Schumpeter famously said that taxes are the “thunder of world history.” So what kind of history did the Republicans make this past week? Here I am in The Guardian, answering that question with four takeaways on the GOP tax bill. The piece is a kind of digest of some of my posting on social media this past week; increasingly as some of you have noted, I’m doing more of my posting on social media rather than on the blog. If you’re not on Facebook and/or Twitter—and who can blame you if you’re not?—you’ll have missed these posts, so The Guardian piece is a good digest to look out for.

I have a piece in The Guardian on the Republicans’ stalled healthcare bill in the Senate. Some excerpts: At the beginning of this week, Republican senators were planning to head home for the Fourth of July recess and celebrate the nation’s independence and freedom by enacting their idea of liberty: denying health insurance to more than 20 million people. By the middle of the week, their hopes were dashed. … Once again the Republicans have found themselves in the peculiar position of possessing total control of the elected branches of the federal government, yet unable to act on one of their longstanding dreams: not just slowly destroying Medicaid, a federal program that guarantees healthcare to millions of poorer people, but also forcing […]

The Washington Post has a good article this morning on the response on Capitol Hill to Trump’s budget. The big news is that the biggest opposition to Trump’s budget is coming from—it’s almost getting predictable, at this point—not the Democrats but the Republicans. Some of President Trump’s best friends in Congress sharply criticized his first budget Thursday, with defense hawks saying the proposed hike in Pentagon spending wasn’t big enough, while rural conservatives and others attacked plans to cut a wide range of federal agencies and programs. The bad mood among Republican critics was tempered by a consensus that the president’s budget wasn’t going very far on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers reminded everybody that they ultimately control the nation’s purse strings. “While […]