President Trump announced the day before the World Series began that he was ending ongoing trade and tariff negotiations with Canada. As a result, the contest has taken on symbolic significance amid worsening relations between the two countries.
Economic Policy
Posted inTAP
Trump’s Faltering Economy
The seemingly not-too-bad Trump economy is living on borrowed time. Both inflation and employment are getting worse, and the booming stock market is in AI bubble territory.
Posted inTAP
Unveiled Today: The First Politically Viable Wealth Tax
A proposed 2026 California ballot measure would tax billionaires’ fortunes to fund imperiled health access for 15 million state Medicaid recipients. The spillover effects of its presence on the midterm-election ballot should be considerable.
Posted inEconomic Policy
The Myth That Mamdani Will Cause New York City’s Richest to Leave
Millionaire tax flight would devastate a future Mamdani administration. If the rich leave, how could anything be financed? But research shows that wealthy individuals move at lower rates than others, even in response to higher personal income taxes.
Posted inEconomic Policy
No, the Boomers Did Not Take It All
The more that young people focus on supposed generational injustices rather than the real injustices of class and power, the less likely they are to embrace a politics that might make a real difference.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Fed Making Key Economic Decisions Without Key Economic Data
The Fed considers information from a variety of sources in setting monetary policy, everything from anecdotal reports to original data produced by its regional Reserve Banks. But the loss of public, and apparently some private, data is an acknowledged blow.
Posted inEconomic Policy
The Socialist Case for Antitrust
The modern antitrust movement, sometimes called the neo-Brandeisians after the former Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, had a major influence on the Biden administration. Now that Donald Trump has returned to power, what’s next? Over at the new publication The Argument, Matt Bruenig has a critical review of what he calls the urtext of the modern antitrust […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
How Scott Bessent Enables Oligarchy
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the government began cracking down on hidden transfers of wealth. The purpose was to prevent money laundering that might finance terrorism. Some of this was codified in the USA PATRIOT Act. After the financial collapse of 2008, other safeguards were added. All this strengthened the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Brown Stage Capitalism
Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in 2022, though it was hardly a new phenomenon even then. In granting apps the right to wield the absurdities of intellectual property law to legally bully their users, the government emboldened tech founders to view their companies as exempt from laws and regulations.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
America’s Greatest Mistake
This article appears in the October 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. The World’s Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Right) By David J. Lynch PublicAffairs For a time, globalization was synonymous with utopia: the untrammeled flow of capital across borders, new markets waiting to be opened, the growth of developing […]