Topic: U.S. politics
Will: Is the US trapped in a debt spiral?
The Congressional Budget Office projects that new federal borrowing over the next 10 years will total $12.4 trillion and that at the end of 2028, the debt will be $28.7 trillion – 96 percent of GDP, up from 39 percent in 2008.
Will: Republicans’ tax wager is worth the gamble
Economics is a science of incentives, and like all sciences it is never “settled.”
Morici: Economic nationalism is a losing strategy
Instead of rallying American allies to confront China’s mercantilism through joint action, Mr. Trump has bullied Mexico, South Korea and Canada, pulled America out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and derailed free trade talks with the EU.
Will: A nod, and noddingoff, to another year of American hilarity
Tryptophan, an amino acid in turkey, is unjustly blamed for what mere gluttony does, making Americans comatose every fourth Thursday in November. But before nodding off, give thanks for another year of American hilarity...
Mitchell: Here’s how millionaire leftists can continue paying their ‘fair share’ of taxes
The Treasury Department has a website that they can use to voluntarily send extra money to Washington. It’s called “gifts to reduce the public debt,” and people like George Soros can have their accountants and lawyers calculate the value of any tax cut and then use this form to send that amount of money to D.C.
A disconcerting raid on university endowments
Great universities are great because philanthropic generations have borne the cost of sustaining private institutions that seed the nation with excellence. Donors have done this in the expectation that earnings accruing from their investments will be devoted solely to educational purposes, in perpetuity.
Morici: Forget triple-A, US bonds deserve a rating of ‘F’
The upcoming showdowns over Medicaid, other entitlements and cuts to other federal spending as part of efforts to raise the debt ceiling and to define targets for spending in the 2018 fiscal year appropriation bills will reveal the Republican majority’s stomach for spending reform and courage to lead the country out of the fiscal wilderness.
Will Congress be stirred from its slumber?
What Obama did was popular and unconstitutional. The latter attribute probably does not interest Obama’s successor, but the former attribute evidently does.
Trump is threatening war with North Korea. But what kind?
When Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” was he threatening to cross the nuclear weapons threshold?
Rahn: The tax cut the US cannot do without
Without cutting our noncompetitive corporate tax rate, businesses will continue to move to the rest of the world, leaving fewer jobs for Americans and less to tax.
Morici: When workers cannot or will not compete, investment suffers
Skepticism is growing among economists – and more importantly business decision makers – that Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress will appreciably lower the cost of investing in the United States.
Time for Trump to embrace free trade
According to one study, 88 percent of manufacturing job losses are the result of improved productivity, not rapacious Chinese.
Will: Laws that subvert the rule of law
When John Adams wrote into Massachusetts’ Constitution a commitment to a “government of laws and not of men,” he probably assumed that the rule of law meant the rule of laws, no matter how many laws there might be. He could not have imagined the modern proliferation and complexity of laws, or how subversive this is of the rule of law.
Morici: Girding for a showdown with China
North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs present the United States with no good options, but China’s posture is a foil for its wider strategic objectives.
Our diminished trust in government can be traced to the bungles in Vietnam
The war’s legacy lives in Americans’ diminished trust in government. Since 1968, trust has not risen to pre-Vietnam levels.
U.S. Air Force has dug into the equivalent of trench warfare
Only the United States has the capacity to be, as retired Adm. Gary Roughead and Kori Schake say in a Brookings Institution study, “guarantors of the global commons — the seaways and airways, and now the cyber conduits.”
Rahn: When legal protections begin to disappear
Real rule of law only exists if the laws are few enough in number, clearly written as to be readily understood by those subject to them, and equally enforced.
Will: Fixing the ‘rotting carcass’ tax code
George F. Will
WASHINGTON – Cynics are said to be people who are prematurely disappointed about the future. Such dyspepsia is encouraged by watching Republicans...
Will: A measure to rein in Medicaid’s ‘mission gallop’
George F. Will
WASHINGTON – Were it not for the provision that Pat Toomey, the Pennsylvania Republican, put into the Senate’s proposed health care reform,...
Trump: The earthquake and the aftermath
What lies behind Donald Trump’s nomination victory? Received wisdom among conservatives is that he, the outsider, sensed, marshaled and came to represent a massive revolt of the Republican rank and file against the “establishment.”
