On Monday, Donald Trump became just the latest Republican White House hopeful to propose a Treasury draining, tax cut windfall for the richest Americans. But while Trump calls for slashing the top marginal income tax rates at a time of record income inequality, a new study from the Brookings Institution argues that hiking those same […]

House Speaker John Boehner shocked the political world last week when he announced his resignation less than 24 hours after hosting Pope Francis on Capitol Hill. As it turns out, his timing was altogether fitting. After all, Boehner's life had become a living hell precisely because he had a done a deal with the devil […]

The 2016 Republican presidential field is shocked--shocked!--that frontrunner Donald Trump refused to correct a questioner insisting President Obama is a Muslim foreigner. Recalling one of the finest moments for the GOP's 2008 nominee, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) revealing explained, "This happens to all of us. It happened to John McCain. You have to push back." […]

Some things never change. With some constants in life, like the invariable force of gravity or the sun rising in the east, that persistence is good news. (Imagine your morning coffee without them.) The bad news is that some myths, no matter how dangerous or thoroughly debunked, never seem to die. This week, the greatest […]

On September 8th, Dick Cheney will deliver an address at the American Enterprise Institute in the hopes of torpedoing the Iranian nuclear agreement. As his Wall Street Journal op-ed this week suggests, Cheney will argue that "the U.S. Congress should reject this deal and reimpose the sanctions that brought Iran to the table in the […]

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 […]

While all eyes have been focused on the worldwide stock market plunge, a recent survey of economists by the Wall Street Journal identified a different threat to the vitality of the U.S. economy. But it's not the instability of Chinese stock prices, the devaluation of its currency, the Eurozone's Greek tragedy or even a premature […]

Of all of the Republicans' manufactured controversies during the Obama presidency, one less-remembered episode may be the most telling of all. Unable to prevent three-fifths of the Senate from voting to confirm Elena Kagan as the newest Supreme Court Justice, Republican in May 2010 denounced Obama's nominee for declaring that the Founding Fathers' three-fifths of […]

Things did not go well the last time Jeb Bush tried to blame President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for Dubya's calamity in Iraq. After comically flip-flopping as to whether he would have invaded Iraq knowing what he knows now, Jeb! was then humiliated by a 19 year-old college student who correctly explained […]

In the course of American and world history, slavery and the Holocaust are sui generis cataclysms. Any comparisons--especially casual ones--to the Nazi genocide of European Jewry and the bondage and oppression of African-Americans necessarily diminish these unique and unparalleled horrors. To seriously equate the ordinary to the almost unimaginable is a special kind of blasphemy […]