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George Mason University alums Phil Magness and Steve Miller, writing in the Wall Street Journal, find further credible evidence against Emmanuel Saez’s and Gabriel Zucman’s incredible claim that high-income Americans pay income taxes at lower rates than do lower-income Americans [2]. Here’s Phil’s and Steve’s conclusion:
In their rush to embrace a convenient political narrative last fall, much of the press and political classes never considered the possibility that the data would undermine their story. It did.
Jayme Lemke recommends [3] the newest book from my GMU Econ colleague Chris Coyne, Defense, Peace, and War Economics. [4]
Peter Earle applauds South Korea’s decentralized method of dealing with the coronavirus outbreak [5]….
Emily Chamlee-Wright counsels humility [7].
Globalization itself diversifies risk. It means nations can trade for food when their own farmers suffer a bad harvest. Manufacturers can seek better-quality and lower-priced inputs from a diversity of suppliers, rather than being held captive by domestic cartels. Investors can better diversify their portfolios.
Any efforts to forcibly curb globalization would be akin to injecting another kind of virus into the global body economic, a kind of ideological fever that weakens our productive capacity. The Congressional Budget Office recently determined that the tariffs the Trump administration has imposed during the past two years have shaved a half-point off U.S. GDP — similar to the economic impact of the coronavirus.