For most of history, people’s biggest problems concerned adequate food, clothing, and shelter. Life resembled Thomas Hobbes’s description of the state of nature: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Today, we have, if anything, the opposite problem: we have so much food, clothing, and shelter that we pay professionals to help us manage it all. Juggling all the opportunities that come with modern life in a wealthy country has also created an industry of coaches, consultants, and others who train people to optimize their time, manage their contacts, and declutter their calendars. Here are the three first-world problems we wish everybody had.
1. Obesity (a body cluttered with fat). Our ancestors had too little to eat. We have too much, and the problem is so bad that obesity is considered a leading public health threat. When people write about “food deserts,” they’re not always writing about places with no calories. They often write about places with too many calories, but too many calories for the wrong kind — and it is a “problem” we can solve if we let the free market work. I’ve heard it said that sometimes, people want to move to the US because they want to live in a country where the poor people are fat. Totalitarian communist states do not have this problem, but the fact that it looks like the only person in North Korea with a weight problem is the totalitarian dictator should tell you something about communism.
2. Stuff (a home cluttered with things). Most of us, I suspect, would agree that we have too much stuff. The cluttered house, too, is a modern first-world problem. Where children used to play with carved wooden toys and dolls literally made from rags, they now have rooms filled to bursting with practically unlimited opportunities to expand their imagination. Great books are practically free. Sears revolutionized music by selling cheap electric guitars through its catalog. Cheap musical instruments mean that almost anyone can learn how to play something. Guitar. Keyboards. Drums. Furthermore, so many things are so cheap that people can spend a lot of time sampling hobbies and interests. To be affluent is to be able to surround oneself with doodads and tchotchkes that evoke pleasant memories and to understand the cruelty of telling someone, “I hope you step on a Lego.”
3. Busyness (a calendar cluttered with events and commitments). Our ancestors might have lived in serene poverty, but this wasn’t necessarily because they chose a more virtuous path. They probably weren’t overwhelmed by FOMO (“Fear of Missing Out”) because they likely had little idea of what was happening beyond their small communities and didn’t know what they might have missed out on. Once again, you face the opposite problem. The packed calendar is the modern status symbol, like a luxury car or watch was a few decades ago. You have too many ways to spend your time profitably and productively. Streaming services, e-books, and podcasts bring the best (and worst) the world has ever thought or written to you constantly. It’s more than you could digest in a lifetime. You have to choose wisely — a problem our ancestors didn’t have.
Magnificently, free markets that have given us these “problems” also give us solutions. Capitalism comes to the rescue. Do you have a weight problem? Gyms cater to people of all budgets and with all sorts of fitness goals. There are cheap gyms like Planet Fitness (I’ve been a member for about seven years and honestly don’t use my membership that well) and more expensive gyms that are almost country clubs. Do you have too much stuff? There is a burgeoning market for professional organizers who will help you keep it all organized (this episode of EconTalk with Adam Minter, author of Secondhand, is fascinating). Too busy? We can’t all hire a personal assistant, but there is a similar market for companies that help people manage their projects and calendars (I’m a member of Asian Efficiency and was on their podcast in 2022).
Where our ancestors lived lives that were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, the twenty-first century has us overwhelmed with connections, opportunities, and experiences. People might claim things are bad and wish for the olden days, but “olden day” lifestyles are well within our reach, and we still embrace modern comforts. It’s a great time to be alive. I can only hope that by the time my children are grown, the rest of the world will be overwhelmed with the kinds of first-world “problems” we deal with daily.
Art Carden is a Senior Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also an Associate Professor of Economics at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.
A Biden judicial nominee under fire for ties to an anti-Israel group is now facing a call by the conservative watchdog American Accountability Foundation (AAF) to withdraw for failing to disclose the sources of his income.
AAF sent Adeel Mangi a letter Thursday demanding he ask President Joe Biden to withdraw his nomination for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, calling Mangi’s failure to include income sources on his Financial Disclosure Report “disqualifying.” Though the White House has doubled down on its support for Mangi, at least one Senate Democrat, Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, said Tuesday she would not support him.
“Despite your extensive legal education and your years as a partner at a prestigious law firm you were unable to complete this vital disclosure form with the level of disclosure required by law,” AAF’s letter states. “After reviewing how unambiguous and straightforward the guidance is and understanding your level of professional legal education, it is difficult to come to any conclusion other than you were attempting to withhold vital information from the public.”
AAF noted the income source information omitted on his report is “vital to understanding what specific conflicts of interest [an] attorney may have before assuming the bench.”
Mangi’s disclosure notes that he earned $2,306,626 in 2022, $4,440,000 in 2023 and $0 in 2024 from the firm where he is a partner, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, but does not list clients.
During the time period covered by his disclosure, Mangi represented clients that included companies like Appian Corporation, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems and Blue Buffalo, according to the questionnaire he submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Disclosure reports must “identify the filer’s sources of compensation (other than from United States government employment) exceeding $5,000 during either of the preceding two calendar years or during the current calendar year up to the date of filing, and must briefly describe the nature of the duties performed or services rendered by the reporting individual for each such source of compensation,” according to guidance for nominees cited in the letter.
Information considered “confidential as a result of a privileged relationship” need not be reported, though an example provided in the guidance notes the “name of the client would not normally be considered confidential.”
“A nominee who is a partner or employee of a law firm who has worked on a matter involving a client from which the firm received fees during a calendar year must report the name of the client and the filer’s amount of compensation if the compensation received by the nominee exceeded $5,000,” the guidance clarifies.
Republicans have slammed Mangi’s affiliation with the Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race and Rights (CSRR), where he sat on the advisory board from 2019 to 2023, for the organization’s “antisemitic extremism.”
The CSRR issued a statement blaming Israel for Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack. It also co-sponsored an event on the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11 to “challenge” the narrative of the attack, where activist Sami Al-Arian, who pleaded guilty in 2006 to conspiring to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group, was featured as a speaker.
Mangi said the board only met once a year and that he was not aware of the Sept. 11 event before his confirmation hearing, according to Courthouse News.
Mangi previously failed to disclose his role in moderating a 2022 panel for the National Association of Muslim Lawyer’s annual conference, which included Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) litigation director Lena Masri, according to the Washington Examiner. He later issued an apology for the oversight.
Several major law enforcement organizations, including New York’s largest police organization representing over 50,000 officers, opposed his nomination because he serves as an Alliance of Families for Justice advisory board member. His affiliation with the group is also behind Cortez Masto’s opposition.
“Mr. Mangi’s affiliation with the Alliance of Families for Justice is deeply concerning,” Cortez Masto told Politico. “This organization has sponsored a fellowship in the name of Kathy Boudin, a member of the domestic terrorist organization Weather Underground, and advocated for the release of individuals convicted of killing police officers.”
The White House has said Mangi is facing “uniquely hostile attacks” due to “his Muslim faith.”
“There is no excuse for this flagrant withholding of vital ethics disclosures from the public,” AAF’s letter continues. “Because of your flagrant disregard for the rules and repeated efforts to hide required disclosures from the public it is unreasonable to expect the American people to view you as trustworthy, an essential attribute of a federal judge.”
(The Center Square) – Mexican cartels for decades have devised creative ways to smuggle narcotics and other contraband across the southern U.S., including using produce, law enforcement officials say. This month, in one week, thousands of pounds of meth were seized hidden in shipments of peppers, tomatillos and carrots.
At the Otay Mesa, California, cargo facility this month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized large quantities of methamphetamine hidden under packages of the vegetables.
In one instance, CBP officers stopped a 27-year-old male with a valid border crossing card driving a commercial tractor-trailer with a shipment manifested for peppers and tomatillos. At first glance, the shipment appeared to contain only peppers and tomatillos. But after a K-9 unit screened it, officers examined the trailer and found a box containing a crystal-like substance. Additional officers were radioed to provide assistance and began extracting package after package hidden under the produce. They found 3,594 packages that were tested and identified as methamphetamine. The stash totaled 3,671.58 pounds.
The same week, CBP officers at the same facility uncovered another massive load of meth being smuggled in using carrots.
They stopped a 44-year-old man, also a valid border crossing card holder, driving a commercial tractor trailer hauling a shipment manifested as carrots. Officers unloaded the cases of carrots and found suspicious packages hidden underneath, which were tested and identified as methamphetamine. Overall, they seized 574 packages weighing approximately 2,900 pounds.
In both instances, the meth and commercial tractor-trailers were seized; the drivers were turned over to Homeland Security Investigations.
According to Addiction Resource, a lethal dose of methamphetamine is 150 milligrams. However, the lethality of a dose varies, it says, due to how pure or impure it is. Less impurities means the dose is more toxic.
Cartels use several tactics to smuggle drugs and people into the U.S., including “task saturation” and “migrant warfare,” authorities have explained. Surging resources in one area to leave the border open in another area enables cartel operatives and gangs they work with to commit a range of crimes. Another tactic is hiding people and drugs in trucks, including behind or under produce, to bring through ports of entry.
While Border Patrol agents are primarily in the field, CBP officers and canine units work at ports of entry to interdict human and drug smuggling driven by the Sinaloa Cartel, which has taken operational control of the border from California to El Paso, Texas, The Center Square has reported.
The Sinaloa Cartel “is one of the oldest and more established drug trafficking organizations in Mexico,” the DEA explains. “Though its birthplace and stronghold is the Mexican State of Sinaloa, the Sinaloa Cartel controls drug trafficking activity in various regions in Mexico, particularly along the Pacific Coast.”
It uses “violent local street gangs and criminal groups and individuals across the United States to flood American communities with huge amounts of fentanyl and methamphetamine, which drives addiction and violence and kills Americans,” The DEA explains. A major port of entry for illicit drugs is California, where they are then distributed throughout the U.S.
Last year, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares led a coalition of 21 attorneys general calling on the president to designate the Sinaloa Cartel, among others, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. President Joe Biden has not done so although the Texas legislature and governor did last year.
The Department of Justice charged Sinaloa Cartel members and the sons of its former leader, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, last year. El Chapo is serving life in prison in the U.S. since July 2019. The U.S. Treasury Department has also been sanctioning Sinaloa Cartel members and Mexican companies associated with them for years.
As CBP officers continue to seize large quantities of drugs, California Border Patrol chiefs have warned of increased security threats between ports of entry where checkpoints have been closed due to current administration policies. When deposed by the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security during its impeachment investigation of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, they expressed alarm about not knowing how many people or drugs are being smuggled across the border.
Despite being stretched thin, California CBP and Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 500,000 illegal border crossers in fiscal 2023, The Center Square reported.
Record high illegal entries continued along the southwest border in the first quarter of fiscal 2024, with California seeing higher entries as Texas’ resistance grew, The Center Square reported.
Board Governor Christopher J. Waller at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in Washington, DC. January 2024.
Inflation picked up in January, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCEPI), which is the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, grew at a continuously compounding annual rate of 4.1 percent in the first month of the year. The PCEPI has grown at an annualized rate of 1.8 percent over the last three months and 2.5 percent over the last six months. Prices today are 8.4 percentage points higher than they would have been had they grown at an annualized rate of 2.0 percent since January 2020.
Figure 1. Headline and Core Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index with 2-percent Trend, January 2020 – January 2024
Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, also increased. Core PCEPI grew at a continuously compounding annual rate of 5.0 percent in January. It has grown at an annualized rate of 2.6 percent over the last three months and 2.5 percent over the last six months.
There is no denying that measured inflation increased considerably in January. The question is whether it means inflation will likely be higher than previously expected in the months ahead. There are at least two reasons to think the January uptick is just a blip, and will be followed by much smaller price increases in the months ahead.
First, the increase in inflation was partly due to a surge in imputed prices. Imputed prices are quantified opportunity costs. What didn’t happen is not directly observed and, hence, must be estimated. Consider owner-occupied housing. Whereas the price a renter pays his landlord for housing services can be measured, the price an owner implicitly pays herself to live in her own house cannot. Economists at the BEA must estimate the price of owner-occupied housing in order to estimate the general level of prices. Similarly, some services provided by financial and nonprofit institutions serving households are not directly observable.
Although economists at the BEA surely do their best to accurately estimate imputed prices, there is no guarantee that they get it right. Correspondingly, some degree of skepticism is warranted when imputed prices diverge from market prices, as they did in January. Market-based PCE, which is a supplemental measure offered by the BEA, is based on household expenditures for which there are observable prices. It excludes most imputed transactions. The market-based PCE price index grew at a continuously compounding annual rate of 3.1 percent in January. It has grown at an annualized rate of 1.3 percent over the last three months and 2.4 percent over the last six months. Maybe imputed prices are rising more rapidly than observable prices, as estimates suggest. Or, maybe, those estimates are overstating the rise in imputed prices.
Second, the usual seasonal adjustment for January may be insufficient for January 2024. Many prices reset in January, as contracts are renewed at the start of the year. To prevent a spike in CPI inflation each January, the BEA adjusts the data to account for the typical January price increase. This procedure essentially apportions some of the increase in January prices to other months, as if the prices had grown gradually from one month to the next instead of suddenly each January.
Seasonally-adjusting price level data works pretty well in normal times. But, in unusual circumstances, the seasonal adjustment may over- or under-state actual price changes. When prices are rising faster than usual, the seasonal adjustment — which accounts for the usual increase in prices —will not apportion enough of the January price increases to other months. Consequently, the seasonally adjusted price level will tend to overstate inflation in January (and understate inflation in other months). Robin Brooks recently made this point in the context of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), but the argument applies to the PCEPI as well.
Brooks describes the January 2024 uptick in prices as “an echo of last year’s start-of-year price resets that made inflation in early 2023 look much worse than it really was.” In January 2023, the PCEPI grew at a continuously compounding annual rate of 6.7 percent. It had grown at an annualized rate of 3.5 percent over the prior three months and would grow at an annualized rate of 3.0 percent over the subsequent three months. In hindsight, January 2023 was an outlier. January 2024 looks likely to be an outlier, as well.
Following the January inflation data, most commentators fall into one of two categories: those concerned because they believe we are experiencing a resurgence of inflation, and those unconcerned because they believe the January uptick in inflation is just a blip. In contrast, I believe there is cause for concern even though the January uptick will likely turn out to be just a blip. Why? Because it will likely lead Fed officials to keep monetary policy tighter for longer.
In a recent talk, Fed Governor Christopher Waller said the January inflation data reinforced his “view that we need to verify that the progress on inflation we saw in the last half of 2023 will continue.” He said “there is no rush to begin cutting interest rates to normalize monetary policy.”
Waller rightly acknowledges that the January increase in inflation “may have been driven by some odd seasonal factors or outsized increases in housing costs.” But he errs in thinking “the strength of output and employment growth means that there is no great urgency in easing policy.” The available data is historical and monetary policy acts with a lag. To avoid overcorrecting, and pushing the economy into a recession, the Fed must ease monetary policy before the data clearly demonstrates inflation is back down to 2 percent.
The Fed failed to tighten policy swiftly as inflation picked up in the second half of 2021. Consequently, prices rose much higher than they should have. It has similarly failed to ease policy as inflation returned to its 2-percent target in 2023. The Fed should be looking ahead and adjusting monetary policy in light of its forecasts. Instead, its eyes are fixed on the rearview mirror. Let’s hope the Fed adjusts its trajectory before it is too late.
William J. Luther is the Director of AIER’s Sound Money Project and an Associate Professor of Economics at Florida Atlantic University. His research focuses primarily on questions of currency acceptance. He has published articles in leading scholarly journals, including Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Economic Inquiry, Journal of Institutional Economics, Public Choice, and Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance. His popular writings have appeared in The Economist, Forbes, and U.S. News & World Report. His work has been featured by major media outlets, including NPR, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, TIME Magazine, National Review, Fox Nation, and VICE News. Luther earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics at George Mason University and his B.A. in Economics at Capital University. He was an AIER Summer Fellowship Program participant in 2010 and 2011.
What do you want, a nice pair of gold sneakers or a scented candle?
Donald Trump is a businessman. He hires people that do business with other businesses and the public. That’s how businesses are supposed to work, developing an economy.
Trump recently introduced a new line of signature shoes at Sneaker Con. Trump says, “This is something I’ve been talking about for 12 years, 13 years and I think it is going to be a big success.” This venture will employ people to make and sell shoes. Businesses will make money, people will make money, and people will have an enjoyable product. This is what businessmen do. They try to be a part of and activate the economy.
Instead of congratulating Trump on a new business venture employing taxpaying Americans, Biden’s 2024 communications director, Michael Tyler, stated, “Donald Trump showing up to hawk bootleg Off-Whites is the closest he’ll get to any Air Force Ones ever again for the rest of his life.” That kind of comment made toward new business ventures and taxpaying Americans is not surprising, for Biden thinks that making bullets, paid for with taxpayer money, and giving them to other countries is good business, because he is obviously not a businessman. Biden states, “Being the arsenal of democracy also means good-paying jobs for American workers.”
Trump’s businesses had 22,450 employees as of 2015. According to Forbes Magazine, Trump’s net worth in 2019 was $3.1 billion with about half of that coming from his New York City real estate holdings. Trump’s companies conduct business with numerous other businesses, keeping their workers employed, too. After the recent court ruling in New York, Trump was fined over $355 million for supposed “fraud” where there were no complaints, no victims, and everybody made money. Also, he will not be allowed to run his own business for three years. Since there was no victim to the supposed “fraud,” who gets awarded the $355 million?
Concerning the “fraud,” award-winning researcher and professor of accounting at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Eli Bartov, who was an expert witness at the trial, stated, “‘My main finding is there is no evidence whatsoever of any accounting fraud. …’ Mr. Bartov said that after reviewing the lawsuit against the Trump Organization, ‘the most important evidence is the credit reports of the Deutsche Bank.’”
After stating to the judge, “There is no evidence whatsoever of any accounting fraud,” the judge asked if Bartov meant that the attorney general’s “complaint had no merit.” Bartov responded, “This is absolutely my opinion. … You read the complaint: the complaint has numerous allegations of valuations of GAAP [generally accepted accounting principles]. There is no specific reference to a provision of GAAP that was violated. … Some of them really bordered on absurd,” he added, saying that a few hours of accounting would have sorted out what the attorney general assumed was a violation.
So, this clearly proves that Attorney General Letitia James and New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron are just as inept in their accounting abilities as they are in their legal abilities.
New York voters need to realize Trump could choose to shutter his N.Y. businesses and lay off the employees. This would probably result in other companies losing enough business that they would have to lay off their employees. At that point, how many people would vote for Biden and Letitia James again?
In all fairness, Joe Biden does have other business ventures other than just making bullets with taxpayer’s money and giving them away. In 2020, for example, there were biographies about Joe: “the book that Joe and Jill wrote, Biden calendars, mugs, coloring books and earrings. A Biden action figure cost $15, as [does] the newest item – gray socks adorned with the now-president-elect wearing a red, white and blue-striped tie and proclaiming, ‘Vote for Joe Biden.’” With Joe’s business acuity, let’s not forget the “top seller,” “a Biden scented candle that smells like one of his favorite drinks: orange Gatorade.” So, the Gatorade-candle outsells his books.
Wow! Don’t you just want to run out and purchase a Biden scented candle? I wonder if it is a conflict of interest, if Biden is selling candles while he is also making policy in the U.S. to destroy our power grid, whereby people will need candles to light their homes? Maybe the Biden scented candle really is destined to be a countrywide bestseller.
Not to be out done and showing her business acuity, Kamala Harris came up with an “original” idea and decided to make a scented candle too. After all, it was the “top seller” for Joe. Kamala’s candle has a jasmine scent and has her office’s seal. Some say that one whiff of her candle and you’ll start cackling, just like the veep. Now the Democratic U.S. senator from California, Alex Padilla, has also caught on to the idea, and wants candles with Kamala’s scent. He was told by Harris’ office that he could produce a similar candle, “but asked that he use a different scent,” setting off what some people call the “Candlegate” scandal. Harris actually has an NDA (nondisclosure agreement) with the candle maker. Now we can finally understand why Kamala has done so little in her position as border czar. It’s because she’s been so busy smelling scents for her candle, and protecting her “invention.”
Joe and Kamala, is a scented candle the best you can do? With your names on it, I bet it is guaranteed to stink. Maybe the stench goes with the old gray socks Joe sells.
Former President Trump, I wish you the very best with your sneakers. I’d get a gold pair myself, but they are sold out. I am a size 9, in case you need to know.
Then-President Bill Clinton, flanked by former presidents, signs supplemental agreements to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the East Room of the White House. 1993.
Almost since its inception, the North American Free Trade Agreement has generated controversy far out of proportion to its economic consequences. From Ross Perot’s 1992 warning that NAFTA would create a “giant sucking sound” of jobs flowing to Mexico to Barack Obama’s (and Hillary Clinton’s) campaign trail threat to pull out of the agreement to Donald Trump’s 2016 description of it as a “disaster,” criticism of the trade deal has been a near-constant feature of American politics.
Veracity aside, such swipes are curious. The agreement signed among Mexico, Canada, and the United States — building on a pre-existing free trade deal between the latter two — was never going to significantly alter the United States’ economic trajectory. It just wasn’t possible. Eliminating US tariffs on imports from a single, relatively smaller country already facing very low tariffs — an average of two percent — isn’t the stuff that economic game-changers are made of.
Perhaps, then, NAFTA is best understood as a lightning rod for criticism of globalization more broadly. Ire directed at the agreement is as much aimed at trade conceptually as it is at NAFTA itself, if not more so.
It is in this spirit that one best understands Helen Andrews’ recent critique of NAFTA in The American Conservativeto mark the agreement’s 30th birthday. While Andrews, a senior editor at The American Conservative, directs several barbs at the trade deal, her main beef is the era of globalization she holds NAFTA responsible for helping usher in.
In Andrews’ telling, NAFTA was merely the first of several important free trade dominos to fall, setting off a “chain of events that allowed globalization to run free the way it did.” NAFTA’s entrance into force on January 1, 1994, she notes, was accompanied around the same time by other important milestones of expanded economic integration including the agreement creating the World Trade Organization, the formation of the European Union, and the opening of the Chunnel connecting the United Kingdom and France.
Boom, globalization was off to the races.
But the idea that 1994 heralded a new economic era is a strained interpretation of events. Put more bluntly, it’s false. Globalization — the process of increasing international economic integration—has been underway for centuries, if not millennia. (The first evidence of long-distance trade dates back to 3000 BCE) Sometimes it has ebbed (the outbreak of the world wars) and other times it has flowed (the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Age) but the direction has long been toward more expanded linkages. Indeed, each of the items cited by Andrews weren’t revolutionary events but further evolutions of events long underway.
The European Union, for example, was the successor to the European Community, which in turn traces its origins to the European Coal and Steel Community. The World Trade Organization, meanwhile, was preceded by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which had successfully reduced tariffs around the world through a series of negotiating rounds spanning many decades. Before the Channel Tunnel’s opening, commerce between the UK and its European neighbors took place via shipping and airplanes (and still does). And prior to NAFTA, there was the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement signed in 1988. Globalization has long been apace.
Andrews also errs in other elements of her narrative about globalization’s forward march. While she holds neoconservatives responsible for Republicans’ 1990s-era departure from their traditional pro-tariff stance and Ronald Reagan’s “nuanced and pragmatic” trade policies, she ignores that NAFTA was in many ways the realization of a vision first outlined by Reagan.
In Reagan’s 1979 announcement of his candidacy for president, he called for a “North American accord” — incorporated into the 1980 GOP platform — to develop closer ties among the United States, Canada, and Mexico. While the exact contours of this proposal were not spelled out, Reagan mentioned in his speech his dream of a future in which “a map of the world might show the North American continent as one in which the people’s commerce of its three strong countries flow more freely across their present borders than they do today.”
There’s also the small matter that the US-Canada free trade agreement that served as NAFTA’s foundation was signed by Reagan in 1988. Hardly a neoconservative, Reagan was arguably NAFTA’s intellectual godfather.
This miscasting of history, however, is a relatively minor detail. More notable is the thin nature of Andrews’ NAFTA criticism, which consists as much of promises unfulfilled as actual harms inflicted. She claims, for example, that Mexicans imported their goods from Asia instead of the US (in fact, US exports to Mexico more than doubled from 1994-2000), and points out that a bilateral trade balance that had been in US surplus swung to a deficit (an irrelevant measure of economic success). NAFTA’s immediate wake also saw an “explosion” of illegal immigration, “much” of which Andrews says — baselessly — the trade deal was “directly responsible for.”
The idea that seismic economic or societal shifts would result from a free trade agreement, however, should be met with considerable skepticism.
Regarding the surge in illegal immigration, for example, it’s worth considering other contemporaneous events. In addition to NAFTA, 1994 also saw the so-called “Tequila Crisis” that plunged Mexico into recession (NAFTA helped facilitate the subsequent recovery). On the US side, the go-go economy of the late 1990s saw unemployment drop below 5 percent from May 1997 through August 2001. That immigration increased under such circumstances should surprise no one.
More relevant when evaluating a free trade agreement are economic outcomes — and from that perspective, NAFTA looks pretty good. From the date of the agreement to the present day, per-capita GDP has nearly doubled in Mexico and almost tripled in the United States, and US manufacturing output, median wages, and median household income have all experienced healthy gains. To be clear, it’s a mistake to single-handedly credit NAFTA with such outcomes — correlation isn’t causation. But the same principle applies to NAFTA’s critics, who often blame the agreement for any and all economic problems since 1994.
Interestingly, even Andrews concedes that the number of jobs lost to Mexico was “relatively small.” But, keeping with her overarching narrative, she nonetheless holds NAFTA culpable for its alleged unleashing of forces that allowed globalization to run riot, contributing to various economic ills, including the loss of 5 million manufacturing jobs from 1995-2015.
But NAFTA’s claimed role is ahistorical, and blame placed on globalization for manufacturing job losses is mistaken. The decline in US manufacturing jobs — something that has been taking place since 1979 — is more a story of technology (robots, computers, and the like) and changing US consumer tastes than it is about trade. We know this because while the number of manufacturing jobs has declined, output has risen. Manufacturing jobs have declined abroad too, even in China. More recent US manufacturing job gains, meanwhile, have been accompanied by stagnant industrial productivity. Most lost manufacturing jobs were claimed by automation and economic development, not Mexico and China.
So what is NAFTA’s real record? Literature on the subject paints a consistent picture: the agreement significantly expanded trilateral trade but had only a modest — and beneficial — economic impact. A 2012 OECD literature review of NAFTA studies generally found small but positive results, as did a 2013 US International Trade Commission (USITC) review. GDP, productivity, and wages increased by modest amounts — economic welfare increased. Another 2014 paper examining NAFTA’s effects produced similar results. Given NAFTA’s scope and the long-established gains of free trade, that’s about what one should expect.
It also bears mentioning that some of the agreement’s benefits are not easily quantifiable. The trade deal, for example, means that Americans now have easier access to out-of-season fruits and vegetables that can be grown in Mexico’s favorable climes. Since the late 1990s the amount of fresh vegetables imported into the United States — primarily from Mexico and Canada — has nearly doubled.
NAFTA has also played a role in bolstering the resilience of the US auto industry at a time of rising global competition, especially from Asia. The elimination of duties between the United States and Mexico has provided additional export opportunities for both US automakers and auto parts producers as well as a more competitive source of crucial inputs. The result: a more competitive North American auto industry, with the United States at its center. Indeed, it is for this reason that the Center for Automotive Research warned in 2017 that Detroit would be hard hit by a US withdrawal from NAFTA.
Admittedly, the removal of trade barriers does produce some disruption, particularly for workers previously insulated from import competition. But some context is in order. The dynamic US economy destroys and creates millions of jobs each year due to technology, trade (both international and interstate), innovation, and other factors. According to a 2014 Peterson Institute for International Economics analysis, however, only 5 percent of the job losses were attributable to trade with Mexico. An economy without job loss, whatever the reason, is an economy locked in stagnation and suffering.
If the United States has been harmed by NAFTA, it is perhaps found in the misplaced attention it receives. Energy devoted to the trade deal’s alleged harm is attention deflected from actual policy missteps. That’s useful to politicians and others for whom NAFTA (and other trade issues) provide a useful distraction from actual sources of economic damage such as overwrought environmental regulations, ballooning infrastructure costs, and protectionist policies that undermine US competitiveness such as tariffs on imported metals and the Jones Act.
Focusing on such realistic threats might roil powerful special interests, so blame is instead assigned to NAFTA and foreign competition.
NAFTA has, overall, produced limited but small benefits for the United States, and 30 years on should be regarded as a modest policy success. Its participants have, on net, benefitted from the deal. Three decades on, its critics should finally sheathe their rhetorical swords and move on to actual economic challenges facing the country.
Colin Grabow is a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies where his research focuses on domestic forms of trade protectionism such as the Jones Act and the U.S. sugar program.
There are many dire threats facing America right now. Open borders have allowed millions of unvetted migrants from all over the world to flood our country, bringing in not just wildly out-of-control violent crime, but populating endless terrorist sleeper cells. Inflation is still spiking, and wages aren’t keeping up. Home ownership is out of reach for an entire generation. Thanks to the defund-the-police madness, crime in urban areas is rising to unprecedented levels, and organized retail theft is forcing many businesses to close. The commercial real estate crisis promises to bring endless banks to their knees. And of course, the federal deficit and national debt are far, far beyond sustainable levels.
But you’ll be happy to note none of those issues are really important. The REAL threat facing America is … white rural Trump-supporting Christians.
This latest bit of moonbattery comes from a couple of dimwits who wrote a tome entitled “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.” One dimwit, Tom Schaller, is a professor of political science at University of Maryland; the other, Paul Waldman, is a liberal op-ed columnist, senior writer for The American Prospect, and a blogger for the Washington Post. Neither attempts to disguise his contempt for conservatives and hatred for Middle America.
During an appearance on MSNBC, Schaller declared rural voters to be “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geodemographic group in the country. Second, they’re the most conspiracist group. QAnon support and subscribers, election denialism, COVID denialism instead of scientific skepticism, Obama birtherism. They don’t believe in an independent press, free speech. They’re also the most strongly white nationalist and white Christian nationalist. … They’re most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.”
(Hmmm. Antifa turning cities into war zones. Pro-Palestinian protesters hunting down Jews and creating no-go areas. Black Lives Matter torching entire neighborhoods. Climate activists blocking roadways and defacing artwork. Organized shoplifters looting stores. Are these examples of leftist “peaceful public discourse”?)
Now examine once again the book title. These men are literally saying that those of us who live in Flyover Country – which encompasses 97% of the landmass of the nation and who are unhappy about the way the left has yanked America so far away from the Constitution and Bill of Rights (remember those?) – are a threat to democracy.
They also say the citizens who take such pride in their patriotism are also the least likely to defend core American principles. Core American principles. Like what? Open borders? Defunding the police? Abolishing the First and Second Amendments? Those core American principles?
Sadly, this rural analysis by urban “experts” is nothing new. Those of us who live away from major cities are used to condescendingly being dismissed as unejikated poop-kicking hicks because we attend church, work three jobs, pay our taxes, abide by the law and refuse to teach our children that boys can become girls. Hillary Clinton famously called Trump-supporters “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic” and said we were a “basket of deplorables.” And who can forget Barack Obama’s unguarded comment about working-class voters: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” The mockery of rural America goes back to the movie “Deliverance” and beyond.
Rural America has always been an enigma to urban dwellers. We don’t talk the same, dress the same, think the same, vote the same, or raise our children the same as urbanites, and for this reason we are utterly to be condemned.
A couple years ago, NPR posted an article entitled “Americans are fleeing to places where political views match their own” in a phenomenon it called “The Big Sort.” “America is growing more geographically polarized,” observed NPR. “Red ZIP codes are getting redder and blue ZIP codes are becoming bluer. People appear to be sorting. … ‘The Big Sort’ may be making Americans more politically extreme.” One conservative blue-state refugee noted that “Republicans migrating from blue states are the most militant about stopping creeping liberalism.”
And it’s this issue – creeping liberalism – that accounts for the distrust of most ruralites toward urban dwellers, and may explain why the leftist elites are so hostile to rural Americans.
It’s hard for the progressive agenda to make headway in rural areas. Unable to change our minds about the benefits of transgenderism, the joy of abortion, the economic benefits of open borders, the safety of untested vaccines, and the unquestioning acceptance of other hot-button issues, the left resorts to its favorite tactics: Assigning us nefarious traits, everything from racism to “white rural rage” to conspiracy theorizing to domestic terrorism. They will do anything, in short, except admit their own policies are killing the country.
But yeah, white ruralites are the most dangerous geodemographic in this country. Never forget that.
The elites, and to an extent all leftists, seldom have to suffer the consequences of the corruption and crime from their misguided policies. Interestingly, those who DO suffer a consequence – if they personally become a victim of a violent crime or a home invasion or lose a business due to rampant shoplifting – often see the light and shift their politics to the right.
But why the blatant hatred? Rajan Laad hypothesizes in America Thinker, “The Democrats view voters as subjects who need to be controlled rather than citizens to whom they are accountable. Their object is to rule (not govern). They see these dissenting white rural voters as impediments to their permanence of power. This is why the January 6 protesters were subjected to draconian punishment. This is why President Trump is being relentlessly targeted by all government agencies. These are actions to forever remove their obstacles. The persecution of President Trump – and the fact that during his tenure, the border was secure, the economy was booming, and there was peace across the world – has made the bond between Trump and his supporters unbreakable. This causes the Democrats to almost combust with rage, because for almost a decade they have been trying to create a wedge between Trump and his supporters.”
Couldn’t have said it any better myself. And that, dear readers, is why white ruralites are the most dangerous geodemographic in this country. Again, never forget that.
Constitutional law scholar Alan Dershowitz ripped Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee Friday over his ruling about whether Fani Willis should be thrown off the case against former President Donald Trump.
McAfee ruled that Willis must either step aside or remove Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor Willis hired to prosecute the Trump case, saying there was an appearance of a conflict of interest stemming from their romantic relationship. Dershowitz said McAfee’s ruling was “utterly dishonest” and noted the judge “has to live in Fulton County.”
“Everybody knows, everybody knows, that [she] profited from… everybody knows… [Willis] actually committed perjury that she conspired to commit perjury with Nathan Wade and with the other witness. Who are you gonna believe this judge or you lying eyes?” Dershowitz told “National Report” co-hosts Shaun Kraisman and Emma Rechenberg. “We all know there was an actual conflict of interest here. He just doesn’t have the guts to say it and I predicted he wouldn’t have the guts to say it. He has to live in Fulton County. Now he may have said some things that are very critical of her, but still, he should have removed the DA from the case.”
WATCH:
“There is an actual conflict of interest. She made money from this case,” Dershowitz continued. “If anybody believes that she actually paid back every penny in cash, I got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. There are people in prison, there are people in death row based on evidence less strong than this: The lies about why she was at her house at 11 o’clock at night until four in the morning playing scrabble.”
Willis and Wade came under scrutiny after attorneys for former Trump campaign aide Michael Roman filed a motion for Willis’s disqualification on Jan. 8 alleging that Willis was in a romantic relationship with Wade. Willis and Wade testified during a hearing held Feb. 15 and Feb. 16 that their relationship did not start until 2022.
Robin Yeartie, a former friend of Willis, testified that Willis’s relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade began in 2019, not 2022, while Wade admitted he had no receipts to prove that Willis reimbursed him for expensive trips the two of them took to locations including the Bahamas and Belize.
Phone records also appeared to show that Wade visited a condominium own by Willis at least 35 times in 2021. Two witnesses have come forward since Willis, Wade and Terrence Bradley testified, saying Willis and Wade began their relationship well before 2022.
“This is a scandal, and the judge just didn’t have the courage to do the right thing, and judges often don’t and they will find a way out,” Dershowitz said. “And this is a weaselly way out.”
The US-Mexico Border Wall near Friendship Park and Tijuana. July 30, 2023.
It’s popular within the academy and fashionable intellectual circles to blame rich Westerners for global poverty, or rich Americans for national poverty. Rich people shoulder a lot of the blame for poverty, but not for the reasons you might think.
It’s worth revisiting why rich Westerners share so much blame for poverty. It’s not because we have high standards of living. Rather, it’s because we enthusiastically embrace immigration restrictions that make it hard for people to move to where their labor is most valuable and tariffs that make their labor less valuable by reducing their customer base — and we makeourselvesworse off in the process. In October 2023, President Biden announced plans to resume construction on the border wall he’d pledged to stop while running for President. We’re not blameworthy because we’re richer. We’re blameworthy because we refuse to further enrich ourselves by letting foreigners trade.
People blame the wants of the many on the luxuries of the few. This is incorrect, zero-sum thinking, which holds that there is, always and everywhere, only a fixed amount of stuff to go around. By this reasoning, the fact that I have indicates that someone else has not. Someone goes thirsty because I’m drinking a can of club soda or sparkling water. My opulence causes their want. If that’s true, it’s only true in the very, very short run. People don’t have much because they don’t produce much, and while it’s true that we could redistribute everything and raise the poor’s living standards considerably, we could do so only once (and if we did, we would find the same inequalities emerging immediately). Regular confiscations and redistributions don’t exactly provide people with strong incentives to invest and produce a lot in the first place. One person’s wealth does not cause another’s poverty in a commercial society. It’s a bit more complicated when the rich person is a powdered lord getting ever-richer by taxing the peasants.
A related argument blames global capital, suggesting that we owe our high standards of living to the low standards of living of the farmers and factory workers in poor countries. You might periodically see something float across social media explaining how little of the price of a chocolate bar goes to chocolate farmers or claims that you can buy cheap textiles because people around the world make them for you in (by Western standards) horrific conditions. There are alternative, more accurate explanations. First, the chocolate example shows how little of the value added to a chocolate bar comes from chocolate cultivation, rather than the process’s shipping, processing, marketing, and other parts. Second, the poor conditions in “sweatshops” are due to the workers’ low productivity combined with their lousy alternatives. As Paul Heyne has argued, it seems odd (and morally questionable) to suggest that we are obliged to refrain from offering them slightly better alternatives.
A few sentences ago, I wrote that (some) people don’t have much because they don’t produce much. That isn’t because of any innate deficiency. It’s because of the incentives they face in the societies they inhabit. Making people more productive is a laudable goal, but it has a checkered history. The real gains come from people moving to where their labor is more valuable — and that’s in high-income countries like the United States. The problem is, we rich Westerners won’t let them come. We consign them to lives of low productivity and the attendant poverty by building walls and saying, “No foreigners allowed.” The kicker? We impoverish ourselves in the process. We impoverish ourselves by keeping markets from working and, therefore, keeping others poor.
At the end of 2020, I expressed a wish that we would roll back border socialism. Those policies are among the main reasons why people in low-income countries continue to “enjoy” low incomes. If we allowed them to move to the United States, they might remain poor by American standards, but become rich by global standards.
There is another interesting consideration here, as well. Adam Smith famously wrote that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. Immigration and trade restrictions deliberately limit the extent of the market. Smaller markets mean less specialization and a coarser division of labor, meaning we’re worse off, on net. Some people might be made better off by such policies (which is why they support them), but their net gains are smaller than the rest of our net losses.
This is especially true in the long run. Larger markets mean a finer division of labor and a finer division of knowledge. In “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” F.A. Hayek quotes Alfred North Whitehead, who said that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” Thanks to the division of knowledge, I can write articles like these on a machine I couldn’t design myself, using software I couldn’t write, and I don’t have to think about any of these things. An extensive social division of knowledge means I can concentrate on composition.
In left-wing versions of the popular imagination, rich Westerners are rich because we exploit poor people in the rest of the world. We do share a lot of blame for global poverty, but not because of theft or exploitation. Rather, we are blameworthy because policies like immigration restrictions actively and forcibly prevent people worldwide from improving their lives by moving to where their labor is more productive.
Art Carden is a Senior Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also an Associate Professor of Economics at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.
President Joe Biden’s newest budget request calls for billions of taxpayer dollars to fund international climate programs.
The budget request furthers Biden’s goal to allocate a total of $11 billion in taxpayer funds to support international climate initiatives, including a $500 million payment in 2025 to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. The Biden administration has made a major effort to reassert the U.S. as a leader in international climate diplomacy, even while countries like India and China are expanding their use of coal to produce power.
The budget request calls for $3 billion in funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience (PREPARE) program, which is “a whole-of-government effort to help more than half a billion people in developing countries adapt to and manage the impacts of climate change,” according to the White House. The $500 million payment to the Green Climate Fund is a part of the PREPARE funding, and the budget also requests $100 million for the Amazon Fund to prevent deforestation.
Under the Biden administration, the U.S. has spent billions on international climate finance, with 2023 funding for such initiatives reaching approximately $9.5 billion, according to the budget request’s text. That figure is nearly six times larger than the amount of money the American government was spending on similar initiatives in 2021, when Biden took office.
Recently-departed Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and other Biden administration officials made a splash at the 2023 United Nations climate summit, known as COP28, when they pledged $17 million to the so-called “loss and damage” fund. Energy sector experts previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the “loss and damage” fund is effectively a “climate reparations” program, whereby wealthy nations transfer money to poor and developing countries as compensation for climate change purportedly driven by economic activity in wealthier nations over time.
The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
