The Red Line

Can it get any crazier? Fourteen candidates on one debate stage? Leading newspapers in three small early primary states are partnering with C-SPAN to sponsor the “Voters First Forum,” a prime time TV event inviting all announced GOP presidential candidates Monday.

Nuts, right? Maybe not. What’s at stake is a fundamental principle of democracy. Should voters have the first say on the candidates or should pollsters and Madison Avenue hired guns working for the candidates with the most money?

After last year’s low volatility and impressive gains, stock market investors have been whipsawed in early 2014. Stocks dropped sharply in January, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbling more than 5%, and falling again Monday.

Yet the roller-coaster ride may just be getting started. Aside from the trouble in emerging markets and slowdown in U.S. manufacturing activity, there is a tax effect at play in the current market downturn, and it is likely to increase market volatility for the rest of this year.

This weeks widely followed Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results comparing the education attainment of 15-year-olds across much of the industrialized world found a floundering U.S. education system. American students' performance plummeted from 25th to 31st in math, 11th to 21st in reading, and 20th to 24th in science. The result was amplified coming only weeks after our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) disappointed once again.

Sandwiched between the two reports was one reason why America's education system continues to lag. We keep investing in efforts that don't produce results.

Universal pre-kindergarten schooling, every progressive’s fondest dream, is back in the news. Bill de Blasio, the overwhelming favorite in the New York mayoral race and the likely future head of the nation’s largest school system, is pushing universal pre-K as his No. 1 policy proposal. President Obama offered a national version of this idea in his February State of the Union address and has since pushed hard in other settings. Two problems: Such programs would have negligible educational value, and they would be massively expensive.

Senators from both sides of the political divide are displaying an encouraging resolve to break up the country’s biggest banks. Unfortunately, they’re focusing too much on the complexity of big bank operations and ignoring the greater threat entailed in their enormous size.

There were many happy faces in Washington on Friday with the Treasury Department’s announcement of robust tax revenues for April. Individual income-tax receipts surged to $240 billion for the month, taking the total for 2013 to $483 billion. This is far greater than the $393 in tax revenues the federal government collected for the first four months of 2012. The increase far surpassed the Congressional Budget Office projections in February.

The influx surprised the CBO and many other observers, but it shouldn’t have. Neither should the dramatic drop that is likely to follow, though policy makers will be tempted to behave as if the revenue flood will continue.

If we decide to break up the big banks, can we actually do it?

The first and most obvious proof that we can lies in the 2010 bank-regulation law, the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires America’s too-big-to-fail banks to submit plans — so-called living wills — outlining how they can be dismantled if they get into trouble. So these banks have already provided breakup blueprints.

All that is required is to remove the conditionality and change the timing: Break them up now, not when and if. And what could be easier than doing so according to their own instructions, and so, once and for all, eliminate the systemic risk posed by the biggest and riskiest banks?

All the debate about the pros and cons of a Greek exit from the euro area is missing the point: A German exit might be better for all concerned.

Unless Europe’s leaders take some kind of radical action, such as adopting and executing some of the many reform ideas they have floated, the currency union is headed for disintegration.