GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump mystified economists with his prediction this week that the United States faces a "major recession." Their confusion is well-founded. After all, with unemployment at 5.0 percent and the job-seekers returning to the work force, the U.S. just turned in its best two-year performance since the booming 1990's. That said, there […]
Category: Economy
Running third in the race in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Ohio Governor John Kasich nevertheless insists he's in it to win it. His refusal to yield is based on two equally bogus selling points. Compared to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the union-busting, abortion-ending Kasich portrays himself as a relative moderate. […]
Just days after recording robocalls for Marco Rubio in Florida, failed 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney joined Governor John Kasich on the campaign trail in Ohio on Monday. Bizarrely, Romney wasn't there to endorse Kasich, but instead merely to oppose Donald Trump. But in trying to keep alive his faint hopes of rescuing the […]
As Barack Obama marks his seventh year in office, the resurgent American economy is posing a major problem for his Republican detractors. After years of denouncing the President's supposed "out of control spending", "job-crushing taxes" and "job-killing Obamacare," the pathetic GOP claim that Obama "made the economy worse" can't pass the laugh test. After all, […]
It is an article of faith among Republicans that federal spending is "out of control" under President Obama. For the stenographers who seem to make up the bulk of the American media, the image of Obama the "tax and spend liberal" is taken for granted. Too bad it's not true. As the latest 10-year budget […]
Back in my days as a denizen of Silicon Valley, we start-up types used to joke that Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California was the single most important street in the world. After all, for almost five decades that one-mile mecca of the venture capital world has helped fund every high-tech transformation of the […]
As 2015 drew to a close, political observers of all stripes were rightly getting raked over the coals for their respective failures to predict the most dramatic development of the 2016 GOP presidential campaign. But when it comes to the unlikely rise and surprising staying power of Donald Trump, President Barack Obama didn't seem taken […]
On Tuesday night, Fox Business hosted the next debate between the 2016 GOP presidential contenders. All involved hoped to avoid a repeat of the last such event, the CNBC fiasco which left the moderators embarrassed and the campaigns whining. But while the Republicans have been fretting about the debate format, questions, opening and closing statements, […]
Stung by Donald Trump's self-evident truth that history did not begin on September 12th, 2001 and end at noon on January 20, 2009, Jeb Bush asked, "Does anybody actually blame my brother for 9/11?" As it turns out, this is hardly the first time the former Florida governor complained about the unkindness the calendar has […]
Unveiling the Congressional Budget Office's latest long term forecast this week, new CBO Director Keith Hall made an unremarkable statement. "The evidence," Hall explained, "is that tax cuts do not pay for themselves." For the overwhelming majority of economists or just about anyone with a passing familiarity with the U.S. budget since Ronald Reagan first […]