Free Republic

Monday morning, as I did my morning bicycle ride (I live in a safe neighborhood), I listened to Breitbart News host Alex Marlowe interview John Nolte, another Breitbart personality about COVID vaccination hesitancy. By the end of the interview, they’d wandered through several logical fallacies that need to be exposed so people can accurately balance vaccines versus treatments. Marlowe and Nolte quoted data purporting to show that Washington state counties that Trump won have much higher COVID death rates than counties that Biden won. Vaccination rates are blamed for the difference. Marlowe went on to declare that it’s been proven...

New York Times “The Morning” newsletter writer David Leonhardt claimed President Joe Biden’s massive tax hike proposal was not “radical.” One economist was having none of it. Leonhardt panned outcries from detractors against Biden’s tax increases like the Tax Foundation as allegedly obscuring “a basic fact about Biden’s tax plan: It would not actually raise tax rates on the rich to high levels, historically speaking.” He pivoted off of an opaque analysis on historical tax rates by University of California Berkeley associate professor of economics Gabriel Zucman to claim Biden’s plan was “not radical. For that reason, it is highly...

Observing the comings and goings in both Iowa and New Hampshire this month, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt is clearly fed up. The system is rigged, broken and (obviously)… racist. With all that in mind, the author vented his frustrations at the Gray Lady, declaring once and for all that Iowa should never go first again. Let’s let him explain his reasoning. Right now, I’m as obsessed as anyone with the early-state polls. Yet I also want to use this moment to point out how bizarre the current system is — and to make a plea: The 2020 cycle...

---SNIP--- Why are Democrats holding back? There is one explanation that makes some sense: They believe that Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump, will issue a report very soon, and they want to learn what’s in it before starting a fight over the tax returns. A Mueller report could include some of the same information in those tax returns.

Elections have a way of blowing up partisan conceits—see what happened to the Democratic Party’s Electoral College “lock” in 2016. This year Democrats busted one of their own cherished myths by proving that Republican gerrymanders weren’t preventing them from retaking the House of Representatives. There’s a lesson here for voters and judges. State legislatures have been drawing congressional boundaries to favor one party or another since America’s founding. During the 40 years of sustained Democratic control of the House in the late 20th century, this worked in the Democrats’ favor. As political scientist Matt Grossmann has shown, Democrats sometimes enjoyed...

The end of Robert Mueller’s investigation. The loss of health insurance for several million people. New laws that make it harder to vote. More tax cuts for the rich. More damage to the environment. A Republican Party molded even more in the image of President Trump. These are among the plausible consequences if the Republicans sweep the midterm elections and keep control of both the House and Senate. And don’t fool yourself. That outcome, although not the most likely one, remains possible. The last couple of weeks of polling have shown how it could happen. Voters who lean Republican —...

And the Democratic Party has not actually become a band of radical leftists Conventional wisdom says that the middle is disappearing from American politics: The Republicans have moved far to the right, the Democrats far to the left, and woe to any moderate voters looking for politicians to represent their views. Well, the conventional wisdom is wrong. The Democrats have not actually become radical leftists, or anything close to it. You keep hearing this story partly because Republicans have an obvious interest in promoting it and partly because large parts of the news media find it irresistible. It’s a “both...

Ten years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the official economic statistics — the ones that fill news stories, television shows and presidential tweets — say that the American economy is fully recovered. The unemployment rate is lower than it was before the financial crisis began. The stock market has soared. The total combined output of the American economy, also known as gross domestic product, has risen 20 percent since Lehman collapsed. The crisis is over. But, of course, it isn’t over. The financial crisis remains the most influential event of the 21st century. It left millions of people —...

This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter each weekday. When it comes to President Trump and race, there is a predictable cycle. He makes a remark that seems racist, and people engage in an extended debate about whether he is personally racist. His critics say he is. His defenders argue for an interpretation in which race plays a secondary role (such as: Haiti really is a worse place to live than Norway). It’s time to end this cycle. No one except Trump can know what Trump’s private thoughts or...

NYT: Obama Only Lied 18 Times in 8 Years; Trump Off the Charts Quick, somebody do a chart on NYT’s lies. 12.14.2017 News Trey Sanchez    The New York Times, which promised to do a better job at unbiased reporting after the election, actually reported with a straight face that President Obama only lied 18 times in his entire presidency. Take a second to recover from laughter (or outrage). David Leonhardt, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Stuart A. Thompson considered it a challenge when they heard from Trump supporters who after reading the NYT's list of lies of President Trump said: “Yes,...

A reader writes, “Everyone says Donald Trump can’t win. Exactly why not?” David Leonhardt, editor for The Upshot, considers the question: Can Donald Trump win the Republican nomination? Sure, it’s within the realm of plausibility; he’s now been leading the polls for months, after all. But it seems highly unlikely because it would violate just about every historical pattern of presidential races. No modern candidate has received a major-party nomination — and perhaps no candidate in American history — while being opposed by the party’s elites: donors, media figures, politicians and others. Elite support matters because they have the ability...

In the hardest places to live in the United States, people spend a lot of time thinking about diets and religion. In the easiest places to live, people spend a lot of time thinking about cameras. This summer, The Upshot conducted an analysis of every county in the country to determine which were the toughest places to live, based on an index of six factors including income, education and life expectancy. Afterward, we heard from Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, who suggested looking at how web searches differ on either end of our index. The results, based on...

For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago. Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor. Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the...

[Obama's] agenda is a bold one in many ways. Yet his tax code would still look more kindly on wealth than Nixon’s, Kennedy’s, Eisenhower’s or that of any other president from F.D.R. to Carter. And only part of the reason for this is widely understood. It’s well known that tax rates on top incomes used to be far higher than they are today. The top marginal rate hovered around 90 percent in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. Reagan ultimately reduced it to 28 percent, and it is now 35 percent. Obama would raise it to 39.6 percent, where it...

For The New York Times economic scene section for March 31, David Leonhardt came across with one of the most amazing admissions about Obama that I've ever seen in the Times. Namely that Barack Obama is just like Hitler. Now, many of you may be solemnly shaking your head in agreement, but in so doing you would be missing why the Times was comparing Obama to Hitler. You see, Leonhardt didn't mean it as an insult. He was saying that it was a good thing that Barack was being like Hitler at least in an economic sense.

The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters. The Obama budget — a bold, even radical departure from recent history, wrapped in bureaucratic formality and statistical tables — would sharply raise taxes on the rich, beyond where Bill Clinton had raised them. It would reduce taxes for everyone else, to a lower point than they were under either Mr. Clinton or George W. Bush. And it would lay the groundwork for sweeping changes in health care...

As Gov. Bobby Jindal began to offer a Republican response, it became apparent that he would be no match with Barack Obama in the soaring-oratory department. The Republicans really should have tried a gimmick instead. Perhaps Jindal could have walked on and said, "Today, the president held what he called a fiscal responsibility summit." He could then afford a wide smile, knowing his audience had erupted in laughter. Honestly, now: Are we quite ready finally to declare the Era of Obama As Fiscally Conservative is over? Last year, Republicans warned that Barack Obama was ultraliberal — a socialist, in fact...

Yesterday, David Leonhardt of the New York Times mounted a vigorous - and successful - smear attempt against Lou Dobbs ("Truth, Fiction and Lou Dobbs"). Whether you like Dobbs or hate him, he's a proxy for the immigration "debate", and this minor victory wasn't just a victory for the NYT, it was also a minor victory for those who support and/or profit from illegal immigration. What's worse is that - in a country with 300 million people or so - I was one of the few people who pushed back, defending Dobbs or going after some of those who piled...

The whole controversy involving Lou Dobbs and leprosy started with a “60 Minutes” segment a few weeks ago... ...“Well, I can tell you this,” [Dobbs] replied. “If we reported it, it’s a fact.” With that Orwellian chestnut, Mr. Dobbs escalated the leprosy dispute into a full-scale media brouhaha. The next night, back on his own program, the same CNN correspondent who had done the earlier report, Christine Romans, repeated the 7,000 number, and Mr. Dobbs added that, if anything, it was probably an underestimate. A week later, the Southern Poverty Law Center — the civil rights group that has long...

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity -- the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation's living standard -- has risen steadily over the same period. -- "Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity" by Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt, The New York Times, August 28th, 2006 We decreased the size of our workforce, beginning last summer, by approximately 200 positions. In September, we announced the elimination of another...