Cochrane Fails to Make His Case for the Trump Tax Cut Again John Cochrane recently noted: Stock Buybacks Are Proof of Tax Reform’s Success… A short oped for the Wall Street Journal here on stock buybacks. As usual, they ask me not to post the whole thing for 30 days though you can find it […]
(Dan here…Better late than never!) A thought for Sunday: the march of demographics and the 2018 midterms Below is a graph showing that the older the demographic (up until age 80), the bigger the turnout during midterm elections. The data behind this graph isn’t just from 2014, but from a series of midterm elections over time […]
Jeffrey Sachs on Trump’s Trade Fallacies I heard on some news show an incredibly stupid statement from our President earlier today and in utter disbelief fired off this comment on some blog: Trump equates our trade deficit with us being ripped off. Let’s do this as a simple example. You walk into Best Buy and […]
Wilbur Ross on the Effective Rate of Protection When I watched this clip by Wilbur Ross – all I could think of was Mr. Ed. But what did he say? “In a can of Campbell’s Soup, there are about 2.6 pennies worth of steel. So if that goes up by 25 percent, that’s about six-tenths of 1 cent […]
On Those Aluminum Tariffs The global price of aluminum fell below $1500 per metric ton by the end of 2015. By June 2017, it had risen to $1885 per metric ton. This source suggests that this price is even higher. So what happened yesterday?: The stock market dip reflects the enormous impact that a 25 percent tariff on imported steel […]
China, not automation, is by far the biggest factor in the decline of prime age labor force participation Perhaps the biggest mystery in economic analysis in the last few years has been trying to find an explanation for the big decline in labor force participation since 1999. A recent NBER working paper by Abraham and Kearney has […]
Memo to younger readers: in an era of rising interest rates, deficits DO matter very much If you are under about 45 years of age, the odds are that you agree with one statement made by Dick Cheney: that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” As I mention from time to time, I am a […]
Initial jobless claims: the single most positive aspect of the entire economy I haven’t been bothering to comment on initial jobless claims reports lately, for the simple fact that every week it’s the same story: they’re good! In fact, the initial jobless claims reports are probably the single most positive aspect of the entire economic […]
by David Zetland (reposted from Aguanomics) What went wrong in Capetown? I asked that question of Mike Muller, who has been working on water issues there for decades. He referred me to this op/ed he wrote and — more important — the inadequate response from a local city councillor. [Tl;dr: Failure to invest against risk […]
A Kennedy-Reagan-Trump Fiscal Policy? Heather Long reports that the White House economists have no clue about the history of U.S. fiscal policy: President Trump’s policies are driving an economic turnaround that puts him in the company of transformative presidents such as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, White House economists said Wednesday as they unveiled their […]