag” and a “stoner” ‑ and here I’m paraphrasing the words of the Tsarnaev brothers’ acquaintances and friends ‑ have committed one of the most gruesome terror attacks in modern American history? We might never have a good answer to this question, and certainly won’t have a good answer anytime soon. But what we can do is get a sense of what we do and don’t know about U.S. Muslims, and what it might mean for our future.

Although I can’t claim to be representative of U.S. Muslims as a whole, my experience leads me to believe that America’s Muslim community will grow more secular over time. My parents are originally from Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country of 150 million that is currently in the throes of a violent clash over the role of Islam in public life. While Bangladesh has made impressive strides in a number of social indicators in recent decades, its poverty has sent large numbers of migrants to India, the Persian Gulf, Europe, Southeast Asia and, over the past two decades in particular, the United States.

Less than two years after resigning from Congress under less than ideal circumstances, Anthony Weiner is reportedly giving serious consideration to running for mayor of New York City. During his first bid for the Democratic mayoral nomination in 2005, Weiner distinguished himself as a voice for middle-income outer borough voters who felt left out of Michael Bloomberg’s Manhattan-centric vision for the city’s future. To some, Weiner seemed like a younger, scrawnier Ed Koch, with the same bulldog tenacity and populist brio. Having graciously conceded defeat that year in the name of Democratic unity, many believed Weiner had a strong shot at winning the mayoralty once Bloomberg left the picture. Then, of course, he was caught sending creepy photographs of himself to various young female strangers, and then lying about it to the press.

So why, one might ask, is Weiner being taken seriously as a potential mayoral candidate? One reason is that he has $4.3 million in campaign funds, and he is entitled to an additional $1.5 million in public matching funds under New York City’s generous campaign finance system. The bigger and more depressing reason is that the leading Democratic mayoral candidates are hilariously ill-equipped to face the fiscal challenges to come, and voters are very open to someone new.

There are  some solid candidates in the mix, but they’re not running as Democrats. Joe Lhota, the former MTA chief who served as Rudolph Giuliani’s right-hand man throughout the 1990s, has a wealth of administrative experience that would serve him well. Adolfo Carrión Jr., the Independence Party nominee and former Bronx borough president, is running on an innovative platform centered on revitalizing New York City’s neglected outer boroughs. But short of a miracle or a Bloomberg-level injection of super PAC money, it will be hard for either candidate to overcome the fact that they aren’t Democrats.

You’d think comprehensive immigration reform legislation would be a done deal. President Barack Obama has promised to overhaul immigration policy since his 2008 campaign, and leading Republicans have been keen to do the same in the wake of the last presidential election. Last week the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, representing the interests of Corporate America and organized labor, respectively, endorsed a series of reform proposals, including a substantial increase in work visas and labor-friendly prevailing wage requirements. A bipartisan group of eight senators has been working toward a deal, and a bipartisan group of eight House members is also in on the act. So what’s the holdup?

The basic problem is beautifully illustrated by two little controversies, one sparked by liberals and the other by conservatives. On the left, there is a widely held belief that U.S. immigration laws are far too stringent, and that we’re not doing enough to help low-income immigrants become citizens. On the right, there is an equally common conviction that U.S. immigration laws should not, as a general rule, have the effect of expanding the number of people who depend on means-tested government benefits to maintain a decent standard of living.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Rahm Emanuel, the blustery mayor of Chicago and Obama’s former chief of staff, and Luis V. Gutierrez, an Illinois congressman who represents a large share of Chicago’s Latino population, argue that, in order to apply for citizenship, Citizenship and Immigration Services is charging immigrants too steep a price – $680, including a fee for fingerprinting. Emanuel and Gutierrez observe that as the fee has increased over the past decade the number of lawful permanent residents who apply for citizenship has declined. They neglect the possibility that other factors could be at play.

As the Supreme Court weighed arguments over California’s Proposition 8 and the federal Defense of Marriage Act last week, the cultural and political momentum in favor of same-sex civil marriage was extraordinary. One after another, prominent Democrats who had been reluctant to endorse same-sex civil marriage switched their positions, recognizing that they were in grave danger of being “on the wrong side of history” (a phrase we’re hearing a lot lately). Some of the reversals have been surprising only because they’ve come so late, as in the case of Hillary Clinton. Others, like Senators Jon Tester and Kay Hagan, were surprising because they represent states, Montana and North Carolina, where same-sex unions aren’t recognized.

But this rush among politicians, including a small but growing number of Republicans, to back same-sex civil marriage won’t settle the issue. Assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t decide to invalidate the laws of the 37 states that limit civil marriage to opposite-sex couples, 31 of which have constitutional amendments to that effect, this debate will go on for many years. And we’re already starting to see the contours of what comes next ‑ a battle between those fighting to return cultural values to what they were before the sexual revolution, and those convinced that there is no turning back.

A number of conservatives, myself included, have argued that the right needs to shift from opposing same-sex civil marriage to focusing on the broader erosion of marriage, particularly among working- and middle-class Americans. Over the past half-century the share of 18- to 29-year-olds who are married has fallen from 60 percent to 20 percent. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if young adults were delaying child-rearing until after marriage, as is true among college-educated Americans. But the out-of-wedlock birthrate now stands at 41 percent. By changing the subject from fighting same-sex civil marriage to strengthening marriage for all families, conservatives who believe that stable marriages are crucial for child-rearing and economic advancement can form alliances across the political and cultural spectrum. Although this argument has gained at least some currency among younger conservatives, who’ve been raised in a culture that takes gay equality as a given, it is far from becoming the conservative conventional wisdom. If anything, opponents of same-sex civil marriage see this “call for a truce” as a reflection of a basic misunderstanding about the real meaning of marriage.

One of the core ideas behind the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Obama’s ambitious and very controversial effort to expand access to medical insurance, is that state governments will work with the federal government to make high-quality care more accessible and affordable by creating subsidized state-based insurance exchanges. For those who aren’t covered by employer-sponsored insurance or Medicare or Medicaid, the exchanges are meant to offer a range of affordable insurance plans, with subsidies varying by household income.

The architects of the ACA believed the exchanges would be one of the more politically attractive aspects of the law, as they were designed to give states considerable latitude and to harness the power of market competition. But 34 states, representing two-thirds of the U.S. population, have thus far refused to establish their own exchanges, and the federal government is scrambling to create its own exchanges in the states that have refused to play ball.

Defenders of the ACA have noted the irony that conservatives, who tend to champion state autonomy, have led the opposition to the creation of state-based insurance exchanges. Yet as Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum, a leading critic of the ACA, has observed, the state-based insurance exchanges are best understood as “a second Medicaid program,” which will likely suffer from the same misaligned incentives as its more familiar cousin. While the federal government will cover the entire cost of the subsidies designed to make the insurance plans offered on the exchange affordable, state governments will be free to impose regulations and mandates on insurance plans that could raise their cost. State lawmakers might want to reward medical providers by deeming that various expensive and non-essential medical treatments must be covered by insurance, but state governments will be under no obligation to bear the cost of having done so.

This week, House Republicans and Senate Democrats released budget resolutions that illustrate the chasm that separates the two parties.

The Republicans, led by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, aim to shave $4.6 trillion off of the federal government’s spending trajectory. They get there primarily by reducing the growth rate of domestic social programs like Medicaid and rolling back the coverage-expanding provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Although the Ryan budget accepts the revenue increases that were part of the fiscal cliff deal and the Affordable Care Act, it does not allow for any further revenue increases.

The Democrats, led by Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, aim to reduce spending by $975 billion. Yet they also call for $100 billion in new stimulus spending and shutting off the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts scheduled to take place under sequestration, which suggests that spending reductions will be more than balanced by spending increases. And while the Ryan budget resists revenue increases, the Murray budget calls for $975 billion in revenue from unspecified cuts to loopholes and spending in the tax code.

Across the political spectrum, there is a growing recognition that while short-term battles over government spending are important, they would be far less ferocious and intense if our economy were growing at a faster clip. But while conservatives and liberals alike clamor for more growth, they disagree about how to produce it. The key is unleashing what the economist Joseph Berliner once called the “Invisible Foot,” the neglected counterpart to Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand.”

Before we turn to the Invisible Foot, let’s think through the prescriptions for growth offered by Democrats and Republicans. President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies often argue that substantial increases in public investment will deliver robust growth. Republicans, in contrast, emphasize the notion that reductions in marginal tax rates will spur growth by increasing the incentives to work and invest. These approaches are obviously far apart, yet they face at least two common obstacles. First, the aging of the population and the high cost of health entitlements severely limit the government’s ability to increase spending or cut taxes. Second, advanced economies have by definition already taken advantage of the most obvious sources of productivity growth and so are forced to innovate to find new sources of productivity growth. And innovation is a trial-and-error process that is far more expensive and arduous than simply following the leader.

So the question of the day isn’t whether we want growth (yes, we want it badly) or whether we can dramatically increase public investment or dramatically cut taxes (neither strategy is in the cards). Rather, it is whether there is anything we can do to make the American economy friendlier to the kind of risk-taking and innovation that will eventually yield productivity gains without breaking the bank.

The minimum wage debate is back, thanks to President Barack Obama. In his State of the Union address this week, he noted that a full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour would earn $14,500 a year. This is an amount that would be very low for a single adult living alone, let alone the parent with two children whom the president invoked in his speech. And so he called for a sharp increase in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour, an amount that would be indexed to inflation, as a way to fight poverty and to give the economy a boost.

What the president didn’t mention is that the share of full-time workers who earn the federal minimum wage is very low. Mark Perry, an economist affiliated with the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, observes that as of 2011, only 1.7 percent of full-time hourly employees were earning the minimum wage or less. Minimum-wage earners were more common among those aged 16 to 19 – 22.8 percent of these workers were earning the minimum wage or less. Of course, many of these workers live with their parents and are generally not the sole source of support for themselves or their families.

Another reason why so few workers earn the federal minimum wage is that as the value of the federal minimum wage has eroded, dozens of states have established or raised their own minimum wages. Thus far, only the state of Washington has a minimum wage, at $9.19 an hour and indexed to inflation, higher than the president’s proposal.

Federalism’s days appear to be numbered. The reason isn’t so much that the power of the federal government has increased, though that’s part of it. Instead, the slow-motion death of federalism flows from the fact that a wide array of federal programs have seduced state governments into playing Washington’s tune.

This week, for example, Ohio Governor John Kasich, a conservative who first came to prominence as one of the foot soldiers of the 1994 Republican Revolution, announced that he supports the federal expansion of Medicaid, one of the central pillars of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA). Opposition to ACA, and to the enormously expensive Medicaid expansion, had until recently been considered a conservative litmus test.

Kasich is the fifth Republican governor to embrace the Medicaid expansion, alongside Arizona’s Jan Brewer, Nevada’s Brian Sandoval, New Mexico’s Susana Martinez, and North Dakota’s Jack Dalrymple. And he almost certainly won’t be the last. Florida Governor Rick Scott, a former healthcare executive who strongly opposed to the Obama administration’s health reform effort in his 2010 campaign, is widely expected to do the same.