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America desperately needs to start investing in itself. And it can easily afford to do so.

But the path to a better future has been blocked by partisanship and misguided concepts of fiscal rectitude. Which is why I’m pleased to see members of Congress embracing budget chicanery.

The background: The Senate appears on the verge of passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill — that is, a bill receiving support from a large enough minority of Republican senators to overcome the filibuster. This bill falls far short of what America really needs; it will be up to Democrats to fill the gaps with additional legislation enacted via reconciliation. Still, it’s a major political achievement, especially after the way “infrastructure week” became a running joke during the Trump era.

But how did the Senate get there? The politics were fairly obvious: Infrastructure spending is very popular, and a significant number of Republicans didn’t want to be seen as complete...

Last week I devoted a column to the unsettling political developments in Hungary. To expand on all this, I’ve asked my Princeton colleague Kim Lane Scheppele, who has been working extensively on the situation, to contribute a post. It’s below the fold.

Hungary’s Constitutional Revolution Kim Lane Scheppele

Last week, Paul Krugman’s column “Depression and Democracy” called attention to Hungary’s “authoritarian slide.” Since I was one of the sources for Paul’s column, I’d like to explain why I have been alarmed at the state of both constitutionalism and democracy in Hungary.

In a free and fair election last spring in Hungary, the center-right political party, Fidesz, got 53% of the vote. This translated into 68% of the seats in the parliament under Hungary’s current disproportionate election law. With this supermajority, Fidesz won the power to change the constitution. They have used this power in the most extreme way at...

During a stretch in April and May, bad traffic on nearby Interstate 81 delayed the arrival of steel plates from Georgia on three occasions. Such incidents send senior production controller Mike Middaugh to his computer to test alternative assembly schedules, given what parts the factory has on hand and what other deliveries might be accelerated.

SAMUELSON FRIEDMANThe Battle Over the Free MarketBy Nicholas Wapshott

The New Deal and World War II transformed the U.S. economy from a market free-for-all into a system that was still capitalist, but with many of the rough edges sanded off.

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“Before, they were doing four or five gimmicks. Now they just picked one gimmick and just made it much bigger,” said Marc Goldwein, a budget expert at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan think tank. “So, maybe less in style points.”

Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, isn’t stupid. He is, however, ambitious and supremely cynical. So when he says things that sound stupid it’s worth asking why. And his recent statements on Covid-19 help us understand why so many Americans are still dying or getting severely ill from the disease.

The background here is Florida’s unfolding public health catastrophe.

We now have highly effective vaccines freely available to every American who is at least 12 years old. There has been a lot of hype about “breakthrough” infections associated with the Delta variant, but they remain rare, and serious illness among the vaccinated is rarer still. There is no good reason we should still be suffering severely from this pandemic.

But Florida is in the grip of a Covid surge worse than it experienced before the vaccines. More than 10,000 Floridians are hospitalized, around 10 times the number in New York, which has about as many residents; an average of 58 Florida...

It has long been central to Republican mythology that Democrats have nothing but seething contempt for the rural and small-town inhabitants of the Real American Heartland. Republicans sometimes pair this with vile lies about Democratic proposals that would deliver economic benefits to those regions, turning their residents against them.

I’ve long been a believer in the magazine cover indicator: when you see a corporate chieftain on the cover of a glossy magazine, short the stock. Or as I once put it (I’d actually forgotten I’d said that), “Whom the Gods would destroy, they first put on the cover of Business Week.”

There’s even empirical evidence supporting the proposition that celebrity ruins the performance of previously good chief executives.

Presumably the same effect applies to, say, economists.

You have been warned.