Washington – Unless you tuned out Donald Trump on his final frenetic campaign blitz, you remember seeing him barnstorming across Florida, stoking the fears of Latino voters with his nightmare threat that Joe Biden & Company would “turn America into Communist Cuba or Socialist Venezuela.” Fearmongering pure and simple, but it worked with a big […]
Washington – While you and I have focused on the economic havoc of job losses, pay cuts and business failures caused by the corona pandemic, we missed noticing that the tiny sliver of super-super-rich at the apex of our economy was simultaneously fattening their already phenomenal fortunes, thanks to the pandemic. A surprise perhaps because […]
Washington – Maybe you’ve forgotten, as I had, how snidely candidate Donald Trump declared war on Wall Street back in 2016, savaging Hillary Clinton as ”the puppet” of Wall Street – “they pull the strings” – and personally vowing to generate an economic renaissance that would lift the American middle class out of stagnation and […]
Washington – Alan Krueger, the Princeton professor and economic adviser to two presidents who died last weekend, rang the alarm bell for me as a reporter six years ago with a disturbing speech that he gave, of all places, at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Museum. Krueger was one of those rare economists who break out […]
Washington – Behind the hollow sparring over the border wall and government shutdowns, the ground is shifting under President Trump and the political pendulum is swinging toward a new economic agenda. Even conservative Fox News reports that American voters, by a huge margin, now want to reverse the Trump tax cut of 2017 and increase […]
Washington – The most lethal damage to American society embedded in the Republican tax plan now being rushed through Congress is that it will metastasize the cancerous economic inequality that has been eating away at the health and fabric of American democracy over four decades – an issue some Democrats plan to take to voters […]
Washington – With Republicans surfacing more details of their tax-cut package and debate sharpening over its likely impact, Trump’s top economist forecasts a boost of $4,000 in annual income for the typical American family but most economists don’t buy that estimate and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer derides it as “fake math.” In fact, one […]
Our political world is feeling the after-shocks of Campaign 2016. The question now is whether President Trump and the GOP in Congress will deliver on Candidate Trump’s promises of a better deal for working middle class Americans or whether Trump’s new allegiance to the elite and the ideological conflicts within the Republican Party will do the […]
Washington – Okay, let’s keep score. He’s thrown down the gauntlet. After taking the oath of office, President Trump used his Inaugural address to tar his presidential predecessors and most of Congress, whose members sat around him, as failures – “politicians who are all talk and no action.” So that’s Trump’s standard – action, not […]
Washington – With his cabinet of billionaires and trickle-down CEOs, President-elect Donald Trump has set the stage for the second “Revolt of the Bosses,” ignoring that the first “Revolt of the Bosses” starting in the late 1970s fueled the gaping inequalities of income and wealth that now plague America and that infuriated Trump’s working class […]
Hedrick Smith, who conceived this website and is its principal writer and architect, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and Emmy award-winning documentary producer for PBS and PBS FRONTLINE. more »
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