ON TAP

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 […]

American political and financial elites make catastrophic, self-serving mistakes. Exhibit A is Xi Jinping, China’s newly announced lifetime president. As recently as decade ago, leaders of both U.S. parties and informed commentators were convinced that China would soon converge with the West, as a capitalist democracy, and that easy terms of entry to the World […]

With the oral arguments in Janus v. AFSCME come and gone, the five Republican justices are now circling what’s left of the union movement as vultures do carrion. Ironically, the right’s war-to-the-death on worker organizations looks to be peaking just when labor’s favorability is the highest it’s been in decades. Over the past year, Pew […]

There is a sexual misconduct/rape case going forward at Yale, which sheds some light on several thorny issues. In this case, a woman wound up very drunk in a fellow student’s dorm room, reported waking up briefly to find him on top of her, tried to push him off to no avail, and in the […]