Theodore Roosevelt (president 1901–09) and Woodrow Wilson (president 1913–21) are the two celebrated progressive presidents. Many of today’s observers, not familiar with the detailed history of that era, fail to appreciate the fundamental importance of the tariff issue to debates of that time.
Americans are being told that China’s currency manipulations are causing harm to its trading partners, America being the main victim. Nothing could be further from the truth. China’s currency manipulations certainly cause harm, but to China itself!
No country can cause harm to another by adopting any economic intervention. All economic interventions cause harm only to the country that adopts them. This applies to subsidies of home industries, quotas restricting import volumes, tariffs imposed on imports, and currency manipulations.
Most experts are of the view that as the economy gains strength the Fed must step in at some stage and introduce a tighter stance in order to prevent the rate of inflation getting out of control.
Why however, should economic growth be positively associated with a general increase in the prices of goods and services?
History is an easy subject to teach if you are intellectually lazy. It is the most challenging subject to teach if you have a great memory, read a lot, and care about understanding causes and effects.
You keep having to rewrite your narrative to fill the same number of lessons every year. Time marches on.
If you pad your lectures, no big problem. If you write tight lectures, you must remove material you thought was crucial.
Your school district will supply you with a new edition every few years. Teach the text -- the boring, establishment text.
The Tariff Act of 1828 quickly became known as the “Tariff of Abominations.” That tariff now has a contender for the name.
The Trump tariff program seems to be metastasizing by the day. What are Mr. Trump’s objectives? Consider a different question first. Would Trump be on this course if he thought that it would cost campaign contributions or votes in November? Silly question. As I see it, Trump tariff policy is the most brazen reach for votes and political cash since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, and may go down in history as just as big a mistake.
Imagine a county sheriff that took a suspected drug-law violator into custody more than 10 years ago. Since then, the man has been held in jail without being accorded a trial. The district attorney and the sheriff promise to give the man a trial sometime in the future but they’re just not sure when. Meanwhile the man sits in jail indefinitely just waiting for his trial to begin.
New home prices are rising in Las Vegas, with rising costs being blamed. Andrew and Dennis Smith write in the June edition of The Las Vegas Housing Letter, “Rising costs have been one of the key factors cited by home builders when it comes to rising home prices.”
This October, recreational cannabis will become legal in Canada. Or, put more accurately, it will become legal again.
As in the United States, the prohibition of marijuana was a twentieth-century invention, but nevertheless remained an untouchable prohibition for several decades, and in spite of a 1972 recommendation from a federal commission that marijuana be de-criminalized.
Medical marijuana was finally legalized in 2001, although efforts at de-criminalizing recreational marijuana failed in 2003 and 2004.
