For those (very many) people who write, talk, and pontificate about the modern economy in general, and trade in particular, as if these are phenomena simple enough for smart, informed, and apolitical officials in capital cities to manage – for these officials to pick ‘winners’ that actually should win and ‘losers’ that actually should lose – for these officials to impose tariffs here and dispense subsidies there in ways that will achieve economic outcomes that, by some metric, improve the overall economy – I recommend the new Cato Institute website, “Globalization, Unfolded.” (HT Scott Lincicome, who introduces the project here.)
George Will is understandably dismayed by both major-party candidates in the 2024 U.S. presidential contest. Two slices:
Harris is parsimonious with interviews, but who cares? They can only reveal today’s batch of her views, which tend to expire in batches. It would, however, be fun to find out if there is any question — e.g., are there enough submarines for the AUKUS partners? — she will not answer by saying, “I was raised a middle-class kid, okay?”
Former president Donald Trump still resembles the “Bleak House” character about whom Charles Dickens wrote: “When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man, to have so inexhaustible a subject.” But Trump’s ongoing choices of colorful companions raises a question: Has a ship’s hull ever become so encrusted with barnacles that the weight of them sank the vessel? The Trump campaign should wonder. He evidently enjoys the company of the dregs of America’s political culture — Holocaust deniers, 9/11 “truthers,” Tucker Carlson, who praises a “historian” who thinks Winston Churchill was beastly to Adolf Hitler.
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Her industrial policy will pick winners (and therefore, necessarily, losers), directing government subsidies to the most promising industries of the future. She has not said how her political career equipped her for such economic clairvoyance.
Eric Boehm reveals an inconsistency in J.D. Vance’s economics. A slice:
In response to a question about how to expand the housing supply, Vance argued that part of the solution must be lower energy costs—because those factor into the cost of housing.
“Think about it, if a truck driver is paying 40 percent more for diesel, then the lumberhe’s delivering to the job site to build the house is also going to become a lot moreexpensive,” Vance said. “If we open up American energy, you will get immediate pricing release relief for American citizens, not by the way, just in housing, but in a whole host of other economic goods too.”
That’s a good point—and Vance is right that affordable, abundant energy should be a top priority for any presidential administration.
But he should also consider the lumber that’s being carried on the truck in his hypothetical example.
If that lumber comes from Canada, it will be subject to 14.5 percent tariffs—tariffs that were hiked from 8 percent to that level earlier this year—that will increase the cost of that load a lot more than slightly higher fuel prices will. The National Association of Home Builders, an industry group, calls those tariffs “a tax on American builders, home buyers, and consumers” and says they directly affect housing affordability.
Building housing also requires steel and aluminum, and lots of other products manufactured from those two materials. Vance’s running mate, former President Donald Trump, slapped tariffs on much of America’s supply of steel and aluminum (and, in fairness, the Biden administration has kept those tariffs in place). Trump and Vance are campaigning on a plan to hike more tariffs, which would not only increase the cost of buying a house but also filling it with furniture, appliances, and other items.
Has the decline in manufacturing been the catastrophe portrayed by various politicians? Hardly. Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product per capita increased from around $15,000 in 1947 to about $66,000 in 2023. Real per capita disposable income rose by a similar rate. So it isn’t true that our prosperity depends on having most people work in the manufacturing sector—quite the opposite. Technology has dramatically raised labor productivity in manufacturing. Automakers here and abroad need far fewer employees now than they did in 2000 to make better cars than they used to. That’s a powerful force reducing employment in the auto sector—and the same is true in many other industries.
Per capita income couldn’t have risen so dramatically if most of the workers who left manufacturing landed up working in fast-food restaurants. Americans moved from manufacturing to other types of jobs in which their labor is needed and their level of productivity allows their employers to compete. Financial services, medicine, biotech and higher education are all examples of industries that have grown dramatically over time and powered our prosperity. The icing on the cake is that banking and software are huge U.S. exports.
Emma Camp exposes Tim Walz’s understanding of the First Amendment as poor. A slice:
The worst part about all this for Walz is that his sloppy, revealing answers on free speech derailed what had been one of his strongest moments in the debate. The subject only came up in the first place because Vance, in an attempt to sidestep a question about Trump’s election loss and the possibility of challenging future results, argued that big-tech censorship and government jawboning pose a bigger threat to democracy than Trump’s election denial.
Kerry, however, didn’t advocate such censorship. He explained, rather, why it is not an option under the Constitution.
“There’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts,” he said. “But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.”
Exactly right.
