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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…
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,…
October 18, 2024
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris seem to agree that one of the nation’s most important challenges should remain unaddressed — a problem that has been slowly eroding the foundations of economic prosperity for decades. That problem? The national debt. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reports that federal debt held by the public averaged 48.3 per…
October 17, 2024
AEI Scholar and Director of Economic Policy Studies Michael R. Strain contributed to the Dispatch’s Symposium titled Economic Policy Experts: Doom, Thy Name Is Populism, as a group of experts outlined the many ways in which either potential administration’s populism could lead to poor policy and worse economic outcomes. Below is a section from Michael R. Strain contribution….
October 15, 2024
In my new paper for the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, I argue: The protectionism, trade wars, and industrial policies of the Trump and Biden administrations have not succeeded at meeting their goals and likely will not succeed at meeting their goals. They have caused manufacturing employment to decline, not to increase. They have not reduced the…
October 9, 2024
An influential 2013 paper by economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson finds an average reduction in manufacturing employment of 90,000 jobs per year from 1990 to 2007 because of U.S. competition with imports from China. Those economists published another important paper, along with economists Daron Acemoglu and Brendan Price, that found import growth from China led to…
September 5, 2024
Have populist politics gotten so out of control that politicians believe they need to hurt Pennsylvania’s workers in order to win Pennsylvania’s electoral votes? Yesterday, the Washington Post reported: President Joe Biden is preparing to announce that he will formally block Nippon Steel’s proposed $14.9 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel, according to three people with knowledge of the…
June 26, 2024
Editor’s note: This is one of a pair of essays responding to the Economic Innovation Group’s report, “The American Worker: Toward a New Consensus”, by Adam Ozimek, John Lettieri, and Benjamin Glasner. The other is by Paul Krugman of the New York Times. To the Economic Innovation Group’s attempt to articulate a “new consensus” about the American…
June 10, 2024
Populism has infected both major parties in the United States, leading to policies that previous generations of economic policymakers would immediately recognized as foolhardy and counter-productive. But whether the country can escape its self-destructive pessimism is anyone’s guess. WASHINGTON, DC – The past decade has brought a sea change in US economic policy, and not…
June 4, 2024
The steep tariff increases on Chinese goods that US President Joe Biden’s administration recently announced are just the latest in a long string of interventionist economic policies that fly in the face of decades of neoliberal orthodoxy. And the Biden administration is hardly alone: a growing number of governments, economists, and institutions are rethinking the…