The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s measure of median disposable household income in America was higher than in all but one advanced industrial economy as of 2021 — higher than Switzerland, Germany, Britain and Japan. The exception is tiny Luxembourg. In fact, America’s median disposable household income is about double that of Japan.
And as Noah Smith points out in an excellent essay, America’s median income has not been stagnant, as conventional wisdom tells us; it has been growing briskly over the decades. Smith notes that real median personal income has risen by 50 percent since the 1970s. Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, are up substantially since the 1990s. And the hourly wages of the bottom third of Americans are up by even more: over 40 percent.
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Look at Flint, Michigan, and Greensboro, North Carolina — often seen as classic towns that were devastated by the loss of manufacturing. Over the past two and a half decades, real wage growth for the poorest is up more than 40 percent in Flint and over 26 percent in Greensboro.
These are not anecdotes. The Brookings Institution in 2018 looked at 185 urban industrial counties that had lots of manufacturing jobs in 1970 and discovered that 115 had managed to transition from manufacturing, improving residents’ well-being. Only 14 of these industrial communities could still be defined as “vulnerable.” Remember, unemployment in the United States has been close to a 50-year low for more than three years now.
Jim Bacchus decries Trump’s destruction of the rules-based global trading system. A slice:
While President Trump takes a victory lap following the capitulation of many of America’s trading partners to his arbitrary trade demands and the application of astronomical tariffs to imports from other countries worldwide, and while the piles of additional tariffs on US imports add more and more to the prices of purchased goods, it is worth pausing to note what has now been cast aside along with the long-established legal and economic arrangements of modern civilization. The loss of global public goods to humanity from these myopic and misguided US actions involves much more than may be immediately apparent in the accumulating effect of the tariffs as taxes on trade.
The flagrant violations of international law in the imposition of the tariffs are so numerous that few bother even to mention them anymore. Who continues to point out that these arbitrary actions by the United States are inconsistent with the basic laws of nondiscrimination that are supposed to guide and govern world trade under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO)? Brazil and some other countries are seeking consultations on these illegal tariffs in WTO dispute settlement, but is it even certain that the United States will bother to show up in the Geneva legal proceedings? A request for consultations on a trade dispute must be heeded under WTO rules, but does that still matter?
Likewise, the domestic economic price of the tariffs is increasingly accepted as a given. Congress is intimidated to the point that it is unwilling to reclaim its constitutional authority over trade from the executive branch, and so arbitrary tariffs based on both unsound trade reasons and unpredictable nontrade reasons are now viewed as nearly inevitable. Although economists report that the tariffs are increasingly taking a toll on American competitiveness and the American cost of living, and although this toll will surely rise with the imposition of the latest global tariffs, this is providing little political motivation for change. We appear to have decided as a country simply to assume the existence of the added price of a certain portion of US protectionism in every international exchange of goods. The American people are losing, but Trump is “winning,” and this is largely what is reported.
Mr. Lutnick’s explanation for terminating the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee made no sense. Input from disinterested experts drawn from across industry and academia is a good idea. But now it seems that Mr. Lutnick was taking marching orders to fulfill his boss’s desire to control economic data. On Aug. 1 President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that releases the government’s monthly employment report. The president claimed the most recent numbers were “phony” and “rigged” to make him and Republicans look bad.
Mr. Trump’s assertion that the numbers are rigged has no basis in fact. The employment data are often revised, like all numbers based on surveys, but no evidence impugns the objectivity of the government’s statistical releases. It may be that Mr. Trump cleared the way to appoint a BLS director who might help manipulate a politically more important statistical target.
George Leef understandably is a fan of Phil Magness’s book The 1619 Project Myth. Two slices:
It is useful to have frequent reminders that people often resort to deception to peddle their beliefs. The book The 1619 Project Myth by Phillip W. Magness is highly valuable in that regard, as it devastates the historical accuracy of “The 1619 Project” published by The New York Times.
That long magazine piece was the brainchild of one of its writers, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who used it to make her breathtaking claim that the true date of America’s founding was not 1776, but rather 1619, the year when the first slaves were landed in North America.
Why say that?
The answer is that, like so many “progressives,” Nikole Hannah-Jones wants to undermine the idea that the United States was founded to increase the people’s freedom and replace it with the notion that the nation’s founding was rooted in slavery and oppression. The American Revolution was fought, in her telling, to preserve slavery, which the colonists feared was going to be ended by the British government. Moreover, she and several of her co-authors maintained, the effects of slavery are still with us. What better way to get people to think of America as a terrible nation that’s in need of radical (or revolutionary) transformation?
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If there was ever the slightest doubt as to the political purpose of the 1619 Project, it was erased when Hannah-Jones, in the subsequent Hulu TV series based upon it, called for the nation to pay reparations for slavery. That idea has long been dismissed by scholars of all races as unjust and economically ruinous. Nevertheless, she blithely stated that reparations were needed to atone for our racist past and, to explain how we could pay for the trillions it would cost, told viewers that the government can afford anything it wants just by printing enough money. How do we know that? Because a few crank economists who subscribe to Modern Monetary Theory say so. Thus, the 1619 Project combines false history with ludicrous economics to promote the statist agenda.
Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler celebrates the demise of “fuel efficiency” standards. A slice:
Tired of ugly cars and SUVs that all look the same? Check out crossovers like the Honda CR-V, the Ford Escape and the BMW XM—the last with a staggering $160,000 price tag. The three vehicles look almost identical—an unintended consequence, believe it or not, of 50-year-old Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. But gasoline-mileage rules were effectively tossed in July’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which could usher in a new era of big, beautiful auto design.
Most didn’t notice CAFE’s demise. It turns out that you can’t kill mileage standards in a reconciliation bill, so Congress quietly zeroed out its penalties via Section 40006, which “eliminates the civil penalty for a violation by a manufacturer of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards.” Clever.
President Trump likes to stir things up, and he’s done it again with his choice of Stephen Miran to fill an open seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. We can’t recall when a President nominated to the Fed someone whose abiding policy conviction is to weaken the U.S. dollar.
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But his ambition goes beyond tariffs. In that 2024 essay he laid out other policy options for negotiating a weaker dollar and diminishing its reserve-currency status. One idea is to tax foreigners who hold U.S. Treasury debt as an incentive to hold less of it. This would amount to a de facto default on current debt.
