Global Investors Are Telling Donald Trump His Deficits and National…
Washington is unnerved these days about budget deficits and the national debt. Deficit angst comes along periodically, often as a pretext for cutting social spending. This time, however, there’s genuine cause for alarm. Outsized deficits are par for the course when the economy is in recession or reeling from a shock like the pandemic or the financial collapse; most of… Continue reading
Republican Presidents and Inequality
The new findings on growing inequality by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman are deeply disturbing. They demonstrate again how extreme overall inequality has become in America. The top 1 percent’s share of all pretax income went from 10.7 percent in 1980 to a little over 20.2 percent in 2014, while the share claimed by the bottom 50 percent…Continue reading
What Hillary’s Campaign Missed
Last week’s election should be dubbed the revenge of the neglected. The outcome would have been different if Hillary’s strategists had taken to heart James Carville’s famous quip in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid.” I remember it well, because I pulled together Bill Clinton’s economic program for the 1992 campaign. Of course, today’s economic problems are different from those of…Continue reading
Halloween Special: How Hillary Can Handle Scary Interest Rate Hikes
Looking past this weekend’s kerfuffle over Huma Abedin’s emails, Hillary Clinton’s success in her first term as President will depend in large part on whether the incomes of most Americans keep rising. As readers of this blog know, my studies tracking people’s incomes, year to year as they aged, found that the median household incomes of millennials, Gen Xers and boomers…Continue reading
Obama’s Expansion Is Finally Paying Off
There’s no debate that the tough economic times of the last decade have helped frame the 2016 elections. In fact, many Americans are so accustomed to seeing the world through their experience of tough times, that it’s hard to recognize when conditions have changed. Yet, here’s one sign that times are different: American businesses have created almost 9.2 million net…Continue reading
On Economic Growth, Hillary Delivers and Trump Pretends
To prepare for tonight’s debate, I decided to think through Donald Trump’s promise to deliver 4% annual economic growth. First off, if this is Trump’s goal, then his program is as much a fraud as his foundation or university. If anything, his proposals would slow our already modest growth. To be sure, no one has a silver bullet to raise the…Continue reading
The Trump and Clinton Foundations Are Character Tests that Hillary…
Donald Trump’s charge that Hillary Clinton used her office as Secretary of State to service donors of the Clinton Foundation exemplifies a regular Trump tactic: Preemptively charge your opponent with what you know you’ve done. So, fully aware that his own family foundation is a shoe-string operation that breached IRS regulations, or worse; Trump and his surrogates charged for months that the…Continue reading
The Economic Outlook for the Election and Beyond, and How…
With nine weeks to go, the economic conditions for the election are set — modest growth, low inflation, and continuing job gains. A few Wall Street forecasters rate the odds of a 2016 recession at one-in-three; but unless a major shock wrenches the economy off its present course, bet with Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke on the economic expansion continuing…Continue reading
Sorry, Donald – The Incomes of Minority Households Grow More…
Donald Trump says that Democrats have failed American minorities, so let’s test his claim by the most basic economic criteria: What happened to the incomes of African Americans and Hispanics under Democratic and Republican administrations over the last 35 years? The data do not lie. The incomes of minority households — and in most cases the incomes of white households,…Continue reading