ON TAP

…from the Congressional Budget Office, which projected a budget deficit of $1 trillion in 2020, Republicans were already responding to the gap they created when they passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut. Their response, of course, isn’t to revisit the cuts they showered on the rich, but to cut the domestic spending that they and […]

Donald Trump has a new toy: tariffs. He seems to be putting them in roughly the same mental category as tweets: something to use to express instant frustration and vituperation. This is not exactly a policy, much less an effective one. Trump’s shadow trade war with China is reminiscent of his “mine is bigger” contest […]

…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 […]