Brookings Institution economist Clifford Winston makes the case for privatized airports. A slice:
We then considered whether the Boston-area airports would install heated runways if they were privatized and made the decision based on whether heated runways could increase profits. We found that Logan would have a profit incentive to install heated runways, but the other airports didn’t have enough traffic to justify it.
Airlines would increase their profits and air travelers would gain enough from the reduction in travel delays to offset any increases in fares. Improvements in runway safety would add to travelers’ and airlines’ benefits.
Regulated taxicabs were always free to develop ridesharing and ride-hailing apps that we now associate with Uber and Lyft. But it took innovation by the private sector to first provide this beneficial service to urban travelers. Similarly, public airports lack the imagination and incentive to install heated runways. Privatizing airports would spur them to innovate.
President Trump could direct Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to pursue privatization through the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airport Investment Partnership Program. Keep that in mind the next time a snowstorm disrupts your flight.
Jeffrey Frankel offers four reasons why Trump’s tariffs haven’t crashed the U.S. economy. Two slices:
Moreover, Trump introduced major tariff exceptions for some countries. For example, the integrated North American auto industry would have been devastated if he hadn’t decided on 6 March to exempt goods from Mexico and Canada from the 25% levy that had gone into effect two days earlier. Goods from these countries now face no penalty if they are imported under the US-Mexico-Canada agreement.
This softening was predictable. US business would have suffered enormously if Trump had fully implemented the tariffs he had announced, let alone threatened, so it was never likely that he would persist with the worst of them. Trump regularly stakes out extreme negotiating positions, only to back down when the heat is on, even if he hasn’t gotten what he demanded from the other side. In fact, investors’ assumption that “Trump always chickens out” – known as Taco – has become a taunt. But when a madman threatens Armageddon, it is foolhardy to goad him into following through. The tariffs Trump hasimplemented are still very high.
But this does not mean economists got their predictions all wrong. There are good reasons to think that many of the adverse effects of Trump’s tariffs have simply been delayed, and we should expect them to show up in 2026.
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To be sure, the prices importers pay have risen proportionately with tariffs, contrary to Trump’s claims that foreign exporters cover the costs of the duties by lowering their prices. It is US companies that have been absorbing the costs, much as they typically do when the dollar depreciates. This partly reflects the fact that they have no idea how long the tariffs will be in place. Trump might change his mind, or perhaps the supreme court will decide to adhere to the law and strike them down. This uncertainty also helps to explain why many affected companies have so far refrained from laying off workers.
But companies will not let tariffs erode their profit margins indefinitely. Assuming the tariffs remain, the US can look forward to more price increases, and downward pressure on real incomes, in 2026.
The dominant attitude driving lockdown policies that closed schools, businesses, churches, playgrounds, and more was well articulated by Jon Allsop in the Columbia Journalism Review‘s newsletter. There is “no choice to be made between public health and a healthy economy—because public health is an essential prerequisite of a healthy economy,” he wrote in April 2020 as debate over “reopening” was ongoing.
That all-or-nothing approach reveals how little the economists were involved in the early decisions over COVID. “There are no solutions; only tradeoffs,” is how Thomas Sowell once put it, but during the early months of the pandemic, solutions were overly promised and tradeoffs were routinely ignored. That was a tremendous error.
“At its most basic, economics is about analyzing choices made under constraints. Politicians and government agencies made a vast range of public health decisions this past year that violated principles that good economists take for granted,” wrote Ryan Bourne, an economist with the Cato Institute, in a 2021 review of early COVID policies. “These decisions made the public health and economic welfare impacts of the pandemic worse than they needed to be. In that sense, the poor response to COVID-19 represents a failure to think economically.”
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Economists can be frustrating to advisers in the policymaking process. The impulse to point out the inevitable tradeoffs in any policy can make it seem like their only purpose is to blow holes in the high-minded plans of the nation’s elected officials. But throwing them out of the room does not make foolish ideas more perfect. Six years of dismissing economic reality have not brought us utopia.
If our elected officials are looking for a handy New Year’s resolution for 2026, here’s an idea: Start listening to the economists again.
Jeff Jacoby is understandably appalled by Trump’s megalomania. Two slices:
DONALD TRUMP’S obsession with putting his name and face on things long ago passed the point of parody. So far in his second term as president, Trump has moved to affix his name or picture to public buildings and government websites, to national park passes and a savings account for babies, and to a special $1 million visa, the so-called Trump Gold Card, for rich foreigners. The Treasury Department plans to mint a commemorative $1 coin depicting Trump next year. There is even a proposed “Trump class” of US Navy warships.
The president’s “long love affair with his own name and likeness,” as The New York Times recently described it, is certainly vulgar and narcissistic. But more than that, it is utterly at odds with the Republican presidential tradition. For most of the party’s history, Republican chief executives generally refrained from personal self-glorification; many of them regarded it as a vice — something corrosive to judgment, dignity, and republican government itself.
In that sense, Trump’s self-worship, besides being a severe character flaw, amounts to a repudiation of one of the most consistent and admirable moral instincts of GOP leadership.
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Nearly every Republican president from Lincoln onward would have recoiled from Trump’s bottomless narcissism. In this crucial respect, as in so many others, today’s Republican president stands not in continuity with his party’s history, but as its very antithesis.
Graham Walker, Williamson Evers, and Phil Magness assess what was done to liberty in 2025.
