Republicans Fast-Track Tax Cut for the Wealthy That Increases Deficit by $1.5 Trillion
House Speaker Paul Ryan leads a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday. Tom Williams/AP After years of railing against deficit spending, House Republicans voted on Thursday for a budget resolution that allows for $1.5 trillion of deficit spending to finance tax cuts. Nearly 80 percent of the cuts would go to the wealthiest 1 percent…
New Mexico Officials Back Down, Abandon Effort to Politicize Science Education Standards
lisegagne/Getty Images The controversy over an attempt by New Mexico’s education agency to scrub evolution, global warming, and even the age of the Earth from the state’s new science standards appears to have reached its end. The state’s Public Education Department on Wednesday evening announced that it would instead adopt the nationally respected Next Generation Science…
What Did the Great Moderation Moderate?
Let’s see. What country am I in today? Oh yeah: the United States. Well, California, anyway, which is sort of an outlying territory these days. So let’s do something America-centric with a chart to get me back into non-vacation mode. Alex Tabarrok points out today that the “Great Moderation” in the US economy appears to…
America’s Biggest Private Prison Company Just Hosted Its Annual Conference at a Trump Golf Resort
President Donald Trump talks to a caddie during a round of golf at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. Allen Eyestone/The Palm Beach Post via ZUMA Wire The country’s biggest private prison company last week held its annual leadership conference at a golf resort owned by President Donald Trump, underscoring an increasingly cozy…
Trump Election Commission Has Ground to a Halt, Says Republican Member
Sign outside the room for the first meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in Washington, DC, July 2017.Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP The work of President Donald Trump’s controversial election integrity commission has ground to a halt in recent weeks as the commission faces a barrage of lawsuits, according to one of its Republican…
Rejecting Critics, Trump Brags of Ivy League Credentials and “Great Memories of All Time”
President Donald Trump continued to defend himself from the ongoing controversy over his phone call to the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, telling reporters in an impromptu press conference on Wednesday that he was “really nice to her.” He explained that not only was he equipped with a chart listing Johnson’s name, but relied on his…