The second issue Dougherty raises is his claim that “the overwhelming contributor to the growing upper-middle class is not higher productivity . . . It’s more hours worked, and at a higher wage.” Let me quickly just point out that according to data I assembled for an earlier paper, between 1979 and 2022, net productivity (which excludes depreciation — don’t ask) in the nonfarm business sector rose 97 percent while hourly wages rose 85 percent. So it doesn’t exactly feel like productivity growth was unimportant. More good news!
Furthermore, it’s not the case that only women have seen wage gains while men “saw stagnant or modest growth in their wages” and deterioration in their employment. Rather, the numbers behind Figure 2 in this paper of mine indicate that the median wage of men ages 25 to 54 rose by 16 to 29 percent from 1989 to 2023 (and I’d advocate hard for the 29 percent as the better number). One can wish that increase was stronger, but it nevertheless means that men are better off than ever.
In response to the lawsuits, Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate notes that the plaintiffs who opposed Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, which likewise included a bunch of blue states along with small businesses represented by the LJC, suggested that Section 122 was the appropriate vehicle for tariffs aimed at addressing the purported problem posed by the longstanding U.S. trade deficit in goods. “Plaintiffs repeatedly argued that the President’s tariffs were unlawful under IEEPA but would be justified under Section 122,” Shumate writes. He adds that federal courts, including the CIT, “relied on plaintiffs’ counsel’s arguments and agreed that Section 122 was the proper authority for imposing such tariffs.”
Shumate does not mention that the Trump administration has also changed its tune. In defense of the IEEPA tariffs, the government’s lawyers rejected the idea that the president should instead rely on Section 122. That provision, Shumate and his colleagues said does not have “any obvious application here, where the concerns the President identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade deficits, which are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.”
The Trump administration wants the CIT to forget about that concession, which goes to the heart of the president’s asserted authority under Section 122. The government’s lawyers are now contradicting their prior position, saying a trade deficit is enough to establish “fundamental international payments problems.” Citing the official “balance of payments” numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Shumate urges the CIT to focus on the “current account,” which consists mainly of the trade deficit, and ignore the other accounts that figure in the calculation. Those countervailing accounts include foreign investment in the United States and borrowing via U.S. government bonds.
John Puri writes sensibly about egg prices.
“Mammas don’t let your babies grow up to be disgruntled, underemployed PhDs.“
