Free Republic

It’s hard to overstate just how good recent economic numbers have been. On Friday, we learned that job growth is still solid while unemployment remains historically low. I think it’s safe to say that Donald Trump’s 2020 prediction that a Joe Biden presidency would mean a “depression” — a claim he’s now repeating by predicting a “great depression” if Kamala Harris wins — didn’t come true. A week earlier we learned that inflation has continued to decline and is now more or less at the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. This success has defied the view, held by many...

On Tuesday, I was part of a City University of New York event about economic perceptions, which was briefly disrupted by a protester yelling out that President Biden isn’t helping some of the areas afflicted by Hurricane Helene. The guy’s politics were unclear — he was also yelling something about Israel — but it was an indication that Donald Trump’s latest lie has gone viral.In case you missed it, Trump has been trying to exploit the natural disaster for political gain, claiming he heard that the federal government — Biden — and North Carolina’s Democratic governor are “going out of...

Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader, said something cynical and transparently dishonest the other day. To be fair, that’s sort of an evergreen remark; you could have said the same thing about him just about any week over the past few years. But this particular statement seemed important, because it involved a lie that has a direct bearing on how America will respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Here’s what McCarthy tweeted: “These are not Putin gas prices. They are President Biden gas prices.” Now, that’s just false. You can argue about how much responsibility Biden’s policies bear for...