RKuttner

I made an error in my On Tap post last week on the New York Times feature piece on black public opinion and charter schools. My post criticized the Times for publishing a page-one story with an exaggerated headline, “Minority Voters Feel Betrayed Over Schools.” The Times piece cited a poll showing black support for charter schools at 47 percent. My mistake was to infer from this figure that black support and opposition were about equally divided. As one of the story’s authors pointed out in an email, [...]

The Times ran an overwrought and overwritten front-page story Wednesday under the breathless headline, “Minority Voters Feel Betrayed Over Schools.” Betrayed? The headline on the jump page where the story continues is even more exaggerated: “Minority Voters Chafe as Democrats’ Charter School Support Wanes.” The piece reads as if it were dictated by the charter school lobby. Read the story very carefully, if you bother to read to the end, and you will learn that some black and Hispanic voters see [...]

Whatever the Democratic field needed, it wasn’t a socially liberal Wall Street billionaire hoping to buy the Democratic nomination. Donald Trump got elected in large part because working-class voters considered Democrats too liberal on social issues and not giving a damn about the way elites were thriving at the expense of ordinary working people. Mike Bloomberg is perfect—for Trump: very liberal on the environment, guns, etc., and very protective of the business model that produces billionaires like himself. He’s [...]

The New York Times piece today on the projection by the Penn Wharton Budget Model that Warren’s proposed tax would reduce growth manages a rare trifecta. It discredits both the model and the Times for playing it straight, and demonstrates the need for a very different brand of economic policy and analysis. The model projects that by raising taxes on the very wealthiest, Warren’s tax would cut growth by two-tenths of 1 percent. But a model is only as good as its assumptions. Among [...]

Well, my sometime pal Steve Bannon sure got one thing right. What stands between Donald Trump and outright tyranny is the deep state. Just look at the witness list for the impeachment hearings: one foreign service officer after another—not a profession noted for attracting left-wingers, but for the most part honorable and principled people. And when Trump tried to take over agencies of government with police powers, to use as his own private spying and operations forces, he ran [...]

Back in the day, the idea was to decriminalize marijuana. Smokers could get their stash from small-time dealers, with much of the stuff homegrown, and nobody would be prosecuted. That, in any case, was the pipe dream. But somehow, the pot crusade morphed into full-blown legalization, which was followed by corporatization. And now, of course, the corporate guys are screwing up what was once a nice, modest thing. And so we have everything from payoffs to politicians for coveted [...]

The term Latinx is supposedly needed as a gender-neutral word to describe voters of Latino or Latina origin. For the most part, pressure to use Latinx comes from Anglo radicals and liberals, not from Hispanics. Now, a reputable pollster has confirmed that most Latinos and Latinas—98 percent, to be precise—don’t like the word. For starters, Latinx violates the architecture of the Spanish language. Spanish solves the gender problem in its own way—using a to indicate female, and o to signal male. You got a problem with that? [...]

GDP grew at just 1.9 percent in the third quarter, well below last year’s average of 2.9 percent and far below the Trump administration’s prediction for 3.2 percent for all of 2019. Trump will be lucky if the economy delivers 2 percent growth for the year. The Fed duly cut rates, but low interest rates can only do so much. Mainly, they are pumping up a speculative stock market. Why is the economy slowing? Global growth is weakening, and [...]

It was the deep state that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State—and Trump’s impetuousness, love of dictators, and abrupt troop withdrawal that almost destroyed the secret operation. Trump’s spin, bragging about an operation that he damn near upended, immediately collapsed. What is the deep state? It is career public officials, civilian and military, who have a sense of integrity and patriotism; people who have risked their careers to testify in the impeachment investigation against the wishes of the [...]