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November 4, 2024
Again, Tariffs Didn’t Make American Manufacturing Great
Nationalist/populist conservatives, including the Republican nominee, claim that US economic history supports their views of trade protectionism. Donald Trump says “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and…
October 22, 2024
Poverty, Hardship, and Government Transfers
Abstract We examine how the well-being of those with few resources changed, amidst economic disruption and large, transitory government transfers. We find that in the years leading up to the…
June 20, 2024
The War on Poverty at 60: Lessons to Inform the Future
…Engineering, and Medicine argued that the supplemental poverty measure should be elevated to the nation’s headline poverty statistic. James Sullivan from the University of Notre Dame explained how a consumption…
April 9, 2024
The Child Tax Credit: My Long-Read Q&A with Kevin Corinth
…Pethokoukis: Kevin, welcome to the podcast. Corinth: Thanks for having me on, Jim. I want to talk about a couple of things, one of those things is a government program….
April 5, 2024
What’s Wrong with the US Economy? Anything?
Economists were expecting 200,000 net new jobs added in March. Instead it was 50 percent more. Unexpected strength, but maybe not so unexpected, really, for an economy that continues to deliver…
November 30, 2023
Evaluating the Success of the War on Poverty Since 1963 Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure
Abstract We evaluate progress in the War on Poverty as President Lyndon B. Johnson defined it, which established a 20% baseline poverty rate and adopted an absolute standard. While the…
October 31, 2023
It Takes Two
…matter. Furthermore, somewhat undermining her case, Kearney notes that research by Nobel laureate James Heckman has found that Denmark’s more expansive welfare state does not appear to translate into higher…
October 27, 2023
What Happened to the American Dream?
…from medicine to nuclear power. The recent book by the Reaganite economic writer Jim Pethokoukis, “The Conservative Futurist,” makes an extended version of this argument, tracing our era of stagnation…
August 22, 2023
Is Paid Leave a Pro-Growth Policy?
Some pro-growth public policies seem super obvious, like attracting more high-skill immigrants or reducing the federal paperwork needed to build clean energy facilities and infrastructure. Paid leave, whether mandated by…
August 21, 2023
Four Shocking Truths about the American Economy! (Well, Shocking to Some.)
I recently wrote a brief essay, “Generative AI and Economic Growth,” for Exponential View, the great newsletter by Azeem Azhar. And I knew one particular passage would be sure to raise…