Douglas Holtz-Eakin

It dawned on Eakinomics that there has never been an Eakinomics “fun fact.” Now, obviously, every Eakinomics issue is chock full of facts and tons of fun. Duh. But FOMO must have struck hard, so here are two inflation fun facts. Yesterday the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the May data on the Consumer Price Index (CPI); […]

Deregulation is a signature initiative of the Trump Administration (best followed by subscribing to the Week in Regulation .) The public relations line associated with this effort is the president's “one in, ten out” pledge to eliminate 10 regulations for every new one. At a mechanical level, the approach is to give each agency a regulatory budget – the dollars of new regulatory burden the agency is permitted to impose on the private sector – and to have those budgets be zero or negative numbers.

Let us begin with a confession. A while back – probably 2019 – Eakinomics predicted the imminent passage of federal privacy legislation because there would be bipartisan interest in setting a single standard and not being saddled with a patchwork of state-level laws. Roll the clock forward to 2026. In his discussion of the Securing and Establishing Consumer Uniform […]

The federal budget is a disaster. The substance features dangerously large deficits, explosive debt levels, and an unsustainable fiscal outlook. The process may be even worse. There is no regular budget resolution or budget planning. The appropriations process simply never gets completed on time and both parties have now enacted appropriations through reconciliation. And reconciliation is […]

“A bad penny always turns up” is just the old-fashioned way of saying Senators Grassley and Klobuchar will always introduce the American Innovation and Choice Online Act ( AICOA ), despite the fact that it has gone nowhere in previous Congresses and that it mimics the European Union's highly detrimental and unsuccessful Digital Markets Act ( DMA ). The DMA is credited with delaying access to the new artificial intelligence (AI) version of Apple's Siri until 2027.

The average person should be excused if they have lost track of the administration's tariff policy. After all, there has been a flurry of announcements, delays, rate changes, and court decisions. Fortunately, AAF's Jacob Jensen has a recap of the action in his The New Section 301 Tariff Regime . As Jensen notes, the Supreme Court's decision that the tariffs imposed under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) exceeded the president's authority does not mean the end to tariffs.

There was a time when Senator Bernie Sanders' American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would have been quickly dismissed as the pointless rantings of the lunatic left. The act would create a “sovereign wealth fund” consisting of a 50-percent equity stake in large (and also perhaps not-so-large) artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced robotics firms. It would have been instantly and widely recognized as an inappropriate intrusion of the government into private-sector commerce and, most likely, an illegal government taking of private property. It would certainly not have merited the effort of a total takedown by AAF's Fred Ashton.

Fed watchers will be focused this week on Thursday's release of the May personal consumption expenditures measure of inflation. A hot inflation number – it was 3.8 percent in April – will highlight the disconnect between the new chairman's desire for rate cuts and the inflation environment in the aftermath of the decision to attack Iran.

Regular readers of Eakinomics, and especially those that follow the writing of Jordan Haring (see here here , and here ), are aware of the perilous state of Social Security's finances. The latest trustees' report indicates that the trust funds will hit zero in 2032. In the absence of reforms, current law dictates that all Social Security recipients will receive a 22-percent, across-the-board cut in their monthly checks.

Most days Eakinomics' interest in electricity is limited to whether flicking the switch turns the lights on. If yes, the day's electricity thoughts are complete. But suddenly electricity policy is everywhere and, to the average mere mortal, super confusing. For example, a big question in competition policy is the proposed acquisition of Dominion Energy by NextEra Energy – a roughly $67-billion deal that would create the world's largest regulated electric utility.