The term “modern monetary theory” has been talked about so much lately that we mainstream economists need to try to understand it. We’re having trouble, though I’m beginning to suspect that it may be because M.M.T., as it’s often called, is really just a voguish name for a group of old and, for the most part, sensible ideas, repackaged in a new form. M.M.T. is sometimes invoked to justify reckless

President Trump has put trade policy at the center of his agenda. A case in point is the revised trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, announced on Monday. Yet it is hard to be sanguine about this accomplishment, in part because the changes are so modest but mostly because the president’s overall approach to international trade is so confused. Mr. Trump’s confusion is understandable. Economists

I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. [On Oct. 28, 2020, Miles Taylor, who left his position as chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security, made public his authorship of this article. While The Times has a strict policy of protecting its sources, in this case he personally waived our agreement to ke

The highways in Houston were empty last Tuesday after the city was inundated with floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey.Credit...David J. Phillip/Associated Press. The waters are receding in Houston, and so, inevitably, is national interest. But Harvey will leave a huge amount of wreckage behind, some of it invisible. In particular, we don’t yet know just how much poison has been released by flooding

Those apocalyptic warnings are still foolish: America, which borrows in its own currency and therefore can’t run out of cash, isn’t at all like Greece. But running big deficits is no longer harmless, let alone desirable. The way it was: Eight years ago, with the economy in free fall, I wrote that we had entered an era of “depression economics,” in which the usual rules of economic policy no longer

Supporters of the Affordable Care Act gathered outside the Supreme Court in 2015.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times More than two and a half years have gone by since the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, went fully into effect. Most of the news about health reform since then has been good, defying the dire predictions of right-wing doomsayers. But this week has brought some genuine bad ne

Do you remember what happened when the Berlin Wall fell? Until that moment, nobody realized just how decadent Communism had become. It had tanks, guns, and nukes, but nobody really believed in its ideology anymore; its officials and enforcers were mere careerists, who folded at the first shock. It seems to me that you need to think about what happened to the G.O.P. this election cycle the same way