Latest news with #OrenCass
Wall Street Journal
2 days ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Reagan Prized Free Markets
Phil Gramm's op-ed 'Ronald Reagan was No Protectionist' (July 24) is absolutely right. Despite efforts by Oren Cass, Robert Lighthizer and other national conservatives to get the Gipper on their side, Reagan favored free trade and opposed protectionism. He wanted to cut taxes on trade, not raise them. One need only listen to Reagan's words and observe his actions. In 1985, Reagan stated 'our trade policy rests firmly on the foundation of free and open markets—free trade.' He argued that 'Instead of protectionism, we should call it destructionism. It destroys jobs, weakens our industries, harms exports, costs billions of dollars to consumers, and damages our overall economy.'
Bloomberg
5 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Trumponomics: Is Trump Right About the Fed Getting It Wrong?
On this episode of Trumponomics, we discuss whether Jerome Powell has overestimated the risk of inflation stemming from the US trade war. Joining us are Oren Cass, founder and chief economist at American Compass and Anna Wong, chief US economist at Bloomberg Economics who served in various roles in Trump's first administration. Along with host Stephanie Flanders, they examine whether the Fed has been getting it wrong on rates, and if so, why.
Wall Street Journal
6 days ago
- Automotive
- Wall Street Journal
Ronald Reagan Was No Protectionist
During a debate that I participated in at the Harvard Club of New York in December, Oren Cass, founder of the think tank American Compass, tried to draft President Ronald Reagan into the ranks of trade protectionists. Mr. Cass quoted a claim that Reagan was 'the greatest protectionist since Herbert Hoover' and said that he 'took repeated aggressive protectionist trade actions against the Japanese in particular.' Mr. Cass's argument, now a standard protectionist claim, was that because Reagan in 1981 agreed to a temporary voluntary restraint deal limiting the number of Japanese automobiles that could be imported into the U.S., he was a protectionist. I pointed out to Mr. Cass that I saw Reagan 'at least once a week' during that period while I was working on the president's budget, which I co-authored in the House, and could attest that the president hated the deal. He agreed to the compromise only to prevent lawmakers from passing more extreme protectionist legislation. Several historical events led up to the Japan agreement. The U.S. emerged from World War II with a monopoly in heavy manufacturing because our industrial base was new and intact while most of the developed world's factories were largely in ruins. That started to change after the first Japanese Toyotas rolled off the ship in Los Angeles. By the 1970s, America's auto monopoly faced growing competition on quality and price. Foreign auto imports surged, putting financial stress on an industry that had become noncompetitive. Congress responded by bailing out Chrysler Corporation, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, in 1979. In March 1981, the presidents of America's Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford and Chrysler—visited Washington to announce that their ability to continue producing cars in the U.S. was in doubt and to plead for help. Unemployment, inflation and interest rates were near postwar highs. Any hope of passing Reagan's 1981 budget in the Democratic-controlled House would require a near-unanimous Republican vote, which at the time was incredibly rare.
New York Post
29-06-2025
- Business
- New York Post
Globalism is dead, Zohran Mamdani too extreme and other commentary
Conservative: Globalism Is Dead The effect of President Trump's policies on trade, immigration and the stock market shows a 'three-dimensional collapse of the narrative atop which we built our economy over the past generation,' argues Oren Cass at Commonplace. Contra the tariff-panic crowd, 'consumer sentiment is up and inflation is down,' while 'the stock market is up.' Plus, 'the dollar is down' which means cheaper goods. 'With aggressive immigration enforcement, the United States has ceased releasing illegal migrants into the country entirely,' and 'one million people in the country illegally may already have departed.' Advertisement 'And as the State Street index shows, a basic S&P 500 fund has been outperforming the private equity industry over every timeframe.' The globalist conventional wisdom is dead. 'We are seeing now that a different course has always been available.' From the right: A Sane Step in Visa Vetting 'Checking the social media accounts of visa applicants for hostility toward America is an obvious step in safeguarding America's security and values,' proclaims the Washington Examiner's editorial board. Advertisement The State Department will do a ''comprehensive and thorough vetting' of all student and exchange visitor applications, including a review of applicants' social media profiles.' Smart: 'The revolutionary fervor and deep anti-American activism that ripped apart university campuses last year requires a closer examination of the views of foreign students.' 'A US visa is a privilege, not a right. No one is entitled to access to our universities or job markets.' This 'visa vetting overhaul, with its sharp focus on social media scrutiny, is a bold and necessary move.' Advertisement Get opinions and commentary from our columnists Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters Energy beat: NY's Looming Energy Crisis 'For all Gov. Hochul's talk about 'affordability', it seems electricity prices have not received that memo,' snarks the Empire Center's Zilvinas Silenas. Per the US Energy Information Administration, 'New York households on average pay the sixth-highest price for electricity' in the nation. Meanwhile, the state 'is slowly losing the capability to make energy' just as officials are electrifying 'everything — heating, cooking and transportation — all of which will require much more electricity.' Advertisement Plus, 'the development of energy-intensive industries' requires the production of additional electricity 'which New York likely cannot supply on its current trajectory.' To make New York more competitive, state pols 'need to remove all hurdles to cheap, plentiful energy' which 'will help with affordability, too.' Democrat: Zohran Too Extreme 'Today's Democratic activists must keep extremist, unpopular positions out of our party's platform and serious conversations,' warns William M. Daley at The Wall Street Journal. Daley — Clinton-era Commerce Department secretary and White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama — sees Zohran Mamdani's platform as 'equally outlandish and radical' as President Trump's. Mamdani's Democratic Socialists of America 'seeks to 'defund the police' by cutting 'budgets annually towards zero,' to 'disarm law enforcement officers,' to 'close local jails,' and to 'free all people from involuntary confinement,'' along with a slew of other radical economic and social proposals. 'Mainstream Democrats must loudly disavow these views.' Just as the GOP is now dominated by Trump's ideas, Democratic 'party leaders risk a similar fate if they shrug off Mr. Mamdani's victory.' It's 'a wake-up call. Will my party answer it?' Foreign desk: A Middle East Reset Advertisement As the Abraham Accords 'come up on their five-year anniversary at the end of the summer, the transformation they represent is only starting to become clear,' cheers Commentary's Seth Mandel. On CNBC recently, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff teased news regarding 'some pretty big announcements on countries that are now coming into the Abraham Peace Accords.' Obvious candidates are Syria and Lebanon: With the Accords serving as 'a new regional structure,' if they 'want to make it in the new Middle East, they cannot rely on Iran and Russia. They must navigate the increased influence of the US and Israel.' Indeed: Accords membership is 'becoming a sort of security umbrella.' — Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
Vox
22-06-2025
- Business
- Vox
The economic theory behind Trumpism
For more than half a century, the American right has preached the virtues of free markets and low taxes and deregulation. But a new wave of conservative thinkers are now arguing that Republicans have been wrong — or at the very least misguided — about the economy. This new economic thinking represents a break from what we've come to expect from the American right. Its proponents argue for a new strain of economic populism, one that departs from the GOP's past allegiance to big business and focuses instead on the working class. The question is, is it for real? Oren Cass is the founder of the think tank American Compass and the editor of a new book called The New Conservatives. He's also one of the most influential advocates of this conservative economic populism. Cass thinks the Republican Party has been too captive to corporate interests and market fundamentalism, and that conservatism needs a major reset, one that embraces American manufacturing and empowers workers. I invited him onto The Gray Area to talk about this new right-wing populism, what distinguishes it from the left, and whether the Republican Party is serious about adopting it. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Back in 2018, you wrote: 'Our political economy has relied upon the insidious metaphor of the economic pie, which measures success by the amount of GDP available to every American for consumption. … But the things America thought she wanted have not made her happy.' Let's start there: What did we think we wanted, and why hasn't it made us happy? You're very perceptive to start there. We were just putting together this new book called The New Conservatives, which is an anthology of everything we've been doing at American Compass over the last five years. And I actually went back and grabbed that essay and made it a prologue to the book. Because exactly as you said, it is a starting point for the way I think about a lot of this. In my mind, what we saw go wrong in our economics and our politics is that we did come to think of consumption as the end unto itself. And to be clear, I love consumption as much as the next guy. I'm not saying we should go back and live in log cabins, but I think we assumed that as long as we were increasing consumption, as long as material living standards were rising, everybody would be happy and we could declare success. And it's important to say that, from a formal perspective, that is in fact how our economic models operate. Economists will tell you their assumption is that the goal of the economic system is to maximize consumption. And so that's where that economic pie metaphor comes from. Something that was so widely embraced across the political spectrum, across the intellectual spectrum, was this idea that as long as you're growing the economy, you're growing GDP, you don't really have to worry too much about what's in the pie or where it's coming from. You can always then chop it up and make sure everybody has lots of pie. And I think it's important to say that — and this is the point, that we got what we thought we wanted — it's important to say that that worked. That for all of the problems we have in this country, if you're only looking at material living standards, if you're asking how much stuff people have, how big their houses are, whether they're air-conditioned, even how much health care they consume, at every socioeconomic level, consumption is up. We did that. And yet I think it's also very obvious that that did not achieve what we were trying to achieve, that [it] did not necessarily correspond to human flourishing, did not correspond to a strengthening economy over time, that it certainly did not correspond to strengthening families and communities. And ultimately, it didn't correspond to a strong and healthy political system or democracy. And so there's obviously a lot of talk of, Okay, well, why isn't that right? Why did it go wrong? What do you do about it? The strange thing for someone like me is that American conservatism, certainly in my lifetime, has largely existed to reinforce the ideology you're rejecting here. Why do you think the political right has been blind for so long to the things you're fighting for now? There's a very interesting pivot point that you see around the time of the Reagan revolution. The coalition that Reagan assembled had these different elements. It had the social conservatives, who I would say are most closely aligned to a fundamentally conservative outlook on a lot of these questions. But then it brought to that the very libertarian free-market folks on the economic side, and the quite aggressive interventionist foreign policy hawks. And what all these folks had in common was they really hated communism and really wanted to win the Cold War and saw that as the existential crisis. But what happened is, within that coalition, a very libertarian free-market mindset was then imposed on the economic policy of the right of center, even when that was very much in tension with a lot of other conservative values. And you saw people writing about that from both sides. From one side, Friedrich Hayek, who is one of the ultimate carriers of this pre-market ideology, has a very famous essay titled 'Why I Am Not a Conservative,' emphasizing that what he calls faith in markets to solve problems and self-regulate was very much at odds with how conservatives looked at the world. And from the flip side, you had a lot of conservatives, folks like Yuval Levin, who prefer markets as a way of ordering the economy to other options, but recognize that markets are very much in tension with other values like family and community. And in some cases, markets even actively can undermine or erode the strength of those other institutions. Markets are also dependent on institutions. If you want markets to work well, you actually need constraints. You need institutional supports. And so that tension was always present. I think that the coalition made a lot of sense in the context of winning the Cold War. It made a lot of sense when markets in the middle of the late 20th century really did seem to be delivering on a lot of the things that conservatives really cared about. But I think it reached its expiration date and just lived on by inertia into the 2000s, into this era of radical embrace of free trade even with communist China and cutting taxes even in the face of big deficits. I can imagine a skeptical leftist hearing all of this and thinking it's just a rebranded democratic socialism. Why is that wrong? What makes this conservative? There's a real disconnect both on the ends and on the means. I think there's a very healthy contestation over what are the appropriate ends that we're actually building toward. And what you're seeing conservatives coming back to articulating a set of actual value judgments about, what do we think the good life consists of? I think there is a set of value judgments and preferences for, in many respects, quite traditional formations at the family level, at the community level. [For] saying that it is not merely a value-neutral choice — 'Would you rather get married and have kids or spend more money on vacations in Greece?' — that it is actually appropriate and necessary for the good society to say, No, one of these things is better than the other and more important and should be valued more highly. At the national level, you're also seeing a much more robust nationalism on the right of center. Conservatives recognize the importance of the nation and solidarity within the nation to functioning markets, to a functioning society, in a way that at least the modern left tends to resist in a lot of cases. Part of the case you're making is that there's an ongoing paradigm shift within American conservatism. When you look at what this administration is doing on the policy front, when you look at what the Republican Party is doing, do you see them moving in your direction? We're definitely moving in the right direction. On tariffs alone, [we could] spend a tremendous amount of time emphasizing the ways I think the problems that they're addressing, the direction they're trying to go, is the right one. On the specifics of how things are timed and what the levels are and so forth, what legal authorities you use for what, I have all sorts of thoughts on how it might be done better. But broadly speaking, to your question about the direction that things are headed, I think it's extraordinarily clear to me that the Republican Party and the conservative movement are shifting quite dramatically in this direction. One way to look at that is in terms of personnel. Trump has obviously been something of a constant over the last decade in Republican politics, but the distance from Mike Pence to JD Vance is pretty dramatic. The distance from [Secretaries of State] Rex Tillerson to Marco Rubio is pretty dramatic. The distance from the various secretaries of labor in the first term to a secretary of labor recommended by the Teamsters is pretty dramatic. Is it really, though? Rhetorically, yes. But substantively? If you want to know why I can't take this iteration of the GOP seriously, look at the domestic policy they just passed in the House. It's the same Republican Party. It's jammed up with a bunch of stuff that reflects conventional conservative priorities. It's not doing a whole lot to help working-class people. It's more tax cuts offset by more cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, which low-income people depend on. And the net result, as always, will be more upward redistribution of wealth. And on top of that, another $3 or $4 or $5 trillion tacked onto the deficit just for good measure. How can you look at that and feel like the GOP is genuinely pivoting in your direction? I've been extremely critical of the 'big, beautiful bill' — particularly of the deficit element — because I think if one is going to be a fiscal conservative, one has to not be adding to deficits right now. But a lot of the efforts to argue that things are not changing in the Republican Party strike me as a real disservice to people who are trying to understand where things are going. Elected political leaders are always going to be the lagging indicator of what's happening in any political party or political movement. They are by definition going to be the oldest, the ones who have been around the longest, the ones who have built their careers and ideologies and relationships around what was happening 20 or 30 years ago. And so if one wants to know what is passing in Congress today, then yes, you count the votes of the people in Congress today. If you want to know what's actually moving within a party or what's going to happen over a 10- or 15-year period, counting the votes today is just not what someone in good faith trying to understand the direction would do. The tariff regime, the trade war — that is a genuine shift. No doubt about it. It's not entirely clear to me how that helps poor and working-class people at the moment, but maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture. There's a very interesting economic debate to be had about whether it will work. I obviously have one very strong view. But it seems pretty clear to me that what they are trying to do is quite explicitly focused on the economic interests of workers. Another very interesting area — I mentioned some of the things that are going on on the labor front. One really interesting effort that's underway, and [Sen.] Josh Hawley is the leader of it, but Bernie Moreno, the new senator from Ohio, is the co-sponsor of it — they've taken the [proposed] PRO Act, which is the ultimate Democratic wish list of labor reforms, and they've chopped it up. And they've said, Look, some of these are perfectly legitimate and good ideas. Others of these we don't agree with. And we're going to start advancing the ones we think are good ideas. That's a dramatic shift in how you would see the Republican Party. I think you're seeing the same thing in the financial sector. There was a great example recently where a private equity firm that had bought out a bunch of paper plants was trying to shut down a paper plant in Ohio. And you literally had the Republican politicians out there at the rally with the union leaders, forcing a change and a commitment to at least keep the plant open for the rest of the year and try to find a transaction that would keep it open afterward. On family policy, in 2017 you had [then-Sens.] Marco Rubio and Mike Lee threatening to tank the entire tax cut bill to get an expanded child tax credit in it. Now it is an uncontroversial top priority that the child tax credit is not only kept at that level, but expanded further. And so even at the level of what is happening in legislation, it's clear that this is a very different party from 2017. If you look at who Trump has appointed, it's a very different set of appointments. If you look at the critical mass and sometimes center of gravity among the younger elected officials, the people coming into the Senate, it's a completely different set of priorities and policies from those who have been there for a long time. Like I said, I'm not convinced that the DNA of the party has changed, but I will grant that there are indications of a shift. I don't know what it's going to amount to, materially, but this is not the party of Mitt Romney. I think Trump has cultivated a very unique coalition, certainly much more working-class than the pre-Trump Republican Party. I don't know how much of that coalition is a function of Trump and how much of that coalition will fade when he fades. If the Republican Party does prove an unreliable vehicle for your movement, can you see a world in which you're working with Democrats? We do work with some Democrats. I think there are Democrats who are doing very good and interesting work. We recently had [Rep.] Jared Golden from Maine on the American Compass Podcast because he is the sponsor of the 10 percent global tariff legislation in Congress. One thing I always emphasize is that I think a healthy American politics is not one where one party gets everything right and dominates and the other one collapses into irrelevance. It's one where we actually have two healthy political parties that are both focused on the concerns and priorities of the typical American and are then contesting a lot of these very legitimate disagreements about ends and means. But based on what is happening in American politics today and the fundamental differences between conservatism and progressivism, I would expect that this is going to have the most success and salience and overlap in thinking on the right of center.
