December 17, 2024
Industrial Policy and Deficits: Dark Clouds for Democratic Capitalism
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 13, 2024
Economics & Data-Driven Inquiry
At the behest of New College Florida and the Global Freedom Initiative, AEI scholar Kevin Corinth joined a distinguished group of scholars and practitioners for the Symposium on Ideological Capture of Universities and Institutions to discuss the ideological capture—or politicization—of America’s educational, professional, and political institutions. Dr. Corinth, along with co-panelists Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus…
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…
December 5, 2024
Inflation Reduction Act Offers a General Lesson against Industrial Policy
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…
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…
