The real danger with debt is what happens if lots of people decide, or are forced, to pay it off at the same time.

I don't think I've had any great success in predicting politics or social change, nor have I really tried.

It should be possible to emphasize to students that the level of employment is a macroeconomic issue, depending in the short run on aggregate demand and depending in the long run on the natural rate of unemployment, with microeconomic policies like tariffs having little net effect. Trade policy should be debated in terms of its impact on efficiency, not in terms of phoney numbers about jobs created or lost.

The federal government is basically an insurance company with an army.

Simple doesn't mean stupid. Thinking that it does, does.

A snarky but accurate description of monetary policy over the past five years is that the Federal Reserve successfully replaced the technology bubble with a housing bubble

The economic expansion that began in 2001, while it has been great for corporate profits, has yet to produce any significant gains for ordinary working Americans. And now it looks as if it never will.