Robert J. Samuelson

These were to be the glory days for Europe's economy. The European Community's single-market program ("EC '92") would be virtually complete, and the buying power of more than 340 million consumers would propel an ongoing boom.

Every parent knows that parenting is an intensely personal, frustrating and fulfilling experience. You make it up as you go along. Your children (we have three) are a constant source of surprise and anxiety.

When he became chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan was chided about being too candid. He quickly reformed. "I have learned to mumble with great incoherence," he quipped to one group. "If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said." Well, times have changed.

There's always a lot of cant in Washington about "paying attention to the long term." It's usually only that, because the long term doesn't vote and doesn't have a lobby.

The rhetoric about the economy and the economy itself are drifting farther and farther apart. If you listen to the rhetoric, you'd think we were dropping rapidly into an economic canyon akin to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

You remember the 1950s: cars had fins, television was black and white, Ike occupied the White House--and almost no one worried about inflation. The fins, black-and-white TV and Ike are gone forever, but we can retrieve the '50s' splendid inflation record.

Don't look to Corporate America for moral leadership. Too many chief executives share the ethics of a welfare cheat. The welfare cheat breaks the law to chisel the government.

The Soviet economy is a shambles. Can we help? We should try. Until now, the Bush administration's wary policy has made sense. Outside aid, the argument went, wouldn't work without Soviet reforms.

Every so often, it's worth peeking into history's mirror to re-examine pivotal events that have shaped our times. We are now passing the anniversary of just such an event-but one virtually unknown.

The trouble with advertising is, frankly that there isn't enough of it. Just in case you hadn't noticed, it's in a tailspin. Hey, this could be a catastrophe.

The recession may be over, but its effects will linger. What made this slump different is that, along with the usual industries that suffer in a recession (autos and housing), large parts of the service sector were devastated.

Lamar Alexander, the ex-governor of Tennessee and the new secretary of education, is a charming man. Like all education secretaries, he talks tough about the need to raise school standards.

NEWSWEEK'S economics columnist has a better idea We are not yet serious about school reform. The latest plan from the Bush administration mixes lofty rhetoric (a pledge to "invent new schools") with vague proposals to rate our schools with national tests.

Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu met with President Bush last week to repair U.S.-Japanese relations. The Japanese are exasperated that, after pledging $13 billion for the gulf war, Americans are still upset.

There's something sleazy about respectable people claiming to be the innocent victims of their own blunders or wrongdoing. That's why I can't muster much sympathy for Donald Kennedy and Clark Clifford - the first is the president of Stanford University, the second a well-known lawyer and adviser to presidents - who have been caught in scandals.

After the war, part of the peace dividend will be a rise in national boredom It was just a year ago, and Germany was the big story. The Berlin wall had come down.

President Bush's "national energy strategy," unveiled last week, is predictably disappointing. Conspicuously missing is an energy tax, which would force Americans to invest more in energy efficiency.

Let's talk about the economics of war. You know the basic question: can we afford both guns and butter? It's always asked, and it's being asked now. We're told the war is frightfully expensive (perhaps $1 billion a day) and that, perhaps, we ought to pay for it with a surtax.

Should it come, the war will not be about cheap oil-but about preventing oil power from being tragically misused. We have not sent nearly 400,000 Americans to the Persian Gulf to defend crude at $18 a barrel.

Just about the wackiest idea in circulation these days is the notion that the press is talking the country into a recession. The theory has a superficial appeal and also panders to the popular impulse to despise the media (that crude amalgam of newspapers, magazines and television).

Let's keep this tax thing in perspective. Suppose Congress and the White House decide to raise taxes $25 billion. That's less than a 2.6 percent increase in overall federal taxes.

We are forever rediscovering old economic truths. Consider the case of Michael Porter, a respected observer of corporations who teaches at the Harvard Business School.