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Defunding America’s Future: The Squeeze on Public Investment in the United States

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Executive Summary

Policymakers who have chosen to slash critical public investments in future generations while simultaneously saddling these generations with a mountain of debt are jeopardizing the long-term economic health of the United States. Failure to correct course could have serious consequences for the economy and the American people, including lower incomes, fewer high-quality jobs, and a reduced ability for future policymakers to address new challenges.

America’s deteriorating fiscal condition should be a central issue in the 2018 midterm and the 2020 presidential elections. As Republicans in Congress and the White House abandon any pretense of fiscal responsibility, the time is right for Democrats to offer a new progressivism that invests in our country without leaving the bill to young Americans.

The goal of this report is to alert the public and policymakers to the problem and highlight the actions our elected leaders must take to avoid fiscal ruin, which include renewing public investments in the foundation of our economy, modernizing federal health and retirement programs to reflect an aging society, and enacting pro-growth tax reform that raises the revenue necessary to support both of these critical government functions. 

DEBT AND DEFICITS THREATEN PUBLIC INVESTMENTS (PP. 5-11):

• By 2029, the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product is projected to surpass the all-time high reached at the end of World War II if current policies remain in place. And on that trajectory, the national debt would grow to more than double the size of the U.S. economy within the next 30 years.

• All this borrowing comes at an enormous cost: if current policies remain in place, annual interest payments would rise from $316 billion today to nearly $1 trillion in 2028. At that point, annual interest costs would be twice the projected federal spending on public investments in education, infrastructure, and scientific research combined.

 

INSTEAD OF ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM, TODAY’S POLICYMAKERS ARE MAKING IT WORSE (PP. 12-17):

• While virtually every other developed country from Germany to Japan is paying down their debts, self-proclaimed “king of debt” Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have been making ours bigger. In the span of just two months, they enacted $2 trillion in tax cuts and abandoned spending caps that Republicans demanded be imposed at a time when most economists believed it was far more perilous to cut spending than it is today.

• The last time the national unemployment rate was as low as it was for most of 2018, the Clinton administration was in its fourth consecutive year of budget surpluses. But, thanks to the GOP’s borrow-and-spend policies, the next presidential election in 2020 – and potentially every election thereafter – will occur against the backdrop of an annual budget deficit of over $1 trillion.

PUBLIC INVESTMENTS ARE BEING STARVED BY BAD BUDGETING (PP. 17-21):

• Between 1965 and 1980, total federal spending on public investments in education, infrastructure, and scientific research regularly equaled about 2.5 percent of GDP (which would have been roughly $470 billion in 2017). But misguided cuts imposed by policymakers seeking to reduce deficits have taken their toll: Federal spending on public investment was just over $300 billion in 2017 – less than 1.5 percent of GDP.

If current policies are continued, public investment spending is projected to fall to its lowest level in modern history as a share of the economy by 2026. Public investment spending is likely to be cut even more in the future if policymakers are unwilling or unable to tackle the main drivers of growing deficits.

SECURING PUBLIC INVESTMENTS REQUIRES FIXING HEALTH CARE AND RETIREMENT PROGRAMS (PP. 21-29):

• While spending on public investments shrinks, spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is growing on autopilot due to an aging population. Spending on these programs relative to the size of the economy is projected to grow by half over the next 30 years (from about 10 percent of GDP today to nearly 16 percent of GDP in 2048).

• In 1965, there were 5.4 working-age Americans (those between the ages of 18 and 64) who could pay taxes to finance the health care and retirement benefits of each American aged 65 and older. But by 2050, the U.S. Census Bureau projects the ratio of working-age to retirement-age individuals could be as low as 2.6 to 1 – less than half what it was in 1965.

• There are no easy substitutes for tackling the growth of federal health and retirement spending. The unaffordable tax cuts enacted over the past year can and should be reversed, but even if federal taxes were immediately raised to their highest level since WWII and remained there indefinitely, deficits and debt would still be growing significantly faster than the economy.

THE SHORTSIGHTED STATUS QUO IS SHORTCHANGING YOUNG AMERICANS (PP. 29-31):

• Current policies are unfair to young Americans, who are already starting from a worse financial position than their parents and grandparents did. The federal government is spending nearly six times as much per elderly American (those aged 65 and older) as it is per child, even though children have a poverty rate nearly twice that of the elderly.

• The shift in priorities – from annually appropriated discretionary spending to formula-driven mandatory spending – will leave future politicians with less say over how their constituents’ tax dollars are spent. Whereas the Congress of 1968 had the authority to appropriate 66 cents out of every dollar spent by the federal government, the Congress of 2048 will have the same authority over just 18 cents on our current trajectory. This erosion of “fiscal freedom” robs future democratically elected officials of their ability to respond to the changing policy priorities of their taxpaying constituents.

• Growing debt and interest costs also have the potential to make future generations poorer, reducing the size of our economy by up to $6,000 per person per year in 2048.

The longer we wait to address these problems, the harder they will be to solve. Neither progressives (who want more social spending) nor conservatives (who want lower taxes) will benefit from a federal budget that has no room for either because it is stuck paying for the policies of the past. As Republicans in Congress and the White House abandon any pretense of fiscal responsibility, the time is right for Democrats to offer a new progressivism that invests in our country without leaving the bill to young Americans. Voters must demand our leaders enact the policies necessary to lay the fiscal foundation for a better world tomorrow.

 

Read the full article here:

Gerwin for New York Daily News, “Trump’s NAFTA revision actually reaffirmed open regional trade”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Donald Trump huffed, and he puffed, but he couldn’t blow NAFTA down.

Like the Big Bad Wolf in the fairy tale, President Trump presumed that NAFTA — which he’s called the “worst trade deal ever” — would collapse before his bluster like a house of straw. Trump’s bombast may have knocked a few shingles off the agreement’s free trade edifice. And it’s caused serious collateral damage to America’s neighborhood and beyond. But, in the end, NAFTA’s structure — like the Three Pigs’ house of bricks — still stands.

Trump, of course, tells a different fable. At a recent rally, Trump declared “[w]e are replacing the job-killing disaster known as NAFTA, with the brand new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.”

Continue reading at New York Daily News.

Marshall for New York Daily News, “New Old Labour: The U.K. party’s tight embrace of retrograde ideas, and what it might mean for Democratic Socialists in the U.S.”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Democrats, like progressive parties across the transatlantic world, are struggling to find an answer to populist nationalism. Could that answer lie in reviving another old political creed, socialism?

Some young Democratic activists, inspired by Sen. Bernie Sanders, are flirting with “democratic socialism.” But they have nothing on Britain’s Labour Party, which consummated its on-again relationship with socialism in Liverpool last week.

The occasion was the party’s annual conference, which I attended when not wallowing in Liverpool’s trove of Beatles memorabilia. The gathering presented an oddly incongruous picture: a reinvigorated party with lots of young faces hawking old ideas.

The Merseyside Conference also capped Jeremy Corbyn’s improbable odyssey from Labour’s hard-left fringe in the early 1980s to party leader today. Having survived media ridicule for his retro views, several attempted ousters and a recent imbroglio over charges that he’s tolerated anti-Semitism among left-wing Labour members, Corbyn at last seems to have his party firmly in hand.

Continue reading at New York Daily News.

Litan for RealClearPolicy, “Fixing the American Dream Machine”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Fixating on the traditional aggregate measures of the economy’s health — GDP growth, the unemployment rate, or the inflation trade — ignores not only rising income and wealth inequality, but the fact the American Dream machine has been sputtering for at least two or three decades. Stanford’s Raj Chetty and his co-authors have shown that only half of Americans born in 1980 or later were out-earning their parents at the age of 30, compared to 90 percent of those born forty years before. No wonder so many Americans across the political spectrum have been so anxious or even angry, with racial resentment and political incivility on the rise.

Three broad narratives for fixing our American Dream machine, which admittedly won’t cure all problems, have been advanced by political leaders and researchers. The two that have received the most media attention are both either misleading or inadequate.

One narrative, pushed by President Trump and in more muted tones by some Democrats, blames increased and “unfair” trade for the decline of manufacturing jobs and stagnant or slow real-wage growth. Trump and many Republicans also wrongly blame illegal immigrants, who are working (if they can) at low wages doing jobs like cleaning dishes or mowing lawns that few American citizens want to do. 

Continue reading at RealClearPolicy.

The Problem with PBMs

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Carl Icahn, the billionaire businessman and investor, recently advised shareholders to reject Cigna’s proposed $67 billion acquisition of the pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) Express Scripts. He says that a reckoning is coming for PBMs and that the price grossly exaggerated their value as “over-earning middle men.”

In 2016, PBMs made $23 billion in gross profits – with most having never touched a drug. They don’t make them, they don’t distribute them and they don’t sell them. So what do PBMs do, and why is there so much misunderstanding about their value?

Because of the structure of PBMs, they create perverse incentives for drug makers to price drugs high. A flat fee structure, greater clarity of drug costs, and increased competition would help increase transparency, align incentives, and reduce costs for the pharmaceutical sector.

 

Langhorne for The 74, “From Troubled School to Turnaround to Texas ‘Teaching Lab'”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

“Good morning, scholars!” principal-in-training Jackie Navar yells, kicking off the community meeting at Ogden Elementary School, part of the 78207 zip code on San Antonio’s struggling West Side.

Hundreds of children echo Navar’s salutations.

“What’s a college-ready word for ‘good’?” Navar asks the room. Hands shoot up into the air: “Amazing.” “Fantastic.” “Great.”

“Excellent. Here’s a new one for you — ‘phenomenal.’ Can we all say that together?”

At Ogden, each school day begins with breakfast followed by community meetings like this one. Preschoolers eat in their classrooms, kindergartners through third-graders in the cafeteria, fourth- and fifth-graders in the gym, and sixth-graders upstairs. Ninety-eight percent of Ogden’s 650 students qualify as economically disadvantaged, and every one receives a free school breakfast.

“The community meeting helps our scholars start the day with a positive mindset,” says Tim Saintsing, executive director of teaching and learning labs at Relay Graduate School of Education, which was brought in to run the school after years of poor performance. “It lets students and staff reflect on our core values and our sense of self as a school. It gives us a chance to celebrate our successes and discuss our challenges.”

Today, a first- and second-grade class are being honored with attendance awards. As a prize, the students get to sing their homeroom chants, and then, in what’s known as a “thunder clap,” the room simultaneously brings their hands together once — loudly — in their honor.

“Remember,” Navar yells across the cafeteria, “If you miss school, you…”

“Miss out!” the kids shout back in unison.

It’s a vastly different atmosphere from the Ogden Elementary of 2016.

Continue reading at The 74.

The Broader Implications of Amazon’s Wage Hike

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In my view, Amazon’s wage hike has blown a gaping hole in the low-wage, low-productivity equilibrium that has bedeviled the US for the past 3 decades. Ecommerce fulfillment centers are using technology and big data to boost productivity in the distribution sector, while creating hundreds of thousands of paid jobs by drawing hours out of the unpaid household sector.

The big debate was over how much those jobs were being paid. Now Amazon has put those disputes to rest.   $15/hour is within 10% of  the median wage for production occupations in many states. For example, the median hourly wage for production occupations in Illinois is $16.19, according to the BLS, and $14.73 in Georgia.

This success story is going to be copied in other physical industries. Companies are going to be forced to invest in their workers and in new technology, or be squeezed by rising wages.

 

Production Occupations
Median Hourly Wage, May 2017
Arkansas 14.30
Florida 14.53
Mississippi 14.57
Alabama 14.67
Delaware 14.70
Georgia 14.73
North Carolina 14.88
South Dakota 15.18
California 15.33
Nevada 15.45
Idaho 15.46
Tennessee 15.58
Utah 15.69
New Mexico 15.75
Arizona 15.82
Texas 16.00
Illinois 16.19
Oklahoma 16.27
Missouri 16.28
Virginia 16.28
Indiana 16.49
West Virginia 16.49
New Jersey 16.50
Montana 16.60
Iowa 16.65
Kentucky 16.67
Michigan 16.69
South Carolina 16.71
New York 16.76
Colorado 16.84
Rhode Island 16.84
Nebraska 16.89
Vermont 16.90
Maryland 16.93
Oregon 16.96
Alaska 17.04
Ohio 17.08
Wisconsin 17.21
Kansas 17.22
New Hampshire 17.38
Hawaii 17.54
Maine 17.54
Pennsylvania 17.54
Minnesota 17.63
Massachusetts 18.01
North Dakota 18.11
Connecticut 18.94
Louisiana 19.07
Washington 19.18
Wyoming 23.83
District of Columbia 25.03

Press Release: New PPI Report Explores Why Suburban America Needs Charter Schools Too

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

WASHINGTON—Despite dramatically improving academic achievement and performance in America’s urban areas, public charter schools have had difficulty expanding into the country’s more affluent suburban communities. A new report released today by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) investigates why.

Authored by PPI education analyst Emily Langhorne, the report analyzes the performance of existing suburban charter schools, explores how charter schools can benefit suburban students, and highlights why charter schools are struggling to expand into the suburbs.

“The spread of charter schools in suburban areas can create tremendous opportunities for families dissatisfied with the traditional neighborhood schools, whose children might do better in a system that offered a variety of educational models, specialized curriculum, and personalized learning,” writes Langhorne.

“In a thriving charter sector, one finds Montessori programs and other project-based models, dual-language immersion schools, schools that use computer-based learning in creative ways, competency-based schools, Waldorf schools, early college high schools, arts-focused schools, STEM schools, and more.”

However, three major factors are preventing schools like these from expanding into suburban areas, according to the report. These include: political barriers erected in states by teachers unions, who feel as though charters are in direct competition with local school districts; the overestimation of local public schools by suburbanites, despite evidence that suburban students are falling behind on international tests when compared to their socio-economic peers in other countries; and widespread charter school myths, misconceptions, and misinformation.

“Unfortunately, Americans overall—especially those who have been exposed to charters only through media coverage—still don’t understand how charter schools can benefit their communities because they don’t have a clear picture of what charter schools are,” Langhorne says. “Because of this lack of experience, upscale, suburban families have become susceptible to the well-trodden myths about the supposed dangers of public charters.”

For charter schools to take root in suburban areas, Langhorne argues, the narrative around them needs to change from one centered on creating options for low-income families to one that emphasizes creating innovative schools for all kids.

“The priorities of charter school parents in the suburbs are not the same as those in urban areas. For suburban parents, public charter schools aren’t usually a means to escape failing public schools; they’re an alternative to an education system that is not innovative, engaging, or specialized. Appealing to such parents means placing less emphasis on test scores and more on curriculum, less talk about failing schools and more about different learning models.”

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PPI Statement on NAFTA Reform Announcement

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

“President Trump has called the new USMCA ‘the most important trade deal that we’ve ever made, by far.’ To the extent that the Administration is backing away from Trump’s earlier threats to blow up or emasculate NAFTA, that may be true. To the extent that the USMCA is largely an elaborate rebranding exercise, it seems that the Administration could have accomplished that—and usefully modernized NAFTA—without repeatedly threatening the very foundations of North American trade.

“At first glance, the USMCA hardly seems groundbreaking. It would modernize NAFTA by adding provisions derived from the Trans Pacific Partnership deal that the President abandoned, and would increase U.S. access to Canada’s dairy sector. But it’s far from clear whether its highly complex rules of origin for autos and other sectors would have the transformative economic effects that the Administration claims.

“It’s noteworthy that the new agreement doesn’t eliminate U.S. ‘national security’ tariffs on aluminum and steel from Canada or Mexico—or the retaliatory tariffs that those countries continue to impose on American manufacturers and farmers. And the Agreement’s reliance on the threat of ‘national security’ tariffs on Canadian and Mexican cars is a particular concern. As it reviews the new deal, Congress needs to push back against these and other abusive efforts by the Administration to restrict trade and hijack trade powers that are vested by the Constitution in Congress.”

Why Suburban Districts Need Public Charter Schools Too

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On November 8, 2016, while the rest of the world anxiously awaited the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, a subset of voters with a keen interest in education had their eyes on Massachusetts. This was the day Bay Staters would vote on Ballot Question 2, a proposal to raise the state’s cap on public charter schools by up to 12 new schools per year.

Massachusetts is home to some of the highest performing charter schools in the country, with especially impressive gains at schools serving urban, low-income and minority students. In Boston, one of the eight districts in the state to have reached its cap on charter schools, students at charters learn the equivalent of an extra year of math and reading each year, when compared to their peers with similar demographics and past test scores at the city’s traditional public schools.1The local school district, Boston Public Schools (BPS), enrolls about 53,000 students in a city of about 77,000 students. Currently, public charters enroll only about 10,000 students, but there are more than 32,000 children on waitlists for these schools.

 

Why Progressives Need to Embrace Innovation: Amazon’s $15/hr minimum wage

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Amazon just announced that it would raise the minimum hourly wage for all of its US workers to $15 per hour, including workers employed by temp agencies.  This is good news for Amazon’s workers, obviously.  But it’s also a sign that we’ve moved into a new era, where technology is driving rising real wages for everyone, not just the well-educated.

Ecommerce is proving to be a positive force for labor. For 30 years, retail workers struggled with a horrible status quo that suppressed any growth in retail wages and forced workers of color into the lowest paying retailing jobs. Between 1987 and 2017, real hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers in retail went up a grand total of 2%.

Amazon and other ecommerce sellers have decisively disrupted that horrible status quo, and created hundreds of thousands of better paying jobs. Even before the Amazon wage hike, PPI research found that ecommerce fulfillment centers typically pay 30% more than brick-and-mortar retail in the same area. Labor share in warehousing rose from 75.8% in 2007 to 83.2% in 2017, coinciding with the rapid growth of ecommerce fulfillment centers. Amazon’s latest move will only push the labor share up further.

These higher wages don’t make Amazon a philanthropic organization, anymore than Henry Ford was being benevolent when he boosted wages for workers in his factories in 1914. Ford needed to pay more to attract a competent workforce because his introduction of the assembly line boosted productivity, lowered prices, made cars affordable to the masses, and created an auto boom and an insatiable demand for skilled workers.

In the same way, Amazon and other ecommerce firms are using technology to transform the previously expensive process of getting products from manufacturers into the hands of consumers—what we call the “Internet of Goods.” These technological improvements have created benefits for both consumers and workers. For example, BLS data shows that real margins in the electronic shopping industry (NAICS 4541)—defined as prices received by retailers less their acquisition price of goods—have fallen by 13% since 2007. That means consumers are gaining from lower prices.

Progressives need to embrace innovation. It’s the only road to the best future for everyone.

Misguided Crew Size Legislation Risks Slowing Needed Freight Rail Growth

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has previously opposed arbitrary, redundant, and costly regulations, and proposed the Regulatory Improvement Commission to eliminate them. Regulation plays a vital role in refereeing market competition, protecting public health and safety, and keeping powerful economic actors honest. But regulations must be more nimble and adaptable to catalyze growth in a fast-changing world.

For people skeptical that regulation inhibits innovation and productivity growth, here’s an example of a wrong-headed proposed rule that would put Washington in the business of micromanaging employment in the freight rail sector.

When the Rail Safety Improvement Act was passed following the 2008 Chatsworth train collision, it mandated freight railroads implement Positive Train Control (PTC). PTC is a nationwide system of newly developed technologies that constantly processes thousands of variables to avert human error, including train collisions and derailments. Its implementation came at a hefty price to the railroads, estimated to cost more than $10 billion by completion.

One of the benefits of PTC was that it would enable railroads to move from two-person to one-person crews at some point down the road, boosting productivity with no loss of safety.

However, lawmakers now appear eager to flip course as fears of automation and job loss loom large in public policy conversations. Earlier this year, the Safe Freight Act was introduced in the Senate, a companion bill to a bipartisan House proposal unveiled in 2017. The legislation would mandate the crew size of freight trains to include both a locomotive engineer and a train conductor. While the legislation will not pass before midterms, it is likely to be reintroduced next Congress.

These proposals would deny freight rail the productivity gains of the digital age despite the widespread embrace of automation for passenger vehicles and commercial trucks on highways. Labor productivity for rail transportation has risen only a modest 16 percent over the last decade, about the same as the lagging pace of productivity growth across the entire U.S. economy. Meanwhile, as shown in Figure 1, the price of railroad transportation has risen 77 percent since 2000, far outpacing inflation. Allowing the freight rail industry to digitize would jumpstart productivity growth and cut distribution costs for the energy, manufacturing, and construction sectors they serve.

What’s more, there is no evidence to suggest that one-person crews are less safe than two-person crews. Single-person crews are commonly used in other countries and the FRA acknowledges the “evidence…indicates that safety record of these foreign operations are acceptable.” In the U.S., crew sizes have steadily been reduced from the five-person crews of the 1970s to the current two-person crews, with accident rates falling more than 80 percent during that time. And passenger trains have safely used single-person crews for decades.

Railroad investment and technological advances have played a critical role in realizing safety gains over the last decade. Since 2008, freight railroads have spent $245.3 billion on capital expenditures like infrastructure and equipment. Ultrasound, ground-penetrating radar, smart sensors, analytics software, and data sharing have enabled railroads to proactively identify and fix track and equipment issues. As a result, railroad accidents are at a historic low, according to data from the FRA. As shown in the figure below, the total train accident rate dropped 42 percent from 2007 to 2017. Track-caused accidents have dropped 51 percent. And accidents caused by human error are down 41 percent.

The implementation of PTC promises to further drop accident rates. According to forecasts from the Federal Highway Administration, total U.S. freight shipments will rise from 17.7 billion tons in 2016 to 24.2 billion tons in 2040, a 37 percent increase. Imposing crew size mandates on the freight rail industry would inefficiently divert resources from investing in safety, cutting costs for consumers, and improving and expanding America’s rail infrastructure. Rather, it would unnecessarily increase labor costs in the safest era ever of rail travel.

Goldberg for The Hill, “The case before the Supreme Court this month that is dividing progressives”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The U.S. Supreme Court is planning to decide this month whether it will hear a case that has started a seismic shift in how local governments look to fund their efforts to address pollution and other public health risks. This case, which deals with removing lead paint from homes, may not dominate national headlines the way nominations do, but it has been the source of intense debate in the legal and business communities for nearly two decades. In short, can local governments make businesses pay for the clean-up of downstream hazards associated with their products even when the companies did not cause the harms?

This case, submitted to the Supreme Court by Sherwin Williams and ConAgra, as well as others like it, are challenging for progressives. On one hand, the allure for environmentalists and social activists of dealing with a hazard without relying on government appropriations is understandable. But, subjecting someone to liability without fault or causation – which do not exist in these cases – violates the core progressive legal philosophy of standing up for one’s constitutional rights. To be clear, companies in these cases lawfully made and sold non-defective products. The lawsuits are solely over downstream hazards that often occurred years after the products were sold.

Continue reading at The Hill.

Osborne and Langhorne for The 74, “Where Politics Make Charters Difficult, 9 Tips for How Urban Districts Can Create Charter-like Schools – and Improve Their Success”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over the past 15 years, the fastest improvement in urban public education has come from cities that have embraced charter schools’ formula for success — autonomy, choice, diversity of school designs, and real accountability for performance. To compete, many districts have recently tried to spur charterlike innovation and increase student achievement by granting their school leaders more autonomy.

District-run autonomous schools are a hybrid model, a halfway point between charters and traditional public schools. They’re operated by district employees, but they can opt out of many district policies and — in some cities — union contracts.

Our recent analysis of state exam scores from 2015 and 2016 in Boston, Memphis, Denver, and Los Angeles showed that public charter schools outperformed both traditional public and in-district autonomous schools on standardized tests in three of the four cities studied. In the one exception, Memphis, the district concentrated its best principals and teachers in, and provided extra funding and support to, its autonomous iZone schools.

However, when the political landscape makes chartering difficult, in-district autonomous models may be the second-best option. Districts can increase the success of these schools if they heed these nine lessons learned by the four cities in our study.

 

Continue reading at The 74.

Gerwin for The Hill, “Off-the-rails trade war shows how America loses under Trump”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Donald Trump promised that America would start “winning big on trade.” Trump vowed to keep “special interests” from rigging U.S. trade, pledged trade decisions would “benefit American workers and families,” and promised to confront trade violations by China.

For the former Apprentice host, winning means that Trump picks the winners, tilting the scales for his favored trade interests. He’s imposed tariffs on washers and dryers, steel and aluminum and is pursuing 25-percent “national security” duties on imported cars.

Trump’s new taxes on $200 billion in imports from China, which led to the inevitable retaliatory tariffs of $60 billion on U.S. exports, are the latest in a series of impulsive choices that have turned a vital investigation of China’s technology theft into an out-of-control tariff war.

Trump’s trade edicts have helped some companies and workers. But many more Americans — and America as a whole — are losing under Trump’s trade policies.

Continue reading at The Hill.

The App Economy in Colombia

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Introduction

This report provides an update to our 2016 paper on Colombia’s App Economy. We find 87,900 App Economy jobs in Colombia, up from 83,100 two years ago. We compare Colombia’s App Economy performance to other Latin American countries, estimate the relative size of the iOS and Android ecosystems, and give some examples of companies that are hiring App Economy workers.

Read the full report here.