Free Republic

Former President Donald Trump is assembling his policy team with familiar faces from his first term and signaling they would have roles in his potential 2025 Republican presidential administration. Trump and his allies have been meeting and talking by phone for months, sculpting the policies that will define his second term should he win the presidency in 2024. The names of the inner circle were revealed Friday in the latest effort by the Trump campaign to counter outside conservative organizations' efforts to vet and staff a future 2025 administration. Among these aides are former trade representative Robert Lighthizer, former White...

As Karl Popper demonstrated, evaluating a scientific proposition requires falsifiability—theories or hypotheses can’t be proved or disproved if they can’t be subjected to empirical tests. When the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed, we were criticized for being overly optimistic about the effects we predicted it would have. Now the evidence is in. Our critics were wrong, and the economic data have met or even exceeded our predictions. In 2017, we predicted that reducing the federal corporate tax rate to 21% from 35% and introducing full expensing of new-equipment investment would boost productivity-enhancing business investment by 9%. Though...

President Trump has promised an economic boom that will last for years to come, but he’s unlikely to get one without the help of Congress to pass major new legislation, according to estimates by Trump’s own economic team. To achieve about 3% growth for the next decade, Trump would need a big infrastructure bill, more tax cuts, additional deregulation, and policies that transition more people off government aid and into full-time jobs, according to the 2019 Economic Report of the President, released Tuesday by Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. There’s skepticism that Trump will be able to get all of...

As trade tensions escalate between the U.S. and China, Washington is sending a warning to U.S. companies: Think twice about doing business with China. “If I were a business, I would basically just stay away from China right now. Their misbehavior is so terrible.” Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers said on Yahoo Finance’s Market Mover Friday.

The current economic boom has nothing to do with President Obama, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett suggested Monday in the briefing room. In a speech last week at the University of Illinois, Obama claimed credit for the improved economic outlook. It was his policies, he noted that paved the way for the current rate."Don't forget when the recovery started," he told the audience."You don't have to reach far" for an explanation as to why the economy is looking up, Hassett said. Trump deregulated the economy, oversaw massive tax cuts, and cut corporate tax rates, all which have resulted in...

He's giving a briefing to the PRESS and taking questions about the economic policies of President Trump. This guy just is rocking it out. Answering stupid questions with impeccable logic and knowledge.

President Donald Trump has picked an economic advisor who believes in growing the nation’s economy by importing workers and consumers, and by expanding free-trade outsourcing, despite Trump’s “buy American, hire American” campaign promises. Kevin Hassett is slated to become chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors if he is approved by the Senate’s banking committee. If Hassett is confirmed, that will be a win for the corporatist, business-first faction in Trump’s White House, which fights for influence in the Oval Office against the populist, America-first faction that helped Trump win the election in November.

The financial crisis of the past year has provided a number of surprising twists and turns, and from Bear Stearns Cos. to American International Group Inc., ambiguity has been a big part of the story. Why did Bear Stearns fail, and how does that relate to AIG? It all seems so complex. But really, it isn't. Enough cards on this table have been turned over so that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some...

Bush taps Kellogg Co. CEO Gutierrez to head Commerce Corbett B. Daly WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- President Bush announced Monday that Carlos Gutierrez, Kellogg Co.'s chief executive, would replace Don Evans as Commerce Secretary, making the first of what are expected to be many changes in his economic team. "Carlos Gutierrez is one of America's most respected business leaders," Bush said at the official announcement in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. (...) Gutierrez, 51, has been CEO at Battle Creek, Mich.-based Kellogg (K) since April 1999. Kellogg shares fell 51 cents immediately after news broke that the cereal maker...

Accusations of political bias in the media are often made by members of both political parties, yet there have been few systematic studies of such bias to date. This paper develops an econometric technique to test for political bias in news reports that controls for the underlying character of the news reported. Our results suggest that American newspapers tend to give more positive news coverage to the same economic news when Democrats are in the Presidency than for Republicans. When all types of news are pooled into a single analysis, our results are highly significant. However, the results vary greatly...