Free Republic

Dr. Robert Jeffress: "I predict the House flipping will give President Donald Trump a larger re-election majority win in 2020. Watch & share my interview from @LouDobbs Tonight on @FoxBusiness."

Presidential candidate Donald Trump is now taking on one-time Obama "car czar" Steve Rattner.On Monday, Trump fired off a tweet telling Rattner: "I think you should have gone to prison for what you did, I guess Obama saved you." He ended the tweet telling Rattner to watch: "I will win!" It was unclear what activity Trump was referring to that should have landed Rattner in jail. Trump did not respond to CNNMoney's request for comment. In 2010, Rattner did pay $10 million in fines when he settled with the New York state attorney general for his alleged involvement in a...

Steven Rattner, "car czar" and counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, cites three different modelers in his N.Y. Times commentary, "Trump’s Formidable 2020 Tailwind." The big picture: Trump wins all three modelers. Economists predict that the tailwind is large. Ray Fair, a professor at Yale, "found that the growth rates of gross domestic product and inflation have been the two most important economic predictors — but he also found that incumbency was also an important determinant of presidential election outcomes." "Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has looked at 12 models, and Mr. Trump wins...

Three modelers are predicting President Trump will win reelection in 2020 based on a combination of economic data and incumbent advantages, according to a column in The New York Times. Steven Rattner wrote that Ray Fair of Yale favors Trump to win based on a model that combines incumbency and gross domestic product growth rates. The model predicted Barack Obama’s 2008 popular vote margin within a fraction of a percentage point and got within two-tenths of a point for his 2012 vote share, Rattner, who served as a counselor to the Treasury secretary during the Obama administration, added. The model...

teven Rattner, "car czar" and counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, cites three different modelers in his N.Y. Times commentary, "Trump’s Formidable 2020 Tailwind." The big picture: Trump wins all three modelers. Economists predict that the tailwind is large. Ray Fair, a professor at Yale, "found that the growth rates of gross domestic product and inflation have been the two most important economic predictors — but he also found that incumbency was also an important determinant of presidential election outcomes." "Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has looked at 12 models, and Mr. Trump wins...

The economy invariably ranks among the top issues on the minds of voters in presidential elections. At the moment, it appears to offer President Trump a meaningful tailwind. But how big is that tailwind? Fortunately, economists have worked hard to develop models for predicting election outcomes, and according to one of the best of these, it should be quite large. One of the first — and perhaps still the best — of these models was created by Ray Fair, a professor at Yale. He found that the growth rates of gross domestic product and inflation have been the two most...

President Donald Trump has a low approval rating. He is engaging in bitter Twitter wars and facing metastasizing investigations. But if the election were held today, he’d likely ride to a second term in a huge landslide, according to multiple economic models with strong track records of picking presidential winners and losses. Credit a strong U.S. economy featuring low unemployment, rising wages and low gas prices — along with the historic advantage held by incumbent presidents. While Trump appears to be in a much stronger position than his approval rating and conventional Beltway wisdom might suggest, he also could wind...

I’m not just saying it — CBO is. On Thursday the Congressional Budget Office released its annual Budget and Economic Outlook, and buried in one of its nearly impenetrable tables of numbers is a remarkable story that has gone entirely unreported by the mainstream media: The 2003 tax cut on capital gains has entirely paid for itself. More than paid for itself. Way more. To appreciate this story, we have to go back in time to January 2003, before the tax cut was enacted. Table 3-5 on page 60 in CBO’s Budget and Economic Outlook published in 2003 estimated that...

Of course the Left blames George W. Bush for the deaths this week of a dozen coal miners. Tom Blumer at BizzyBlog cites the New York Times edit page's usual Bush-bashing innuendo: ...the Bush administration’s cramming of important posts in the Department of the Interior with biased operatives from the coal, oil and gas industry is not reassuring about general safety in the mines. Steven Griles, a mining lobbyist before being appointed deputy secretary of the interior, devoted four years to rolling back mine regulations and then went back to lobbying for the industry. Blumer then points out what the...

TAXATION AND SLAVERY: ROBERTS RESPONDS TO THE CRITICS    The following was sent to me by Paul Craig Roberts, in response to criticism of his column comparing the income tax to slavery -- which I myself defended last week. From time to time people write to me asking how they can become columnists. I tell them that they do not want to become columnists. Read on. Many years ago when I was offered an appointment at the University of Rochester, I remember wide-ranging discussions of economic issues with the many distinguished economists who were at Rochester at that time. One...

Ah, the profound economic analysis of the New York Times: There is a lot to be said for getting the best deal, economists say. That blinding glimpse of the obvious came from reporter Steve Lohr, in a story Monday about Wal-Mart. But surely we can expect more profound insights from the newspaper of record's economics superstar, Paul Krugman — now a Princeton professor and once the winner of the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal as most important American economist under 40. Yet sadly, no. In Krugman's most recent Times column, we find this appraisal of the nation's fiscal situation: Nothing...

DIEBOLD-FACED LIES    When someone says "this isn't about money," you can be sure it's all about money. And when Paul Krugman says " there's nothing paranoid about suggesting" something, you can be sure that what he's suggesting is a crackpot conspiracy theory, built on lies and innuendo, that only a true paranoid could believe. What "there's nothing paranoid about suggesting" in Krugman's New York Times column yesterday is that touch-screen voting machines are part of a Republican plot to hijack elections. He sanctimoniously warns, "let's be clear: the credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake." The proof? Krugman...

COVERING UP FOR THAT COVER   A rare Paul Krugman correction in the New York Times? Not quite. Today's corrections section states, "An article last Sunday about the differing covers on the American and British editions of a book by Paul Krugman, the economist and Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, Page, referred incorrectly to a caricature on the British version. According to groups that distribute the image, the drawing of Vice President Dick Cheney, with the words 'Got Oil' on his forehead and a dark mustache, was intended to evoke the 'Got Milk' advertising campaign, not to suggest a...

The Tax Cuts Worked! By Donald Luskin - October 31, 2003 STOCK-MARKET punditry is a tough game, and victories are few and far between even for the best of us. So when a victory comes along, you do a victory lap. The third quarter's gross-domestic product growth rate of 7.2% was a big victory. Representing the biggest quarter for the American economy in almost 20 years, it's a powerful vindication for those of us who have argued all year that the economy has turned the corner. So let's do a big victory lap. But when we've gotten that out of...

AN IMMINENT THREAT (TO DEMOCRATS, THAT IS)A threat to the nation is vastly exaggerated. It is claimed that the President must take draconian countermeasures against the deadly enemy immediately -- an enemy that a powerful ideological faction has had in its crosshairs for years. To build public support for action, intelligence reports are "sexed-up" to make the enemy seem stronger. Yes, there are seeming disclaimers that the threat is not "imminent" -- yet the message is crystal clear: the republic is in grave danger, and we must act before it becomes too late to act. Am I talking about Paul...

HE'S BAAAACK....    Paul Krugman is back from vacation, and bashing Bush for a new boss -- Bill Keller. It's been nice these last two weeks, not having to dirty my hands taking Krugman's New York Times columns apart one lie at a time every Tuesday and Friday. But now it's back to the routine -- it's dirty work, and all that... But I must say, with Krugman back I'm looking forward to an end to the recurring nightmares I've been having. You see, rumor had it that he was cycling in France. In my nightmares, I see a gnomishly...

KRUGMAN: "FOR THE CHILDREN..." Paul Krugman covers all too familiar ground in his New York Times column today -- supposed Bush/Blair lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and a quote-fest from the always-reliable British press (no correction or retraction of his uncritical quotation of Vanity Fair's misquotation of Paul Wolfowitz, natch). David Hogberg does a fine job of revealing the true context of Krugman's deceptively out-of-context Bush quotes. Robert Musil has speculated that Krugman is positioning himself for a job at the Financial Times. But the best single paragraph is about Bush's tax cuts. It says, in part:...

"EVEN CONSERVATIVE ANDREW SULLIVAN NOW ADMITS..." It's disappointing to see Andrew Sullivan sounding so much like Paul Krugman. Andrew has been worrying for a while about increasing deficits and increasing government spending under a supposedly conservative administration -- and that's fine, I worry about all that too. But that's no excuse for uncritically passing on slanted and inaccurate scare stories in the media that claim the Bush administration is responsible for -- or worse, is trying to conceal -- some cataclysmic new fiscal threat to American civilization. And, disappointingly, that's just what Andrew is doing today. I'll betcha anything that...

BLAIR, BRAGG, DOWD ... KRUGMAN?Posted by Donald Luskin at 2:26 AM May 30, 2003I noticed that the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities was referred to as "a liberal group" in a New York Times article today (natch, the article was about something supposedly terribly wrong with President Bush's tax cuts). Is this something new for the post-Jayson Blair era? Nothing will ever stop the Times from being a mouthpiece for liberal advocacy groups, and reporting their opinions as news -- but perhaps at least the Times will now have the decency to disclose the political orientation of the source....

Saturday, April 26, 2003 SAME CORPSE, DIFFERENT TWITCHESDo you call it a "response" when someone's been shot in the forehead and his dead body twitches a couple times? If you do, then you'd say that Paul Krugman has "responded" again to my bull's-eye exposé (blog version and National Review Online version) of the multiple lies and errors in his April 22 New York Times column.  He posted a first "response" Thursday night on his personal website, where Andrew Sullivan says "he admits to errors in order to avoid fessing up to them in the Times itself." Now, after another shot...