“Old soldiers never die, they just fade away,” General Douglas MacArthur told a joint session of congress seventy years go. Not true of old politicians, as Joe Biden has proved. Old soldiers often try to fight new wars with outdated methods developed in their long-ago battles. The risk for the American economy is that Biden […]
Just as it seemed the impeachment trial of Donald Trump would drag into this week, the impeachment managers decided that delaying the inevitable acquittal by calling witnesses was a bad idea, and settled for a deposition from a Republican congresswoman stating what she heard from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy what he said he had […]
Poor Joe Biden, cursed by his predecessor with an inheritance that makes his life difficult. That inheritance includes several successful vaccines and a distribution system that produced one million jabs per day before Biden moved into the Oval Office. And an economy that has such strong underpinnings that the Congressional Budget Office, hardly home to […]
This is the 12th day on which Joe Biden has been the most powerful man in the world. So powerful that he can demand the opening of schools, not so powerful that he can prevent the teachers’ unions from ordering their members to stay home despite evidence that the spread of the virus is no […]
American politics is taking a new turn. Out with the personal, confrontational politics of the Trump era, in with the unifying, policy-centered politics of the Biden era. To the fore are battles of over how to confront powerful enemies: Covid, global warming, and an insidious threat to the preservation of the economic system, inequality. True, […]
On Wednesday, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. will become the 46th President of the United, a testimonial to the enduring strength of America’s democracy, its resistance to assaults from without and within. His immediate priority is to persuade congress to pass his American Rescue Plan, a $1.9tn relief bill that will add $1,400 to the $600 […]
In 1787, at the close of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked whether he and the other founding fathers had created a monarchy or a republic. “A republic, if you can keep it,” he is said to have replied. Last week, America proved it can. A Trump-incited mob seized control of the houses of […]
Consider the parties you didn’t have this holiday season merely postponed. So advise economists at Goldman Sachs. They reckon that economic growth will accelerate in the second quarter of this New Year as “mass immunization greatly reduces the virus threat, unleashing a spending boom in the high-contact consumer services sector…”. The investment bank’s contribution to […]
President Trump threw terror into the hearts of millions of Americans by refusing to sign the Covid relief bill, a refusal which if maintained would have brought their benefits to an end. Satisfied that he had proved he retains some relevance, he then agreed late last night to sign it, extracting an agreement from congress […]
This will be a strange Christmas in America. Gloom at the virulence of the new outbreak of Covid-19 shares the stage with joy at the distribution of vaccinations that will ultimately beat the virus. Joy at the arrival of the holiday season is offset by warnings from politicians and the health-care bureaucracy that family gatherings […]