Steven Rattner

Originally appeared in the New York Times. Medicare for All. The Green New Deal. Free college tuition. With each new entrant into the Democratic presidential sweepstakes comes a fresh cascade of ambitious social programs to entice and excite would-be supporters. The list of “payfors,” to use a bit of Washington jargon, grows more slowly. They’ll […]

Originally appeared in the New York Times. Steven Rattner responds to readers who have doubts about his plan to raise revenue from the uber wealthy. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling for a steep increase in the tax rate of America’s top earners to help level income inequality and raise revenue for the deficit. But in […]

Originally appeared in the New York Times. Kudos to our latest political supernova, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for helpfully bringing taxes back into focus, with her call for a new top tax rate of 70 percent on incomes above $10 million a year. That seemingly simple concept makes for a great headline, but it’s not great tax policy. […]

Originally appeared in The New York Times. By any measure, 2018 was another Year of Trump. From his efforts to remake the American economy to his go-it-alone trade war to his curious pro-Putin foreign policy to the at least 17 investigations underway into his various activities, President Trump dominated the news as few of his predecessors have […]

Originally appeared in the New York Times In 2016, as he crisscrossed the country for his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised repeatedly that he would make American factories great again. “My plan includes a pledge to restore manufacturing in the United States,” he told a cheering crowd in the nation’s automobile capital, Detroit. In truth, Mr. Trump’s […]

Originally appeared in the New York Times. For the second consecutive Friday, the Trump administration had an opportunity to point to fresh data that supposedly demonstrates the strong boost the president’s policies have given to the nation’s economy. Last week, news that the gross domestic product expanded at a 4.1 percent rate in the second quarter […]

Originally appeared in the New York Times. American companies, according to their critics, are so focused on making quick profits that they have abdicated building for the long term. That idea has captivated policymakers, commentators and even some leading business executives. The complaint has reached a fevered pitch amid news that companies are diverting much of […]

Originally appeared in the New York Times. Bemoaning the worrisome state of liberal democracy has become a cottage industry. With each erosion of individual liberties, with every election gone awry, the commentariat disgorges a fresh flotilla of analyses of the world’s ailments and favored prescriptions for fixing them. Some fret about the slide toward absolutism in […]

Originally appeared in the New York Times. Even by Trumpian standards, the president has been in high dudgeon this week, railing about everything from illegal immigrants to unfair Chinese trade practices. For that, at least some Trump watchers blame his smashing defeat in the passage on March 23 of the omnibus spending bill. That legislation, […]

Originally appeared in the New York Times.  President Trump’s attacks on Chinese trade practices may be garnering the headlines, but underpinning that dispute lies a more consequential struggle, between liberal democracy and state-directed capitalism. Of late, it’s a competition in which the Chinese approach has been delivering the more robust economic result. Indeed, implicit in […]