Date: 19-04-2018
Source: The Economist
The president’s takeover of his party won’t soon be undone
It will not easily be undone
“NEVER has a party abandoned, fled its principles and deeply held beliefs so quickly as my party did in the face of the nativist juggernaut,” Jeff Flake, a Republican senator from Arizona, said in a speech in March. “We have become strangers to ourselves.” There is a lot of truth in this. The speed with which the Republican Party’s establishment accommodated itself to a candidate, and then a president, who spurned all manner of norms and broke many bounds of decency, as well as policy commitments, was indeed without any precedent.
Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, went from refusing to campaign with Donald Trump (after a recording of him boasting about sexual assault became public) to failing quickly to condemn him (when, as president, he spoke of “very fine people on both sides” of confrontations between neo-Nazis and protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia). It now appears that Mr Ryan cannot stomach his position—or, alternatively, that he thinks the voters will not provide the Republican House majority he would need to continue in it after this November’s mid-term elections. On April 11th he announced that he will not seek re-election. Like Mr Flake himself, and Bob Corker, a senator who memorably compared Mr Trump’s White House to an “adult day-care centre”, not to mention 40 other House Republicans—a record—he is leaving the field of battle. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
LONDON – Not so long ago, there were two competing explanations of unemployment. The first was the Keynesian theory of deficient demand, which holds that workers become unemployed “involuntarily” when their community lacks the money to buy the goods and services they produce. The second was the view often associated with the Chicago School, according to which unemployment is a voluntary choice of leisure over work at whatever the offered wage. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »