Virtually alone among major world economies, the United States has a debt ceiling which limits how much money the government can borrow to pay the bills it has already incurred. From the time Congress created the debt limit in 1917 to simply the massive borrowing need to fund the U.S effort in World War I […]

To my Republican friends willing to trigger a global economic catastrophe by refusing to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling, let’s engage in a little thought exercise. Imagine for the moment that Donald Trump actually won reelection in November 2020. (That shouldn’t be hard, given polling that shows that 66% of Republicans already wrongly believe […]

COVID-19 deaths in the United States reached 2,879 on Thursday. To put that American body count in perspective, the figure is more than the number of U.S. military personnel killed at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 or Pearl Harbor in 1941 or even D-Day in 1944. Tomorrow and probably every day for the rest […]

With the tens of millions of cash-strapped Americans teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe, Senate Republicans and President Trump are unable to act on a new package of COVID economic response programs. Three months after House Democrats passed a $3 trillion Coronavirus relief bill, GOP leaders in the Senate are trying to muster support […]

Furious over the Dow’s 1,900 point plunge over the past three days, President Trump held a press conference Wednesday to try to calm markets. Echoing the comments of his National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow that “we have contained” Coronavirus and the American economy is “holding up nicely,” Trump declared the pandemic risk to Americans is “very low” because […]

Among other things, Donald Trump will go down in history as the "everyone could have predicted" president. That is, it's not just that the 45th president of the United States has failed to deliver on pretty much every promise that he made to the American people; it's that the fact that Trump's guarantees would crash […]

With the unemployment rate still at 3.7% and GDP growth at 2.0%, the American economy remains solid, if not spectacular. But with more warning lights flashing yellow, Team Trump is growing more concerned about the direction of the so-called best economy ever just as the 2020 election heats up. The president and his advisers have […]

As Donald Trump's bragging about the economy reached a crescendo last fall, former Obama White House communications director Jen Psaki provided a helpful reality check for the American people. "A buffoon could have kept the recovery going," Psaki explained, "and in fact one has so far." That Trump had inherited an Obama boom, an expansion […]

So another tax season has come and gone. In this case, that means Americans can render their verdict on the first year of the signature legislative achievement of Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Thus far, the reviews are not kind. Despite an analysis by […]

Even a broken clock, the old saying goes, is right twice a day. So it was for Donald Trump during his 2019 State of the Union address on Tuesday night. During perhaps the most backward-looking presidential message in memory, the president thundered about a mythical national crisis of undocumented immigration putting America and Americans at […]