Opinion

  Hillary Clinton enjoys about a five-point polling lead over Donald Trump. One way to look at this is that it’s a margin, at this stage of a presidential race, that is rarely reversed. Here’s another way. The Democrats had a successful convention, the Republicans didn’t. Clinton’s campaign has been smooth; Trump’s has careened between disasters. She has reached out …

  The Republicans won’t stop harping about President Barack Obama’s handling of the Louisiana floods. Their media focus until this week was to talk exclusively about whether he would break into his August vacation and tour the damage. When he got there, of course, it was (for them) too little, too late. What has been noteworthy about this coverage is …

  Once upon a time, a regular hacker could make decent money in the world of ransomware, malicious software that locks up parts of a victim’s computer and demands payment to restore access. Now those days are gone. I blame globalization. Ransomware has only recently entered the public consciousness, thanks to the high-profile extortion of a Los Angeles hospital and …

  Australia has a split personality when it comes to China: Government officials stress the importance of their strategic alliance with the U.S., even if it upsets Beijing. But business leaders argue that Australia must accommodate the reality of China’s overwhelming economic power in Asia. It’s an awkward straddle for Australia, as its security and economic interests diverge. “It has …

Welfare reform may be the last great bipartisan success story. It was enacted in 1996 by a Republican Congress led by Newt Gingrich and by Democratic President Bill Clinton in response to decades of public frustration with the U.S. system of aid to the poor. At the time, the law had liberal enemies, some of whom resigned from Clinton’s administration …

  When he talks about “rigged” elections and calls for voter-identification laws to prevent fraud, Donald Trump is squarely within the Republican mainstream. The party has made passing those laws one of its highest priorities in state after state. Yet as the evidence continues to show, the type of fraud that voter ID laws could prevent is basically non-existent. Now …

  Investors are courting Africa like never before. The resource-rich continent, which has massive business potential, is turning into the new investment hub for many countries — with Japan and China taking the lead. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is set to unveil aid and development projects at a conference in Kenya this weekend. He will meet business leaders to …

  Ronald Reagan famously summed up the logic of government thusly: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” Uber and Lyft move, so naturally, the state of Massachusetts wants to tax them. And since taxis aren’t moving nearly as much as they used to, the state wants to hand …

  Donald Trump made a seemingly momentous announcement on Monday, jettisoning a presidential campaign’s worth of assertions that he would deport millions of undocumented immigrants and close what he has repeatedly called an “open” border. Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, who interviewed Trump, was obviously stunned. After telling Trump that the news media is “running wild with this,” he asked …

I miss 2011. Looking back, that was the heyday of economic blogging. The financial crisis had abated, but the recovery from the recession was disappointing, and everyone was talking about how to jump-start growth. Macroeconomics was important again. Now, with the U.S. economy having returned to some semblance of normal, and with political threats looming, the finer points of macroeconomic …