The Forum

Here are some excerpts from a nice piece by Holman Jenkins, writing for the Wall Street Journal

The case for tax cuts as deficit-fighting has never been more valid, since getting the tax base growing is the only way to escape an even bigger fiscal and monetary crisis. Workers who are out of jobs over time become unemployable; plant and equipment depreciate and never contribute to the tax rolls again. Mr. Obama can easily and consistently argue that we need to go for growth above all.

But his steepest learning curve has been getting rid of the copybook approach to defining his agenda—sadly still evident in last week's State of the Union. The country has big problems—it always has big problems. It never doesn't have big problems. But the idea that he has to throw solutions on the table to everything at once is just what we've seen: a formula for irrelevance, a strategy to turn himself into a punch line.