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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…

November 7, 2024

Introducing the “More Accurate Consumer Price Index”

Abstract Particularly since the 1990s, federal statistical agencies have worked to improve the ability ofvarious price indexes to measure changes in the cost of living. However, in recent years, somehave sent mixed signals to researchers about the relative merits of different measures. As aresult, academic and policy researchers routinely use theoretically and empirically inferior priceindexes…

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…

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….