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 […]

"Both sides do it" may well be the most dangerous and deceitful phrase in U.S. politics. The lazy analyst's substitute for actual journalism doesn't merely misdiagnose what plagues the American body politic, but fails to correctly identify the source of the disease. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their 2012 book, It's […]

As 2018 draws to a close, there is growing concern about what the next year will bring for the American economy. President Trump's twin self-inflicted wounds of an ongoing trade war with China and a needless government shutdown helped send stock markets into a December panic. The expanding global economy, too, shows signs of a […]

And now for today's thought exercise. Imagine you are a member of Congress. Recent assessments from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warn that the budget deficit for fiscal year 2018, which ended on Sept. 30, jumped to $779 billion and annual trillion-dollar shortfalls will return beginning in FY 2020. But then you learn of […]

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Mitt Romney made a not-so-bold promise about the stewardship he would provide for the American economy. "I can tell you," he guaranteed, "after a period of four years, by virtue of the policies we'd put in place, we'd get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent--perhaps a little […]

Over the past couple of weeks, the Trump administration and its allies have been engaging in a lot of wishful thinking. Fresh off the strong second quarter economic growth number of 4.1 percent, Trump told a gathering of business leaders next quarter "could be in the fives." Not content to rest there, the President echoed […]