The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law by President Trump less than a little less than year ago, on December 22, 2017. What are the likely benefits and costs associated with the legislation? The Fall 2018 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (where I work as Managing Editor) includes a two-paper symposium on the subject. Joel Slemrod provides an overview of the main elements of the legislation and its effects in " "Is This Tax Reform, or Just Confusion?" (32:4, pp. 73-96). Alan J. Auerbach focuses on one primary aspect of the law, its shifts in the US corporate income tax, in "Measuring the Effects of Corporate Tax Cuts," (32:4, pp. 97-120).
· Despite US tariffs, China’s September trade balance with the US reached a record high
Traditional monetary policy, as practiced in the decades up to 2007, faces a problem looking ahead. The shared areas in this figure show recessions. During a typical recession, the Federal Reserve cut its policy target interest rates--the so-called federal funds rate--by about 5 percentage points.
The latest measures adopted by the Central Bank and the government of Argentina have stopped the collapse of the peso. However, without structural reforms on the spending side, we may find ourselves with a period of calm before a new storm.
One of my pet peeves about arguments over the role of money in elections is that the discussion usually focuses so heavily on campaign contributions, while leaving out other intersections of money in politics--like the role of lobbying.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that arguing about the definitions of terms like "capitalism" and "socialism" is a waste of time. So rather than argue, I will simply assert that the world has many flavors of capitalism: among them, US/British, Japanese, Scandinavian/northern European, German, Spanish/French/Italian southern European, and doubtless others. Within the United States, one might further identify a spectrum of capitalist beliefs.
The Fall 2017 issue of the Cato Journal includes 11 accessible papers on "The Economics of Immigration." Here, I'll mention some insights that especially caught my eye from two of the papers.