To those who knew him well, Jeffrey L. Bell was a real-life George Bailey: an accomplished and decent man who shaped important events by helping others achieve their own greatness, mostly without recognition himself.

THE FINAL REPORT OF PRESIDENT Bush's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform reveals a Republican party shell-shocked by the hostile reception to its Social Security reform plans and deeply ambivalent about the direction to take on tax policy. The underlying drama, rarely acknowledged, is whether the…

BY PUTTING INCOME-TAX and Social Security reform atop his second-term domestic agenda, President George W. Bush courageously zeroed in on the two most important fiscal issues facing American families for at least a generation. The basic choice is whether to retain the formula Ronald Reagan…

OUR GREAT DIFFICULTY IN UNDERSTANDING the Asian financial bubble and its implications for the United States is not that we have too few explanations, but far too many. The crisis has been blamed, variously, on greedy speculators (by an Asian head of state), on the failure of Asian governments to…