David Coates

Answering Back

Answering Back: The Living Book is a resource to keep you up-to-date as you fight for a better America. The book consists of 10 chapters, each covering a major issue in today’s political debates. Additional articles on these topics are regularly added to the book’s website, so it continues to live on. Here you will find the latest story lines, data sets, and literature references necessary to keep you fully up to speed with this incredibly rapidly changing and important set of political struggles.

I encourage you to respond to any and all of the articles. – David Coates

May 11, 2012

The Unfinished Business of the Obama Administration: Poverty & Unemployment

The Obama Administration has unfinished business: lots of it, actually. The President will no doubt seek re-election in November by emphasizing policy successes. He would do well, however, to seek re-election by also recognizing policy failures: recognizing them and committing his Administration to do better. To win re-election, that recognition will need to be honest. . . read more »

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April 24, 2012

Taking the Republicans to Task: (5) On Industrial Policy

  The Republican Party likes to pretend (even to itself) that it doesn’t have an industrial policy. It also likes to pretend that the U.S. economy is currently in such deep trouble because the Democratic Party does. Not so. Both parties have industrial policies whether they acknowledge them or not. The American economy is in. . . read more »

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April 9, 2012

Taking the Republicans to Task: (4) On Health Care Reform

              As we await the verdict of nine Supreme Court Justices on the constitutionality of all or part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it is worth asking what the remaining Republican Presidential nominees would create in its place. We know that they would have to create something, because each is committed to the. . . read more »

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March 26, 2012

The White House and Your House: Policy Inertia and Organizational Resistance in the On-going Crisis of American Housing

  Ask any of the  Republican presidential hopefuls in this long and drawn out primary season what in general is wrong with the economic policies of the Obama Administration, and they will each tell you that the economy is under-performing now because the current Administration intervenes in its workings too frequently and too heavily. They. . . read more »

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March 8, 2012

Taking the Republicans to Task: (3) on Smaller Government, Smaller Deficits

              The current frontrunners in the fight for the Republican presidential nomination vary far more in their personalities and leadership styles than they do in their problem analysis and policy prescription. Ron Paul apart, their explanation of what is going wrong in contemporary America, and what therefore needs to be done to put things. . . read more »

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February 23, 2012

Taking the Republicans to Task: (2) On the Regulation of Business and Labor

            In the standard trilogy of core commitments currently being made by Republican presidential candidates, the cutting of taxes and the pruning of government is invariably accompanied by the promise to deregulate business – and indeed to re-regulate labor. The Obama administration stands condemned, not simply for its tax-and-spend propensities, but also for its subordination. . . read more »

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February 13, 2012

Taking the Republican Candidates to Task: (1) on Taxes

  One consequence of the Republican Party’s current propensity to select its presidential nominee by the political equivalent of American Idol is that we are regularly exposed to sound-bite answers designed to differentiate one candidate from another. Both the brevity of the answers, and the enthusiasm for differentiation, come however at a cost. They obscure. . . read more »

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January 29, 2012

Republican Truth and Real Truth: GSEs and the Housing Bubble

  In any wars of words in an election season, truth is often an early casualty. The war of words between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich is no exception. The two Republican front-runners are currently telling each other carefully fabricated stories about their own pasts that cover tracks and reinvent reputations.[1] But in the end. . . read more »

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January 17, 2012

Republican Politics and the Unemployment Conundrum

  In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the world discovered by Alice was one in which every aspect of reality was inverted. Big things were small. Small things grew big. The Cheshire cat faded into a grin.One side of a mushroom made you grow. The other made you shrink. It was also a world. . . read more »

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January 2, 2012

Time to Choose, America!

It is likely that 2012 will be long remembered as a watershed year in America politics. It certainly needs to be. Neither the country nor the world can afford much longer the gridlock that is presently immobilizing Washington. We all know that. Here we are, beset with a string of fundamental problems and bumping along. . . read more »

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