This week, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—a massive legislative package of climate spending, health care subsidies and price controls, and corporate tax increases—into law. Now Democrats intend to sell it to the public in hopes of salvaging their midterm election fortunes. As Politico reports, a consortium of outside groups aligned with […]
Another week, another reminder that heavy-handed government industrial policy is in fashion. Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence recently endorsed it as embodied in the newly passed “CHIPS ” legislation, an attempt to bolster America’s semiconductor industry. The endorsement, like so many, rests not on evidence or economics, but on blind faith in Congress and President […]
The news that President Joe Biden is preparing to meet face-to-face in Asia in November with the head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi Jinping, broke shortly after I’d finished reading a passage in former President Ronald Reagan’s memoir about Reagan’s own presidential trip to Asia to meet with the Chinese Communist leader at […]
For a few years, I have sounded the alarm that a growing wave of conservatives are working to make Republicans indistinguishable from Democrats on social spending. Some say that to win elections, Republicans need to pay more attention to families—by which they mean dole out ever more money to families like the Democrats do. Exhibit […]
A jobs report released today by the federal government shows that employment has mostly recovered from the dark days of COVID-induced mass joblessness and that inflation may get worse. The latest figures released by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that the economy added 528,000 jobs in July, bringing the […]
Immigrants are 80 percent more likely than native-born Americans to found a firm, according to a study released this May by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But more than that, a report released this week by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) indicates that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for starting high-value companies. […]
Economic reality cannot be denied—but can it be redefined? That’s what the Biden administration is about to find out, following the release on Thursday morning of a report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) showing that the United States has endured back-to-back quarters of negative economic growth—a situation that meets the standard definition of […]
Industrial policy is making a comeback. For those of you under the age of 50, this is just another term for corporate welfare—a lovely name for the unlovely practice of a government granting subsidies, protective tariffs, and other privileges to politically influential industries or companies. It’s often done in the name of some lofty goal […]
This administration can’t make up its mind about alcohol. Sometimes it brags that the industry is thriving. Sometimes it acts like the business needs a government intervention. Last year President Joe Biden issued a far-reaching executive order that, among other things, ordered the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau to investigate anti-competitive issues in […]