Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Can the Supreme Court be trusted to call balls and strikes?  Neil Gorsuch, in Over Ruled, gives us one answer.

I will try to say more about this, but for now: You might have missed it, but in August, Gorsuch published a book titled Over Ruled, which argues that there are too many laws on the books and that government officials at both the federal and state levels are enforcing them in increasingly unpredictable and unjust ways. The […]

Why hurricane effects and funky seasonal adjustments will make tomorrow’s initial claims report particularly fun

– by New Deal democrat The drought in new economic data continues through today. We’ll make up for it all at once tomorrow with jobless claims, retail sales, and industrial production.  In the meantime, last week I noted that Hurricane Helene’s impact in Florida and North Carolina was a big part of the reason for […]

A simple Misunderstanding of How Tariffs Work

October 15, 2024 Letters from an American After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, […]

The Case for the 28th Amendment

This is a guest post by Charles Euchner, a political scientist and former special projects editor at New America. Euchner is the author of the forthcoming The Rules of Activism: Political and Social Movements and the Fight for Democracy (Polity Press, 2025). He can be reached at awriteratlarge.com. By Charles Euchner Why are we waiting? […]

Where housing affordability is worst and costs are highest in the U.S.

– By Jasmine Cui and Matthew Danbury NBC News Across the country, the prospect of home ownership is slipping out of reach for the ordinary buyer. The affordability gap — an estimate of the difference between an area’s median household income and how much income is necessary to afford payments on a median-priced home in […]