Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Presidents

Joe Biden One Economy to Rule Them All

THE eND OF hISTORY MARCHES ON:

The Post-Neoliberal Delusion: And the Tragedy of Bidenomics (Jason Furman, March/April 2025, Foreign Affairs)

[T]he Biden administration’s post-neoliberal turn, the predicted economic transformations of which prompted comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, fell considerably short of its lofty goals. In some respects, the macroeconomic outcomes have been impressive. The U.S. economy has bounced back much faster than it did after previous recessions, and its post-pandemic performance has also outpaced that of many peer countries in terms of economic growth. But the recovery has been uneven, frustrated by inflation at least partly induced by the administration’s own policies. Inflation, unemployment, interest rates, and government debt were all higher in 2024 than they were in 2019. From 2019 to 2023, inflation-adjusted household income fell, and the poverty rate rose.

Even before inflation doomed Biden’s chances for reelection, it undermined the administration’s goals. Despite efforts to raise the child tax credit and the minimum wage, both were considerably lower in inflation-adjusted terms when Biden left office than when he entered. For all the emphasis he placed on American workers, Biden was the first Democratic president in a century who did not permanently expand the social safety net. And despite signing into law an infrastructure bill that committed over $500 billion to rebuilding everything from bridges to broadband, skyrocketing costs of construction have left the United States building less than it was before the law’s passage.

There have been important successes, especially considering the slim congressional majority with which Biden was forced to operate. Massive legislation that he pushed to address climate change is already reducing emissions and likely will continue to do so even in the face of hostility from the Trump administration. Domestic semiconductor production is being revived. But a hoped-for manufacturing renaissance has not materialized, at least not yet. The proportion of people working in manufacturing has been declining for decades and has not ticked back up, and overall domestic industrial production remains stagnant—in part because the fiscal expansion Biden oversaw led to higher costs, a stronger dollar, and higher interest rates, all of which have created headwinds for the manufacturing sectors that received no special subsidies from the legislation he championed.

The Biden administration failed to seriously reckon with budget constraints and to contend with the effects of “crowding out,” when a surge in public-sector spending causes the private sector to invest less. Both missteps reflected a broader unwillingness to contend with tradeoffs in economic policy and allowed Trump to ride a wave of discontent back into the White House. For Democrats, it would be a mistake to think their loss was due solely to a global backlash against incumbents—or worse, to conclude that American voters had simply been insufficiently appreciative of everything Biden did for them.

Truly building back better will require harnessing the Biden administration’s ambitions for economic transformation without discarding conventional economic considerations of budget constraints, tradeoffs, and cost-benefit analysis—in other words, not giving in to the post-neoliberal delusion.

Presidents

THE 40 YEAR EPOCH:

Jimmy Carter: The First Reaganite (John Phelan, 2/08/25, EconLib)

Despite claiming ignorance of the causes of or remedies for rising inflation, he acted as though he did grasp that inflation was, in the popular formulation, “too much money chasing too few goods.”

If that was the problem, one half of the solution lay on the supply side by increasing the number of goods on which the money could be spent. To this end, Carter deregulated the airline, trucking, rail, and telephony industries. “These actions,” Susan Dudley writes, “allowed new entrants into the markets, increased efficiency, lowered prices, offered consumers more choices, and likely contributed to declining inflation.”

The other half of the solution lay on the demand side by reducing the amount of money. Carter appointed Paul Volcker chair of the Federal Reserve in 1978. “We needed a new approach,” Volcker wrote, “Put simply, we would control the quantity of money (the money supply) rather than the price of money (interest rates).” As money growth fell, interest rates soared. The economy shrank in 1980, and unemployment hit 7.2% but inflation would fall from 13.5% to 3.2% in 1983. By then, Carter was out of office and Reagan was cruising to a landslide reelection due to an economic boom thanks, in some small part, to Carter’s deregulatory and sound money policies.

Historians will not differentiate the presidencies from 1976 to 2016.

Presidents

GODSPEED:

Jimmy Carter’s Boyhood Fishing Memories (Jimmy Carter, December 29, 2024, Garden & Gun)

About once a year my daddy took me on a fishing trip to a more distant place, usually farther south in Georgia. We made a couple of such visits to the Okefenokee Swamp in the southeastern corner of our state, near the Florida line and not far from the Atlantic Ocean but cut off from the east coast by sand hills. The swamp is a shallow dish of six hundred square miles of water and thousands of islands, mostly of floating peat, on which thick stands of cypress and other trees grow. These peat islands are the “trembling earth” from which the area got its Indian name. Stained with tannin, the water has a reddish-brown color, but was considered by all the fishermen to be pure enough to drink.

We stayed at the only fish camp around the western edge of the swamp, owned by a man named Lem Griffis. His simple pine­board bunkhouses, with screens instead of windowpanes, could accommodate about twenty guests. As we sat around an open fire at night, Lem was always eager to regale us with wild tales about the biggest bear, the prettiest woman, or a catch of so many fish they had to haul in water to fill up the hole left in the lake. His stories were honed by repetition so that the buildup and punch line equaled those of any professional entertainer. We listened and laughed for hours even when we were hearing the same yarn for the second or third time. His regular guests would urge, “Tell us about the city lady who thought her son might drown.”

Lem would wait awhile until enough others joined in the request, and then describe in vivid and heart-rending tones the anguish of a mother who was afraid to let her only child near the swamp. “I finally said, ‘Ma’am, I can guarantee you the boy won’t drown. I’ve been here all my life and never heerd of anybody drowning in this here swamp.’ The lady was quite relieved. There was always a long pause, until Lem finally added, “The gators always get them first.”

Neoconomics W

TAXES WHAT YOU DON’T WANT, NOT WHAT YOU DO:

Trump Should Finish What He Started (Jason Harrison, Nov 26, 2024, Cremieux Recueil)

Back in 2005, the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform, established by President George W. Bush, rolled out proposals that echoed the principles underlying the DBCFT. Their plans included lowering marginal tax rates, eliminating certain deductions, and promoting saving and investment—concepts that resonate with the DBCFT framework. Interestingly, aspects of this tax reform have found nods of approval from both sides of the political aisle. Jason Furman, who served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, has highlighted the merits of specific components, particularly those that promote simplicity in the tax code and encourage economic growth. In fact, many Democratic lawmakers and advisors, whether openly or in quieter conversations, have also recognized the value of this approach, underscoring their bipartisan appeal. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017, the eventual enacted policy born out of “A Better Way” and signed by President Donald Trump, included provisions that have been recognized for their positive impact and could serve as common ground for future bipartisan tax policies. It’s true, parts of the TCJA genuinely are worth hanging onto.

When you peel back the layers, the tax reform plan put forth by the Republicans that was later embodied in the TCJA isn’t so much a radical leap into the unknown as it is the culmination of a long journey through scholarly research and policy evolution. It reflects a convergence of ideas from economists, policymakers, and bipartisan commissions, all wrestling with the never-ending challenge of designing a tax system that promotes efficiency, fairness, and growth. In an era where the United States faces increasing competition from countries like China, mounting national debt, and the challenges of profit shifting by multinational corporations, the urgency of effective tax reform is undeniable. A tax system that enhances international competitiveness, supports long-term wage growth for workers, and simplifies the complex web of current tax regulations is essential, and the DBCFT offers a compelling framework to address these issues.

Advocacy for a Destination-Based Cash Flow Tax is really advocacy for consumption taxation in disguise, so it makes sense to first actually address what consumption taxes are, or, more importantly, what people mistakenly think they are (spoiler: they’re not just taxes on your latte habit.)

When you peel back the layers, the tax reform plan put forth by the Republicans that was later embodied in the TCJA isn’t so much a radical leap into the unknown as it is the culmination of a long journey through scholarly research and policy evolution. It reflects a convergence of ideas from economists, policymakers, and bipartisan commissions, all wrestling with the never-ending challenge of designing a tax system that promotes efficiency, fairness, and growth. In an era where the United States faces increasing competition from countries like China, mounting national debt, and the challenges of profit shifting by multinational corporations, the urgency of effective tax reform is undeniable. A tax system that enhances international competitiveness, supports long-term wage growth for workers, and simplifies the complex web of current tax regulations is essential, and the DBCFT offers a compelling framework to address these issues.

Advocacy for a Destination-Based Cash Flow Tax is really advocacy for consumption taxation in disguise, so it makes sense to first actually address what consumption taxes are, or, more importantly, what people mistakenly think they are (spoiler: they’re not just taxes on your latte habit.)

The future al every policy is the past of W, in this case Neoconomics.

It's a RICO case

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Jenna Ellis Pleads Again, Cracking Wall Of Silence Around Trump’s Crimes (Lucian K. Truscott IV, August 06 | 2024, National Memo)


Serial plea-copper Jenna Ellis has agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors in yet another fake elector case, this one in Arizona. She previously filed a guilty plea and cooperated in the racketeering case in Georgia in which Donald Trump is a co-defendant. Ellis played a major role in advising Trump during his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, right up until the day he left office in 2021.

Cheeto Jesus Identitarianism Joe Biden

ALL JOE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

The Dark Protectionism of Trump and Vance: Goodbye to competition; hello, inflation (ROGER LOWENSTEIN, JUL 18, 2024, Intrinsic Value)

The policy that will mark the Trump era in the history books is protectionism—a 180-degree pivot from seven decades of postwar, bipartisan support for free trade.

Trump’s venom for trade, a staple of his naïve fantasy to remake America as he imagines it used to be, is a bedrock belief. It’s one of few issues on which he has been consistent (something that cannot be said for his views on abortion, entitlements, or any number of others).

And it’s emblematic of his larger nationalism—his wish to fence in America and make it, like Trump himself, suspicious, hostile, and defensive. It expresses his essential pessimism, which darkens his view even of market competition and private enterprise. Better to let the economic commissar in the red necktie decide which products Americans can buy from whom: Don’t leave it to private businesses or consumers, that is, to the American people.

J.D. Vance has Trump’s populist, neo-interventionist instincts. If Mike Pence’s nomination in 2016 represented a ransom check to evangelist Republicans, Vance signals the former President’s wish to solidify and extend tariff policy and his (similarly harmful) anti-immigrant nativism.

In some ways, Vance is more Trump than Trump. As an economic populist, he is openly skeptical of business and an admirer of Lina Khan, President Biden’s FTC chairwoman, known for creative theories of antitrust and, so far, mostly losing litigation.

But Vance is a newcomer to protectionism. In Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir of growing up poor in Appalachia, the book that made him known, he recounted the widespread unease of folks in Middletown, Ohio—Vance’s hometown—when Kawasaki, a Japanese firm, bought a controlling share of Armco, a steel company. After the furor abated, Vance’s grandfather, who had worked at the steel plant, told him, “The Japanese are our friends now.” As Vance wrote, “If companies like Armco were going to survive, they would have to retool. Kawasaki gave Armco a chance.” In the interconnected global economy, cutting off capital from a foreign source would be self-destructive, as the Yale Law grad had come to understand.

Or had he?

No one can ever have expected Joe Biden to be an even mildly competent president, nevermind a thoughtful one, but his great tragedy is the degree to which he aped Trumpism on immigration and trade. Of course, the problem is that these are natural positions in his party while they are an alien infiltration of the GOP.

One Economy to Rule Them All Ownership Society

BRING BACK W’S PERSONAL ACCOUNTS:

The Biggest Winners in the Stock Market (Ben Carlson, 7/21/24, A Wealth of Common Sense)

The stock market is hard to beat because picking the winning stocks is hard. Index funds own them regardless.

Winners > losers. Index funds also own the losers, of which there are many.

But the winners more than make up for the losers.

That’s the beauty of the stock market.

Compounding over decade-long periods is like magic. There are no stocks for the long run with crazy 20% or 30% annual returns over 8-9 decades.

From 1926-2023 the S&P 500 was up 10.3% per year so it’s not like the best-performing survivors crushed the market by leaps and bounds.

But those above-average returns compounded over 98 years added up to incredible growth over that time.

That compounding has been magic for the stock market.

Cheeto Jesus

ALL THE QUEENS MAN’S MEN:

American Berserk (ROSS BARKAN, JUL 16, 2024, Political Currents)

Trump is a criminal, a pathological liar, a narcissist, and an inveterate bully. He has few deeply held beliefs. As a politician, he has no regard for the mechanics of government or the analysis of policy. He is, as his critics say, vacant. And he is also a genius—not in the sense of a soaring I.Q. or an aptitude for the sciences or any ability to make computations that most human brains cannot. He is, in no way, an intellect. His genius is for the all-American, for publicity, for having the native foresight, buried deep in his viscous core, to understand what he had to do. He had to perform. He had to shout fight, he had to hunt out the cameras, he had to get his fist in the air, he had to apprehend, somehow, what this all meant before the secret service barreled him away. He himself, in the hospital, seemed astounded by his own power. “A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” he told Michael Goodwin, the sycophantic New York Post columnist. “They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.” This is the platonic ideal of a Trump quote: self-aggrandizing, incorrect, and aimed straight, like an arrow into the heart, at all that he will ever care about, and all he has gained. He is known. He is forever known. He has fame, and the best kind, the American kind, that which, like Cronos, devours whatever else is on this Earth, so men and women in Paris and Egypt and Kampala can think of him and dream of him and even bear his likeness, this image of the blood and the flag and the fist, on a cotton t-shirt. What else, near death, can Trump long for? The presidency is beside the point. If he wins, as everyone seems to think he will, he’ll only get four more years anyway, no matter what they tell you about American Hitler. Trump has no genius for governing or genuinely dominating others; he cannot, like Napoleon, stand up a new empire or, like the Nazis and the Soviets, make fascism as real as the gun pressed to your temple. His political machine runs on the exhaust fumes of his own mania, and it can do little to discipline the states, the little republics of federalism that will choose, if governed by Democrats, to shirk Trumpism. Soon, Trump will be eighty, and this milestone will either be celebrated in the Oval Office or at Mar-a-Lago, in permanent exile as a two-time presidential loser.

Cheeto Jesus

THIS IS WHAT HE MEANS BY gREAT:

Donald Trump and the language of violence (Gil Duran & George Lakoff, JULY 14 2024, frame Lab)

[N]o one has done more to inject violence into our political discourse than Trump.

He demonizes his political opponents as “animals,” “scum” and “vermin.” He calls for jailing his opponents without cause and forcing them to stand before military tribunals. He speaks of the “bloodbath” that will occur if he loses the election. When a deranged man attempted to murder House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer, Trump mocked the incident as his audience laughed.

Trump creates serious fear in the minds of many Americans with his promises to destroy democratic norms and become a dictator on “day one” if he gets re-elected president. On January 6, 2021, he urged his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol and did nothing as they launched a violent insurrection to overturn the 2020 election. At the Capitol, Trump’s followers hunted Nancy Pelosi and chanted “hang Mike Pence.”

None of this justifies the attempt on his life – or any kind of political violence against anyone. Yet Trump has continually framed American politics as a violent struggle requiring bloodshed.

Identitarianism Joe Biden

THE OTHER TRUMP:

Biden clings to Trump’s trade policy, preventing the US from overtaking China (NARUPAT RATTANAKIT AND IAIN MURRAY, 06/24/24, The Hill)

Not only have these tariffs failed to dent Chinese trade dominance, but they hurt the American economy by raising prices, disrupting supply chains, and inviting retaliation. The U.S. needs better trade policies to compete and succeed globally.

One enormous opportunity to restore America as the world’s biggest trade partner is to secure a deal with other Asian nations, especially in Southeast Asia, a combined emerging market projected to be the fourth-largest economy in the world by 2030.

So far, the Biden administration has failed to make progress on that effort. By sidelining for domestic reasons traditional trade issues such as market access, tariff reduction and market liberalization, the Biden administration’s stalled trade pillar in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity has real limitations. This has frustrated key partners in Asia.

Launched in 2022 under the White House’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity fails to offer a broad economic plan. The framework cannot even be called a free trade agreement; instead, its four pillars are modeled after former President Trump’s restrictive U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Katherine Tai views as the blueprint for modern trade deals.

More than a year after its launch, an annual survey by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies reveals declining optimism about the framework among Southeast Asians, with positive sentiments dropping and uncertainties rising. Asians are concerned about the framework’s effectiveness and its failure to provide market access. The survey also highlights the frustration with the added compliance costs, necessary to adhere to the restrictive regulations, standards and agreements set forth within the framework, coupled with a lack of tangible economic benefits.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s use of export controls and tariffs are supposed to target China for its unfair trade practices, but these measures impact Southeast Asia, such as in its production of bifacial solar panels.

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