There have been a great many claims that the new tax bill passed by the GOP will have a chilling effect on charitable giving because it reduces the incentive represented by a tax deduction by increasing the standard deduction. In … Continue reading →
Long, long ago Paul Krugman was an economist of some objectivty. Then he added a gig as opinion columnist for the NY Times (around 2000), and since then he’s written about a great deal more than economics, with a remarkable … Continue reading →
If you read Democratic reactions to the tax bill just passed by Congress, you’d think it orders that poor people and the middle class be shot at dawn. If you read Republican reactions, you get a spectrum of reactions from … Continue reading →
Salena Zito notes that it hasn’t gotten much press: Last weekend in Beijing, as part of his 12-day trip to Asia, President Trump announced that the US and China had signed an $83.7 billion memorandum of understanding to create a … Continue reading →
…until Congress passes a tax reform bill. But it looks as though it might happen. The House seems poised to do it. If the Senate manages to pass one, it will probably be somewhat different, and then those differences must … Continue reading →
The CBO has spoken, and the resultant spin on what the CBO has said is that the news is dire, dire, dire. But here’s my question: since when has the CBO been correct on health insurance reform predictions? I don’t … Continue reading →
Just about everyone seems to have agreed that Seattle’s very liberal minimum wage law would be a good test of when enough is enough in terms of hiking the minimum wage. And the first studies indicate that $13 seems to … Continue reading →
You guessed it—why, public assistance, of course! Like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, at least for a while. Here’s the scoop on Abedi [emphasis mine]: Salman Abedi is understood to have received thousands of pounds in state funding in the run up to … Continue reading →
Commenter “Big Maq” asks about all the people on the right who are asking for a more market-based solution to Obamacare: How many, who make these calls here, have been actively convincing their aged cohort to give up Medicare, in … Continue reading →
It’s the latest salvo in a trade war, one that’s been going on for quite a while: U.S. President Donald Trump intensified a trade dispute with Canada, slapping tariffs of up to 24 percent on imported softwood lumber in a … Continue reading →
Here’s an interesting article in City Journal. I use that word “interesting” a lot. That’s because an awful lot of things are interesting. But some are more interesting than others, and this is one of them. It pulls together a … Continue reading →
Unintended, yes. But effects such as these should not be unexpected: San Francisco’s higher minimum wage is causing an increasing number of restaurants to go out of business even before it is fully phased in, a new study by the … Continue reading →