Economics

The fundamentals are still strong. But the stock market collapse is on the president's thumbs.

The president has elected himself to GM's management team.

Conservatives play an essential role as gatekeepers. Vetting some of the left's perspectives and ideas, even in this polarized environment, could resonate with their base.

The future only looks bad.

I was raised in one and have spent much of my career researching them. My findings have shown positive life outcomes—reflecting my own.

An all-time classic puts the future of the NFL on display. Plus: The NYT advocates for price controls, but not on newspapers; and how Donald Trump is like a cornerback.

An all-time classic puts the future of the NFL on display. Plus: The NYT advocates for price controls, but not on newspapers; and how Donald Trump is like a cornerback.

Ten years after the financial crisis, Robert F. Bruner surveys the best books on what went wrong and what still should be fixed.

Unless political peace breaks out, the only way Democrats and Republicans can meet interest payments is to let inflation rip, devalue the dollar.

Plus, one easy way to kill a platform.

If things can't get better, does that mean they have to get worse?

How a good economy might not help the GOP this time but a downturn could cause pain in 2020.

Maybe not.

He didn't start it, but he's joining it.

Trump said he would erase America's debt in 8 years. It's now bigger than ever.

We now know why President Obama had to struggle so hard to spur the economy and allow it to grow more than 2 percent a year. And that was the high-water mark. In the last quarter of his presidency, growth had slipped to 1.5 percent. Today it’s obvious what Obama’s problem was. He had the wrong…

The bankruptcy of the original everything store tells us a lot about where America is going.

Donald Trump wants Jay Powell to stop raising rates. Like, now.

The USMCA is more than just a rebranded NAFTA. It's the shape of things to come.

Don't look now, but gas prices are climbing.

Bailouts, inflation, and tariffs—oh my!

A guide for the perplexed.

The politics of protectionism mean it's here to stay.

“Oh, when will they ever learn?” asked Pete Seeger in 1955. Surely not by 2008, when Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest bank in America, was forced to file for bankruptcy after 158 years in business because Wall Street titans had failed to learn the lesson of crises past: that they must all hang…

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

The Fed chairman stands up to President Trump at Jackson Hole.

The senator's Accountable Capitalism Act is economically questionable, and the latest example of a policy platform that amounts to a host of strictures, regulations, and oversights by the state.

Michael M. Rosen reviews Michael Best’s ‘How Growth Really Happens’ and asks what we can learn from past economic booms.

It's Trump's economy against the rest of the world—and as of now, America is winning.

In an Iowa metal shop, the booming economy is hiding the effects of Trump’s tariffs.

With the November congressional elections only 87 days away, Donald Trump has added to his revolutionary use of tweets what might prove to be an outdated reliance on two old-fashioned electoral winners to pull Republican candidates through tough elections: a booming economy and promise-keeping.…

Growth trumps decline. That’s what President Trump is gambling on to hand him victory if the trade skirmish morphs into a trade war. The U.S. economy is growing at an annual rate of 4.1 percent and continues to create jobs. According to yesterday’s jobs report, the economy added 157,000 new jobs in…

Hosted by Charlie Sykes

On July 25, 2018, at approximately 3:00 p.m. eastern daylight time, the tweets fell silent, and a truce was declared on the European front of the trade war between the United States and, well, the rest of the world. President Donald Trump of the United States of America, and President Jean-Claude…

The left-wing organization MoveOn subjected itself to ridicule this week by posting a message to its social media accounts: “Low wages are violence. Knowingly letting people suffer is violence. It must end.” The attached graphic had to do with the minimum wage, which the staff at MoveOn in their…

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

Lots of good news last week. "The economy is as good as it’s ever been, ever. . . . People can’t believe what’s happening,” says President Trump, abandoning his usual preference for understatement. Economic growth “may be 4 percent for a quarter or two” Larry Kudlow, the president’s economic…

The New York Times recently ran an article, "How Much Will the Trade War Cost a Typical American Family? Around $60 (So Far)", that shows how broad is the misunderstanding of President Trump’s tariffs. Roughly speaking the article added up the cost assuming everybody keeps buying from China. But…

There are better ways than tariffs to get concessions.

We've reached tit-for-tat-for-tit in the president's trade war.

Even those without a college degree who are seeking work are doing well.

The American economic expansion, heading into its tenth year, still has room to run. So say some of the best regarded pundits. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimates that in the second quarter the economy has grown at an annual rate of 3.8 percent. Too gloomy a guess for forecasters at…

Trump knows when to hold ‘em and knows when to fold ‘em, knows when to walk away and knows when to run, as Kenny Rogers advised all poker players. He was holding a losing hand when it came to handling the children brought to America illegally by mothers crossing the border illegally, so he folded…

Nothing good is likely to come from Trump’s tariffs.

On this latest micro episode, the Substandard breaks down the battle between MoviePass and now AMC Stubs A-List. JVL insists AMC Stubs membership has its privileges. Sonny and Vic remain skeptical. And question! Are there really three good movies to see each week?

Elon Musk is in the news. (Again.) The latest announcement came last Thursday when Musk’s Boring Company signed a contract with the city of Chicago to build an "express loop" from O'Hare Airport to the city's downtown. In one important way, the deal is wholly unlike most of Musk's other projects—it…

Economy watchers can’t seem to find anything to worry about, with the possible exception of a trade war that few believe will happen. The economy is growing, unemployment is down, labor force participation is up, inflation is hitting Fed targets, the stock market shrugs at bad news and embraces the…

The world needs more of it, not less.

Plus, go inside the converted Walmart that houses immigrant kids.

Understanding the economics of MAGA.

No, we are not in the midst of a trade war. A trade scuffle, surely. But not a war. At least not yet.

People have been forecasting the end of the euro since the currency came into being in the late 1990s. Yet the euro has survived five sovereign bailouts—including three successive ones of Greece (the continent’s most troubled economy)—and two bank rescues aimed at Spanish and Cypriot banks. The…

The great American job-creating machine, already in high gear, picked up in May, when the economy added 223,000 jobs—over 50,000 more than experts had predicted.

The pendulum swings.

Remember the good old days when experts decided that the power of the OPEC oil cartel to control oil prices had come to an end? That fracking had made the United States the swing producer, ramping up production any time prices started to rise? That the future of the world’s economy would be based…

For over a decade there has been a trade war between China and America, with America playing the role of passive victim. China has required American firms investing in its country to take on a Chinese partner and turn over their technology, which it agreed not to do when it joined the World Trade…

Stamping out the next great cure is one bad economic policy away.

A yearly Government Accountability Office report on NASA’s major projects outlined on Tuesday several challenges that the space agency faces, including cost growth and launch schedule delays. But the report also addressed a more complex topic: NASA’s aging workforce.

Every week brings news of some fresh campus absurdity—tenured professors saying and doing idiotic things, students cursing and attacking speakers while college authorities do nothing about it, schools proudly denying students due process. When news circulated recently that Penn State has forbidden…

A record number of signal-callers goes top-10. Plus: Misleading studio flicks, and breaking down the world one decimal point at a time.

You’ve got to admit it’s getting better.

A possible record number of QBs will be taken in the NFL Draft's first round (and there's a chance that analysts will really, really like the picks). Plus: Why teams make seemingly inconsequential trades.

Never say Never. That’s what some of the Never Trumpers are saying, and even more are thinking. Both in private. They are afflicted with a nagging suspicion. Trump might, how shall they whisper it, Make America Great Again.

The White House aims at Chinese trade practices, hits Americans.

It’s almost as if a tight labor supply helps workers.

The false panacea of taxing online retail sales.

Seers at the Congressional Budget Office are guessing that due largely to the recent tax cuts, the economy will grow at an annual rate of 3.3 percent this year and 2.4 percent in 2019. Federal Reserve Board monetary policy gurus agree, and expect the tax cuts and the recent budget deal to give the…

"I will do such things, what they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth."

We don't hear much from Donald Trump about the stock market these days. Odd, that. There was a time when he took credit for its spectacular rise after his election. "The reason our stock market is so successful is because of me. I've always been great with money." Perhaps he has been absorbed with…

“Believe me,” said—well, not really “said,” but posted—Mark Zuckerberg. Raising Chico Marx’s old question, Who are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes?

"What would a Das Kapital look like if written today?" may sound like a query that is more than a tad contrived, but in the hands of Rupert Younger and Frank Portnoy, who posed the question in a remarkable piece in the Financial Times recently, the conceit actually works quite well.

“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” wrote Shakespeare. Although the odds that President Trump was reminded of that observation when re-reading The Tempest must be regarded as low, they are somewhat higher that he might at one time have stumbled across the modern variant, about…

Moving forward while backing down is no small feat. But the president managed it last week. On live TV.

What do a priest, a politician, and T. Boone Pickens have in common? You would think this is me talking about a weird thing I saw in a bar in Oklahoma once but it isn’t. (I’ve never been to Oklahoma nor would the good citizens of The Sooner State want me there.) The answer is they all have a profit…

President Donald Trump’s chief economist was grilled by lawmakers on the administration’s trade policy on Wednesday amid rising concern on Capitol Hill about the potential negative impacts of new steel and aluminum tariffs which have been put forward by the White House.

President Trump’s recent decision to slap huge new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum is certain to wreak havoc on the American economy. So we argued last week when the decision was announced: Tariffs often make plenty of political sense but penalize domestic industries no less than foreign…

Sunday morning on ABC News’ This Week, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross made two basic errors discussing Donald Trump's new trade proposals: He understated both the immediate harm of President Trump’s steel and aluminum import tariffs and the future harm from possible retaliatory actions by America’s…

Jay Powell and Donald Trump combined last week to shake investors to their core.

In August, Oliver Schmidt pled guilty to helping Volkswagen evade clean air laws with special software that tricked emissions tests. The software worked even with cars whose emissions were 30 times higher than normally allowed.

To ask coherence of President Trump is to ask too much of a man with the attention span of a tweet, and for whom cognitive dissonance is not something he spends nights losing sleep over. So we have had large tax cuts, putting money into the pockets of consumers, which will enable them to increase…

In 2007, Warren Buffett took a $1 million bet on an investment. He won. In his annual letter to Berkshire-Hathaway investors, made public on Saturday, he detailed the wager’s final tallies.

Hurricanes Irma and Maria strafed much of the island of Puerto Rico and worsened what was already a perilous fiscal problem facing the island’s government. However, a reconstruction program that has finally kicked into high gear helped its surprisingly robust economy bounce back, and the employment…

The Scrapbook takes a fairly dim view of the field known as “economic development.” We’re not opposed to governments facilitating economic growth when they can, but there are very few things government can do, proactively, to spur economic activity—though we can think of many, many things…

On Tuesday, Walmart’s value, as reflected in its stock price, dropped by more than 10 percent. That’s nearly $31 billion. It had a bad quarter and in no small part suffered as a result of complications with its online inventory restocking system—it ran out of some items in demand and so couldn’t…

The president is setting the theme for the November congressional elections: We—he prefers “I” but might deign to share credit with Republican incumbents—have upped the pace of economic growth from below 2 percent to above 3 percent, created millions of new jobs, and cut taxes to put more money in…

What should be the requirements for the next vice-chair of the Federal Reserve? At present these are elementary, I believe, and each one points to the same person.

At first blush, universal basic income sounds like something dreamed up on a California commune or in a late-night college bull session. The idea: Just give people money. Ask nothing in return. Impose no requirement to work or to look for work. And don’t just give taxpayer money to people living in…

The bad news is that share prices have been plummeting, wiping billions in value off the holdings of investors and pension funds. The good news is that share prices are plummeting by thousands of points on the Dow, taking froth off markets and restoring monetary policy to its proper place in our…

So regulation is not always a bad idea after all.

Rarely have both exuberance and anxiety run simultaneously at the high pitch evident these days at gatherings of investors. The exuberants are the noisiest right now. Trump tax cuts have produced a surge in business after-tax profits—which even before the tax cuts were up double digits compared…

Blow out the candles and cut the cake! On February 4 Jerome Powell will turn 65. The day before, he’ll replace Janet Yellen as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the first non-economist to hold the title in 40 years.

The New Normal. Slow growth. Persistently low inflation threatening to morph into Japanese-style deflation. Stagnant wages. Rising inequality. The American Dream converted to a nightmare. All the result of the metastasizing of the regulatory and entitlement states, say the Republicans. No, it’s the…

As far as lunch deals go, Subway’s $5 footlong sandwich has been a hit with consumers. The company sees the promotion as a way to revive interest in its restaurants, which have struggled to attract diners in the last few years. In January, Subway brought the deal back for a limited time and now…

“Forgive me Lord, for I knew not what I was doing.”

If Trump set your teeth on edge in 2017, prepare for a grinding 2018. The story coming out of the White House is that the need to garner congressional support for his tax cut forced the president to restrain his reformist-populist-belligerent instincts until his signature legislation was on the…

“Mournful, dazed, sullen, traumatized, self-absorbed, defensive, remote, morbid, bleak, bummed-out, alienated, unprotected, besieged.” That’s how a leading pop music critic describes the music of choice of “millennial and younger listeners . . . making their way into an era of accelerating income…

Are you a bitcoin billionaire? After today, probably not (too soon?), but Remy has another instant classic over at ReasonTV.

There was a time in the not-too distant past when the government’s monthly labor report was the most eagerly anticipated and influential of all economic data, and could move markets. Unemployment and a rising number of workers dropping out of the labor market meant the Great Recession had not run…

Over the past couple of years, a succession of American tech executives have decamped to Beijing to pander to the dictatorial leadership there. Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, has shown a penchant for flattering the ruling caste in China; he has repeatedly visited the country that his company,…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Mark Hemingway talks with host Eric Felten about the fight over who is in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Thanksgiving has come and gone, diets have been broken, and some 88 percent of us have eaten turkey, carving up some 46 million birds in the process. The hunter-gatherers are safely home from the malls—or at least most of them are. The less courageous stay-at-their-computers are resting their…

People like me are always praising the value of limited government (and we’re right). But exactly how limited can it get?

The Russian Revolution, the centennial of which has just passed, changed the world in more ways than one can count. But one little-noticed way in which it affected American intellectual life was by giving us Ayn Rand.

Now it can be told: In 1968, I was one of those who got “clean for Gene.” I cut my hair and put on a jacket and tie to campaign for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the Democratic primaries of that year. Those of us who did so understood without having to have the matter explained to us that we were…

A notice came last week from a newspaper I subscribe to. Since “offering check payments is becoming increasingly difficult to support,” the paper is “looking to move all our readers to digital payment methods.” The letter was bossy and presumptuous but the upshot was clear. There’s no longer anyone…

In the first 10 months of the Trump presidency, the blueprint for peeling back regulations has looked something like this:

Investment companies that run index funds—which merely seek to replicate the ups and downs of a broader market index and that entail no investment strategy by any managers—are becoming ever more popular, with a greater proportion of our retirement savings are going into them. Forty percent of all…

As the House Ways and Means committee proceeds with the markup of its landmark tax reform proposal, one change that seems inevitable is the curtailment of the modest reforms of the myriad home ownership tax breaks contained in the original legislation. These included capping the deduction for…

All Hail the Middle Man. (Or at least this one.) Meet Ryan Grant, a 28 year old who raids the clearance aisle at big box stores, and upsells items as a third party seller on Amazon. He started doing this to make some side hustle money, but then quit his job in accounting to do it full time. It…

Robert Skidelsky, whose biography of John Maynard Keynes is unlikely ever to be surpassed, judged that his subject “never needed a Jehovah, because he had never experienced despair.” Skidelsky was speaking of religion and morals, a department where Keynes was a typical Bloomsbury hedonist. In…

For the vast edifice of baloney that is social psychology, there’s been good news and bad news lately. The good news is that Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize. Thaler is the foremost evangelist for behavioral economics—the parasitic discipline that uses the findings of social psychology to…

We call it the Nobel prize in economics, but the Nobel that Richard Thaler won last week is technically a prize in “economic sciences,” and that bit of self-puffery (Oh, we’re scientists now, are we?) is fitting. Thaler is a pioneer of behavioral economics, the latest craze to sweep a trade not…

We call it the Nobel prize in economics, but the Nobel that Richard Thaler won last week is technically a prize in “economic sciences,” and that bit of self-puffery (Oh, we’re scientists now, are we?) is fitting. Thaler is a pioneer of behavioral economics, the latest craze to sweep a trade not…

Andrew Ferguson talks with host Eric Felten about the problems with Richard Thaler's Nobel-winning Behavioral Economics.

American trade policy is focused on steel, gasoline-powered cars, and coal; China’s is focused on robots, electric vehicles, and solar panels.

The stock market rockets ever-upward, as well it should, what with the president’s tax package destined to make corporate America great again. Sure thing.

Can we send the Boy Scouts an economics textbook? I love popcorn. It's my favorite snack. I was also a Cub Scout once, and selling Trail's End popcorn was my least-favorite fundraising activity. (Selling magazine subscriptions for my Catholic grade school was much easier.) My mom, saint that she…

And then there were four. Vacancies on the Federal Reserve Bank’s seven-person board of governors, that is, now that vice-chair Stanley Fischer has tendered his resignation for “personal reasons”—widely believed to be his wife’s health.

All hail the price gougers. As Irma bears down on Florida, people are stocking up on bottled water. Let's recall not but a week or so ago when, in the wake of Harvey, people were using social media to shame those who sold bottled water at a price they were not used to. Or, now, let's look at social…

We’ve all heard the ubiquitous urban legend: “Large retailers ruin local economies.” Typically, big-box critics assert that mega-retailers cause lower wages, lower prices force mom-and-pops out of business, and profits aren’t reinvested locally.

Ten years ago, almost to the day, something went wrong with the American banking system. So horribly wrong that it almost brought down the entire system of international finance and caused what is now known as the Great Recession.

Over the years Irwin Stelzer has been one of my favorite economists. He is a direct, yet graceful, writer, a clear thinker, and an analyst possessing large amounts of both humility and charitability. I like to think of him as the anti-Krugman.

Amtrak interim CEO Charles W. Moorman III made a rare admission for a businessman in a speech last week: His company is never going to make a profit. That’s no surprise to anyone who knows anything about Amtrak, which has cost taxpayers more than $45 billion in subsidies since service began in…

A college preparatory school for black and Latino boys opened in Washington, D.C., last year to a burst of public interest—and the inevitable question from the American Civil Liberties Union of the Nation's Capital: What have you done for girls lately? In the city's newest public high school,…

Central to the rise of the island of Singapore as one of the world's most important cities are its location on one of the planet's most important waterways and crossroads and its potent mix of the behavioral values of two cultures—British and overseas Chinese.

A college preparatory school for black and Latino boys opened in Washington, D.C., last year to a burst of public interest—and the inevitable question from the American Civil Liberties Union of the Nation's Capital: What have you done for girls lately? In the city's newest public high school,…

Central to the rise of the island of Singapore as one of the world's most important cities are its location on one of the planet's most important waterways and crossroads and its potent mix of the behavioral values of two cultures—British and overseas Chinese.

It appears that the Treasury will soon be getting a champion of the pro-growth conservative crowd on its team in David Malpass, who has his confirmation hearing for Undersecretary for International Affairs in front of the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday.

The United States has experienced a tumultuous last decade. It's endured an historic financial crisis, prolonged government dysfunction, eroding trust in public institutions, a farcical presidential election, and Twitter. No society should have to suffer any of these. But gaze upon the world for…

There is little doubt among economic forecasters that over the medium term, Asia's emerging economies—China and India foremost among them—are expected to drive global economic growth. Taken as one, the region from India to Japan is not only the biggest market for raw materials, energy, and the…

We will soon, TED talks promise, travel to the beach in driverless cars, where our artificial blood cells will enable us to stay underwater for hours. But we may prefer the virtual reality we will be able to inhabit thanks to direct brain implants, which will have replaced unfashionable headsets.…

We will soon, TED talks promise, travel to the beach in driverless cars, where our artificial blood cells will enable us to stay underwater for hours. But we may prefer the virtual reality we will be able to inhabit thanks to direct brain implants, which will have replaced unfashionable headsets.…

There is little doubt among economic forecasters that over the medium term, Asia's emerging economies—China and India foremost among them—are expected to drive global economic growth. Taken as one, the region from India to Japan is not only the biggest market for raw materials, energy, and the…

In the deceptively thoughtful 2014 action film John Wick, Keanu Reeves plays a recently widowed assassin who comes out of retirement after Russian gangsters beat him up, steal his car, and kill his dog. Miffed about the car, not too happy about the beating, but furious about the demise of his…

There is something dispiriting about the debate over trade policy, and the problem does not lie with Donald Trump, or his tweets, or his on-again, off-again threats to various trading partners, or his fickle choice of partners to head the negotiating queue: EU to the front, Brexiting Britain to the…

In the deceptively thoughtful 2014 action film John Wick, Keanu Reeves plays a recently widowed assassin who comes out of retirement after Russian gangsters beat him up, steal his car, and kill his dog. Miffed about the car, not too happy about the beating, but furious about the demise of his…

Anyone wishing to learn more about the economic effects of immigration on America and American workers would do well to read this book. George J. Borjas is a highly respected economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and one of the world's foremost experts on the economics of immigration.…

For years, the U.S. market has been much more open to Korean goods than Korea was to U.S. goods. The U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement that went into effect in 2012 was supposed to change this. But that hasn't been the case. And President Trump agrees. In a recent interview he told Reuters, "It's a…

It's that time of year again: Graduating high school students, consumed by "senioritis," are making that all-important decision of which college or university they will attend. And their parents, consumed by anxiety, are aghast at the ever-growing cost of higher education.

In his address to Congress, President Trump promised that "dying industries will come roaring back to life." I think the president should be even more ambitious: He should seriously consider bringing back industries and services that have already died. And I can think of two "dead" products that…

It's that time of year again: Graduating high school students, consumed by "senioritis," are making that all-important decision of which college or university they will attend. And their parents, consumed by anxiety, are aghast at the ever-growing cost of higher education.

Monetary policy is on hold: The Fed has set a pattern of interest rate increases and is sticking to it. Fiscal policy is also on hold. Republican scorpions bottled in the House of Representatives are split between deficit hawks and deficit doves, and those favoring a border tax and those joining…

Monetary policy is on hold: The Fed has set a pattern of interest rate increases and is sticking to it. Fiscal policy is also on hold. Republican scorpions bottled in the House of Representatives are split between deficit hawks and deficit doves, and those favoring a border tax and those joining…

Barack Obama thought a 28 percent corporate tax rate is about right. House Republicans think 20 percent would make America competitive again. Donald Trump thinks a 15 percent rate would Make America Great Again. And for comparison, Britain's prime minister Theresa May thinks 17 percent would make a…

The impending end of Donald Trump's break-in period is as good a time as any to see where he will go from here. The first 100 days are typically a honeymoon, during which the political knives remain sheathed. Not this time. Political back-stabbing, intra- and interparty, is rife. Democrats are…

In two weeks Donald Trump will serve his one-hundredth day as President of the United States of America. He approaches that milestone with an approval rating of 40 percent, the lowest of any modern-day president at this stage of his tenure. The man who made his reputation, and part of any fortune…

The American economy added a mere 98,000 jobs last month, less than half the number expected. Not good enough for President Trump, who not only wants more jobs: He wants them for coal miners and those horny handed sons of toil who once were the backbone of the American manufacturing work force. To…

This is a revolt of the masses, in this case masses of economic students from around the world who came of age during the 2008 financial crisis and have united in a movement they call Rethinking Economics. The leaders of the movement, which according to the Guardian has grown to 43 student…

This is a revolt of the masses, in this case masses of economic students from around the world who came of age during the 2008 financial crisis and have united in a movement they call Rethinking Economics. The leaders of the movement, which according to the Guardian has grown to 43 student…

The stock market is through the roof. Consumer confidence is at a 15-year high. And this morning, in the first full monthly jobs report from the Labor Department, comes news that the country added 235,000 jobs in February. That pace is about the same as it was the month before and about double the…

There is only one way President Trump can square a circle, a circle in which he will meet himself coming around as he tries to deliver on his promises. Call it the 3-1/2-percent solution. No, not a cocaine shot half as potent as the 7-percent solution self-administered by the world's most famous…

Gary Cohn isn’t the oldest of President Donald Trump's senior White House aides, or the most experienced, at least when it comes to government. Indeed, unlike Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, and Kellyanne Conway, Cohn has no experience in politics to speak of. He's not even a Republican!

The American economy has taken the shape of an iceberg. The visible part glistens in the reflected sunlight of Donald Trump. Beneath the surface lurks a structure that might not long be capable of supporting the glistening tip.

I frequently point you to the writings of Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist and blogger who I think of as the liberal Theodore Dalrymple. His blog is called Slate Star Codex and he's pretty great.

An aggressive monopolist doesn't just content itself with monopoly profits in the market it controls; where possible, it leverages that advantage to gain market power in additional markets as well, where regulators may be less vigilant and the players in the target market are vulnerable.

Writing good policy is very much like seeing a skilled intern­ist. First, the doctor decides that you really are sick. Next, he determines exactly what's wrong. Only then does he choose an appropriate prescription. Too much of policymaking ignores these steps, opting instead to focus on what the…

Sometimes, if you are quiet enough in Washington, D.C., you can hear the distinct sound of supple Gucci leather creaking its way around town. And with the Trump administration now in office, and tax reform again on the horizon, the quiet sound has become a roar. The shoe polish smell alone can be…

Adam Smith (1723-1790) may be the most misunderstood British thinker of the last 500 years—misunderstood not by intellectual historians but by journalists and the educated public. A case in point: Steven Pearlstein, a well-regarded business journalist, asserts that Smith argued that the…

A spectre is haunting America, the spectre of TDS. That is the acronym for the plague that is afflicting half of our adult population, more than half if truth be told, and many youngsters whose parents have exposed them to the disease. According to Bernard Goldberg, writing in his column, some…

Adam Smith (1723-1790) may be the most misunderstood British thinker of the last 500 years—misunderstood not by intellectual historians but by journalists and the educated public. A case in point: Steven Pearlstein, a well-regarded business journalist, asserts that Smith argued that the…

Writing good policy is very much like seeing a skilled intern­ist. First, the doctor decides that you really are sick. Next, he determines exactly what's wrong. Only then does he choose an appropriate prescription. Too much of policymaking ignores these steps, opting instead to focus on what the…

It is the exorbitant privilege of the United States that it can conjure the world's primary reserve currency, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, then French finance minister and later president, remarked half a century ago. This privilege, maintained as the dollar took the place of gold, allows the United…

Nearly every household in the country spends a sizable proportion of its income on housing. The median household allots over one-third of its income to keeping a roof over its head, and the annual expenditure of the median earner's income on housing has increased by 35 percent since 2000.

Missouri governor Eric Greitens signed legislation Monday making his state the twenty-eighth to pass a right to work measure into law.

Most presidential honeymoons are characterized by congressional and presidential vows of everlasting cooperation, but the policy cohabitations are soon torn asunder by the healthy re-emergence of political differences. President Trump's honeymoon period was different. He chose to abuse his…

Nearly every household in the country spends a sizable proportion of its income on housing. The median household allots over one-third of its income to keeping a roof over its head, and the annual expenditure of the median earner’s income on housing has increased by 35 percent since 2000.

It is the exorbitant privilege of the United States that it can conjure the world’s primary reserve currency, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, then French finance minister and later president, remarked half a century ago. This privilege, maintained as the dollar took the place of gold, allows the United…

He means it. The President of the United States of America Donald Trump says he will use the power of his office to tear up the post-WWII international and domestic settlements. No more world policeman, spending blood and treasure to protect nations that won't defend themselves. No more…

The symbolism of President Donald Trump's pre-inaugural appearance before the Lincoln Memorial was part of his effort to show that he is sympathetic to the aspirations of the black community even though one of its leaders declared him "illegitimate" and added a boycott of Friday's swearing-in to…

The Puerto Rico Fiscal Oversight Board is on a tight deadline to draft a recovery plan that will put the island back on its financial feet, avoid further defaults, and pave the way for a sustainable economic future. The Board is currently slated to unveil its Fiscal and Economic Growth Plan (FEGP)…

A week from Monday, when the post-inauguration revelries, which include a "Deplorables Ball", are no more, Donald J. Trump, the forty-fifth President of the United States of America, will for the first time become fully aware of the 115th Congress of the United States of America. Although he has…

Writing in the Wealth of Nations in 1776, Adam Smith stated that, "corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity (sic)." Faced with a growing population and flattening agricultural productivity, essentially what Smith was pointing out was the world needed more corn and less silver.

When Donald Trump campaigned last spring in the Republican primaries, he touted his tax cuts in a special way. To give them credibility, he would declare proudly that economist Larry Kudlow loved them.

Ring out the old. Please. Only 18 percent of Americans say things got better for the country in 2016 than they had been in 2015. Ring in the new. Please. Some 55 percent of Americans expect 2017 to be better for them than was 2016, up twelve points on last year's poll. Consumer confidence is at a…

Thomas Sowell is giving up his column. I can think of lots of columnists whose writing we wouldn't miss. Sowell isn't one of them. Every column he wrote in a quarter-century career as a columnist was eminently worth reading. I say this having read nearly every one of them.

There's going to be a new sheriff in town, or as one businessman put it, "We now have to plan for the big fist in the sky." Doug Oberman, CEO of Caterpillar and chairman of the big-businessmen-only Business Roundtable told his members, "Some of us may bear our turn in the bullseye." And some…

CNN reports:

In the months since the passage of PROMESA and the implementation of Congress' Federal Oversight Board, Puerto Rico's woefully underfunded pension systems have taken center stage in discussions concerning the island's fiscal reform. While there is no disputing that the Commonwealth's pension plans…

The dream of developing the next best mousetrap, selling it, and then retiring or moving on to create the next big thing is part and parcel of the American vision of success. Strong intellectual property rights are critical to protecting innovation—protections were enshrined in Article 1, Section 8…

Donald Trump has three big problems, two of his own creation, one created by a ticking time bomb that Obama is leaving for him.

So much ink and punditry is being expended on gossip about how President-elect Trump might cast his play, that too little attention is being paid to the plot. Not that the cast won't matter: Those with roles at key agencies can contribute to the success or failure of the drama now unfolding here in…

It is common knowledge that Puerto Rico is a financial mess and that it arrived at its current predicament due to its government's unwillingness to make difficult decisions. Ex-Governor Luis Fortuno made an attempt to return the island's finances to sanity, but his efforts cost him his reelection…

As impassioned calls to curb income inequality, including through a growing movement to establish a “guaranteed basic income," have increasingly dominated the political conversation here and abroad, Edward Conard's contrarian argument for pro-growth policies—including those that inevitably increase…

As impassioned calls to curb income inequality, including through a growing movement to establish a “guaranteed basic income," have increasingly dominated the political conversation here and abroad, Edward Conard's contrarian argument for pro-growth policies—including those that inevitably increase…

Before there was Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, and Bill Mitchell's Yard Signs, there was Vigo County, Indiana. The half-urban, half-rural area about 80 miles southwest of Indianapolis has voted for the winner of the presidential race in 30 of the last 32 elections, and…

Like a new drug commercial with a list of side effects longer than the problem it solves, Donald Trump's campaign is leaving behind a wake of issues for the Republicans, the economy, and public policy in general. Despite Trump's distracting 3 am tweets, his unapologetic sexism, and his contempt for…

Three days hence those Americans not too lazy, or not seriously unhappy with the choice before them, will join the 37 million who have already voted. Hillary Clinton is hoping they will have taken on board Friday's jobs report. The economy added 161,000 jobs in October, and the reports for the past…

When I sit down on a barstool in my favorite watering hole in Peoria, Illinois to watch game 6 of the World Series Tuesday night, I will be proudly wearing the "Chicago Cubs: NL Champs" t-shirt I just bought.

Daycare used to be downright quaint: When I was a kid, my "daycare center" was Mr. and Mrs. Cummings' front yard across the street from my house. I walked there after school and under their careful watch I played every dangerous game that existed until my parents got home from work. The cost of…

Economist and scholar Charles Wolf Jr. has died at the age of 92. The RAND Corporation, Wolf's home for more than 60 years, has released a statement.

Third presidential debates usually don't matter. And there's a reason. The candidate who's behind tries to avoid mistakes made in the earlier debates and sound more clear-minded and knowledgeable. The candidate who's ahead simply plays it safe.

An email thread released by Wikileaks appears to reveal skepticism in Hillary Clinton's camp about a nationwide $15 minimum wage, reflecting doubt among some liberal economists about the key progressive agenda item.

Writing at City Journal, Clifford Asness notes that neither candidate on the debate stage Monday night seemed willing or able to defend free enterprise or conservative economic ideas. "There were many frustrating examples in the first debate of Donald Trump failing even to challenge Hillary…

I live in a little homogenized exurb about 30 miles outside of Washington. Way outside of the Beltway. Out in the "real Virginia," as George Allen once unfortunately put it. And over the weekend my little town had two craft breweries open. That's in addition to the brewery that opened last year.…

An article in Sunday's Washington Post takes a look at mooted plans to expand the D.C. Streetcar's route network. For the fortunately uninitiated, the D.C. Streetcar is a 2.2 mile form of "transportation" that 1) is slower than walking 2) cost upwards of $200 million to construct and was years late…

There are times when inordinate importance is attached to a data release. Those are times to follow rules: averages can be deceiving: you can drown in a lake with an average depth of three feet; and disaggregate to get an understanding of the real-world significance of the data.

In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Fred Barnes talks Trump's economic plans—are they conservative? Vic Matus joins host Eric Felten to quaff some campaign cocktails, and author Daniel Wattenberg comes by to regale us with the exploits of Stephen Decatur.

On Wednesday, Labor Secretary Perez was asked by a reporter about a study done by the American Enterprise Institute on the District of Columbia's minimum wage hike. D.C. raised its minimum wage to $10.50 an hour last July. According to AEI, following the mandatory wage increase, D.C. saw the loss…

This spectacular history traces the rise and plateau of the American economy since industrialization. Massive productivity gains from a networked society led to huge rises in life expectancy and per capita income. Addressing the slowdown of recent decades, economist Robert J. Gordon adopts the…