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 […]

The United States was the world's lone "hyperpower" when President George W. Bush launched his disastrous and unnecessary war with Iraq in 2003. An economic and military hegemon unchallenged by any single enemy or collection of rivals, the U.S. could and did act with impunity in swiftly toppling Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad. But even […]

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 […]

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 […]

Like a recurring biblical plague, they descend across the country. Despite the repeated warnings from both experts and lay persons of good faith and common sense, the media and tens of millions of people are nevertheless still shocked by their arrival. As predicted, they devastate everything in their path, leaving a swath of destruction in […]

Many Congressional Republicans were shocked--SHOCKED!--this week at Donald Trump's humiliation in Helsinki. Like the rest of the world, they watched in real time as an American president kowtowed on foreign soil to a dangerous adversary of the United States. Siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the repeated conclusions of the unified American intelligence community […]

If nothing else, Republicans over the past few weeks have delivered an important civics lesson to the American people in general--and Democrats in particular. Facing a growing mountain of irrefutable evidence that the incompetent, out-of-his-depth GOP president of the United States has been enmeshed in a network of ties to Russian business and government interests […]

The end is nigh for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. To be sure, ISIS affiliates in Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere will remain dangerous. And its fighters and sympathizers will continue to launch terror attacks in Europe and the United States for years to come. But the writing is on the wall for […]

Economics, the textbooks say, is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. The economics of health care is certainly no exception. Given the competing and often contradictory demands across its ecosystem of patients, employers, physicians, drug stores, pharmaceutical firms, device manufacturers, clinics, hospitals, insurers, and government, the economics of health care might more accurately […]

ive days after the presidential election, I wrote a concession message to Trump voters congratulating them for what they had won. To those Trump promised would get "sick of winning," I predicted, "You've won his 'big and beautiful' Obamacare replacement plan that will take away health insurance from 22 million Americans." If the president-elect and […]