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April 9, 2025
Trump’s Tariff Formula Is Still Wrong. Maybe That’s Why No One Will Admit They Created It.
Last Friday, we showed that the Trump Administration’s tariff formula contained an error that made its calculated tariffs up to four times too large. The entire premise of the administration’s approach—that a country’s tariff and non-tariff trade barriers can be derived solely from the bilateral trade balance with that country, and that the goal of…
April 4, 2025
President Trump’s Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It’s Also Based on an Error.
President Trump on Wednesday announced tariffs on practically every foreign country (and some non-countries), ranging from a 10 percent minimum all the way up to 50 percent. The economic fallout has been dramatic, with the stock market losing nine percent of its value (based on the S&P 500 index at the time of writing) and…
March 13, 2025
Two Charts Show Why a Trade War Over Fentanyl Doesn’t Make Sense
Following a month-long pause, President Trump last week reimposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico, only to pause many of them again two days later. Different reasons have been offered by the Trump Administration for the tariffs, but in recent days the President’s advisers have honed in on one reason in particular: Fentanyl is being shipped across our borders with…
January 7, 2025
More Skilled Immigrants for More Economic Growth
The recent appointment of venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan, an Elon Musk ally, to the incoming Trump administration sparked controversy on X (formerly Twitter) among MAGA supporters. The conflict arose from Krishnan’s past support for removing green card country caps for skilled immigrants, a position aligned with Silicon Valley but controversial among some Trump supporters. Amid this debate,…
December 5, 2024
More High-Skill Immigration Is Popular. Let’s Act on That
This might be one of the most underappreciated facts of American public opinion: As controversial as the subject of immigration is, high-skill immigration isn’t controversial at all. A Pew Research Center poll in September found 71 percent of Donald Trump supporters and 87 percent of Kamala Harris supporters favored admitting more high-skilled immigrants. Likewise, a survey last summer from…
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 that America “in the 1890s was probably the wealthiest it ever was” because of its tariff system. First, per capita GDP is, conservatively, seven times higher…
April 17, 2024
Fiscal Sanity Please, Senators
The Wyden-Smith tax bill, which combines an expanded child tax credit (CTC) with a variety of business tax breaks, has been in limbo in the Senate for the past three months. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised to bring up the bill if there’s enough support, but so far, these votes have not been forthcoming…
April 10, 2024
The Political Landmines Buried in the Latest Jobs Report
CNN on Friday dubbed the latest monthly jobs report a “blowout,” pointing to 303,000 net new jobs created in March. President Joe Biden immediately claimed credit, saying the report “marks a milestone in America’s comeback,” as it indicates a total of “15 million jobs created since I took office.” Meanwhile, the latest data confirm that most…
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 surprise after surprise. It’s been a great run lately for economic optimists: real wage gains, faster labor productivity, and gobs of jobs. A tight summary…
February 12, 2024
Millennials Are Doing Better than You Probably Think
“Each generation is worse off than the one before.” It’s one of the primary tenets of the notion that American capitalism has failed and that we live in the final days of “late capitalism.” But have things really been all downhill since the Boomers became adults? Maybe not, according to the new study “Has Intergenerational…