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Mrs. Clinton’s substantial coffers mean that if she so chooses, she could spend an average of $7.6 million per day between Oct. 20 and Election Day.

Trump’s coffers have paled in comparison with Clinton’s.

In total, he’s given himself a little over $56 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which doesn’t come close to his “more than $100 million” pledge.

The Democratic National Committee asked a federal judge Wednesday to hold the Republican National Committee in contempt of court, claiming that Donald Trump and his campaign had violated a longstanding consent decree that bans the RNC from intimidating minority voters.

That connection places the RNC in direct violation of a 1982 consent decree that limits how Republican officials can challenge minority voter qualifications at the polls, the DNC argued.

“The RNC is working in active concert with Trump, the Trump campaign, and Stone to intimidate and harass minority voters in violation of this Court’s Consent Decree,” the DNC’s filing said. “The Court should use its inherent contempt powers to remedy those violations, and enforce future compliance with the Consent Decree, with sanctions.”

The RNC settled the lawsuit in 1982 and agreed to a consent decree that, among other conditions, required the party and its associates to “refrain from undertaking any ballot security activities…where the racial or ethnic composition of such districts is a factor” and “where a purpose or significant effect of such activities is to deter qualified voters from voting.”

“Frankly, if any Catholic votes for Hillary Clinton, if I were a Catholic, I wouldn’t be talking to them anymore,” Trump said. “She’s been terrible in what she said and her thoughts toward Catholics, and to evangelicals—she was mocking evangelicals, also. Why would an evangelical or a Catholic—and almost, you could say, anybody of faith—but in particular, because they were mentioned, evangelicals and Catholics, why would they vote for Hillary Clinton, and how could they vote for Hillary Clinton?”

For their part, Third Way representatives bristle at the idea they are doing the bidding of Wall Street power brokers.

The philosophy set out by Third Way will be part of that conversation.

Third Way raises just over a third of its $9.3 million annual budget from undisclosed corporations. The remainder, the bulk of its funding, is donated by individuals, almost all of whom are members of Third Way’s board of trustees.

Both Vogelstein and Heller were major financial backers of Obama, and all three contributed heavily to Senate Democrats.

“We’re not remotely aligned with what Wall Street wants,” said Jonathan Cowan, the group’s president and cofounder.

“It goes back to what Bill Clinton said, which is ‘You can’t love the job and hate the job creators,’ ” said Matt Bennett, Third Way’s vice president for public affairs and one of its cofounders. “Vilification of industry isn’t helping Democrats.”

They insist on deficit reduction and entitlement cuts as conditions for key tax hikes on the wealthy.

Third Way’s insistence on linking tax hikes to a grand bargain — which has been impossible to obtain in the Obama era — has a direct bearing on the wallets of the group’s wealthy funders.

“If the Democratic Party stands only for raising taxes on the wealthy, not for actually making entitlement reforms and other spending cuts,’’ he said, “then the other half of the equation will never happen.”

Bennett said it should not be characterized as a donation from Goldman Sachs, but as a personal contribution from Heller that was made through the Goldman charity.

Though Third Way does not report details of its contributions, some of its donors do so through private foundations.

Third Way’s 2012 tax filing. Peck Madigan, which did not respond to e-mailed questions, lobbies for several Wall Street-tied clients, including MasterCard, Deutsche Bank, and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.

She is, for instance, the first Democratic nominee in more than 20 years to be leading among those making over $100,000, according to a Bloomberg News poll. She clobbered Trump among millionaires by 13 points in a CNBC poll. She also has a 20-to-1 fundraising edge among billionaires, and an even bigger one among top corporate earners.

if we’re going by proposed tax policies alone, there really is no dispute about which candidate promises to most advance the interests of America’s 1 percent.

As the graphic shows, Clinton’s plan would raise taxes for the top 1 percent — those making over $730,000 — by an average of $123,570 a year. That number is a little misleading —

Overall, Clinton’s tax increases on the top 1 percent would increase revenue by somewhere in the order of $140 billion in 2017 alone. That money would then be funneled into an ambitious and extensive array of social welfare programs and other policy initiatives,

Among them include raising capital gains taxes, imposing a 4 percent surcharge on incomes over $5 million, advancing a new tax for incomes that surpass $1 million

Trump, meanwhile, would give the top 1 percent an extra cash cushion in the range of $162,000 a year.

Goldwein’s analysis is based on one think tank’s estimate of incomes for 2017, though Trump’s plan is based on a different think tank’s estimate of incomes for 2016.

The inaugural committee is a separate entity from the campaign and the transition, and can raise money as it sees fit, though donors and bundlers of $200 or more will be made public.

any and all funds raised above amounts needed to fund the Inaugural events will be donated to charitable organizations

"On November 9th our country began the peaceful transition to power that will culminate on January 20th, when our country will unite in celebrating freedom and democracy."

though he pledged to spend $100 million of his own money, never met that amount, giving less than $60 million

She’s also a woman who sells this image strategically. The white working-class Americans to whom Ms. Trump’s father directed many of his appeals hew more closely to traditional views of marital obligations and gender norms than those who are college educated, even as most working-class mothers are employed outside the home and are more likely to be raising children on their own.

Women expecting egalitarianism at home often feel hoodwinked by this new subtly sexist arrangement. Women expecting traditionalism find they’re stretched too thin by a belief that they should be the primary parent and an economic reality that demands their employment.

Women who maintain demanding careers and also believe they are chiefly responsible for managing the domestic front are much more stressed out than women whose partners share in both work and family duties, according to social science research. For white working-class families, where women often work out of necessity and who also believe in the importance of divergent responsibilities for men and women, that dissonance sows significant marital conflict.Least feminist of all: The “women who work” discourse adopted by Ms. Trump frames this all as a woman’s choice, rather than the predictable and deliberate outcome when feminist gains are warped by conservative public policy.

U.S. Treasurys, currently considered risk-free, are the benchmark of the global financial system. They enjoy safest-of-safe status precisely because creditors believe they’ll be paid back in full. Rattling the public’s faith in our creditworthiness would set off a crisis throughout the world. 

Mulvaney will probably be the most ideological and least-qualified OMB director in decades. (Mulvaney didn’t even serve on the House Budget Committee, which might help explain his superficial understanding of the debt ceiling.)

This is largely a demand driven phenomenon. People want 'fake news' (news which maximally confirms their beliefs and excites their fears, regardless of its accuracy) and because of that people will pop up to provide it

The Derek Black story is actually an instructive one. It was a slow product of persuasion, about who people are, about what's right and wrong that shifted his thinking and led him to question the factual claims embedded in the racist ideology he'd been raised on. It wasn't exposing him to fact-checks of racist ideology

For people whose agenda is journalism I don't think there's anything to do but do more and better journalism. I don't think journalism's job is to make people believe factual information. It's to provide it and in a reasoned, empirically demonstrated way

For people whose agenda is politics and political change, it is important not to be fooled by the limited importance of factual detail can have on political beliefs. It's changing the beliefs themselves. And that comes from persuasion about deeper beliefs about political rights and wrongs, interests, at the end of the day, ideology.

The converse of this is what got so many people so frustrated during the election. There was no end of information, basically undisputed, that Donald Trump was manifestly unfit to be president: too corrupt, too dishonest, too impulsive. And yet it just didn't matter. The other forces - a mix of intense support and the partisan reinforcement that took effect after he was the nominee - were more powerful.

we shouldn't be obsessing about "fake news." The impact of truly "fake news" - completely made up stories - is likely less than we imagine. But the power of tendentious and misleading propaganda is driven by political beliefs that are not so easily changed and only do change by persuasion, activism and organizing.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the upstart White House hopeful who has stirred the passions of liberals, made a final appeal for support in Philadelphia on Monday ahead of primaries that could render his already narrow path to the Democratic nomination virtually nonexistent.

“Honestly, it shows such total weakness, and it’s pathetic when two longtime insider politicians — establishment guys, whether you like it or not — have to collude, have to get together to try to beat a guy that really speaks what the people want,” Trump said during a campaign event in Warwick, R.I., on Monday

Trump, who has stirred outcry over remarks about women during the campaign, took sharper aim at Clinton, declaring she would be a “terrible president“ who is playing up the fact that she is a woman.

“Donald Trump says wages are too high in America and he doesn’t support raising the minimum wage,” Clinton said on Monday. “I have said come out of those towers named for yourself and actually come out and talk and listen to people.

“I call her crooked Hillary because she’s crooked and the only thing she’s got is the woman card. That’s all she’s got. . . . It’s a weak card in her hands,” Trump said on Fox. “I’d love to see a woman president, but she’s the wrong person. She’s a disaster.”

But less than 12 hours after the pact was announced, Kasich undercut the idea by declaring Monday that his supporters in Indiana should still vote for him. The Ohio governor also plans to keep raising money in the state and to meet Tuesday with Republican Gov. Mike Pence.

Cruz, meanwhile, said that Kasich was “pulling out” of the state. A super PAC supporting the senator from Texas also said it would continue to air an anti-Kasich ad in the state — a sign the Cruz camp fears Kasich could still peel away enough support to sink Cruz’s chances in Indiana.

And Cruz declared that his supporters should continue to cast ballots for him. He attempted to paint himself as the only candidate who could win both the primary and general elections. Trump, he said, could win the nomination but not the general election and Kasich could win the general election but not the primary.

The tumult fueled doubts about the arrangement among voters and Republican elites, who worried that Cruz and Kasich have handed Trump a ready-made argument that the party establishment is plotting against him. The mogul said as much in a series of stump speeches on the eve of primary voting.

Furthermore, both Reagan and Clinton inherited depressed economies, with unemployment well over 7 percent. This meant that there was a lot of economic slack, allowing rapid growth as the unemployed went back to work. Today, by contrast, unemployment is under 5 percent, and other indicators suggest an economy close to full employment. This leaves much less scope for rapid growth.

The only way we could have a growth miracle now would be a huge takeoff in productivity — output per worker-hour. This could, of course, happen: maybe driverless flying cars will arrive en masse. But it’s hardly something one should assume for a baseline projection.

belief that tax cuts and deregulation will reliably produce awesome growth isn’t unique to the Trump-Putin administration.

We heard the same thing from Jeb Bush (who?); we hear it from congressional Republicans like Paul Ryan. The question is why. After all, there is nothing — nothing at all — in the historical record to justify this arrogance.

Yes, Reagan presided over pretty fast growth. But Bill Clinton, who raised taxes on the rich, amid confident predictions from the right that this would cause an economic disaster, presided over even faster growth. President Obama presided over much more rapid private-sector job growth than George W. Bush, even if you leave out the 2008 collapse. Furthermore, two Obama policies that the right totally hated – the 2013 hike in tax rates on the rich, and the 2014 implementation of the Affordable Care Act – produced no slowdown at all in job creation.

Meanwhile, the growing polarization of American politics has given us what amount to economic policy experiments at the state level. Kansas, dominated by conservative true believers, implemented sharp tax cuts with the promise that these cuts would jump-start rapid growth; they didn’t, and caused a budget crisis instead. Last week Kansas legislators threw in the towel and passed a big tax hike.

At the same time Kansas was turning hard right, California’s newly dominant Democratic majority raised taxes. Conservatives declared it “economic suicide” — but the state is in fact doing fine.

It would be nice to pretend that we’re still having a serious, honest discussion here, but we aren’t. At this point we have to get real and talk about whose interests are being served.

Never mind whether slashing taxes on billionaires while giving scammers and polluters the freedom to scam and pollute is good for the economy as a whole; it’s clearly good for billionaires, scammers, and polluters.

And on such matters Donald Trump is really no worse than the rest of his party. Unfortunately, he’s also no better.

Sadly, and shockingly given where the U.S. used to stand in most rankings, few of the best practices foreign leaders want to emulate are any longer in the U.S.

Young Americans who see this country from different shores can't help but conclude that something is awry in a political culture that denies what they plainly see elsewhere: health care systems that provide better outcomes at lower cost and for everyone; better airports, faster trains, more extensive urban public transportation--and even, amazingly, better highways; more upward mobility (yes, the American dream is now more real in many other countries than it is here); more sustainable energy policies; elections that work more quickly and inexpensively, with more rational discourse and greater citizen participation. The list is long.

Consider some of the things that have fueled that American lantern of attraction for more than two centuries. Perhaps more than anything else, it has been the American Dream: the universal desire of all parents that their children will lead lives better than their own. This dream was given an American name, and not just in American dictionaries. But that dream is dying. And it can't be resuscitated if talented people sit on the political sidelines or don't attend the game at all. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, only 17 percent of Americans believe our national government possesses the consent of the governed. These numbers may not seem shocking, because they've been low for so long. But not always. In 1964, Pew found 77 percent of Americans expected their government to do "the right thing" most of the time.

One of the strongest indications of American democratic dysfunction is pervasive and expanding poverty. It is not just its existence in the richest country on earth that is shameful, but its utter absence from political discourse. Most of the poor don't vote; they have largely given up hope. And what national politician talks about poverty? Can you name any? America is moving toward the kind of bifurcated society we used to deride in banana republics--rich getting richer in gated communities, while the poor grow poorer, barely seen in segregated urban ghettos and hidden rural decay. Over 20 million Americans live in extreme poverty. One in 50 Americans' only income is food stamps. Add the poor and the near-poor--that is under $44K for a family of four--and you have more than 100 million people. The richest country in the world now has the highest rate of child poverty in the developed world. The U.S. has gone from being relatively egalitarian to one of the most unequal countries in the world.

hese are just a few signs that American government is broken. So why is it so broken? Let's consider the matter of money. When I left for Oxford in 1974, the total spent by all candidates for Congress, House and Senate, was $77 million. In 2010, it was $1.8 billion. Members of Congress spend up to 70 percent of their time raising money; that is their job; they become fundraisers far more than they are legislators. In that same year, 3 percent of retiring Congressmen became lobbyists. Now it's 50 percent of Senators, 42 percent of House members. Critics from the left and right and middle alike call our political finance system one of "legalized bribery."

our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent.

How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does.

What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.

Research has been difficult to quantify, Duma said, because “no one knows how many times or how hard players have been hit.” Until recently, it was common to hide or minimize concussions.

research has shown that the damage from concussions can be cumulative, and that the brains of younger athletes may be particularly susceptible.

if the country’s largest youth football organization were to outlaw all contact and go to a flag-football approach, about 90 to 95 percent of the players would leave and find tackle football elsewhere. He also predicted they would sustain concussions in other sports.

it reflects conservative belief in the magic of the marketplace, in the superiority of free-market competition over government planning.

despite many promises that prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings — as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded — “have simply not materialized.”

To the extent that private prison operators do manage to save money, they do so through “reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs.”

So what’s really behind the drive to privatize prisons, and just about everything else?

One answer is that privatization can serve as a stealth form of government borrowing, in which governments avoid recording upfront expenses (or even raise money by selling existing facilities) while raising their long-run costs in ways taxpayers can’t see. We hear a lot about the hidden debts that states have incurred in the form of pension liabilities; we don’t hear much about the hidden debts now being accumulated in the form of long-term contracts with private companies hired to operate prisons, schools and more.

Another answer is that privatization is a way of getting rid of public employees, who do have a habit of unionizing and tend to lean Democratic in any case.

But the main answer, surely, is to follow the money. Never mind what privatization does or doesn’t do to state budgets; think instead of what it does for both the campaign coffers and the personal finances of politicians and their friends. As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business

nonprivatized government has its own problems of undue influence, that prison guards and teachers’ unions also have political clout, and this clout sometimes distorts public policy. Fair enough. But such influence tends to be relatively transparent. Everyone knows about those arguably excessive public pensions; it took an investigation by The Times over several months to bring the account of New Jersey’s halfway-house-hell to light.

It is, instead, almost surely a glimpse of a pervasive and growing reality, of a corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage that is undermining government across much of our nation.

This may be the singular tragedy of the Obama administration. Five years later, it is clear to all fair-minded economists that the stimulus did work, and that it did enormous good for the economy and for tens of millions of people. But because it fell short of its goals, and was roundly ridiculed by Republicans and inadequately defended by Democrats, who should have trumpeted its success, the president’s stimulus plan is now widely considered a stumble.

This enabled Republicans to champion an austerity policy that produced deep reductions in discretionary spending, undoing many of the gains begun in 2009. The result has been a post-stimulus recovery that remains weak and struggling, undermining an economic legacy that should be seen as a remarkable accomplishment.

The legacy of that policy, detailed by the White House last week in its final report on the effects of the stimulus, affects virtually every American who drives, uses mass transit, or drinks water. It improved 42,000 miles of road, fixed or replaced 2,700 bridges, and bought more than 12,000 transit vehicles. It cleaned up water supplies, created the school reforms of the Race to the Top program, and greatly expanded the use of renewable energy and broadband Internet service.

its assessment echoes the views of many independent economists and the independent Congressional Budget Office. “The Recovery Act was not a failed program,” the C.B.O.’s director, Douglas Elmendorf, told annoyed Republican lawmakers in 2012. “Our position is that it created higher output and employment than would have occurred without it.”

Intel, founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, both physicists, began by building memory chips that were twice as fast as old ones. Sun Microsystems introduced a new kind of modular computer system, built by one of its founders, Andy Bechtolsheim. Their “big ideas” were expressed in physical products and grew out of their own technical expertise. In that light, Meraki, which came from Biswas’s work at M.I.T., can be seen as having its origins in the old guard. And it followed what was for decades the highway that connected academia to industry: Grad students researched technology, powerful advisers brokered deals, students dropped out to parlay their technologies into proprietary solutions, everyone reaped the profits. That implicit guarantee of academia’s place in entrepreneurship has since disappeared. Graduate students still drop out, but to start bike-sharing apps and become data scientists. That is, if they even make it to graduate school. The success of self-educated savants like Sean Parker, who founded Napster and became Facebook’s first president with no college education to speak of, set the template. Enstitute, a two-year apprenticeship, embeds high-school graduates in plum tech positions. Thiel Fellowships, financed by the PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel, give $100,000 to people under 20 to forgo college and work on projects of their choosing.

Much of this precocity — or dilettantism, depending on your point of view — has been enabled by web technologies, by easy-to-use programming frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Node.js and by the explosion of application programming interfaces (A.P.I.s) that supply off-the-shelf solutions to entrepreneurs who used to have to write all their own code for features like a login system or an embedded map. Now anyone can do it, thanks to the Facebook login A.P.I. or the Google Maps A.P.I.

One of the more enterprising examples of these kinds of interfaces is the start-up Stripe, which sells A.P.I.s that enable businesses to process online payments. When Meraki first looked into taking credit cards online, according to Biswas, it was a monthslong project fraught with decisions about security and cryptography. “Now, with Stripe, it takes five minutes,” he said. “When you combine that with the ability to get a server in five minutes, with Rails and Twitter Bootstrap, you see that it has become infinitely easier for four people to get a start-up off the ground.”

The sense that it is no longer necessary to have particularly deep domain knowledge before founding your own start-up is real; that and the willingness of venture capitalists to finance Mark Zuckerberg look-alikes are changing the landscape of tech products. There are more platforms, more websites, more pat solutions to serious problems

There’s a glass-half-full way of looking at this, of course: Tech hasn’t been pedestrianized — it’s been democratized. The doors to start-up-dom have been thrown wide open. At Harvard, enrollment in the introductory computer-science course, CS50, has soared

many of the hottest web start-ups are not novel, at least not in the sense that Apple’s Macintosh or Intel’s 4004 microprocessor were. The arc of tech parallels the arc from manufacturing to services. The Macintosh and the microprocessor were manufactured products. Some of the most celebrated innovations in technology have been manufactured products — the router, the graphics card, the floppy disk

One of Stripe’s founders rowed five seat in the boat I coxed freshman year in college; the other is his older brother. Among the employee profiles posted on its website, I count three of my former teaching fellows, a hiking leader, two crushes. Silicon Valley is an order of magnitude bigger than it was 30 years ago, but still, the start-up world is intimate and clubby, with top talent marshaled at elite universities and behemoths like Facebook and Google.

Part of the answer, I think, lies in the excitement I’ve been hinting at. Another part is prestige. Smart kids want to work for a sexting app because other smart kids want to work for the same sexting app. “Highly concentrated pools of top talent are one of the rarest things you can find,” Biswas told me, “and I think people are really attracted to those environments.

The latter source of frustration is the phenomenon of “the 10X engineer,” an engineer who is 10 times more productive than average. It’s a term that in its cockiness captures much of what’s good, bad and impossible about the valley. At the start-ups I visit, Friday afternoons devolve into bouts of boozing and Nerf-gun wars. Signing bonuses at Facebook are rumored to reach the six digits. In a landscape where a product may morph several times over the course of a funding round, talent — and the ability to attract it — has become one of the few stable metrics.

there is a surprising amount of angst in Silicon Valley. Which is probably inevitable when you put thousands of ambitious, talented young people together and tell them they’re god’s gift to technology. It’s the angst of an early hire at a start-up that only he realizes is failing; the angst of a founder who raises $5 million for his company and then finds out an acquaintance from college raised $10 million; the angst of someone who makes $100,000 at 22 but is still afraid that he may not be able to afford a house like the one he grew up in.

San Francisco, which is steadily stealing the South Bay’s thunder. (“Sometime in the last two years, the epicenter of consumer technology in Silicon Valley has moved from University Ave. to SoMa,” Terrence Rohan, a venture capitalist at Index Ventures, told me

Both the geographic shift north and the increasingly short product cycles are things Jim attributes to the rise of Amazon Web Services (A.W.S.), a collection of servers owned and managed by Amazon that hosts data for nearly every start-up in the latest web ecosystem.Continue reading the main story

now, every start-up is A.W.S. only, so there are no servers to kick, no fabs to be near. You can work anywhere. The idea that all you need is your laptop and Wi-Fi, and you can be doing anything — that’s an A.W.S.-driven invention.”

This same freedom from a physical location or, for that matter, physical products has led to new work structures. There are no longer hectic six-week stretches that culminate in a release day followed by a lull. Every day is release day. You roll out new code continuously, and it’s this cycle that enables companies like Facebook, as its motto goes, to “move fast and break things.”

A few weeks ago, a programmer friend and I were talking about unhappiness, in particular the kind of unhappiness that arises when you are 21 and lavishly educated with the world at your feet. In the valley, it’s generally brought on by one of two causes: coming to the realization either that your start-up is completely trivial or that there are people your own age so knowledgeable and skilled that you may never catch up.

These days, a new college graduate arriving in the valley is merely stepping into his existing network. He will have friends from summer internships, friends from school, friends from the ever-increasing collection of incubators and fellowships.

As tech valuations rise to truly crazy levels, the ramifications, financial and otherwise, of a job at a pre-I.P.O. company like Dropbox or even post-I.P.O. companies like Twitter are frequently life-changing. Getting these job offers depends almost exclusively on the candidate’s performance in a series of technical interviews, where you are asked, in front of frowning hiring managers, to whip up correct and efficient code.

Moreover, a majority of questions seem to be pulled from undergraduate algorithms and data-structures textbooks, which older engineers may have not laid eyes on for years.