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August 1, 2025
Trump’s trade deals have been surprising in their one-sidedness, in favor of the United States. The president’s supporters have painted this in a positive light. But it likely reflects two things. First, Trump is willing to impose more economic harm through higher tariffs on the U.S. than our trading partners are willing to impose on…
July 2, 2025
A quick look at some recent headlines shows that we have problems. The nation sharply and angrily divided along political lines. Rioters in the streets of Los Angeles. A destructive trade war. Debt and deficits at unsustainable levels. Those are real and serious problems (and not close to an exhaustive list). But the tenor of…
June 18, 2025
This paper is a chapter in the volume The Economic Consequences of the Second Trump Administration: A Preliminary Assessment, published by The Center for Economic and Policy Research. Introduction President Trump has stated many goals to justify his trade war. He has argued that tariffs on imports produce leverage that the US can use to reduce…
April 3, 2025
If implemented, the tariffs announced yesterday by President Trump would constitute the largest tax increase since the 1968 levies to fund the Vietnam War. The details will matter, but my back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the tariffs — which are taxes on imported goods — could be as large as 2 percent of annual GDP. This tax increase…
January 8, 2025
Abstract This paper studies how output prices are affected by increases in the minimum wage. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first examination of how the prices of an entire menu of items at a single business adjust in response to a minimum wage increase. Using data we gather from a fast-food…
December 17, 2024
Democratic capitalism is a system that marries liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. This union creates tensions, and requires balancing competing aims. But this tension is healthy, not destructive — provided that democracy and capitalism are properly balanced, each sphere reinforces the other. Over the long term, capitalism requires liberal politics; and democracy will not maintain…
December 5, 2024
With President Trump’s stunning return to power, Congress has the opportunity in 2025 to enact additional business tax cuts. One of their specific goals should be to make “full expensing” of business investment a permanent part of the tax code. By allowing businesses to deduct the full cost of investment in the year the spending…
November 21, 2024
Summary Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) promise to improve productivity significantly, but there are many questions about how AI could affect jobs and workers. Recent technical innovations have driven the rapid development of generative AI systems, which produce text, images, or other content based on user requests – advances which have the potential to complement…
November 19, 2024
Donald Trump’s stunning and decisive return to power makes it official: We live in the Age of Trump. The 2008 global financial crisis was a turning point in history, and it is now clear that Trump is the dominant political figure of the post-crisis period. Trump began his rise to power in 2015 and has…
October 21, 2024
Although protectionism has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in America, the public debate about it gets some basic facts wrong. Yes, trade is disruptive, but the US has been unwilling to take advantage of the opportunities generated by it and is instead trying in vain to recreate the jobs of the past. Washington,…