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The Democratic debates tonight and tomorrow will likely stick to the familiar script from the first ones, with candidates tripping over each other to see who can promise the biggest tax-spend-and-regulate agenda. This doesn't make for compelling television. President Trump nailed the description of the first round with his one-word tweet, "BORING!" To make the debates more exciting to watch and to provide voters with a glimpse of reality into Democrats' fantasy-world policy proposals, the CNN moderators must press the candidates on the consequences of their proposals. A good place to start is by challenging their uniform support of the...

The dramatic collapse in US-China talks in May suggested that Chinese negotiators did not have full political backing for the concessions they proposed to reach a deal to end the trade war, according to a veteran US trade official ahead of the resumption of face-to-face negotiations this week in Shanghai. China was reported to have made last minute, large-scale edits to a near-150 page trade agreement draft, which scuppered the prospects for a deal after 11 rounds of negotiations. The changes suggested that Chinese negotiators never “really connected with all the people who needed to be connected to in order...

Stop us if you've heard this before. According to Reuters, President Donald Trump said that Apple will follow his wishes by opening a U.S. factory in Texas. The president's comments were made the same day that he disseminated a tweet saying that he would not grant the tech giant a waiver that would prevent it from having to pay import taxes on parts for the Mac Pro imported from China. Trump also pointed out that if Apple made the parts in the states, it wouldn't face tariffs on them. While Apple designs its products in the U.S., many of them...

The U.S. economy is roaring. More voters rate the economy positively today than have since 2001. According to spending data from June, Americans spent more at restaurants and retail locations than expected, while U.S. manufacturing output continues to rise. As Federal Reserve Vice Chair Richard Clarida recently put it, "The U.S. economy is in a good, good place. We have a solid growth rate. We have a strong labor market. Inflation is stable." He’s right. Economic growth has been north of 3 percent during much of Trump’s presidency. Employers are creating jobs, employees are happy with raises, bonuses, and newfound...

President Trump Building Economic Landscape for 2020…Earlier today President Trump sent a warning tweet about Apple possibly incurring tariffs on their products if they continue a plan for manufacturing in China. Later in the day the president answered direct questions about those possible tariffs. Additionally, Secretary Wilbur Ross was very insightful when he also spoke of the current U.S. perspective toward the U.S-China trade negotiation. If you have followed the basic road-map of America-First, there’s a very clear picture; however, most pundits and trade analysts will likely ignore the message. [Apple will not be given Tariff waivers, or relief, for...

... Business investment has been cool since last year’s third quarter when the President revved up his trade brawl with China. Executives have reported delaying investment decisions since they don’t know the impact of his multifront trade war on cross-border supply chains. Foreign investment in the U.S. has been declining with capital flows from China falling 87.9% between 2016 and 2018. Trade uncertainty increased last quarter after negotiations with China collapsed in May. Then the President threatened tariffs on Mexico as a cudgel to curb immigration from Central America. Around the same time, the Trump Administration blindsided businesses with a...

The costs of America’s trade disputes with the world continue to mount. Academic studies document clearly, for example, that new U.S. tariffs on washing machines and other products have raised U.S. consumer prices of those goods, thereby cutting into Americans’ real incomes. New government data suggest that another cost is building. Foreign direct investment into America by multinational companies headquartered abroad is falling. In 2015 and 2016, America’s FDI inflows totaled $482 billion and $486 billion, respectively. Soon after taking office in January 2017, President Trump launched several new trade disputes; that year FDI into the U.S. tumbled nearly 40%...

President Trump threatened Guatemala on Tuesday with tariffs and remittance fees after the Central American country pulled out of their agreement with the Trump administration. As The Hill reported the two countries had not formally committed to such a safe third deal, which would require Guatemala to process asylum claims from migrants who set foot there first on their way to the United States. Guatemala’s Constitutional Court earlier this month blocked President Jimmy Morales from declaring the nation a safe third country. President Trump: Guatemala, which has been forming Caravans and sending large numbers of people, some with criminal records,...

According to the Communist ideology, ‘We are the people’s representatives’, so the party cannot accept people rising up against it and forcing it to back down,” said Joseph Cheng, retired political science professor at the City University of Hong Kong. The authorities also have a deep-rooted tendency to blame problems on foreign interference instead of their own governance weaknesses, political commentator and veteran journalist Ching Cheong said. “China sees Hong Kong as influenced by years of colonial rule and having no sense of responsibility to introduce laws to protect the national security or to help the country nab fugitives,” said...

Some Chinese companies are seeking new purchases of U.S. agricultural products, China's official Xinhua news agency said on Sunday, citing authorities, as Beijing and Washington look for ways to end a protracted trade war. U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed at last month's G20 summit in Osaka to restart trade talks that stalled in May. Trump said at the time he would not impose new tariffs and U.S. officials said China agreed to make agricultural purchases. But Trump said on July 11 that China was not living up to promises to buy U.S. farm goods. Chinese...

The trade war between China and the United States isn’t a conflict that will remain confined to the economy. It’s a risky play in a new Cold War. -- Much has been written about the economic wisdom and potential effects of the Sino-American trade war. Yet few understand that the trade war is just one front in what we should view as the Second Cold War. China seems to be in the lead in developing and employing technologies like artificial intelligence, hypersonic missiles, and 5G (which has extensive defense and intelligence system applications). Together, these technologies could create a strategic...

FULL TITLE: Michelle Obama Claims People Dismiss Presidency After Barack: ‘If a Black Guy Can Do It, Anybody Can’ In a Saturday interview, former first lady Michelle Obama insisted that Americans now dismiss the U.S. presidency because a black man was recently in the office. Speaking to TV host Gayle King during the 2019 Essence Festival at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, Obama exclaimed that husband Barack made the presidency “look too easy,” Fox News reported. “I guess it’s kind of like if the black guy can do it, anybody can do it — and that’s not true. It’s a hard job,”...

Among the most politically potent arguments for President Trump’s punitive tariffs on your, my and other Americans’ purchases of imports from China is the claim that these tariffs are a tool for reducing Chinese theft of Americans’ intellectual property (IP).While IP theft in China does occur, as my Mercatus Center colleague Daniel Griswold and I argue in a recent paper, this theft provides far less justification for Trump’s tariffs than is commonly believed.First, the extent of such theft is overblown. Much of this “theft” is in fact in-kind taxation. Beijing requires that certain foreign companies seeking to do business...

The pace of companies moving production out of China is accelerating as more than 50 multinationals from Apple to Nintendo to Dell are rushing to escape the punitive tariffs placed by the U.S., according to the Nikkei Asian review. The trade war between the U.S. and China has dragged on for more than a year with 25% tariffs placed on $200 billion of Chinese goods. President Donald Trump is still threatening to slap duties on another $325 billion of goods. In wake of the intensifying battle, more and more companies announced plans or are considering shifting manufacturing from China. American...

One of the perils of being well-off is the constant risk that the federal government and/or your friendly state and local tax collectors will figure out new and different ways to snatch more of your wealth. Especially wealth that you earned the old-fashioned way: by inheriting it. To raise your paranoia to the appropriate level, here are two new things to worry about. Few noticed when the House of Representatives in May overwhelming passed the imaginatively named “Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act of 2019.” The vote was 417-3. Senate passage was thought to be a mere...

The price of bitcoin tumbled Monday after President Trump Opens a New Window. tweeted Thursday that he was “not a fan” of cryptocurrencies and criticized Facebook’s Opens a New Window. Libra digital currency that’s set to launch next year. Bitcoin price briefly hit below $10,000 just after midnight Monday, a two-week low for the leading digital coin, Coindesk’s data Opens a New Window. showed. The cryptocurrency appeared to rebound slightly to bring it past $10,000 as of Monday morning. It’s unclear what caused the sudden price drop, but it comes just days after Trump took to Twitter to slam cryptocurrencies....

When China’s central government chose Shenyang Machine Tool, a state-owned manufacturing behemoth in the northeastern province of Liaoning, to undergo a programme of reform two years ago, it probably imagined it would provide a yardstick for the broader regeneration of the region as a whole. It could not have been more wrong. While the provincial authorities reported growth of 6.1 per cent in the first quarter, which was on a par with the national figure, little of that upturn came courtesy of Shenyang Machine Tool. In fact, the company’s decline, coupled with years of losses due to mismanagement and political...

BEIJING--China's gross domestic product rose 6.2% in the second quarter from a year earlier, the slowest pace in at least 27 years, according to official data released on Monday. The result was the slowest since the first quarter of 1992 when the earliest quarterly data was available, according to Wind. In the first quarter, China's GDP grew 6.4% from a year earlier.

A record 157,005,000 people were employed in June, the most since February and the 19th record of Trump's presidency, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday. And the economy added a strong 224,000 jobs in June, well above the estimate of 160,000. The unemployment rate, the lowest in 50 years, ticked up a tenth of a point to 3.7 percent. In June, the nation’s civilian noninstitutionalized population, consisting of all people age 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution, reached 259,037,000. Of those, 162,981,000 participated in the labor force by either holding a job...

U.S. employers added 224,000 jobs Opens a New Window. in June, beating Wall Street Opens a New Window. ’s expectations of 160,000 likely quelling some concerns about an impending economic slowdown on the heels of a worse-than-expected month for job creation. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly at 3.7 percent, while the labor force participation rate was also little unchanged at 62.9 percent. Average hourly earnings, meanwhile, rose by 6 cents to $27.90. Over the year, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.1 percent, slightly missing expectations of 3.2 percent growth. Fox News Posted at 9:15 am on July 5,...