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…and likely re-elect—since the opposition parties refuse to coalesce—the nation’s demagogic, neo-fascist, anti-Semitic prime minister, Viktor Orbán. In the course of his most recent term, Orbán has curtailed the independence of the judiciary and the freedom of the press, rewritten Hungary’s history books to extol the nation’s Nazi-allied fascist government of the 1930s and early […]

So let’s see: The nation’s largest retailer is trying to buy one of the biggest and most predatory insurance and hospital conglomerates, Humana. That would give the combined entity a staggering amount of market power, and reduce competition among insurance companies. Supposedly, the proposed merger increases efficiency by providing more walk-in clinics, more cut-rate drugs, […]

President Trump gets almost everything wrong. But once in a while he does something approximately right. Exhibit A: Trump and his trade team have re-aligned U.S. trade policy, from pursuit of a wishful fantasy called universal “free trade” to a realistic recognition that other nations use protectionism to their advantage. The real task is to […]

The trade deal with South Korea is a model for future trade agreements. What a pity that it fell to a lunatic like Donald Trump to bring it about. Credit mainly goes to Trump’s trade advisers, especially Peter Navarro and Robert Lighthizer. The deal exempts South Korea from the steel tariffs, in exchange for an […]

The Commerce Departments’ dead-of-night announcement yesterday that the 2020 Census would ask people if they were American citizens is perhaps the most purely partisan ploy we’ve yet seen in this age of Republican hyper-partisanship. The sole purpose of the question is to intimidate immigrants, the foreign-born, and the undocumented from participating in the census at […]

Let’s review the bidding. The pundits keep warning that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s firing is imminent. Trump obviously seethes and keeps fantasizing about telling Mueller he’s fired. What next? If Trump does move to fire Mueller, he has to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein first. More precisely, he’d have to order Rosenstein to fire […]

The headlines today are filled with alarmist language about how Trump’s retaliatory tariffs against China risk setting off a trade war. He’s imposing up to $60 billion worth of tariffs against an array of goods to compensate for a range of Chinese predatory tactics, including theft of intellectual property, subsidy of production below cost, and […]

Name, Please? Peter G. Peterson. And what makes you think you deserve admission to the Pearly Gates? I’ve led a virtuous life, made billions, and gave most of it to charity. What sort of charity? Well, I gave over $1 billion to create the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, to warn Americans about the dangers of […]