TAP

Tom Friedman and the Reality Club. It was only a matter of time before reality hit Tom Friedman over the head. Or did it? After a long, long delay—decades actually—Friedman’s Wednesday column in the Times concedes that he might have been wrong about China moving to join the ranks of market democracies. His title is, […]

…over President Trump’s decision to stop the proposed purchase of computer chip manufacturer Qualcomm by Singapore-based Broadcom in the name of national security. Critics have termed the decision radical, and highlighted two ways in which it departs from the precedents set by the government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). First, the […]

One of the enduring myths of American economic history is that the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 deepened the Great Depression. Here’s James B. Stewart in Friday’s New York Times. After Smoot-Hawley was passed, Stewart solemnly warns, other nations retaliated and exports “plunged 61 percent from 1929 to 1933. … [T]he ensuing trade war exacerbated and […]

Sure as night follows day, Republicans rediscover the temporarily suppressed horror of deficits once the ink is dry on tax giveaways to rich. And the cure, of course, is cutting what remains of social outlays. The Republican tax bill increased the ten-year deficit by well over a trillion dollars. Now comes Martin Feldstein, Harvard eminence […]

Four months ago, a mother and her seven-year-old daughter crossed the U.S.-Mexico border at San Ysidro, just south of San Diego. They had come from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they had taken refuge in a Catholic church in response to threats to their safety. Somehow, they made it all the way to San […]

In the months after September 1, 1939, after war was declared but before Germany mounted its blitzkrieg offensive, observers were puzzled that Hitler was temporizing. They called it a Sitzkrieg, a sit-down war. Then, in the spring of 1940, the Nazis smashed through much of Europe in a matter of weeks. Excuse the analogy, but […]

Man of Steel. Donald Trump is imposing 25 percent tariffs on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminum. The unions, the bipartisan steel caucus in Congress, domestic steelmakers, and Trump’s nationalistic base were delighted. The usual suspects were appalled. And the stock market promptly plunged. The Wall Street Journal, working itself into a full lather, […]

Back in the day, there was a term for Westerners who, while not communists themselves, had convinced themselves to support communist regimes—and back in the day, that meant the Soviet Union—because they believed those nations were creating workers’ states that would eventually become democracies. The term was “useful idiots,” and it was generally applied to […]