Watching Vice President Harris struggle with what seems like an easy question is painful and I find myself wondering, "what am I missing?" It must be more complicated than it looks.

But, what would be wrong with this?

There is a lot of disinformation swirling about the cause of inflation. One of the most perplexing aspects of this to me is that of all common targets for blame (government spending, supply chain problems, business monopolies), one, and in my view the most important one, is left out: Federal Reserve policy.

Tariffs are a big topic of discussion this election year with many conflicting assertions made about they work and who pays them. I did a little research to see if I could find the facts amongst the noise. Read on for what I learned.

While the world waits for a vaccine to give us relief from the pandemic, global warming and the climatic consequences are accelerating. This rapid pace of change required that our research on the subject, first completed only in 2018, be fundamentally rewritten. Here is a brief summary of what we learned.

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On April 7, in “This Bubble Too Shall Burst,” I shared my view, based on traditional economic thinking, that the mounting US debt is likely to become a serious economic problem for our children. What I didn’t do was address whether or not such borrowing is moral. Yes, I mean moral.

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With problems abounding here and now, it is hard to get excited about a problem that is in potential, in the future, hard to understand, and worst of all, requires current sacrifice to address. Fat chance of selling that. Ever. Nonetheless, here goes.

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After two years of tariffs and bellicose rhetoric, a revision of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was recently agreed upon. What really happened?

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The Democratic presidential candidates have vigorously criticized President Trump for his imposition of tariffs on China, arguing that they have unfairly hurt farmers, producers, and cost jobs. And yet, when asked specifically during the September 10 debate whether they would lift them “on day one,” they all ducked or said no. Specifically, Mayor Buttigieg said he would have “a strategy that includes the tariffs as leverage.” Why is free trade so hard to support? Let’s try to be fact-based and rational.

Last week, when the federal deficit surpassed $22 trillion, there were several references in the media, most of which observed that no one seemed to care. It was just yesterday that the Republican party, led by Paul Ryan, criticized President Obama on what seemed like a daily basis over the “debt crisis staring us in the face” and for a national debt that was “out of control.” But now, no one seems to care. Larry Kudlow, the director of the President’s National Economic Council, dismissed it as not “a problem.” So what sense are we to make of this? Let’s try to be fact-based and rational.