Trib Extra Opinion

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and President Joe Biden are rolling the dice on runaway inflation and slow growth. Global supply-chain disruptions and cost pressures on businesses are likely to persist into 2023 but by merely phasing down purchases of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities, the Fed is still adding significant liquidity....

In recent weeks, the federal court of appeals that includes Texas and two Deep South states has issued rulings in two cases that exemplify the extent of its conservative domination — and the continuing influence of former President Donald Trump. In one, it allowed the controversial new Texas law that...

Remember those “shovel-ready jobs” promised by the Obama-Biden administration in 2011? When many failed to appear after passage of this spending boondoggle, President Obama joked, “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” That law, noted Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), cost $787 billion, of which $48 billion was supposed...

The United States has slipped into cold wars with Russian and China characterized by military brinkmanship and economic competition. To address these challenges, President Joe Biden envisions a community of democracies and strengthening cooperation with Europe and the Quad (the U.S., Japan, India and Australia.) However, each member, most notably...

Democrats have a messaging problem, as you’ve no doubt heard since their recent election losses. The problem hardly started with President Joe Biden, a weak messenger given that he’s been underwater in the polls since August. Weak messaging has defined Democrats for most of the years I’ve covered them. Theirs...

It was a record-scratch of a moment: Texas actor and potential gubernatorial hopeful Matthew McConaughey, who is vaccinated against covid-19, declared in an interview last week that his younger children are unvaccinated and that he wants more information. The comment sparked a headline frenzy and touched off waves of dismay...

“Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.” — Thurgood Marshall Eric Adams, the incoming mayor of New York City, met last week with Hawk Newsome, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York,...

So far, the big message from the Glasgow climate conference is the role of finance in decarbonizing the global economy. It’s a dangerous development. In his speech to the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) earlier this month, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, pledged action to “rewire the...

In the recent election, parents in Pennsylvania school districts responded to how critical race theory (CRT) and so-called anti-racism ideology have seeped into the curricula of K-12 classrooms. Indeed, with the aid of political organizations like the 1776 Project PAC, anti-CRT school board candidates prevailed in districts throughout the Keystone...

The covid-19 pandemic revealed devastating cracks in the foundation of U.S. health care. Hospitals were unprepared for enormous challenges to staffing, resulting from burnout and absences caused by the medical and psychological costs of the coronavirus. There is another emerging crisis that could catch us again unprepared and last for...

WASHINGTON — Whatever happened to Kamala Harris? She shattered all kinds of ceiling glass when Joe Biden made California’s junior senator his running mate and Harris was elected vice president. Since then, she’s largely receded from Washington’s daily doings and the cliff-hanging drama that’s surrounded the fight over the president’s...

Time to pop some bubbles. Sorry progressives, there are some pins coming your way. Recently I wrote a column with the headline “Just tell them no, Joe,” in which I suggested that progressive Democrats were pushing President Joe Biden too far to the left with his domestic agenda and that...

When past presidents have seen their approval numbers take a dive, they went on foreign trips. Sometimes this works, but more often it doesn’t, because failure at home often follows them abroad. World leaders can sense failure and its twin, weakness. Vice President Kamala Harris, whose poll numbers and favorability...

Reinventing conservatism sounds like an oxymoron. How exactly would you reimagine a political philosophy that — as its intellectual father, Edmund Burke, expounded more than two centuries ago — largely consists of opposing radical reinventions? And yet a drastic rethink is what center-right politicians in much of Europe urgently need....

The U.S. Congress passed an infrastructure bill that funds more than a trillion dollars in nationwide federal spending on Nov. 5. The bill puts about $240 billion toward building or rebuilding roads, bridges, public transit, airports and railways. More than $150 billion is slated for projects that address climate change,...

Free trade among nations is not much different than specialization across our continental economy — California in high tech and New York in finance. Nations raise productivity by focusing on what they do best. Trade deals dating back to the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (1934) increase annual U.S. growth by...

On Veterans Day, people across America will thank veterans and active-duty military personnel for their service. But many members of the public don’t have a clear understanding of what service means to people in the military. How do they honor their own? What kind of spaces and activities help them...

Centuries of systemic racism and everyday discrimination in the U.S. have left a major mental health burden on African American communities, and the past few years have dealt especially heavy blows. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that Black Americans are twice as likely to die...

If you needed further confirmation of Washington’s current state of dysfunction, consider this: The 13 Republican lawmakers who voted with Democrats to send a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill to President Joe Biden’s desk late Friday night are finding themselves threatened with primaries and worse for their (alleged) singular act of...

The significance of Virginia Lt. Governor-elect Winsome Sears’ victory cannot be overstated. But her victory is significant not only because she is a Black woman and the “first” of her race and gender to hold the office of lieutenant governor in Virginia, but also because she has been described as...

President Joe Biden, who met Pope Francis at the Vatican Oct. 29, is Catholic. The country’s’ first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, visited the Vatican too. But meetings between U.S. presidents and popes have been a staple of politics since the Kennedy era, whether the president was Catholic or not....

These days, it seems like there are shortages of everything. While the media has largely focused on shortages of goods, the increasingly tight labor market is also having widespread effects. Nowhere is this truer than in the shortage of qualified nurses. It’s a serious problem with many causes, most of...

From an economic point of view, some of the ideas being proposed by current policymakers in Washington, particularly the president’s Council of Economic Advisers and top officials at the Federal Reserve, cause this economist to scratch his head in wonderment. Take the Fed, for example. The central bank hatches policies...

Before Tuesday’s elections I warned against overinterpreting the Virginia gubernatorial election as a national bellwether. I stand by that: Governor’s races are the kind of election that shows the least correlation with national politics, and where candidate attributes and issues make the biggest difference. But if you’re a Democrat looking...

WASHINGTON — The world is changing faster than our sluggish political leaders — let alone the public — can manage. The COVID-19 virus and climate change move far more quickly than the international community, as we saw last week at the G-20 in Rome and the COP26 climate summit in...