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Where’s The Outrage At Calling JFK A Tax-Cutter?
It’s happening again. There’s a big tax-rate-cut bill in Congress, and people affiliated with supply-side economics are calling on the John F. Kennedy legacy to rally support for it. Here is the Job...
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The Last Time We Raised The Child Tax Credit, It Foretold War
The tax bill heading out of conference in Congress appears to increase the child tax credit—the amount of money individuals can lop off their federal income tax liability for each child they have—by...
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With Taxes Done, Now Comes Money
The tax cut signed into law two weeks ago cleared out the greatest fiscal block to normal economic activity these years since the Great Recession. The United States no longer has the highest top...
View ArticleThe Dollar-Euro Exchange Rate Sure Is The Most Important Price In The World
Here’s no conundrum: the stock market dropped a thousand points the other day, on the heels of the dollar losing 19% against the euro. The two biggest transactions areas in the world, the Eurozone and...
View ArticleWhen Tariffs Worked
The tariffs the United States is imposing on imports of aluminum and steel recall a sturdy American tradition. The tariff was the main form of federal taxation over the first half of the history of...
View ArticleThe Scandal Of The Trade Deficit Is The Tax System
Our economy sure looks weird. Stacks of containers filled with goods creep luridly into our ports in huge ships from way overseas at all times. Meanwhile, proportionately, fewer workers in our country...
View ArticleFort Knox Is Why We Don’t Have A Gold Standard
For pushing five decades now, the United States has not defined its currency in gold. Prior to 1971, the nation nearly always had. From the 1790s to the 1930s, the U.S. defined the dollar as 1/20th an...
View ArticleOil Soared Because The U.S. Tanked The Dollar
A warhorse argument about our economic history—a big entry in the Conventional Wisdom—is that energy became expensive thanks the Arabian “oil shock” of 1973. It goes like this. The United States got...
View ArticleThe Injustices Of Keynesianism
The market has its share of unfortunate characteristics. Or so we hear. It produces socio-economic inequality, it cannot check the impulse to pollute and overuse, it narrows us into homo economicus....
View ArticleTom Wolfe Wrote Two Essential Pieces About The American Economy
The incredible litterateur Tom Wolfe, who died several days ago, wrote two essential entries chronicling the course of the American economy in the latter half of the twentieth century. His longform...
View ArticleGold And Oil Are Converging Again
For ages, the price of gold and the price of oil have held at the same ratio. An ounce of gold divided by a barrel of oil, both things priced in dollars, has always been 15, plus or minus about 3. Back...
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Central Banking’s Connection To Warfare Is Intimate
Why did nations start central banks? To finance the materiel needs of the nation-state in time of war. There is no other answer to this question that is as nearly correct as that answer. To provide a...
View ArticleThis Is The First Time Tariffs Have Ever Been Popular
The tariffs on Chinese goods coming into force just now are a clear fulfillment of a campaign promise. Candidate Donald J. Trump campaigned on tariffs, and as president he is putting them into place....
View ArticleTariffs Worked In History When They Warded Off All Other Taxes
The new American tariffs emerging on foreign products, on Chinese and soon European goods as the administration indicated last week, may well serve their stated purpose. This is to convince those...
View ArticleBeltway Elegy, Not Hillbilly Elegy
Several weeks ago, I made a small mistake in a column on the trade deficit. My colleague John Tamny noticed it. I characterized those former mill towns of this country that are now in a ghostly,...
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The Market Identified The National Parks
Late July, early August, and one’s thoughts turn to vacation. How many of us Griswolds, as in National Lampoon’s Vacation, pile into the heap and head to our country’s treasures, the National Parks...
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Do Devaluations Really Help Trade?
“Do Devaluations Really Help Trade?”—the title of a classic Wall Street Journal op-ed by supply-side economics founder Arthur B. Laffer. He wrote it in 1973, just as the United States was forsaking the...
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The Few Words On Money In The Constitution Say More Than We Know
The way United States Constitution of 1789 speaks about money has long puzzled observers. Why does it speak so little about money, people ask, and when it does treat the subject, why the weird specific...
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The Strange And Powerful Connection Between The Income Tax And Free Trade
Fundamental patterns in any kind of system are difficult to break. There is nothing new under the Sun, per Ecclesiastes. When an income-tax cut became law last December, it fit the pattern of history...
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If Taxation Doesn’t Raise Revenue, Why Bother?
To paraphrase Tom Wolfe, people really don’t read the morning newspaper, they slip into it like a warm bath. Too true, Tom! Imagine doing as I was the other day, when flipping through the digital...
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