” in the past, no country was rich. There’s lots of uncertainty involved in historical GDP data — plenty we don’t actually know about populations, prices, and what people consumed in those eras. But even allowing for quite a bit of uncertainty, it’s definitely true that the average citizen of a developed country, or a middle-income country, is far more materially wealthy than their ancestors were 200 years ago”
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“whatever today’s rich countries did to get rich, they weren’t doing it in 1820. Imperialism is very old — the Romans, the Persians, the Mongols, and many other empires all pillaged and plundered plenty of wealth. But despite all of that plunder, no country in the world was getting particularly rich, by modern standards, until the latter half of the 20th century.
Think about all the imperial plunder that was happening in 1820. The U.S. had 1.7 million slaves and was in the process of taking land from Native Americans. Latin American countries had slavery, as well as other slavery-like labor systems for their indigenous peoples. European empires were already exploiting overseas colonies. But despite all this plunder and extraction of resources and labor, Americans and Europeans were extremely poor by modern standards.
With no antibiotics, vaccines, or water treatment, even rich people suffered constantly from all sorts of horrible diseases. They didn’t have cars or trains or airplanes to take them around. Their food was meager and far less varied than ours today. Their living space was much smaller, with little privacy or personal space. Their clothes were shabby and fell apart quickly. They had no TVs or computers or refrigerators or washing machines or dishwashers or toasters or microwaves. At night their houses were dark, and without air conditioning they had trouble escaping the summer heat. They had to carry water from place to place, and even rich people pooped in outhouses or chamberpots. Everyone had bedbugs. Most water supplies were carried from place to place by hand.
They were plundering as hard as they could, but it wasn’t making them rich.
Nor were colonized and exploited nations and peoples rich before the European empires arrived. Yes, Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia were harshly exploited by European empires for their natural resources. But although Africa, Latin America, and Asia were closer to Europe in terms of living standards back then, they were all very, very poor by modern standards.
This should be the first very strong clue that modern rich nations’ wealth didn’t come primarily from plunder, but from something else — something that nations started doing over the last century and a half. In fact, we know what that something is — it’s industrial production, coupled with modern science.”
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“there are two more sophisticated cases you can make for the “imperial plunder” theory of national wealth. The first is that continuing plunder is responsible for income differences between countries. The second is that plunder was necessary to initiate the process that eventually led to industrial production and modern science. The first of these arguments is wrong; the second can’t easily be disproven, but there’s major reason for doubt.”
“Trump’s presidency overturned decades of a generally pro-trade Republican consensus and ushered in an era of assuming that trade is bad for American workers and consumers. He hiked tariffs on steel, aluminum, solar panels, washing machines, and a wide range of Chinese goods. For Trump and his allies, those higher tariffs—which were directly paid by American importers and consumers—were meant to reconfigure the trading relationship between America and China.
But Christie is exactly right. It failed.
The one material thing Trump’s trade war accomplished was a so-called “phase one” trade deal with China, which he signed with Chinese President Xi Jinping to much fanfare in December 2019. That deal included a promise that China would buy $200 million more American exports annually. Those increased purchases were supposed to be spread across multiple sectors of the American export economy, something Trump promised would provide much-needed relief to farmers, manufacturers, and other businesses harmed by the tariffs he’d imposed since taking office.
China didn’t do that. According to an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, American exports to China didn’t even reach pre-trade-war levels in the first year that “deal” was in place. Both countries seem to have quietly dropped any pretense of following through on the agreement.”
“Which company is the leading maker of the so-called “high-priority battlefield items” trafficked to Russia that the Western coalition wants to interdict?
If you said Intel, then go to the top of the class: According to the sanctions team at the Kyiv School of Economics, the U.S. semiconductor giant again leads the pack this year. It’s followed by Huawei of China. Then come Analog Devices, AMD, Texas Instruments and IBM — all of which are American.
Russian imports of microelectronics, wireless and satellite navigation systems and other critical parts subject to sanctions have recovered to near pre-war levels with a monthly run rate of $900 million in the first nine months of this year, according to a forthcoming report from the Kyiv School’s analytical center, the KSE Institute.
All of this indicates that, while Western sanctions imposed over Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, had a temporary impact, Moscow and its helpers have largely succeeded in reconfiguring supply chains — with the help of China, Hong Kong and countries in Russia’s backyard like Kazakhstan and NATO member Turkey.”
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“In our investigations, we showed how U.S.-made sniper ammunition finds its way into Russian rifles, and how China has positioned itself as Russia’s go-to supplier of nonlethal, but militarily useful, equipment.”
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“Russians with close ties to Putin — and their money — continue to be more than welcome in Europe despite the death and destruction his regime has unleashed. His former wife, Lyudmila, and her new partner have splashed the cash on luxury property investments in Spain, Switzerland and France, as a POLITICO investigation found at the start of the year.
And when the European Council — the intergovernmental branch of the EU — does sanction Russian business leaders suspected of aiding and abetting the Putin regime, it has often relied on slipshod evidence that makes the decisions easy to challenge in court, POLITICO has also found.
Nearly 1,600 Western multinationals continue, meanwhile, to do business in Russia. Many that announced they would pull out have struggled to do so, as POLITICO discovered when it investigated Western liquor companies that said they had quit Russia — only to find that their booze was still freely available. And some companies that did stay, like Danone and Carlsberg, have been shaken down by Putin and his cronies — a case of Russian roulette, if ever there was one.”
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“With the EU apparently lacking the means, or the political will, to do more to economically isolate Russia, the bloc is sending its sanctions envoy, David O’Sullivan, on a mission to apply moral suasion to countries that are, as he diplomatically puts it, “not aligned” on sanctions.
On the high-priority battlefield technology, Sullivan told POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast last month that the EU has had “a limited success — but in an area which is absolutely critical to the defense of Ukraine.”
More broadly, he said: “The sanctions are a sort of slow puncture of the Russian economy. Perhaps not the blowout that some people initially predicted, but … the air is escaping from the tire and sooner or later the vehicle is going to become impossible to drive.”
To be fair, O’Sullivan isn’t overselling the efficacy of sanctions. And he may ultimately be proven right.
But he only will be vindicated if Western governments do a better job of holding their own businesses to account in stemming the flows of technology, equipment and spare parts that sustain Putin and his war of aggression.
That will come down to whether they have the will to enforce their decisions. And the evidence so far is that they don’t.”
“The actual problem here is prices.
They’re not going up nearly as much as they were in, say, the middle of last year, but they’re by and large not declining en masse, either. And in most cases, they won’t get back to where they were in the Before Times.
“Inflation in the US is falling relatively quickly compared to all of our other peer countries, and we have the strongest growth out of the recession,” said Felicia Wong, president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. “But people don’t just want falling inflation numbers, they actually want deflation.”
Deflation probably isn’t in the cards (and the rub is we don’t want it to be). Higher prices might just be the sort of thing we’ve all got to get used to. The truth is we’re never going back to how things were in 2019 — we won’t be returning to the office at the same levels, we’ll never hear “corona” and only think of beer, and that night on the town is going to cost us more than it did before.”
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“Basically, if I get a raise at work, I think it’s because I’m awesome. That may be partly true, but that’s not all that’s going on — it’s also that the labor market is tight and wages broadly are going up. My current employer doesn’t want to lose me, and my future employer would have to pay me a little more to lure me away.
While many people see their employment situations (good or bad) as something they’ve earned, they see inflation as something that’s happening to them and that it’s the government’s fault. “The reality is inflation takes away and it gives back. It takes away, prices go up, and it gives back, wages catch up,” said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan. “But you code what it takes away as inflation’s fault but what it gives back as your own genius.””
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“The rate of inflation really is slowing (and, if all goes well, will continue to do so), and the disorienting nature of what’s happened in the economy over the past few years will likely fade. Post-pandemic prices will eventually feel normal, and post-pandemic wages should make those prices more feasible — or at least not significantly less feasible than they were before. Sooner or later, sticker shock will feel a little less shocking.”
“The series of subsidies and tariffs that the federal government uses to artificially inflate sugar prices in the United States cost consumers between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion every year, according to a timely Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released today. Those protectionist policies aren’t the cause of the recent spike in sugar or candy prices, of course, but prices would absolutely be lower without them.”
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“Those higher prices get baked—quite literally—into the cost of everything from Milky Ways to Sour Patch Kids. And, as the GAO also points out, this is a classic case of concentrated benefits for a special interest that results in huge, but very diffused, costs for everyone else: “Because the program guarantees relatively high prices for domestic sugar, sugar farmers benefit significantly, and sugar farms are substantially more profitable per acre than other U.S. farms.””
“unless you pin down the details, basic income is too vague to mean anything politically concrete. Like the Rorschach inkblot, you can interpret and design UBI in an endless variety of ways. A program that provides $250 per month is a different ballgame than one providing $1,200 per month. The same goes for one that replaces all other welfare, like food aid (sometimes referred to as a “pure UBI,” which would actually leave the most disadvantaged worse off, and is a bad idea), compared with one that complements existing programs.
Ultimately, the effects of any income guarantee hinge on the details. How much does it pay? Who gets it? How’s it financed? How does it relate to the rest of the welfare state? But most of the real proposals that have made their way through the policy world share a noteworthy trait: When the dust settles, they just wouldn’t be that radical, in either direction.
Generally, most people at the bottom of the income ladder would be better off, those in the middle would break even as they pay about as much in higher taxes as they’d receive from the basic income, and those at the top would be a little worse off. Society would neither ascend into utopian communism nor collapse into bleak idleness. There would just be less poverty and higher taxes.”
“Biden’s administration sold off more than 40 percent of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve last year to help limit rising fuel prices after Russia invaded Ukraine, leaving the stockpile at its lowest levels since the early 1980s. That’s fueling Republican accusations that Biden has left the U.S. vulnerable to a disruption of global oil supplies — at a time when Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel are stoking fears of a wider regional war disrupting fuel shipments from the Middle East.”
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the reserve still holds 351 million barrels — equivalent to nearly 56 days of total U.S. oil imports last year — though well below the peak of 727 million barrels it held during the Obama administration. That’s on top of 424 million barrels that private companies were storing in the U.S. as of early October.
The administration has defended its handling of the reserve, saying it still holds ample crude to protect the nation’s strategic needs and offer a cushion against price shocks. “I am not worried about the reserve levels at all,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told a House committee in September, adding: “It is the largest strategic reserve in the world.”
And the U.S. is no longer the energy beggar it was in 1973, when the Yom Kippur War prompted an Arab oil embargo against the United States that sent prices spiraling and left Americans waiting in hours-long lines at gas pumps. Back then, U.S. oil production was dropping while its thirst for the fuel was rising — prompting Congress to pass a law in 1975 to create the reserve.”
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” the United States is the world’s biggest oil producer, which exports more crude and petroleum products than it imports. Its output is at record highs and is climbing, even as demand has flattened.
Over the years, some conservatives have even called for abolishing the reserve, complaining — as the Heritage Foundation did eight years ago — that “Presidents have used the SPR as a political tool.”
Still, the reserves’ diminished volumes limit Biden’s options to respond to a future shock to the oil markets, including those that could result from a widening of the war in the Middle East.”