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December 3, 2024
The ‘Fentanyl Election’ Is Over. Now What?
Was 2024 the “fentanyl election”? A recent article in The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells suggests that the effect of the drug crisis on certain communities made their residents more likely to vote for Donald Trump. Perhaps this was another so-called sleeper issue. Though voters didn’t mention it like they did the economy and democracy, the issue…
November 21, 2024
A Local Option for Natural Gas Fracking
The 2024 election was a referendum on a wide range of issues, but there’s no doubt that increasing domestic fossil-fuel production—“energy dominance,” as Donald Trump now calls it—was on the ballot and won. Kamala Harris backed away from her past calls to ban fracking but nonetheless lost Pennsylvania, where voters seemed to doubt her sudden…
November 19, 2024
A Trump Boom?
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 29, 2024
The Black Men’s Burden Harris Ignores
In an attempt to shore up support among black male voters, Kamala Harris proposed small-business loans and training programs aimed at steering them toward “high-paying jobs.” Whatever the virtues of her plans, they overlook a real-world situation facing millions of black men: the combination of a prison record and daunting child-support payments they had no way of…
October 21, 2024
US Tariffs Will Not Bring Back Jobs from China
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
Harris and Trump Are Equally Silent on the Expanding US Debt
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
Harris’ Tax Plans Would Reduce Long-Term Prosperity. Trump’s Proposals Might Be Even Worse.
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
Why Should the US Wish to Be More Like China?
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
Learning the Right Lessons from the “China Shock”
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…
October 3, 2024
Stop the insanity. Our national debt now tops $35 trillion…
America’s political leaders have a spending problem. They know entitlement programs feature benefit promises far exceeding their tax base, but have done nothing to make them sound. Meanwhile, both parties demand more spending increases — despite the national debt soaring to $35 trillion, or more than $100,000 for each American, rich and poor alike. Under rosy assumptions, over $20 trillion in…