In 1977, Jimmy Carter made an improbable journey from Georgia peanut grower to Democratic president in part by playing on his humble roots and receiving support from America’s farmers. Yet this bedrock voting constituency abandoned a fellow farmer to back Ronald Reagan four years later, after Carter punished Moscow for invading Afghanistan by cutting off […]
Why couldn’t we all just get along? Last week, we published an article on the game theory of international trade and trade wars. The article included an interactive game in which you (yes, you) were elected president and could pick your own foreign economic policy. Your goal was to maximize the payoff for your country. […]
The tweet came before 6 a.m., as President Trump’s tweets often do. It was early March, and the Trump administration had just announced steep tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. That did not make China or America’s European allies happy. Last week, after the U.S. imposed tariffs on $60 billion worth of Chinese goods, it […]
We think of today’s Washington as being rigidly divided along party lines on nearly every issue. But a bloc of Democrats in the Senate just joined with Republicans and the Trump administration on a bill that would lighten some restrictions on banks imposed by the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law, one of President Obama’s signature policy […]
Republicans are in revolt. Economists on the left and right are deeply skeptical. President Trump’s top economic adviser resigned rather than be party to it. The culprit: tariffs, and specifically the president’s decision to slap duties on imported steel (25 percent) and aluminum (10 percent). Though they are widely vilified, tariffs actually can work, providing […]