Lou Jiwei also suggested that pilot programs for a property tax should be launched as soon as possible after the economy returns to normal growth. A property tax system was first proposed in 2013, but implementation has been delayed because of difficulties assessing the tax base.

Countries with larger populations tend to be less trade dependent because they have larger internal markets. The U.S. is one of the least trade dependent nations in the world.

ChatGPT loves to generate multi-week structured routines as if it were desigining a training regimen.

Central bank decisions become more political as debt-to-GDP increases. A 1% rate hike has a much larger fiscal and distributional impact when debt-to-GDP is 125% vs 25%.

I've lost count of the number of different media outlets that have treated the Mar-a-Lago Accord as some masterplan rather than a provision of policy options.

This misses the main point: tariffs are not just about economics. Tariffs can have non-economic justifications such as national security, social cohesion, environment, etc. Many economists have had blind spots in these areas.

Focus should be on output, not input. The more output is provided for in a reliable way (low supply chain risk, spare capacity, etc), the more room there is for job flexibility. Industrial policy should focus on the basics first (food, energy, education, healthcare, infrastructure, mfg, etc).

Lobbying presents a double problem for effective tariff policy: not just the strong influence from entrenched interests, but also the weak or non-existent influence of corporations or industries that have already been offshored, went bankrupt, or don't exist yet.

Media shapes the narrative. Republicans hear messaging from the administration about the goal being no or zero inflation. Meanwhile, Democrats hear messaging about tariffs being inflationary. I would like to see the variation in individual responses rather than averages.

Possible names to make MMT more appealing to the right: sovereign economics, national capacity economics, or fiscal realism. De-emphasizing policy prescriptions would also help to get past straw-mans.

Thread on how to define tariff success: Does domestic production increase faster than domestic consumption? Furceri et al (2019) found this may be easier for less advanced economies and during recessions. www.imf.org/en/Publicati...

Highly recommend this report--interesting throughout. Especially section 9, which provides data on how export controls with weak FDPR enforcement may have incentivized U.S. semiconductor manufacturing equipment firms to offshore manufacturing. www.csis.org/analysis/tru...

Interesting article. The quote by @kclausing.bsky.social sounds right. Curious though what alternative unilateral measures the US should then focus on to decrease its trade deficit? The decrease in the fiscal deficit under Clinton had little effect because of other factors.

This pattern of U.S. and European support reflects a conflict of interest between them wanting to avoid horizontal escalation while Ukraine pushes for enhanced capabilities to face Russia's vertical escalation. The resulting cautious approach by the West is a recipe for a prolonged conflict.