ON TAP

The anti-gun-insanity Children’s Crusade (well, really, a teenagers’ crusade) that is emerging in reaction to the Parkland massacre has clear potential to a sweep away the roadblocks that congressional Republicans have long placed before any efforts to institute universal background checks on gun buyers and to ban the sale of semi-automatic weapons. Whatever the kids […]

Our thoughts and prayers. One possibly redeeming consequence of the latest massacre of school children is that the scapegoating of mental illness and the parade of politicians who take NRA money expressing “thoughts and prayers” for dead children and grieving parents are wearing thin. It’s time to take over the national narrative. These are not […]

My friend Drew Westen, author of the classic book on political language, The Political Brain, observes that Republicans run rings around Democrats when it comes to the Orwellian use of political language, and that Democrats often step on their own strengths. For instance, as Westen observes, Democrats should never, ever use the budgetary term entitlements […]

On the Prospect home page today, we’ve posted an article by David Bacon on the efforts of California unions to defend immigrants—and not just their own members—from expulsion, and co-published a piece with Capital & Main on the 5,000 DACA recipients in California who are teachers. In its zeal to meet deportation quotas, ICE has […]

Trump’s $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan is another bait and switch. For starters, it’s dead on arrival, since Congress just concluded a two-year budget deal after massive horse-trading. Legislators are not about to reopen negotiations. It’s bizarre that Trump releases his budget after rather than before this deal. It’s one more sign of his irrelevance. As […]

When Obama was president, Republicans made a huge deal about deficits bankrupting the country, refusing to adequately fund the recovery program and demanding deep cuts in federal spending. Now that Trump is in, deficits suddenly don’t matter. The tax cut will add a trillion dollars to the national debt. The budget deal that was recently […]

…to President Trump’s desire to have his own version of a Red Square Roll-Out-The-Nukes-and-Salute! parade. The first is to note the absurdity of all this. At a time when even hard power is best measured by a nation’s development of things like quantum computing, our new tanks aren’t really a good measure of our might. […]

Now, it’s made up about half of his losses. I’ve been waiting for Trump to tweet that Monday’s sickening market slide was the Democrats’ fault. They spooked investors by refusing to approve his wall; or by failing to applaud his State of the Union address; or maybe by threatening his very presidency, the source of […]

…not least the inherent instability of markets. One perennial cause for such drops, however, is the fear of inflation, of higher interest rates and tighter credit. Which, in our shareholder-uber-alles form of capitalism, translates into a phobia of rising wages. By any measure, it’s hard to find very much that could have triggered this fear. […]