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Economics

A Reminder About Opportunity Zones: Bad Policy Flacked Locally

Those following what passes for economic policy in Whitewater know that this website has been rightly critical of the economic opportunity zones that were part of Trump’s tax bill. See About that Trump Tax Bill, More About that Trump Tax Bill, and The Trump Tax Bill: That’s Not Reform. Jenny Schuetz, commenting on part of Trump’s…

Brain Drain Plagues Key USDA Research Service After Trump Administration Orders Relocation

When the Trump administration relocated the United States Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service to the Kansas City area last year, about two-thirds of its employees quit their jobs rather than move. Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, called the mass resignations a “wonderful way to streamline the government.” These departures have…

‘But Not in Conditions of Their Own Choosing’

It’s a truism to say that all people make history, but not in conditions of their own choosing: Admittedly and sadly, the local boosterism of the pre-Trump years is now in retrospect worse than one might have initially believed: across America boosters who peddled false descriptions & junk solutions during the economic hardship of the…

Market-Hating Republicans Have Been a Local Problem for Years

George Will, writing in the Washington Post, observes that Josh Hawley sounds like he has far too much faith in government: The sails of [Republican] Sen. Josh Hawley’s political skiff are filled with winds gusting from the right. They come from conservatives who think that an array of — perhaps most of — America’s social injuries,…

But, but, but…we were promised growth, growth, growth!

Locally, statewide, and nationally, Trump & those who flacked his tax bill, and those who also pushed corporate welfare schemes (Foxconn, WEDC, Whitewater CDA), promised growth, growth, growth! How odd that these men — politicians, movers-and-shakers, developers, landlords, and public relations types — seem to have missed the mark: The World Bank sees U.S. growth stumbling from…

Journal Sentinel’s Rick Romell Reports the Obvious about Foxconn Project

Over at the Journal Sentinel, business reporter Rick Romell reports that More signs emerge that the pace of Foxconn’s Wisconsin project is falling short of expectations. Honest to goodness – there have been years of reports, and years of analyses, that made clear to any reasonable person that this project was destined for failure. Anyone and…

Foxconn: State of Wisconsin Demands Accountability, Foreign Corporation Stalls

There’s a significant new development in the Foxconn project: the state has told the Taiwanese corporation it’s presently no longer eligible for tax credits. Over at The Verge, a national technology publication, there’s an excellent, detailed story about Foxconn’s serial excuses to receive the public money or credits it wants regardless of performance. In an…

Foxconn: Worse Than Nothing

Below are the abstract and full study from George Mason University on The Economics of a Targeted Economic Development Subsidy (examining the Foxconn deal in Wisconsin).  There’s much to consider in this work, for the Foxconn project, and by reasonable extension to other government-targeted business subsidies. Abstract: In an effort to spur economic growth and…

What the New Dealers Got Right – What Whitewater’s Local Notables Got Wrong

There’s sound reason to doubt that the New Dealers’ economic solutions to the Great Depression were effective, but there’s no doubt that Roosevelt’s Brain Trust was hard-working, smart, and candid in its description of America’s economic problems. For a critical assessment of the New Deal, written accessibly, see The Forgotten Man: A New History of…

Does Anyone at the Janesville Gazette Have a Dictionary?

Recently,  the Janesville Gazette‘s editorialist tried to defend remarks from Trump’s secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue, about the demise of family farmers. See Our Views: Ag secretary’s reality check wasn’t callous. In that defense, one finds that the Gazette‘s editorialist neither understands the meaning of simple English words nor basic economics. The secretary of agriculture said…

Americans’ Support for Free Trade Reaches New High

A strong majority supports free trade and rejects Trump’s anti-market trade wars and tariffs. Mark Murray reports that Amid President Donald Trump’s trade war with China, nearly two-thirds of Americans say they support free trade with foreign countries, according to the latest national poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal. That represents a…

Wastrel

Embed from Getty Images John Bresnahan and Burgess Everett report Deficit Don? Red ink gushes in Trump era (‘The president endorsed a bipartisan budget deal without any of the spending restraints previously demanded by Republicans’): With a new bipartisan budget deal that does nothing to cut federal spending, Trump is on track for another $1 trillion…