Will the new technologies of 3D printing and robotics lead to a reduction in international trade? After all, if countries can use 3D printing and robotics to make goods at home, why import from abroad?
When employers pay the health insurance premiums for their employees, these payments are exempt from income tax. If health insurance payments by employers were taxed as income, the government would collect about $200 billion in additional income taxes, and another $130 billion in payroll taxes for supporting Social Security and Medicare (according to the Analytical Perspectives volume of the US budget for 2020, Table 16-1).
As I explained on CNBC: Even the most optimistic assumptions are unlikely to change the trend of weak global growth.
David A. Price interviews Emmanuel Farhi in Econ Focus (Regional Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Second/Third Quarter 2019, pp. 18-23). Here are some tidbits:
The US had 50,000 opioid-involved overdose deaths in 2019. This is similar to the number of people who died of AIDS at the peak of that crisis in 1995. For comparison, total deaths in car crashes is about 40,000 per year. My dark suspicion is that the opioid crisis gets less national media attention because its worse effects are concentrated in parts of Appalachia, New England, and certain mid-Atlantic states, rather than in big coastal cities.
Several decades ago, the most common ways of thinking about problems of poor people in low-income countries involved ideas like the "poverty trap" and the "dual economy." The "poverty trap" was the idea low-income countries were close to subsistence, so it was hard for them to save and make the investments that would lead to long-term growth. The "dual economy" idea was that low-income countries had both traditional and a modern parts of their economy, but the traditional part had large numbers of subsistence-level workers. Thus, if or when the modern part of the economy expanded, it could draw on this large pool of subsistence level workers and so there was no economic pressure for subsistence wages to rise. In either case, a common policy prescription was that low-income countries needed a big infusion of capital, probably from a source like the World Bank, to jump-start their economies into growth.