Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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Stung by the collapse of the Republican plan to reshape the U.S. health-care system, President Donald Trump’s White House says that it’s taking charge of the next big GOP initiative: tax reform. What it wants and who will manage the effort isn’t clear, but here are some legislative approaches the administration could pursue: --A sweeping tax-reform plan with huge cuts in tax rates balanced by elimination of special-interest tax advantages, plus a massive infrastructure-spending bill. This approach would be aimed at winning bipartisan suppo...
One word describes this U.S. presidential election: dismal. That has ominous implications for the important tasks of governing over the next several years. Elections in which big issues are joined have value because they provide a governance agenda to be debated and decided. Both sides bear responsibility for the sorry state of politics this year, but the overwhelming blame belongs to Donald Trump. He has largely waged a campaign of venom and cruel insults that was substantively shallow. If you waded through his deepest policy thoughts your...
The presidential debates gave the world a chance to watch Donald Trump bluff about his mistreatment of women and lie about mocking a person with disabilities. Nearly as theatrical was the sight of Hillary Clinton spinning convoluted explanations of why people shouldn’t fret about her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state. These and other familiar election-season spectacles may have revealed something about the candidates’ character, but shed little light on how they’d approach governing. Missed substantive opportunities in al...
Any American political strategist or reporter -- I’ve been one for more than four decades -- loves the map: That’s the electoral map that decides the presidential election every four years. Each of the 50 states is awarded electors based on its members of Congress, essentially by population; Washington, D.C., for example, gets three votes. In almost all states it’s a winner-take-all system; there are 538 votes nationally, it takes 270 to win. For about two thirds of the states, including the biggest, California and Texas, the outcome is a nea...
Imagine what could happen if Donald Trump hadn’t turned the presidential campaign into an argument over who founded Islamic State or whether there should be ideological entrance tests for foreign visitors and immigrants. Then he and Hillary Clinton could have a rational debate over taxes, a serious topic on which they have clear differences. Trump wants to cut taxes massively, especially for the wealthy, which he claims will stimulate unprecedented growth. Clinton wants to boost taxes on corporations and the rich and use the revenue to c...
The tensions at the 2016 Republican National Convention aren’t like those typically seen at the party’s divided gatherings: Teddy Roosevelt challenging the hierarchy in 1912; or the moderates versus conservatives, Dwight Eisenhower against Robert Taft in 1952, or 12 years later, Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, then Ronald Reagan taking on President Gerald Ford in 1976. Republicans meet in Cleveland on Monday to anoint their presidential nominee amid deep schisms: Never have so many of the party’s prominent governors, senators, House mem...
The contempt that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump express for each other will continue to play out in vitriolic sound bites. But their profound differences on what to do about the economy and the struggling middle class are far more important. “This election will be won by whichever candidate convinces middle-class voters they are better for their jobs and future prospects,” says Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation economist and Trump adviser. “This is about whether economic forces hollow out the middle class or whether those forces strengthe...
