In his State of the Union address, the president celebrated the economy with exuberance:

"In just over two years since the election, we have launched an unprecedented economic boom — a boom that has rarely been seen before. There’s been nothing like it… The U.S. economy is growing almost twice as fast today as when I took office. And we are considered, far and away, the hottest economy anywhere in the world. Not even close."

Hyperbole and "twice as fast" falsehood aside, the economy is indeed flourishing. Unemployment is near an historic low with millions of jobs created, wages of the

lower-paid have finally been rising, inflation remains tamed. Mr. Trump is in the habit of taking all credit but the boom arrived at the culmination of a long and continuous upward trajectory from the deepest dive we've seen in our lifetimes dubbed the Great Recession. For his part, he did give the economy an added boost by signing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that slashed corporate taxes from 35% to 21% and left the public with a bit more money after withholding's bite of their paychecks.

But he did so at a great cost that went unmentioned in his speech. Days earlier the Treasury Department announced that the deficit for calendar year 2019 had topped $1 trillion for the first time since the 2008 economic collapse, a plunge that brought unemployment of 9.9% at the outset, followed by an economy of part-time "gigs" and minimum wage paychecks that crippled government revenues. Government revenue in 2009 was only $2.1 trillion compared to $3.44 trillion last year.

Compared to those years, how could a $1 trillion deficit happen at a time of 3.6% unemployment, rising wages, a soaring stock market? A trillion-dollar-plus… Read More »

With the sentencing of former Trump adviser Roger Stone imminent, the president tweeted his displeasure at the sentencing recommendation of seven-to-nine years, Attorney General William Barr immediately reduced the guidelines, Trump congratulated Barr for doing so, four prosecutors quit the case in protest,

one quitting the department altogether, and Barr unleashed a stunning rebuke of the president's "public statements and tweets", saying they "make it impossible for me to do my job".

That leaves out a lot, stated in brief because you probably already know the story. It headlined every television news program and newspaper for days. But our take here is to do what the breathless reporting hasn't done: delve into the question of whether the proposed sentence is fair or unjust. To answer that, we turned to the indictment itself. The takeaway is mostly that the disputants don't seem to know what the charges against Stone say. We'll get to that.

Barr claimed that he was already working to mitigate the sentence, had spoken to one of the prosecutors, when Trump burst forth with his opening salvo:

The proseutors went ahead anyway, ignoring Barr, and issueing a 26-page sentencing memorandum calling for seven-to-nine years in prison for Stone. That caused Barr to step in the next day to call for a reduction and earning Trump's appreciation:

This takes us from seven-to-nine years to "a case that…perhaps should not have even been brought" accompanied by a libel of Robert Mueller who did no such… Read More »