Elizabeth Warren is again at the center of a political controversy. Despite her insistence that she is part Cherokee, based upon “family lore” and her observation that some in her family had “high cheekbones like all the Indians do,” she has failed to produce any concrete evidence to substantiate her claim.

The fact that firms are surviving several years after the filing bankruptcy is itself a testament to the efficient functioning of the U.S. bankruptcy system. It suggests that the bankruptcy system goes a long way toward helping businesses recover and resume operations after a bankruptcy filing.

State bankruptcy must serve to break the stranglehold of public-sector unions over state politics and budgets; help restore the federal government's precommitment against bailing out states; and advance, rather than distract from, the far more fundamental federalism reforms that will be required over the coming years.

The new study provides no conclusive proof one way or the other of the effect of the Massachusetts reform on medical bankruptcies.

Greve argues that a state bankruptcy option would represent a step towards restoring fiscal sanity--as long as it succeeds in breaking the stranglehold of public-sector unions over state politics and budgets.

The states' fiscal crisis is structural, not cyclical. Real recovery and reform will require drastic changes to our federal architecture.

The federal government seems a long way from the economic disaster Bowles envisions, but some state governments, like California, are not. To avoid this, Congress could pass a law allowing states to go bankrupt.

The administration's rationale for setting up a government-run resolution authority--to the extent that it is based on the idea that the interconnectedness of Lehman caused the financial crisis--is not well founded.