By Merrill Goozner

Delegates to the Republican national convention will adopt a platform on Tuesday that represents a major triumph for the economic and social conservatives that make up the party’s activist base. The final document, which includes calls to radically transform every entitlement program, moves the party well to the right of where it stood four years ago.

Standard-bearer Mitt Romney has already begun distancing himself from some of the more controversial elements of the document, such as the call to ban abortion under all circumstances, including pregnancies that result from rape or incest. But he has largely embraced many of the platform’s controversial economic planks, such as turning Medicare into a premium support program, establishing private accounts for Social Security and making sweeping changes in the tax code that analysts say would provide most of its benefits to the nation’s richest families. 

Christopher Maag

Debtors prisons may be illegal under the Missouri state constitution, but the practice of locking people up for unpaid debts is alive and well, according to recent reporting by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Using a little-known practice called "body attachments," debt collectors, often working for payday lenders, regularly succeed in getting debtors thrown behind bars.

 

Critics say the practice is illegal and wastes finite government resources.

 

The practice is also common in neighboring Illinois, where state leaders recently passed legislation limiting the circumstances in which creditors can get debtors jailed for failure to pay private debts.

 

 

By Josh Boak

Gasoline prices have shot up to $3.72 a gallon – a shocking 26-cent leap in the last month that reportedly has a politically vulnerable President Obama searching for ways to lower fuel costs.

Consumers usually respond to pain at the pump by cutting back their spending elsewhere, likely dragging down what has been a sluggish recovery just ahead of the November election. And higher prices give Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney an easy target for attacking Obama – one used when gas spiked this spring that can easily be repeated at the GOP convention next week. 

By Eric Pianin

When Bill Clinton accepted the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination in New York, he was portrayed in a video as "The Man from Hope," a governor from a small Arkansas town who promised better economic times and more jobs. Then-Texas governor George W. Bush claimed the 2000 Republican presidential nomination in Philadelphia as the man who would beef up national security and restore "dignity and respect" to the presidency.

Next week, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney will be presented to the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., as "The Man from Bain Capital," or so it would seem from recent media reports. 

By Yuval Rosenberg

Renowned investor Jim Rogers is still worried. As the U.S. heads for the fiscal cliff at the end of the year, the chairman of Rogers Holdings has been outspoken about the consequences of the country’s growing national debt. From his perch in Singapore, he still doesn’t see much reason for real optimism. Rogers rose to investing prominence after starting the Quantum Fund with George Soros in the 1970s, generating an eye-popping and oft-cited return of 4,200 percent over a 10-year span that saw the S&P 500 climb less than 50 percent. Rogers “retired” as a multi-millionaire at age 37.

But he’s remained an active investor, world traveler, author and ubiquitous media presence. The self-styled "adventure capitalist," who rode a motorcycle across China in the early 1990s – and biked more than 100,000 miles across six continents – moved from New York to Singapore in 2007. He created the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI) in the late 1990s. His name has become synonymous with investing in commodities and China. 

By Michael Hodin

How odd it is that we have technologies in this current century to help us celebrate the policies of Social Security (which turns 77 next week) and Medicare (which just turned 47), both formed in an earlier century. We have birthday cakes on Facebook pages and tweets from all quarters about both of these entitlement institutions.

And how interesting it is, too, that topics normally left to policy wonks inside the Beltway or among academics from Cambridge to Palo Alto have made their way into social media. Or that we are now being invited to take to the streets by the Alliance for Retired Americans in their summer campaign with the slogan, "Let’s Not Be the Last Generation to Retire." The group's goal seems to be to amass signatures on a petition calling for America to keep Social Security and Medicare far into the future. Not exactly the inspiration of the good old American work ethic and our understanding of virtue. And not anywhere in the vicinity of our current demographic realities which, as we live well into our 80s, hardly square with outdated ideas of retirement. 

By Bruce Bartlett

Last week, I had a day all pundits dread. I made a confident prediction that Mitt Romney would not choose Paul Ryan as his running mate. Less than 24 hours later, he did exactly that.

Obviously, my expectation was wrong, but that doesn’t mean that my reasoning was. In the week since my column appeared, I have yet to hear a compelling rationale for Romney’s decision. While it has energized one wing of the GOP -- economic conservatives and libertarians -- he already had every one of them in his pocket before choosing Ryan.
At the same time, Romney has made it harder for religious conservatives primarily concerned about social issues such as gay marriage to have any enthusiasm for him. They were already skittish about the prospect of having a Mormon as president, so adding a Catholic admirer of the atheist Ayn Rand to the ticket has made matters worse, from their point of view.