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The dozen or so cranes visible from Interstate 10 in Baytown will only remain for a few more months as Chevron Phillips Chemical's $6 billion petrochemical expansion moves toward completion. Chevron Phillips' complex is more than 80 percent complete, although it won't be fully operational for almost another year. The project involves a massive ethane cracker - on a plot the size of 44 football fields - that will separate a component of natural gas called ethane, which will provide the feedstock for some 1.5 million metric tons a year of ethylene, a common building block of plastics. Chevron Phillips,...

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has postponed funding a busway in the heavily congested Interstate 270 corridor for at least six years, significantly delaying a transit project that Montgomery County is relying on to develop the upcounty without making traffic worse. Hogan’s proposed six-year transportation budget includes no money for the Corridor Cities Transitway, which has been planned since at least 2000 to connect the Shady Grove Metro station at the end of the Red Line with the upcounty. The first nine-mile segment would run between Shady Grove and the Metropolitan Branch MARC commuter rail station in Gaithersburg. Delaying the...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump put new details on a much scaled-back tax plan on Thursday, one that is projected to cost the federal government less money but also to deliver fewer benefits to taxpayers than Trump's original proposal. Trump's economic team estimated that the complete tax plan, combined with rollbacks to some federal regulations and new initiatives to open up more public and private lands for oil and gas drilling, would deliver 3.5 percent growth per year for the next decade and produce 25 million new jobs. The changes also appear to be an attempt to reduce what analysts...

Donald Trump on Thursday shared his economic vision with supporters gathered at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan, promising trillions in tax cuts, energy reform, a crackdown on trade, and a reduction in the number of tax brackets. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, estimated his plan would create 25 million in new jobs, and that the massive tax cut would be offset by gross domestic product growth of at least 3.5%, on average, each year for the next decade. "This is the most pro-growth, pro-jobs, pro-family plan put forth perhaps in the history of our country," Trump said, according to...

Trump is the pro-growth candidate in this race. Hillary Clinton is the anti-growth candidate. Trump wants to expand national income and the economic pie. Clinton wants to redistribute income and shrink the pie. In past columns, I have equated Trump's tax-reduction plan to the JFK and Ronald Reagan tax cuts, which generated economic booms of roughly 5 percent growth per year. President Barack Obama, by comparison, has raised taxes, spending, and regulations, producing the worst recovery since World War II. And Clinton intends to follow in Obama's footsteps with a Bernie Sanders-like, left-wing policy mix. She is the Democrats' anti-JFK....

Well, it turns out Annie had it wrong. The sun won’t come out tomorrow. That was basically the message from Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen last week when she acknowledged the economy is doing more poorly (again) than previously hoped. The Fed admitted that sluggish growth that caps out at 2 percent is with us for as far as the eye can see, or at least through the next two years. Is this a declaration of the last rites for Obamanomics? It should be. Throw it in the dustbin of history alongside all the other failed liberal economic experiments. The...

The economy is still stuck in low gear, new data on manufacturing, construction and auto sales showed Wednesday. Yet even as the Federal Reserve itself described economic growth as “modest” in its new beige book, the report noted that tight labor markets were widespread. The upshot is that even a slow-growing economy is close enough to the Fed’s low speed limit to allow for a July rate hike. The headline Institute for Supply Management manufacturing survey index for May rose 0.5 point to 51.3, above the neutral 50 level and topping expectations. But the details offered a less-than-ideal combination: slowing...

Private job creation slowed even further last month as firms added just 156,000 jobs in April, ADP said in a Wednesday report. "The job market appears to have stumbled in April. Job growth noticeably slowed, with some weakness across most sectors. One month does not make a trend, but this bears close watching as the financial market turmoil earlier in the year may have done some damage to business hiring," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, said in a statement. Economists polled by Reuters expected the number to come in at 195,000. In March, private payrolls were revised down...

U.S. industrial production fell more than expected in March as output declined broadly, the latest indication that economic growth braked sharply in the first quarter. Industrial output decreased 0.6 percent last month after a downwardly revised 0.6 percent drop in February, the Federal Reserve said on Friday. Industrial production has declined in six of the last seven months. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast industrial production slipping 0.1 percent last month after a previously reported 0.5 percent drop in February. Industrial production fell at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the first quarter. The report joined data on retail...

Some economists now see first-quarter growth as negligible, and it could easily turn out to be negative. Economists shaved already weak growth forecasts by a few more tenths Friday, after wholesale inventories fell 0.5 percent month over month in February, much more than the anticipated 0.1 percent decline. January was also revised down by 0.4 percent. The closely watched Atlanta Fed GDPNow model now shows first-quarter growth tracking at 0.1 percent, compared to a 0.4 percent estimate earlier in the week. JPMorgan economists now forecast the economy only expanded by 0.2 percent in the first quarter, from 0.7 percent. Barclays...

What the heck is wrong with us? On Wednesday, Washington, D.C.’s entire Metro subway system shut down with almost no notice to perform emergency inspections, just days after a cable fire “crippled” three lines. The nation’s second-busiest rail system has been plagued by safety problems in recent years, including a 2015 incident where smoke from an electrical malfunction killed one person and a deadly 2009 crash on the system’s Red Line that killed nine people. And with a new Metro chief that has been vocal about returning to a culture that puts safety first, many say that Wednesday’s move is...

...our model shows more growth from the Rubio and Cruz plans than the Trump plan, even though Trump proposed a larger cut: While Donald Trump largely opted for big rate reductions across the board, Rubio and Cruz made improvements to the structure of taxes, while cutting taxes by less overall. Senators Rubio and Cruz both put thought into the nature of the taxes that businesses pay. They noticed that the current way businesses are asked to calculate taxes creates a bias in the code. When a business builds something new, like, say, a new industrial lathe, that decision actually has...

(CNSNews.com) - The United States has now gone a record 10 straight years without 3 percent growth in real Gross Domestic Product, according to data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The BEA has calculated GDP for each year going back to 1929 and it has calculated the inflation-adjusted annual change in GDP (in constant 2009 dollars) from 1930 forward. In the 85 years for which BEA has calculated the annual change in real GDP there is only one ten-year stretch—2006 through 2015—when the annual growth in real GDP never hit 3 percent. During the last ten years, real...

Back in 1995, now-Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said, "I personally happen not to be a great believer in the free enterprise system for many reasons." And having watched Sanders during this primary season, it doesn't appear to me that the self-described democratic socialist has much changed his opinion of capitalism. Which is both amazing and appalling. The single greatest story of human achievement of the past 2,000 years is the dramatic rise in living standards of the past 200 years. It's an astounding ascent -- see above chart -- driven by innovative, entrepreneurial capitalism. Free enterprise. Economic freedom....

Alan Cole of the Tax Foundation notes something important about the TPC report. While the Tax Policy Center refuses to estimate the impact of the Rubio plan on economic growth, TPC observes that the plan would nearly eliminate the marginal effective tax rate on new business investment, while retaining taxes on capital income. Cole calls this a “deeply important” result. “Marco Rubio and his policy staff have found a way to retain the revenue from taxing capital income without any of the harmful effects on marginal investment decisions. This is a clever policy innovation whose importance cannot be overstated.”

The US economy finished 2015 with a pratfall, perhaps a foreshadowing of a bumpy ride in 2016. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth tumbled to 0.7% in the advance estimate of the fourth-quarter data, thanks to a decline in consumer spending that outpaced a slowing in the rate of growth in disposable income.

Expect much of the same from the U.S. economy as in 2015, but possibly a little bit less of it. Another year of tame growth looks like close to a sure thing in a recovery that hasn't shifted out of second gear. The U.S. is likely to deliver its 11th straight year of sub-3% GDP growth in 2016, the longest such stretch since World War II. The fundamental backdrop is expected to remain in place, with the economy fueled by spending on services as a strong dollar and sluggish overseas growth keep manufacturing from gaining much traction. Some of the...

We are forecasting 2.0%-2.5% GDP growth for 2016, lower than most other economists predict, mostly driven by the consumer with little help from other areas of the economy.As we lap some of the biggest energy price declines, we suspect headline inflation could easily approach 2.5% by the end of 2016.We think analysts are overestimating starts and underestimating home-price appreciation again for 2016.U.S. population growth has collapsed from 1.8% in the 1950s and 1960s to 0.7% currently, which is closely correlated with slower GDP growth rates.At just over 3.4% year-over-year, slow credit growth is continuing to hold the economy back....

Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world and is expected to outstrip Christianity by the end of the century. The number of Muslims will grow more than twice as fast as the world's population from now until 2050, the Pew Research Center has said. While the world's population is projected to grow 35 per cent before the middle of the century, the number of Muslims is expected to increase by 73 per cent -- from 1.6 billion in 2010 to 2.8 billion In 2010, Muslims made up 23.2 per cent of the global population. Four decades later, they...

An influential political action group in Washington, Heritage Action for America, all but endorsed the presidential candidacy of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on Monday, with the release of an analysis of the platforms of the top 12 candidates for the Republican nomination.Cruz has been consistently in the middle of the pack in early polling, typically gathering only a fraction of the support currently being lavished on frontrunners Donald Trump and Ben Carson. However, with backing from well-funded Super PACs, the Texas senator has the ability to assert himself in the race in the event that one or both of the...