Reconciliation: How the Democrats Can Run the Table
Congressional Democrats will take office in January with the broadest mandate since the post-Watergate midterms in 1974—twice the popular-vote margin the Contract-with-America Republicans won in 1994. The work begins with dismantling most of what Donald Trump and his corrupt, incompetent administration have done over the past two years. Much of what Trump wrought came through his One Big Beautiful (sic)… Continue reading
Why We Need the Hackers behind the Panama Papers
The outrage heard around the world on the release of the Panama Papers brings to mind Claude Rains’s turn as the Vichy prefect of police in Casablanca, “discovering” gambling going on at Rick’s Café. The fact that many of the world’s richest people and most corrupt politicians squirrel away hundreds of billions of dollars in secret offshore accounts has been…Continue reading
Whatever Some Candidates Tell You, the Incomes of Most Americans…
After a decade when most Americans saw their incomes decline, the latest Census Bureau income data contain very good news: A majority of U.S. households racked up healthy income gains in 2013 and 2014. The facts may not fit the narratives of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or Bernie Sanders. But they do help explain why President Obama’s job approval and…Continue reading
Donald Trump’s Chutzpah: His Tax Plan Doubles Down on Inequality…
Donald Trump, often a master of snide generalities, has been very precise about not only his plans for undocumented immigrants and Obamacare, but also his approach to taxes. The presumptive GOP nominee has laid out detailed proposals to cut tax rates, expand the standard deduction, and sharply shift the approach to business taxes. I’ve reviewed his proposals, and the conclusions…Continue reading
GOP Hopefuls Understand Little about Older Americans and Social Security
In last Thursday’s GOP debate, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie avoided any mention of their common proposal to “reform entitlements” by raising the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 70. Their silence was the right decision: Their proposal demonstrates their lack of understanding about the demographics of older Americans, especially the dramatic disparities in their…Continue reading
Will the GOP Break Up?
At the risk of spoiling your holidays, it’s time for a serious talk about what’s driving the race for the GOP nomination. It’s not just personality, although Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are certainly more effective messengers than, say, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, their ideological doppelgangers. More important, the broad appeal to the party’s base of the extreme attacks…Continue reading
The Surprising Good News about American Incomes
For a change, the latest Census Bureau data on what’s happened to the incomes of Americans is good news. For the first time since the 1990s and 1980s, household incomes rose substantially in 2014, and did so across all demographic groups. You might miss the good news if you looked simply at everyone’s median income or median wage. What’s actually…Continue reading
Where Congress and the President Could Find a Few Trillion…
This year’s presidential hopefuls all agree that America has serious problems, with each party blaming the other. As readers of this blog know, the Number One problem in my view is the end of strong income growth for a majority of American households since 2002. However the candidates define the problem, they all have answers (of sorts), ranging from sweeping…Continue reading
The 2016 Politics of Income Stagnation and Decline
America has a big incomes problem: The incomes of most Americans largely stopped growing around 2002. Wide public resentment over that hard fact already dominates the 2016 debate. On the Democratic side, income issues have been conflated with concerns about inequality, so every plan to cushion the impact on middle-class is financed by more taxes on the unworthy wealthy. From…Continue reading