Less than a week into the new year, the Trump administration kicked off 2018 with one of the most cynical and craven acts of political favoritism in recent American history. On January 4, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke unveiled the Draft Five Year Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program. That massive gift to Donald […]

As the new year begins, press, pundits and politicians alike are saying 2018 could be the year of the "blue wave." Led by a historically unpopular first-year president and still smarting from embarrassing losses in Virginia and Alabama, many Republicans are talking out loud about "bloodbath" in next November's midterm elections. While Democrats are fielding […]

As 2017 draws to a close, President Donald Trump and his amen corner are bragging about his "year of solid policy accomplishments." Despite approval ratings only slightly higher than the Ebola virus, Trump took to Twitter to soak up praise from Maria Bartiromo, who gushed that "Year One has been excellent from an economic standpoint." […]

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and that's our target market." That perversion of Abraham Lincoln's timeless adage might as well be the slogan of the modern Republican Party, especially when the topic is taxes. After all, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Joint Committee on Taxation, (JCT), the Wharton […]

Donald Trump and his Republican allies have two definitions of the term, "golden showers." The first concerns a notorious--and as-yet unsubstantiated--claim from the so-called Russian dossier: Decorum prohibits elaborating further here. The second meaning of the term, however, describes any public policy--usually involving taxes--which overwhelmingly delivers its benefits to the very richest people in America. […]

With apologies to Benjamin Disraeli, there are three kinds of lies Republicans are telling about their tax plan: lies, damned lies, and f**king lies. Constraints of space and time preclude listing them all, but here is a handful of the GOP's most farfetched falsehoods. For example, earlier this month House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) repeatedly […]

Thursday's release of the House GOP tax plan will be greeted with a flurry of "hot takes" about its "winners and losers." So, for everyone's sake, let's keep this simple. Unsurprisingly, the biggest winners from what the President called a "big, beautiful Christmas present" are people named Trump and those like them. Just as predictable, […]

Donald Trump lost the 2016 presidential popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million ballots. But by another seemingly meaningless measure, Trump got clobbered 38 to 0. That lopsided score represents the number of years of tax returns Democrat Clinton and Republican Trump respectively released to the American public. But Trump's unprecedented opacity--for the […]

In recent years, "red state socialism" has become the hallmark of American federalism. That is, even as supposed GOP budget hawks loudly (and wrongly) decry "out of control" spending by Uncle Sam, less well-off Republican-controlled states generally benefit from a one-way flow of federal tax dollars made possible by wealthier blue states usually dominated by […]

Republican leaders in Congress may not be ready to abandon Donald Trump, but there's little doubt about their growing discomfort with the president of the United States. Supposedly shocked by Trump's coddling of white supremacists in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker questioned Trump's ability to either the "demonstrate […]