Erica York

The White House claims tariffs work. Let’s look at each study they cite to see if they’re correct.

Gasoline prices have increased 27% in the past 3 weeks following the US attacks on Iran. That's the largest 3-week increase consumers seen in a very long time. Despite that, gasoline remains at about average levels of affordability (7 minutes of labor) economistwritingeveryday.com/2026/03/18/gas…

The Middle East conflict enters a new phase. ‼️@qatarenergy told @Reuters it may not be able to fulfill long-term LNG contracts for up to 5 years. Can U.S. LNG help mitigate the unprecedented global energy shock? Short answer: No. More in my new @AAF insight.

"Dr. M. Scott Peck, in a book most people know and fewer have actually read, pointed out something more uncomfortable: most of our suffering doesn't come from suffering itself. It comes from avoiding it." arnoldspumpclub.com/blogs/newslett…

Anne Applebaum nails it:

"If you are terrified of speaking up against the US because you are concerned about tariffs I would humbly suggest that where we are going tariffs do not matter." A very sharp read on the sobering but also seismic ramifications of this crisis by someone who follows global commodity chains very, very closely.

Wow.

Many people continue to fall for this claim, but it’s wildly wrong. The top 10%’s share is actually lower now than pre-pandemic!

We have more expensing than we did before, but problems with the corporate tax persist that make a corporate rate hike unwise: 1. Debt is still mostly deductible. 2. ~50% of the capital stock is not expensed 3. Returns to profit shifting still positive and potentially large

WASHINGTON (AP) — Wholesale inflation comes in hot for February with producer prices rising 3.4%, the biggest jump in a year.

Ha I wrote about the irl steel tariff episode that happened when I was in elementary school.

You can look up @ericadyork's posting history (try e.g. "from:ericadyork inputs"), and it's just her trying to explain this thing--this exact thing--to the MAGAnomics and Bidenomics influencers for ten years, and they are just too Simple to get it.

@AndrewYang x.com/ernietedeschi/…

The top 10% now account for almost half of all consumer spending. That’s not what you want to see.

In other words, the Rauh estimate is a revenue estimate and the Galle estimate is a wish.

The Washington millionaire's tax is imposed on income above $1 million for both single and joint filers, yielding the largest marriage penalty by rate differential and the second largest by maximum possible penalty.

Look, everyone has ideological biases. But explicitly progressive economists studying inequality over the past 20 years have mostly shown that their biases have dominated and undermined the quality of their research time and again.

About on par with a Peter Navarro tariff revenue estimate!

I spend way too much time on social media debunking "economic slop" promulgated by lawyers pretending to be economists, so I built Show Me the Model: a tool that uses AI to check whether the economic reasoning in an essay actually holds up. showmethemodel.io Give it a URL or paste some plain text, and the tool flags hidden assumptions, internal inconsistencies, and other problem areas, and tells you how a real economist would think through the issue. Right now, it has 4 "personas:" macro, trade, IO/price theory, and labor. The tool first figures out which persona is right for the job, and then uses a parallelized prompt scaffold specific to that persona to process the source text. Here are some example outputs based on some essays that triggered me hard: Citrini Research's viral essay on how AI could trigger a self-reinforcing financial crisis rivaling the GFC: showmethemodel.io/#/results/2ez3… American Compass on the harms of trade deficits: showmethemodel.io/#/results/kOvt… @oren_cass on why Built-to-Rent should be banned: showmethemodel.io/#/results/OXjr… American Compass on the "China Shock:" showmethemodel.io/#/results/dJM7… @michaelxpettis on why China's trade surplus reduces global output: showmethemodel.io/#/results/C8OT… Try it yourself at showmethemodel.io. You'll need to bring your own API key (OpenAI or Anthropic), and a typical analysis costs $0.50–$1.50. It's super preliminary and will probably break on you. I'd love feedback about both the functionality as well as the quality of the output.

@davidsgamage encouraged me to closely read how @joshrauh came up with his revenue score and compare it to his. I had. But, took a closer look, and I wrote a brief comparison for everyone else.

I had no idea it was this analytically lazy. To think, if those authors were attacking something they disagreed with, would they be more motivated to be accurate?

"When someone makes a claim that a particular tax change will lead to economic growth, we should ask, “What is the mechanism by which this would happen?” Perhaps our interlocutor is arguing that a tax change will put more money in the pockets of businesses; maybe the claim is that a tax change will lower the marginal tax rate on investment. In any case, our discussions about tax policy would be enriched if we pointed to specific causes and effects." taxfoundation.org/blog/unified-t…

Sen. Van Hollen’s plan includes increases and decreases in marginal tax rates. But overall, it would raise marginal rates on a larger share of economic activity than it cuts, leading to a net negative effect on long-run growth.

Sen. Van Hollen said on @SquawkCNBC that his tax plan would grow the economy by putting more money in the pockets of middle-class workers who are more likely to spend it. That reflects a common misunderstanding of how taxes affect long-run growth (see this 2017 TF explainer).