TAP

 What’s at work? For starters, the market has been rising at a completely unsustainable rate, driven by low interest rates, stock buybacks, high corporate profits, and investor expectations of even dizzier heights. At some point, it had to come down to earth, even with the pro-corporate tax-cuts. In addition, the declining unemployment rate has been […]

…wrote a very smart column in The New York Times on Trump’s immigration offer to the Democrats. Edsall quotes a number of political scientists and strategists, but the bottom line is: Take the deal. Trump is offering to more than double the number of number of young people brought here illegally as children who can […]

When Donald Trump makes it in his State of the Union address. On Tuesday night, Trump promised that he’d put before Congress a massive investment in infrastructure, to the tune of $1.5 trillion. What he neglected to say was that just $200 billion of that would actually be federal dollars. The balance would be funds […]

In the mid-2000s, Napster had a futuristic slogan: “Own Nothing, Have Everything.” You know, hang out at Starbucks with your laptop and your iPhone, with all the world’s music, and videos, and books, and free information at your fingertips, and no physical stuff to worry about. On the Road, 21st-century style. Well, the future has […]

It’s the only sanctuary state out there, the state where there are real restrictions on the extent to which cops can cooperate with ICE. It continues to push the envelope on climate change legislation, and, with New York, has mandated that its minimum wage rise to $15 an hour over the next few years. But […]

Clearly, White House Counsel Donald McGahn or his associates were the source of the explosive leak that Trump had directed McGahn to fire Mueller, and that McGahn blocked the move by threatening to resign. But why did McGann choose last week to leak the story of an episode that happened last June? The most obvious […]

For starters, he and his ultra-nationalist domestic policy adviser, Steve Miller, are continuing to play to Trump’s hard-core base. Second, Trump is trying to demonstrate that he’s the boss here. There are several problems, however. First, there is no such thing as a take-it-of-leave-it demand in politics. This may work as a ploy when you […]

The administration’s decision this week to place a 30 percent tariff on imports of solar panels has drawn a predictable backlash from a range of critics, including the companies that install solar panels and the disciples of corporate free trade. Among the latter are a number of congressional Republicans and right-wing think tanks, which have […]

Virtually all mainstream writers have imbibed the conventional wisdom that there is a simple divide between something called “free trade” and something disparaged as “protectionism.” Free trade, good; protectionism, bad. But how do you proceed when another country is clearly protecting its home markets and its exports—by subsidizing their manufacture and selling them below the […]

…another wildly divergent set of articles on what the super-rich have planned for the rest of us. Consider the contrasting takes in two news stories today, one in The New York Times, the other in The Washington Post. The contrast is clear even before you read the stories, since they’re expressed in the headlines. “Ahead […]