Middle-class Americans and the poor enjoyed their best year of economic improvement in decades in 2015, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, a spike that broke a years-long streak of disappointment for American workers but did not fully repair the damage inflicted by the Great Recession.

Real median household income was $56,500 in 2015, the bureau reported, up from $53,700 in 2014. That 5.2 percent increase was the largest, in percentage terms, recorded by the bureau since it began tracking median income statistics in the 1960s.

In addition, the poverty rate fell by 1.2 percentage points, the steepest decline since 1968. There were 43.1 million Americans in poverty on the year, 3.5 million fewer than in 2014. The share of Americans who lack health insurance continued a years-long decline, falling 1.3 percentage points, to 9.1 percent.

A combination of forces fueled the gains, including an improving job market, low inflation and rising wages, particularly for low-earning workers who may have benefited from state and local initiatives to boost minimum wages.

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Donald J. Trump has now driven home, in a way no apologist, enabler or timid analyst can plausibly deny, that he is far too nasty, immature and frighteningly undisciplined to be president.

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This should be a wake-up call to political analysts who have gone out of their way since Trump announced his candidacy to pretend that he was the ingenious creator of a political special sauce who deserved our respect for “speaking his mind.”[font color="red"] No, Trump all along has been a clinically self-involved con man who never took the issues, the presidency or the future of our country seriously.[/font] Can there be any doubt that his campaign is a branding exercise gone, quite literally, mad?

The first, interestingly, was an expression of pure paranoia about his own campaign. “Anytime you see a story about me or my campaign saying ‘sources said,’ DO NOT believe it. There are no sources, they are just made up lies!”

This, presumably, was a response to stories such as a New York Times account by Patrick Healy, Ashley Parker and Maggie Haberman based on conversations with Trump lieutenants. The Times had reported that Trump “found it hard to focus” during his shambolic debate preparations and that he “did not seem to pay attention during the practice sessions.” Not exactly the traits you want in a chief executive with power over our military, the FBI and the nuclear button.
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Antitrust law will probably never be the subject of breathless campaign coverage, at least not in this election year of a beauty queen and a leaked tax return. But it is one of the more powerful ways a president can shape the playing field of the United States economy.

That’s what makes Hillary Clinton’s new comments about corporate power and antitrust law important.

Her campaign has embraced an emerging line of thought in left-of-center economic circles: that a big part of what ails the United States economy are policies that have allowed the biggest companies to become too big and too powerful, resulting in less competition, less opportunity for entrepreneurship, and lower levels of investment and compensation for workers.

Notably, this is an area of economic policy in which the president has great leeway to act. If you want huge spending on public infrastructure or subsidies for college, Congress needs to agree; if you want more aggressive antitrust enforcement, you need only appoint the right people to key jobs at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.
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For more than a year, Donald Trump has said his genius as a businessman makes him uniquely qualified to fix the country’s problems. We can dispense with that fiction now that we know that he claimed a $916 million loss on his 1995 tax returns. Such a mammoth loss amounts to an epic failure, not runaway success.

It is not clear how Mr. Trump racked up this gigantic loss, worth about $1.4 billion in today’s dollars, because he refuses to release his tax returns. It probably had something to do with disastrous business ventures like his bankrupted Atlantic City casinos and the ill-fated acquisition of the Plaza Hotel.

What we do know is that this loss, reported by The Times this weekend, could be used to cancel out taxable income from other sources for up to 18 years, and therefore allow Mr. Trump to get out of paying federal and state taxes. Without more information, we can’t know if he paid nothing in income taxes for nearly two decades, but neither he nor his campaign have denied that he did this.

If Mr. Trump wanted to defend his tax practices, he could simply release his returns. But it seems that even for Mr. Trump, paying no taxes would be a political embarrassment. It would show that the government bailed him out of his catastrophically bad business decisions. Legal or not, this is the kind of handout no ordinary citizen could hope to get no matter how dire the circumstance.
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Plenty of blue-collar workers believe that, as president, Donald Trump would be ready to fight off U.S. trade adversaries and reinvigorate the country’s manufacturing industries through his commitment to the Rust Belt. What they likely don’t know is that Trump has been stiffing American steel workers on his own construction projects for years, choosing to deprive untold millions of dollars from four key electoral swing states and instead directing it to China—the country whose trade practices have helped decimate the once-powerful industrial center of the United States.

A Newsweek investigation has found that in at least two of Trump’s last three construction projects, Trump opted to purchase his steel and aluminum from Chinese manufacturers rather than United States corporations based in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. In other instances, he abandoned steel altogether, instead choosing the far-less-expensive option of buying concrete from various companies, including some linked to the Luchese and Genovese crime families. Trump has never been accused of engaging in any wrongdoing for his business dealings with those companies, but it’s true that the Mafia has long controlled much of the concrete industry in New York.

Throughout his campaign, Trump has maintained that some controversial decisions for his companies amounted to nothing more than taking actions that were good for business, and were therefore reflections of his financial acumen. But, with the exception of one business that collapsed into multiple bankruptcies, Trump does not operate a public company; he has no fiduciary obligation to shareholders to obtain the highest returns he can. His decisions to turn away from American producers were not driven by legal obligations to investors, but simply resulted in higher profits for himself and his family.

Of Trump’s last three construction projects, the first to use Chinese steel was Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, which opened in 2008. That the manufacturer is from China is not immediately evident; this fact is hidden within a chain of various corporate entities, including holding companies registered in the British Virgin Islands. That micro-state is a popular site for obscure off-shore entities that exist only on legal documents, limiting the potential liability of real businesses while obscuring their true owners.
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