It hardly qualifies as news anymore, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership declined from 2023 to 2024, going from 10% to 9.9% of wage and salary workers. Some 32% of public employees are union members compared to only 5.9% of private-sector workers, down from 6% in 2023.
It has been hard this past week, of tariffs applied worldwide on April 2 to tariffs suspended except for China on April 9, to avoid reflecting on how much trouble could have been avoided if economists, instead of talking about countries' trade surpluses and trade deficits, had devised different words -- say, "buyer-dominant" countries and "seller-dominant" countries.
Is President Donald Trump bent on political self-harm? It often seems that way. His overall job approval rating still hovers within a point or two of the 50% popular vote he received last November. But he is losing support on the economy and inflation, the No. 1 issue last year, while his overwhelming success in reducing illegal immigration has reduced the salience of what was the No. 2 issue.
"Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city," former President Barack Obama rhapsodized in April 2009. "No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination."
Now they tell us.
Will the second Trump administration come undone by an economic policy based on what the British military historian Lawrence Freedman, describing Vladimir Putin's rationale for invading Ukraine, calls "tendentious history"?
Some thoughts spring to mind after President Donald Trump's 100-minute address to Congress.
Sooner or later, The New York Times catches on to the news. In the case of immigration policy, the news it has caught up with is that mass immigration, legal and illegal, from less-developed countries is politically toxic.
If you follow these things closely, you may have seen a clip of the chairman of the Munich Security Conference breaking down in tears, unable to speak any further while reflecting on Vice President JD Vance's speech there. This breakdown is remarkable because the chairman, Christoph Heusgen, is not a minor apparatchik but a sophisticated and knowledgeable official who was former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's national security adviser from 2005 to 2017.
As one who shared the hope, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, that representative government, guaranteed liberties and global capitalism laced with some measure of welfare state protections would spread across the globe, I naturally look back over the intervening long generation and ask what went wrong.
After a flurry of activity -- the president's tariff threats and showdowns
Move fast and break things. That's the original operating philosophy of Facebook founder and Meta mogul Mark Zuckerberg, and it seems to be the operating procedure of President Donald Trump in these first weeks of his second term.
The portrait of Andrew Jackson has returned to the wall of the Oval Office, put up in time to greet President Donald Trump as he entered for the first time as the 47th president.
"It is not enough in life that one succeed," the droll economist John Kenneth Galbraith is supposed to have said. "Others must fail."
The times, they are a-changing. The balance of power in the perhaps
New Year's Day is a good time to take a long look backward with a cautious eye toward possible futures. My guide here is RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende's 2012 book "The Lost Majority," whose bold thesis was unduly neglected by political scientists spinning tales of a permanent New Deal Democratic majority.
Maybe the lesson this Christmas season is that even if turnabout is fair play, at some point, enough is enough.
Why did Marc Andreessen -- inventor of the first internet web browser, and perhaps the prime venture capitalist in Silicon Valley today -- switch from his longstanding support of the Democratic Party and back President-elect Donald Trump this year?
Whatever happened to the Democrats' reputation as the party favoring the working man? Put another way, what happened to the Democrats as the party promising economic redistribution from the rich to the average man?
Postmortems of the Democratic Party's loss, running well beyond the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), are starting to come in from some of the party's most perceptive thinkers.
