As the U.S. presidential election draws close, there is increasing demand for simple answers to complex questions, immediate solutions to entrenched challenges, and ten-second sound bites to sum it all up. For nearly 65 years, RAND has focused on big, long-term, core public policy issues and has cultivated the farsighted perspectives required to address them.
While I have no doubt of Levin's determination to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens, incremental adjustments and seemingly small compromises, each sensible under the circumstances, can have a cumulative effect that erodes the very liberty we are trying to protect, writes Brian Michael Jenkins.
Much of the debate over this bill has focused on the political issue of executive authority versus rule of law. In doing so it has overlooked the indirect and insidious effects the new law may have on the United States' largely successful counterterrorist campaign, writes Brian Michael Jenkins.
The kerfuffle over Dodd-Frank conceals broad agreement that corporate fraud and misconduct are bad and that internal compliance mechanisms are intended to protect companies as well the community at large from bad behavior, write Michael Greenberg and Donna Boehme.
Certainly, ideology should play a role in public policy decisions. But when many policies—regardless of their merits—are simply off-limits for ideological reasons, then the nation as a whole has a problem, writes James A. Thomson.