“Trade wars are good, and easy to win,” tweeted Donald Trump when he threatened to slap tariffs on China and other nations he accused of “assaulting our country” last month.

Stock traders were spooked as China promised to retaliate. Commentators across the political spectrum warned of job losses, price increases, economic peril, and trade wars.

Progressives like Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren showed more sense, praising Trump for challenging China’s mercantilist policies, as did Conor Lamb, the surprise Democratic victor in the House special election in Pennsylvania.

Just because Trump denounces our “lousy trade deals” doesn’t mean Democrats have to defend them.

In fact, a majority of House Democrats has led the opposition to our corporate trade policies. Democrats torpedoed Obama’s Trans Pacific Partnership, long before Trump became president. They’ve demanded the renegotiation of NAFTA, and the Korean Free Trade Accord.

Virginia is inching closer to providing health care to 400,000 low-income residents after a key state Republican signaled this week that he was willing to split with his party and support Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

Virginia is among 18 states that has not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), leaving roughly 400,000 in a “coverage gap” — meaning, they’re uninsured because they make too much to qualify for Medicaid but too little for subsidized private insurance. But this year, the state legislature could change that, thus fulfilling a goal Democrats have been trying to accomplish for years.

Democrats need two Republicans in the state Senate to pass Medicaid expansion as part of the main budget — Republicans control 21 seats and Democrats 19 — and on Friday, state Sen. Frank Wagner (R) joined state Sen. Emmett W. Hanger Jr. (R) in saying that he was willing to support expansion on certain conditions.

Wagner wants, for example, to condition Medicaid eligibility on work and provide a more generous tax credit for those who buy insurance on Healthcare.gov. Hanger, on the other hand, wants to eliminate a hospital “bed tax,” which would be used to pay for the expansion.

Four months after Republicans in Congress passed the largest tax code overhaul in three decades, American corporations have gotten a huge tax cut.

New analysis from Americans for Tax Fairness, however, suggests these corporations aren’t using their recently freed up cash to help middle class workers like the administration said it would — more than 84 times.

The organization analyzed corporate data from primarily Fortune 500 companies, whose revenues are two-thirds of the entire gross domestic product (GDP), in addition to news reports and independent analyses of top U.S. companies. What they found was that these powerful corporations have spent a total of roughly $238,244,348,330 in stock buybacks since December 20, 2017 when the tax bill passed.

Working class Americans won’t see a penny of that.

Stock buybacks help those who own corporate stock, which typically means the already-rich. The wealthiest 10 percent of American households own 84 percent of all shares, while the top 1 percent own 40 percen. Roughly one-half of American households don’t own stock at all.

According to the data, few corporations have decided to use the savings from the tax bill to benefit their workers directly. Out of the over 1,500 companies from which Americans for Tax Fairness collected data, just 359 of them actually promised to increase wages for their employees. Of those that have, the majority only offered a bump of $15 an hour in entry-level pay — which, by all accounts, should already be what companies pay entry-level employees in a tightening labor market.

The teachers provide us with a teaching moment, over at WaPo. Their actions pose a stark reminder of the essential need for a strong, organized movement to push back on the forces promoting inequality, non-representative government, trickle down tax policy, and more.

CBO released their updated “baseline,” or estimate of the US gov’t’s fiscal outlook. If you like red ink, you’re in biz. Instead of deficits between 3 and 4% of GDP over the next few years, we’re looking at deficits of 4-5%.

As I’ve written in many places, when you’re closing in on full employment, you want your deficit/GDP to come down and your debt/GDP to stabilize and then fall. It’s not that I worry about “crowd out” so much–public borrowing hasn’t crowded out private borrowing for a long time, as evidenced by low, stable interest rates (rates are climbing off the mat a bit now, as I’d expect at this stage of the expansion).

It’s a) there’s a recession out there somewhere are we lack the perceived fiscal space to deal with it, and b) the larger point that this is all part and parcel of the strategy to starve the Treasury of revenues so as to force entitlement cuts.

Which brings me to this oped by a group of former Democratic chairs of the president’s CEA. It’s a perfectly reasonable call for a balanced approach to meeting our fiscal challenges, and, again, consistent with my view that as we close in on full employment, the deficit should move toward primary balance (another way of saying debt/GDP stabilization).

But two things from this piece, which is a critical response to an earlier oped by a “group of distinguished economists from the Hoover Institution.”

First, I didn’t realize that the Hoover’ites argued that the “entitlements are the sole cause of the problem, while the budget-busting tax bill that was passed last year is described as a ‘good first step.’”

This puts them in direct violation of the Bernstein Rule: if you supported the tax cut, you can’t complain about the deficit.