The Commons
Making Sense of Conservative Economics
Trump’s anti-bureaucracy energy should be directed at regulation as well as waste
It isn’t just about criminal punishments and presidential pardons
The old GOP dictated Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. His new coalition should shape its future.
Latest Episode
Oren speaks on a panel about economic policy in Trump’s second term and more with Jason Furman, Richard Burkhauser, and Kimberly Clausing.
Our Latest
Political economy has no inviolable truths. Anything that economists or political scientists claim as inviolable truth, then, is incomplete—it may hold within the narrow confines of their analysis, but it will not hold in reality over the long run.
Farah Stockman’s new book, American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, documents the closure and relocation of an Indianapolis Rexnord bearing plant to Mexico and Texas. Stockman, a New York Times reporter, was assigned to cover the Rexnord plant after then-candidate Trump tweeted about its pending closure and the scheduled relocation of a nearby Carrier plant to Mexico in 2016.
Oren Cass makes the case that the Republicans must move beyond the dog-eared 1980s playbook of tax cuts and deregulation if they are to succeed.
American Compass research director Wells King argues that woke corporate activism attempts to launder self-interest through liberal ideology and to renege on actual obligations.
Even the financial crisis of 2008–09 did not spur any real realignment of voters toward the left. Nor have—so far—the twin economic and health crises brought on by the COVID pandemic. What has gone wrong?

