The truth is, we aren’t a single-issue country.  We need more than a plan for the big banks. The middle class needs a raise. — Hillary Clinton, last night in her Nevada-caucuses victory speech We’re not a single-issue country?  Who knew?  That’s a peculiar message on which to hang her campaign—as she has been doing […]

Bernie Sanders hates the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which held that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited sums advocating for their preferred candidate. Who doesn’t? Citizens United was a deeply misguided decision that vastly underestimated the state’s compelling interest in preventing the appearance of corruption that massive corporate electioneering inevitably creates. […]

Presidents, Taxes and Economic Growth by Mike Kimel One of the never-ending debates in economics is the extent to which taxes affect the economy.  Most people are fairly certain that higher taxes slow growth.  They’ve learned this from economists. To get my own look at the issue, about six years ago, I wrote a post […]

Via Mark Thoma’s Economists View comes Bruce Bartlett’s post at The Big Picture by Bruce Bartlett: Unemployment ”Truthers’‘ Donald Trump and Other Republicans Are Unemployment “Truthers”, The Big Picture: Among Donald Trump’s stump sound bites is that the national unemployment rate is far, far higher than the official rate of 4.9 percent. He is not alone […]

Nicholas Kristof  ✔@NickKristof Clinton is accusing Sanders of being anti-Obama. Feels fake and contrived to me, and rather nasty. 10:47 PM – 11 Feb 2016 Twitter ___ What worries me more than anything else about a Clinton general election campaign is her propensity to say obviously silly things. Elsewhere in that speech, in Clinton, IA […]

This is not about math — this is about people’s lives, and we should level with the American people.  Every progressive economist who has analyzed that say the numbers don’t add up. And we should level with the American people about what we can do to get quality affordable health care. — Hillary Clinton, at […]

Socialism has always appealed to the young, the cure for which isn’t age but responsibility. This usually comes in the form of taxes and children, both of which involve working and sacrificing for the benefit of others, the extent of which forms the axis upon which all politics turns. That Sanders never outgrew his own […]

Okay, what she actually said is that she can’t be part of the establishment, because she is a woman.  Because by definition, women aren’t part of the establishment. Shucks! No one told all those corporate folks who paid her $225,000 to hear her reminisce to them about how stressful it was to advise President Obama on whether he should approve the raid on […]

I’ve been a fan of New Republic senior editor Brian Beutler dating back to his days as a Salon writer, but in a piece today called “Bernie Sanders Will Be Unelectable If He Keeps This Up” he misinterprets the essence of Sanders’s current criticism of Clinton as a fair-weather progressive in a way that I […]

It’s worth noting that Clinton has an interesting built-in advantage here. Clinton is campaigning as the candidate of continuity, at least in the sense that she is promising to build incrementally on the Obama agenda, while Sanders is implicitly arguing that the change of the Obama era has been woefully insubstantial when compared with the […]