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October surprises: How Wikileaks and ObamaCare hikes are shaking up the race

This roller-coaster campaign has a couple of twists and turns left, and that’s not good news for the woman who many in the media are ready to inaugurate.

The spike in ObamaCare premiums and dwindling insurance options gives Donald Trump a much-needed issue against Hillary Clinton, a longtime champion of universal health care.

It’s crunch time for the Affordable Care Act.Days after a long, thorough speech from President Obama defending the law and laying out his vision for it in the years ahead, the administration released confirmation of what the industry had been signaling for most of the past few months: double-digit percentage point premium increases for benchmark plans for people insured through plans purchased on the Obamacare insurance marketplaces, known as exchanges, this upcoming year.

Young people are still slow to sign up, premiums have steadily risen in the exchanges, and big insurers like Aetna have left the exchanges, leaving several counties and at least one entire state with only one insurer.

Republicans seeking to destroy the law, and Democrats who have become increasingly vocal about further reforms or radical changes to the law. But will the bad news about Obamacare actually affect the election in a meaningful way?

The blueprint also calls for deep cuts elsewhere, including to foreign assistance and environmental budgets.

Mr Trump's proposal would return the US closer to wartime spending.

If he wants to boost the defence budget by $54bn without adding to the deficit, that money will have to come from somewhere - and mandatory spending on welfare and debt interest takes nearly 70% of the budget off the table. Early reports are that the Environmental Protection Agency is facing sharp cuts, but its total annual budget is just over $8bn -a drop in the bucket.The State Department has also been singled out as a source for the needed funds, and its $50bn annually (including $22bn in direct aid) makes it a fatter target.

Two post-election polls – one released Nov. 14 by the Democracy Corps (founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville), the other released Nov. 16 by the Public Religion Research Institute – reveal the decisively liberal views of the core constituencies within the rising American electorate and its support for government activism, especially measures to help the disadvantaged.

By a margin of 60-13, voters on the left side of the spectrum favor raising taxes on incomes above $1 million, while voters outside of the left are much less supportive, 39-25. In the case of raising the minimum wage, the left backs a hike by an overwhelming 64-6 margin, while those on the right are far less supportive, 32-18.  The rising American electorate backs raising the minimum wage by 64-6, while the people outside it back a hike by just 32-18. The left coalition supports a carbon tax or fee by 43-14 while right-leaning voters are opposed, 37-24.

the rising American electorate represents a direct threat to the striking array of government benefits for the affluent that the conservative movement has won over the past 40 years. These include the reduction of the top income tax rate from 50 percent in 1986 to 35 percent; the 15 percent tax rate on dividend and capital gains income, which was 39.9 percent in 1977; the lowering of the top estate tax rate from 70 percent in 1981, with just $175,000 exempted from taxation, to a top rate of 35 percent this year with $5.1 million exempted from taxation.

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro just increased the nation's minimum wage by 40%.

inflation is expected to soar by nearly 500% this year and 1,660% next year

Venezuela's minimum wage, including food subsidies, is rising to 90,812 bolivars a month.

Fast forward a decade: The philosophy, sketched out privately at the Boston office of Brown Rudnick,is now at the center of an intense struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party.

This is more than a grudge match. At stake for the Democratic Party is the support of middle-class, swing voters who decide elections.

Many on the left were shocked, and angered. Warren’s allies saw Third Way as a proxy — being used by her enemies on Wall Street to scare off the rest of the party.

unwarranted arrogance about economics isn’t Trump-specific. On the contrary, it’s the modern Republican norm. And the question is why.

The Trump team is apparently projecting growth at between 3 and 3.5 percent for a decade. This wouldn’t be unprecedented: the U.S. economy grew at a 3.4 percent rate during the Reagan years, 3.7 percent under Bill Clinton. But a repeat performance is unlikely.

For one thing, in the Reagan years baby boomers were still entering the work force. Now they’re on their way out, and the rise in the working-age population has slowed to a crawl. This demographic shift alone should, other things being equal, subtract around a percentage point from U.S. growth.

there has never been a time in American history when the alleged personal traits of candidates mattered less. As we head into 2016, each party is quite unified on major policy issues — and these unified positions are very far from each other. The huge, substantive gulf between the parties will be reflected in the policy positions of whomever they nominate, and will almost surely be reflected in the actual policies adopted by whoever wins.

any Democrat would, if elected, seek to maintain the basic U.S. social insurance programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — in essentially their current form, while also preserving and extending the Affordable Care Act. Any Republican would seek to destroy Obamacare, make deep cuts in Medicaid, and probably try to convert Medicare into a voucher system.

Any Democrat would retain the tax hikes on high-income Americans that went into effect in 2013, and possibly seek more. Any Republican would try to cut taxes on the wealthy — House Republicans plan to vote next week to repeal the estate tax — while slashing programs that aid low-income families.

U.S. stocks dropped on Monday as concern over global growth hit banks and other economically sensitive shares, although a late rally in energy shares left the market well above its lows of the day.

European banks led a global selloff in financial stocks as signs of stress in the sector mounted. Uncertainty over whether the Federal Reserve would raise rates this year also dragged down U.S. bank stocks, pushing the S&P financial index .SPSY down 2.6 percent.

"Investors' attitudes seem to be worsening relative to the likelihood of a global recession. I think that's what financials are reflecting – that their net interest margins are going to be further compressed under collapsing bond yields," said Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia.

A top Army commander on Monday ordered that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl face a court-martial on charges of desertion and endangering troops stemming from his decision to leave his outpost in 2009, a move that prompted a huge manhunt in the wilds of eastern Afghanistan and landed him in nearly five years of harsh Taliban captivity.

According to Sergeant Bergdahl’s defense lawyers, the Army lawyer who presided over the preliminary hearing also recommended that he face neither jail time nor a punitive discharge and that he go before an intermediate tribunal known as a “special court-martial,” where the most severe penalty possible would be a year of confinement.

Monday’s decision rejecting that recommendation means that Sergeant Bergdahl now faces a maximum five-year penalty if ultimately convicted by a military jury of desertion, as well as potential life imprisonment on the more serious charge of misbehavior before the enemy, which in this case means endangering the troops who were sent to search for him after he disappeared.

The answer, I’d argue, is that business decisions are a lot less sensitive to financial incentives — including tax rates — than conservatives claim. And appreciating that reality doesn’t just undermine the case for the Trump tax cut. It undermines Republican economic doctrine as a whole.About business decisions: It’s a dirty little secret of monetary analysis that changes in interest rates affect the economy mainly through their effect on the housing market and the international value of the dollar (which in turn affects the competitiveness of U.S. goods on world markets). Any direct effect on business investment is so small that it’s hard even to see it in the data. What drives such investment is, instead, perceptions about market demand.

the basic result of lower taxes on corporations is that corporations pay less in taxes — full stop. Which brings me to the problem with conservative economic doctrine.

That doctrine is all about the supposed need to give the already privileged incentives to do nice things for the rest of us. We must, the right says, cut taxes on the wealthy to induce them to work hard, and cut taxes on corporations to induce them to invest in America.But this doctrine keeps failing in practice. President George W. Bush’s tax cuts didn’t produce a boom; President Barack Obama’s tax hike didn’t cause a depression. Tax cuts in Kansas didn’t jump-start the state’s economy; tax hikes in California didn’t slow growth.

The future of the Biden presidency, the terrain of the midterm elections and the fate of the Republican Party will all be shaped by a series of early battles unfolding on Capitol Hill.

The White House is standing firm behind Neera Tanden, its pick for budget director, though her nomination seems doomed. Aides to Joe Biden know this first big fight will help set the terms of the new President's relationship with Congress. Other bitter confirmation hearings are turning into early de-facto fights on the great issues of the Biden era, like climate change and expanding access to health care.

Republicans are meanwhile beginning to mobilize against Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid rescue package in the hope of billing it as an example of massive liberal overreach and winning a political payoff.

The problem here is that Romney wants tax cuts for the rich and he wants credit for being a deficit hawk. But as Jed Lewison notes, Romney simply can’t keep all his promises. What makes this even more untenable is the unshakable reality that cutting taxes deeply on the rich is very unpopular. Romney claims he would cut everyone’s taxes. But he can’t do that and also reduce the deficit, unless those tax cuts are offset by policy choices that would turn the middle class’s tax cut into an effective tax hike. And so his tax cuts for the rich would be even more unpopular if Romney leveled with voters on how they would have to be paid for

the story of EpiPens can also explain so much of what’s wrong with our health care system.

Epinephrine is very, very cheap. Even in the developing world, it costs less than a dollar per milliliter, and there’s less than a third of that in an EpiPen.

The EpiPen isn’t new; it has been in use since 1977. Research and development costs were recouped long ago. Nine years ago, it was bought by the pharmaceutical company Mylan, which then began to sell the device. When Mylan bought it, EpiPens cost about $57 each.

She was afraid of being alone and prone to anxiety, a diminutive 66-year-old woman with a poor sense of direction, hiking the Appalachian Trail by herself, who wandered into terrain so wild, it is used for military training. She waited nearly a month in the Maine woods for help that never came

Her last entry reflected a strikingly graceful acceptance of what was coming.

“When you find my body, please call my husband George and my daughter Kerry,”

The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.

Decades of rising revenue meant we could simultaneously become the research arm of government and industry, the training ground for a rapidly professionalizing workforce, and the preservers of the liberal arts tradition. Even better, we could do all of this while increasing faculty ranks and reducing the time senior professors spent in the classroom. This was the Golden Age of American academia.

Rising costs and falling subsidies have driven average tuition up over 1000% since the 1970s.

“Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal … such was the South at its best,” wrote W. J. Cash in his classic 1941 work, The Mind of the South. So far, so good—but Cash goes on to describe some less appealing but still quintessentially Southern traits, among them being “suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too-narrow sense of social responsibility.” And, of course, “too great an attachment to racial values”—or, so as not to mince words, racism.

Much as white Southerners despise being labeled “racist” whenever they vote Republican—and I do understand why that makes them mad—it is still a fact that you cannot separate anything in the South entirely from the question of race.

Plain and simple, it was white folks’ fear of black folks that explained the failure of a sales-tax hike to fund rapid rail in three of the then five counties making up the metro Atlanta area.