Global Investors Are Telling Donald Trump His Deficits and National…
Washington is unnerved these days about budget deficits and the national debt. Deficit angst comes along periodically, often as a pretext for cutting social spending. This time, however, there’s genuine cause for alarm. Outsized deficits are par for the course when the economy is in recession or reeling from a shock like the pandemic or the financial collapse; most of… Continue reading
The Economics of Immigration Aren’t What You Think
Waves of new immigrants often spark economic anxiety and cultural discomfort, as well as occasional violence and wide-net crackdowns, on the Arizona model. Even here, a nation comprised almost entirely of immigrants and their descendents, we’ve seen these reactions not only in recent times but also a century ago, when waves of poor immigrants from Europe arrived here. With a…Continue reading
A New Plan to Create Jobs—and Address Climate Change
The long-awaited climate proposal from John Kerry and Joe Lieberman (minus Lindsay Graham) is now on the table; and it’s clear already that it has no better chance of being enacted than other failed proposals before it. One informal count this past week finds 26 Senators likely to vote yes and another 11 probable supporters — a total of 37,…Continue reading
Deciphering the Crisis in Greece and Its Significance for America
With the world’s stock and bond markets thoroughly roiled by Greece’s sovereign debt problems, it’s only natural to ask the perennial question, how does it affect us? The outlines of the crisis are certainly familiar. As I've been warning in this space for more than a year, governments around the world would inevitably face serious fiscal problems, dealing with the…Continue reading
How Toyota and Goldman Sachs Stumbled — and We Could,…
Powerful and wildly-successful institutions sometimes act like teenagers and addicts, unable to recognize their own self-destructive behavior. This year’s top two examples are Toyota and Goldman Sachs. After investing decades to develop a sterling reputation for safety and quality, Toyota squandered its brand not by accident, but by myopic design: In a benighted chase for higher profits, Toyota’s top brass…Continue reading
A New Progressive Economic Strategy, Part 4: The Global Economy
In a global economy, even the world’s largest economy by a factor of three (that’s us, compared to Japan and China) cannot by itself ensure job opportunities for everyone and healthy incomes gains for everyone who works hard and well. We may wish it were otherwise, but the United States and the forces of globalization now share control over America’s…Continue reading
A New Progressive Economic Strategy, Part 3: Tax Reform
The most dispiriting feature of this year’s economic debates, apart from their fierce partisanship, is the absence of a broad and encompassing view of what the American economy needs. In this series of essays, we're laying out a new, progressive strategy to advance the central goal of an economic policy — namely, to ensure ample job opportunities, strong and widespread…Continue reading
A New Progressive Economic Strategy, Part 2: Spending Reforms
You don’t have to be a Nobel economist to see that the United States needs a serious, new economic approach if we hope to restore what once seemed part of the American birthright — ample job opportunities, strong and widespread income gains, and broad upward mobility. Last week, we sketched a package of initiatives to equip businesses and workers with…Continue reading
A New, Progressive Economic Strategy, Part 1
uLooking out onto the smoky, endless skyline of Seoul, Korea, I think about our two nations’ similar economic paths, from abject underdevelopment to world-class modernization and wealth. In the 19th century, there was one place in the world that managed to move all the way up from low-income to high-income, and that was the United States. From 1870 to 1970,…Continue reading