WASHINGTON — Three weeks after it looked like Donald Trump could challenge Hillary Clinton in Michigan, it now appears the Republican nominee may have squandered that chance with a poor debate performance, revelations about his taxes and erratic behavior on the campaign trail, an exclusive new Free Press/WXYZ-TV poll shows.

The poll showed Clinton, the Democratic nominee and former secretary of state, regaining an 11-percentage-point lead over Trump, 43%-32%, and clawing back levels of support among key voting blocs including women, African Americans and millennials. It came less than a month after a more-disciplined Trump had closed the gap to 3 percentage points in Michigan, which hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential nominee since 1988.

Now, with less than five weeks until the Nov. 8 election, Trump, a businessman, real estate mogul and reality TV star, may have a tough time trying to take back the momentum in a key battleground state; with his already high negative ratings climbing even higher and segments of the public he was counting on to win — men and voters with a high school diploma or less education — not backing him as strongly as was expected, at least not for now.



“The race is much more settled now no matter what demographic group you’re looking at,” said Bernie Porn {"Porn"??_B USA}, the pollster for Lansing-based EPIC-MRA, which performed the survey for the Free Press, WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) and their outstate partners. “It’s hard to imagine (Clinton losing Michigan) unless Hillary has a health (or some other) issue … I think the perceptions of Trump are pretty baked in.”
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Few issues have moved more quickly from fringe to consensus than the “Fight for $15.” When colleagues and I suggested at a Democratic political conference in early November 2012 that we should raise the minimum wage to $15, people in the audience literally laughed. When New York City fast-food workers first walked off the job two weeks later demanding a $15 minimum wage (more than twice the federal $7.25 rate, both then and now), the number was widely dismissed as overreaching and symbolic — a mere bargaining tactic on the part of workers who had little if any bargaining power at all. Nobody predicted what would follow. As an early and vocal advocate for $15, even I was surprised by how fast the dominoes would fall.


But as remarkable as this political progress has been, the political rhetoric surrounding the minimum wage remains surprisingly unchanged. Minimum wage opponents continue to deride every proposed increase as a surefire job killer, while reporters and pundits reliably characterize the passage of every minimum wage ordinance and statute as a dangerous experiment that threatens to harm the very people it’s intended to help. “California makes itself a guinea pig in a massive and risky minimum wage experiment,” tweeted the New York Times’s Noam Scheiber. “Raising minimum wage risky,” the Lexington, Kentucky Herald Leader’s headline tersely warned its readers following $15 victories in faraway California and New York. “Raising minimum wage hurts low-skill workers,” the Detroit News bluntly chimed in. “Even left-leaning economists say it’s a gamble,” Vox solemnly cautioned (without actually managing to cite a single left-leaning economist willing to pejoratively editorialize $15 as a “gamble.”)

No one captured this conventional economic orthodoxy better than Noah Smith, a very smart economist and writer for Bloomberg. Smith, in an article titled “Finally, an Answer to the Minimum Wage Question,” welcomed “the fact that, finally, we’ll have some data on how the $15 minimum wage would affect jobs.” In his article, Smith said he considered it a test because “in theory a higher minimum wage should cause increased unemployment.” Smith’s implication is that we have never run a minimum wage experiment before and that the increase is unprecedented in economic history. But the core assumption of Smith’s piece is a so-called “economic theory” — asserted as if it is a law of nature — that if the minimum wage goes up, employment must come down.

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But the confidence of the doomsayers and the anxiety of the pundits might make more sense to me if they hadn’t been making the same dire predictions since the minimum wage was invented 78 years ago — or if at least some of these dire predictions had actually managed to come true. In fact, contrary to the cautionary headlines, there is nothing “experimental” about raising the minimum wage. The federal minimum wage has been raised 22 times since it was first established in 1938 (state and local minimum wages have been raised hundreds of times), sometimes by as much as 87.5 percent in a single year — far less than the annual increases $15 advocates propose. So if the minimum wage opponents were correct, it should be incredibly easy to find overwhelming empirical evidence that minimum wage hikes cause the job losses they always predict:
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Only serious nerds like me eagerly await the annual Census Bureau reports on income, poverty and health insurance. But the just-released reports on 2015 justified the anticipation.

We expected good news; but last year, it turns out, the economy partied like it was 1999. And this tells us something very important — namely, that a government that wants to can make American society more equitable, improving the quality of life for ordinary families.

The reports showed strong progress on three fronts: rapid growth in the incomes of ordinary families — median income rose a remarkable 5.2 percent; a substantial decline in the poverty rate; and a significant further rise in health insurance coverage after 2014’s gains. It was a trifecta that we haven’t hit since, yes, 1999.

It’s true that the surge in median income comes after years of disappointment, and even now the typical family’s income, adjusted for inflation, is slightly lower than it was before the financial crisis. But the percentage of Americans without health insurance is now at a record low. And the overall performance of the Obama economy has given the lie to much of the criticism leveled at President Obama’s policies.
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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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Hillary Clinton is seeing the benefits of her strong debate performance in battleground state polls released Thursday and Friday.

In Nevada, a Suffolk University poll released Friday found Clinton had the support of 44% of likely voters while Donald Trump had 38%. Libertarian Gary Johnson had 7%. Clinton’s boost in Nevada shows a surge past previous polls in the state in recent weeks which had Trump ahead by a percentage point or two. The poll of 500 likely Nevada voters was conducted Sept. 27-29 and has a margin of error of 4.4 points.

In New Hampshire, a WBUR-FM poll had Clinton 9 points ahead of Trump with likely voters in a two-way race, 47%-38%. When third party candidates are added the lead narrows slightly to 7 points. Clinton had 42%, Trump had 35%. Johnson had 13% backing and the Green Party's Jill Stein had 4%.

The numbers released Friday are a few points better for Clinton than polling in early September that indicated a tighter race. The telephone poll of 502 likely New Hampshire voters was conducted Sept. 27-29 and has a margin of error of 4.4 points.

And a Detroit News/WDIV-TV poll released late Thursday showed Clinton with a 7-point lead over Trump in both a head-to-head matchup and four-way field with Johnson and Stein. In the four-way race Clinton had 42%, Trump had 35%, Johnson had the support of 9% of Michigan likely voters and Stein had 3%. Just under one-tenth (9%) are undecided.
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Donald Trump’s charitable foundation — which has been sustained for years by donors outside the Trump family — has never obtained the certification that New York requires before charities can solicit money from the public, according to the state attorney general’s office.

Under the laws in New York, where the Donald J. Trump Foundation is based, any charity that solicits more than $25,000 a year from the public must obtain a special kind of registration beforehand. Charities as large as Trump’s must also submit to a rigorous annual audit that asks — among other things — whether the charity spent any money for the personal benefit of its officers.

If New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) finds that Trump’s foundation raised money in violation of the law, he could order the charity to stop raising money immediately. With a court’s permission, Schneiderman could also force Trump to return money that his foundation has already raised.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
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