September 6, 2017

Time to Close the Foreign Investors Tax Loophole

Congress will put together a tax reform bill with the goal of eliminating tax loopholes, simplifying the tax system and reducing tax rates.  One loophole that they should eliminate is the most self-destructive tax loophole ever enacted, th...

June 30, 2017

European Union Loots Google

On June 27, the European Commission, an agency of the government of the European Union, placed a $2.71-billion fine upon Google, the American technological giant.  To indicate the anti-American hostility of the Commission, it related the fi...

February 10, 2017

Paul Ryan’s Border Adjustment Tax vs. Donald Trump’s Targeted Tariffs

The 2016 election was a referendum on the imbalanced global trading system. It lost. President Donald Trump’s victory and Bernie Sanders’ insurgency both drew urgency and energy from the millions of livelihoods our trade deficits have cos...

December 22, 2016

Four Ways to Balance the Budget and Boost the Economy by Taxing Foreigners

Donald Trump’s election creates, for the first time in decades, the potential for major tax reform. On the campaign trail, President-elect Trump proposed several overhauls of the tax system. But the contours of any tax rewrite will be determine...

April 5, 2016

The People are Right: It’s Time to Balance Trade

Although Donald Trump (Republican) and Bernie Sanders (Democrat) have both made opposition to U.S. trade policy a major plank of their surprisingly successful presidential campaigns, most elite “opinion leaders” in the media and politics ...

December 20, 2015

Will the Trans-Pacific Partnership Force Us to Fund the Paris Climate Agreement?

In a commentary in the American Spectator on December 16, "No one is Going to Enforce The Paris Climate Treaty through TPP," K. William Watson of the Cato Institute contributed to the ongoing discussion of the Trans Pacific P...

November 20, 2015

What's Actually in the Trans Pacific Partnership?

On November 5, the White House released the text of the 5,544 page Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) that President Obama had just finished negotiating under the FastTrack authority that Congress gave him. That trade pact can no longer be amended...

October 30, 2015

Trump on TPP: 'Why can't they just put it off until I become elected?'

In his October 24 speech in Jacksonville, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump discussed the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the trade pact which President Obama just finished negotiating.  Trump asked a key question of th...

September 30, 2015

Can We Trump the Record U.S. Trade Deficit with China?

At the beginning of his U.S. tour last week, China’s President Xi met with 650 U.S. business leaders in Seattle. Seattle was a natural place to visit.  It is home to the factories of one of America’s largest great export industries ...

June 23, 2015

Today is the big vote on Obamatrade

Today’s Senate cloture vote is the last and best chance for conservatives to stop Obamatrade.  Just 41 Senate votes against cloture would stop it in its tracks.  During previous votes, the Republican leadership had enough votes sewed ...

May 13, 2015

Fast Tracking an International EPA

American businesses are subject to many levels of regulation. But federal, state, and local levels of environmental regulation are not enough for President Obama. He is currently negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) which will add the equi...

May 3, 2015

Fast-Tracking America's Economic Destruction

Last week’s congressional committee votes to give President Obama “Fast Track” negotiating power may go down in economic history as among the most self-destructive ever.  The leaders of the Republican Party betrayed their voter...

February 10, 2015

Tax Corporate Income as Personal Income

Countries around the word have been gradually reducing their corporate income tax rates in order to gain a competitive advantage over their trading partners. Those with lower tax rates attract factories and corporate headquarters, while those with hi...

January 27, 2015

Let's End Means-Tested Benefits

The Democratic establishment gets votes from the poor by locking them into poverty and government dependency.  But to win elections, they must also appeal to the middle class.  That didn’t work out very well in the 2014 midterm electi...

April 24, 2014

China Stealing U.S. Chicken Industry

Last August, the U.S. won a WTO dispute about high Chinese chicken tariffs.  With U.S. corn prices low and Chinese consumers leery of eating Chinese-produced chicken due to outbreaks of Avian Flu in China, everything seemed set for a h...

January 22, 2014

Fast Track to a Bad Deal

On January 9, the Democrat and Republican establishments jointly introduced a bill designed to give Congress's constitutional authority over trade to President Obama. It is officially called TPA (Trade Priorities Act) and is usually referred to as "F...

November 29, 2013

World Economic Growth is Slowing

When gas prices start declining at the pump, as they have this fall, that sometimes means that the world economy is slowing. When U.S. exports decline, as they did in September, that sometimes means that the world economy is slowing. The latest ind...

September 23, 2013

EPA Foils Clean Fuel

By slowing the conversion of vehicles to CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) fuel The Environmental Protection Agency is causing needless nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate, and mercury air pollution. It might just as well be renamed the Environmen...

April 5, 2013

The Gods of the Copybook Headings are in Cyprus

In his 1919 poem, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, Rudyard Kipling compares the truths of the real world ("the Gods of the Copybook Headings") with the promises of social progressives ("the Gods of the Market Place"), and he concludes that nations ...

December 8, 2012

Fiscal Cliff: Negotiation Failure could be the Best Option

It should come as no surprise that the "fiscal cliff" negotiations are taking place under utterly bogus premises. Instead of significantly cutting $502 billion from the $1,327 billion per year 2012 budget deficit as would take place automatically if ...

November 13, 2012

The Fiscal Cliff Is a Good Thing

The entire discussion of the "fiscal cliff" has things a bit backward.  People talk of "going off" the fiscal cliff -- and the natural image is of the disaster that awaits one who tumbles from the edge of a precipice.  Instead, perhaps we s...

November 2, 2012

Obama Fiddles while China Gets Jeep

In December 2011, a few American-made vehicles were getting over China's high 25% tariff barrier, so the Chinese government raised the barrier.  According to The Guardian, China raised its tariffs on GM cars by as much as 22% and on Chrysler car...

October 4, 2012

Obama's Freudian Slip - He Wants to Export Jobs

President Obama told a September 26 rally at Kent State University in Ohio, "I want to see us export more jobs."  Then he caught himself and continued, "Export more products -- excuse me. I was channeling my opponent for a second."  Accordi...

July 10, 2011

How to Restore America's Manufacturing Innovation

The first presidential report to Congress on manufacturing, Alexander Hamilton's 1791 Report on Manufactures, was a classic; it shaped American industrial policy for 150 years. The latest report, the Report to the President on Ensuring American Leade...

April 14, 2011

House Prices in Free Fall

The latest house price data (the S&P Case-Shiller index) shows a clear downward trend for the most recent six months, as shown in the graph below:The next graph shows how this year's data fits in with the long-term trend.  It is clear that t...

January 9, 2011

A Scaled Tariff Would Help Balance the 2011 Budget

The last Congress passed a dangerous mixture of spending increases and tax cuts financed by borrowing.  The American people saw this as a mistake and in the 2010 elections elected a Republican House of Representatives and an increased number of ...

December 10, 2010

Bernanke to China: Stop Hurting Us or You'll Hurt Us

Even though the Chinese economy is growing at a 10% pace while the United States economy is growing at 2%, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke could not resist telling the Chinese government how to run its economy.  His remarks appeared i...

October 19, 2010

The 'Move Your Corporate Headquarters Offshore' Act

In his weekly radio address on Saturday, President Obama said, "There is no reason why our tax code should actively reward [American corporations] for creating jobs overseas. Instead, we should be using our tax dollars to reward companies that c...

September 24, 2010

How to Win the Trade War with the Democrats

There are two trade wars going on at the moment. One is between the mercantilist countries and the United States; the other is between the Democrats and the Republicans. In both wars, one side is punching while the other side just stands there taking...

August 7, 2010

U.S. Growth Slows Due to Trade Deficit

No private sector tire repairman would keep pumping up a flat tire again and again without patching the leak, but that is exactly what our governing class keeps trying. The Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have been pumping the econom...

June 30, 2010

Obama's G-20 Summit Setback

At his press conference following the June 25-26 Toronto meeting of the G-20 nations, President Obama claimed that the summit had been a success:We came to Toronto with three specific goals -- to make sure the global recovery is strong and durable; t...

May 29, 2010

The Euro: This Marriage Can't Be Saved

At the time of the euro's launch in January 1999, Milton Friedman declared that the euro would not survive the first major European economic recession. He believed that the member nations would pursue their own fiscal policies, which would be inconsi...

April 15, 2010

Obama Bows while Hu Stiffs Him

President Obama bowed to Chinese President Hu while they shook hands at the beginning of the April 12-13 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. President Hu did not bow back. The rest of the summit played out the same relationship. First, Hu rejected...

February 24, 2010

Obama Giving U.S. R&D to China

The United States and China are involved in a trade war, the outcome of which will determine who gets America's remaining manufacturing industries and research and development centers. The Chinese are actively fighting; President Obama is actively ta...

January 15, 2010

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

The economic news for January has been dominated by disappointing employment news released on January 8 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total non-farm payroll employment edged down by 85,000 in December from November, led by a loss of 57,000 ...

November 23, 2009

Obama's Failed Asia Trip

President Obama went to Asia this month with great hopes that he could persuade the Chinese government to let its people buy more American products. He failed. Here's the Wall Street Journal reporters' reading of the body language immediately followi...

November 5, 2009

Is It Time to End the IMF and WTO?

This year's Nobel Prize for Economics was co-won by Elinor Ostrom for her work showing that local solutions often work better than government regulation for solving problems as diverse as preventing over-fishing, conserving rainforests, and policing ...

October 8, 2009

Exit Strategy from the Great Recession

In the 1930s, Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt had no exit strategy from the Great Depression, so he blamed it on his Republican predecessor. Roosevelt's policies prolonged the depression until, finally, the start of World War II in Europe cau...

August 11, 2009

Celebration is Premature: The Economy is Still Contracting

Over the last two weeks, the main-stream media and the stock market have greeted new economic data released by the Commerce and  Labor Departments with enthusiasm. Although these data show that the recession is not deepening as fast as it had be...

July 13, 2009

America sliding into a pit of foreign debt

There are two types of news: the news that fits and the news that would cause fits if it were printed. A responsible press would cover both. Unfortunately, economic reporting in the United States doesn't always do this. If news of an economic bombshe...

July 3, 2009

Capping and Trading Away Our Jobs

In his weekly radio address on June 27, President Barack Obama praised the House of Representatives for just passing the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, more commonly known as the cap and trade climate bill. He said: This historic pie...

May 29, 2009

Obama's Plan A is Not Working

On January 10, two of President Obama's economic advisors (Christine Romer and Jared Bernstein) put together a report in which they projected the effects of President Obama's economic recovery plan. The blue line in the chart below shows the unemploy...

May 18, 2009

Obama Stands By while Europe Loots Intel

On May 13, the European Commission fined Intel €1.06 billion (about $1.45 billion) for alleged monopolistic abuses in marketing its microprocessors and computer chips which form the core of most PCs. The Europeans have their own favorite multina...

June 14, 2008

Straight talk from Clinton's trade negotiator

It is rare when a government official actually blames himself for his mistakes. That straight talk occurred in the June 4 issue of Foreign Policy in Focus when Robert Cassidy, President Clinton's Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Asia and China...