Author: Norman Leahy

The national polling averages on the GOP presidential nomination show former President Donald Trump maintaining a double-digit lead over his nearest competitor, undeclared candidate and current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The conventional wisdom over the last few weeks is that whatever presidential ambitions DeSantis may have had are dead – killed in no small part by his own stumbling efforts to build a presence beyond his Florida base. While this is speculation based on hunches about a man who is still not officially in the race, it does leave one thing clear: until proven otherwise, Donald Trump is the clear…

With President Biden officially running for a second term, there is the minor question of whether there should be any debates between him and the other candidates, Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The answer appears to be “no, there won’t be any debates.” For now. While incumbent presidents seeking a second term are, as heads of their parties, under no obligation to give potential opponents free and equal time on a debate stage. And even when the incumbents do win renomination, if the primary fights to do so are particularly bruising, as they were for Jimmy Carter in…

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy got what he wanted, and desperately needed, on the debt ceiling: An approved plan that he and others in the GOP hope will bring Democrats to the bargaining table. It was a close-run thing. The final vote – 217 for and 215 against (including all House Democrats and four Republicans) showed McCarthy could get things done in a fractious GOP caucus. Kudos, then to Mr. McCarthy’s organizational skills. But what did he have to promise in return for that narrow victory? Among many other things, he was forced to leave the federal government’s costly, inefficient and…

An Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll shows something that’s been a constant throughout Joe Biden’s presidential term: a lot of people, roughly three out of four surveyed, don’t want him to run for a second term. That includes a majority of Democratic voters. The reason isn’t because they disagree with Biden’s policies (they do) or that they won’t support him if he’s the nominee (they will). It’s because of his age. At 80, Biden is already the oldest man to be president. He’s also among the oldest national leaders in the world. And that doesn’t sit well…

Back in the early 1990s, when congressional term limits were such a hot issue, it helped the GOP end the Democrats’ 40-year House of Representatives majority. Democrats and the left castigated term limits as a threat to the democratic process and were just a nefarious Republican plot to gain power. Term limits faded from the spotlight once the Supreme Court held that states could not limit their own delegations’ terms in office. The justice who wrote the dissenting opinion in that case: Clarence Thomas. Who now finds himself a case study among some on the left of the need for…

Let’s be clear about Joe Biden’s formal declaration of candidacy for the 2024 presidential race: he will be the Democratic nominee. The challenges from Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are curiosities. There only potential is to annoy Biden, not defeat him. With that said, what does Mr. Biden offer the nation if return for another four years in the White House? In his slick announcement video, Biden promises to continue to “fight for our democracy.” Fight against whom? The “MAGA extremists” who are “lining up to take away those bedrock freedoms.” Which is another way of saying Biden…

The talk in official Washington about the federal budget, the need for spending reform and the imperative to avoid a debt default is still going on. Muted and unfocused, to be sure. But there’s talk about what to do. Which is fine. But let’s add some context to these muted, unfocused and as yet unserious discussions over how Uncle Sam spends your money (and borrows the rest). The Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia has put together a handy list of the federal government’s major spending priorities in the most recent budget for 2022. Boccia writes that the feds: …spent $6.3 trillion…

Official Washington has largely ignored the debt ceiling issue, reasoning that as has always happened in the past, the two major parties will hiss and spit at one-another, then pass some sort of increase that avoids a default. But there’s always been the nagging suspicion in the credit markets and on Wall Street that this time may be different. This time, Republicans and Democrats might be so committed to their game of chicken that there might be an actual, honest-to-God default on U.S. sovereign debt. The greatest unknown – aside from which political faction would blink first – has been…

The end of the federal tax season is a perfect time to assess what this annual exercise costs taxpayers. Not in the taxes paid. But in the time and money spent complying with the tax code. Those costs are very real and very big. In testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, the Tax Foundation’s William McBride noted that the tax code itself is an unwieldy monster that contains “more than 6,000 pages and about 4 million words (plus about 15,000 pages of associated tax law interpretations)…” It’s no wonder, then that complying with such a behemoth is so costly: In…

Relationships are complicated and few are more complex, and dysfunctional, than the one between politicians and corporations. In very broad terms, the two get along famously when politicians are handing out taxpayer cash to corporations that promise to use it to create press release-worthy numbers of jobs and economic growth. They argue and fight when each tells the other how to run its respective business. On the populist right today, that’s seen in the high-profile hissing/legislative spat between Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Walt Disney Corporation over various, and utterly pointless, culture war cul de sacs. On the…