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"During the 1980s and 1990s, European economies went through a period of slowing economic growth and high unemployment, what some economists described as "secular decline." On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States enjoyed a robust recovery during those years by reducing taxes, eliminating regulations on business, and tightening monetary policy. Now, after two decades of subpar growth, the question is whether or not the American economy has entered into its own era of secular decline. This Broadside examines this troubling development, recognizing that there are no easy solutions to the problem. Lacking workable solutions, Americans will have to adjust to a future of slow economic growth, with all that implies for inter-generational progress, American strength abroad and political conflict at home."

Democratic presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, along with progressive economists like Thomas Piketty and Paul Krugman, have made a case for redistributing income from the wealthy to the poor as a means of reducing inequalities in income and wealth. Meanwhile, public opinion polls show that voters reject programs of redistribution in favor of policies designed to promote overall economic growth and job creation. While voters are concerned about inequality, they are more skeptical of the capacity of the government to do anything about it without making matters worse for everyone. In this Broadside, James Piereson explains why the voters are right and the progressive politicians and economists are wrong. As he demonstrates, the progressive case is based upon a serious fallacy: it assumes that the government is actually capable of redistributing income from the wealthy to the poor. For reasons of policy, tradition, and constitutional design, this is not the case. The United States currently has one of the more progressive income tax systems in the industrial world but it does little to redistribute income from the wealthy to the poor. One reason for this is that, though the government spends vast sums on programs to aid the poor, most of these funds flow to providers of services rather than to the poor themselves. Thus, whatever one may think of inequality, redistributive tax and spending policies are unlikely to do much to ameliorate it but will instead line the pockets of providers and advocates who wield great influence in Washington

The controversy over inequality has gathered steam with the publication of Thomas Piketty's new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a dense work of economic history that documents the rise of income inequality in recent decades and sets forth an agenda of taxation to deal with it. Piketty's treatise has turned into a rallying point for those favoring income redistribution and higher taxes on the rich.In this Broadside, James Piereson explains how Piketty's book is flawed and advances a narrow understanding of the market system. While misjudging the era in which we are living and misunde

A collection of 10 essays that have appeared in The American Spectator over the last year. Authors include James Q. Wilson, Norman Podhoretz, Andrew Roberts, Victor Davis Hanson, James Kurth, Lawrence E. Harrison, Daniel Johnson, Fouad Ajami, Natan Sharansky, and Micahel Novak. The Essayists examine how the ideals of liberty and limited government, operating in the related spheres of politics, economics, and religion, can be promoted around the world and adapted to contemporary challenges

Recent commentaries on the American party system have developed conflicting interpretations of the ways in which it changed during the 1960s and 1970s. Studies based upon individual behavior conclude that because of the intense conflicts of the 1960s, voters became more issue-oriented in their evaluations of the parties. Thus, an emerging basis for a "responsible" party system is visible in the changes of this period. System-level studies, on the other hand, point in exactly the opposite direction—to the growing instability of party alignments. The present study attempts to assess these interpretations in terms of the concept of "issue alignment," which refers to the degree to which citizens prefer the same party across a range of issues. Using data from national election surveys taken between 1956 and 1976, it is shown that issue alignment declined after 1956 and certainly did not increase during the 1960s and 1970s. Thus it appears that party alignments across issues are less stable presently than they were in the 1950s. It is suggested that we may have been exaggerating the degree of political change that occurred during the 1960s.

Political scientists have assumed that dividing the electorate into issue publics, on the basis of salient issues, leads to a better understanding of the relationships between issues and both candidate evaluations and electoral choice. This portrait accords nicely with the description offered by pluralists of the operation of the electoral arena. Our data suggest that, at least in 1972, the portrait is flawed. Using a variety of multivariate tech niques we show that salience fails to sharpen the impact of issues and that electoral choice was, fundamentally, a question of candidate images.