Greg Marx

We asked a range of conservatives what could be done to enable more two-parent families to maintain a middle class existence with greater work-life balance. Here's what they had to say.

When the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to
cut its own budget last week, the scant coverage in major outlets
represented a missed opportunity to probe what the consequences of the
reduction might be — or how previous staff reductions have affected the
ability of Congress to perform its work.

Few institutions in the country today are less loved than the Federal Reserve. At a time when disillusionment with Washington and Wall Street is rife, the Fed — which is quite literally a hybrid of the government and the banking sector — has come under widespread attack. And while there are important differences between the critiques offered by the right and the left, there are common threads, too. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, blasting the “veil of secrecy” surrounding the Fed’s emergency lending program at the height of the financial crisis, struck a tone sounded by many Fed critics: the institution is unaccountable, opaque, and unduly responsive to entrenched interests.

To the extent that there’s merit to this complaint, why might it be so? What elements of the Fed’s formal and informal institutional design contribute to this situation?

One of the striking things about the package is an approach to stimulus that wasn't even part of the talks: aid to strapped states.

You might think it would be hard to produce a news article that is simultaneously a puffy profile of an important government official, a credulous conduit for her leading opponents, a feeble explanation of the actual political dynamic, and a lackluster treatment of substantive policy issues. But that’s what The Washington Post delivered last week with its story about Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the industry interests lining up to battle new regulations that the EPA is considering.

GOP refusal to permit final vote on merits thwarts attempt to update laws barring sex-based wage discrimination.

With control of the House of Representatives about to change hands, a recent New York Times article worried over whether Washington's "new power couple," President Obama and presumptive Speaker of the House John Boehner, could get along. And certainly, “working together” and “forging bonds” sound good, in an “everything-I-need-to-know-I-learned-in-kindergarten” sort of way. But it’s not necessarily the case that more comity will produce better outcomes — or, more to the point, who those outcomes will be good for.

Plan leans heavily on spending cuts to balance the federal budget — a consequence of the decision to propose limits on the size of the government.