By James Dail (CMC ’20) Last Friday, President Trump, along with the heads of state of Mexico and Canada, signed the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA). The USMCA is the result of extensive trade negotiations between the three North American nations that began shortly after President Trump took office. The President sparked these negotiations in order to replace the North...
By James Dail (CMC ’20) Education in the United States is in desperate need of an overhaul. It is a long-recognized phenomenon that students in the United States underperform their peers in the rest of the developed world. In some cases, American students are beaten by students in countries that are less socioeconomically developed, such as with Russia in mathematics. There are many...
By James Dail (CMC ’20) If a company voluntarily raises its minimum wage to $15 per hour, will its workers be better off because of it? At first, this might seem like a ridiculous question. Any criticism of minimum wage increases usually relates to workers getting laid off because companies cannot afford the added expenses. If a company raises its wages voluntarily, then it can be assumed...
By James Dail (CMC ’21) One of the most persistent problems that the U.S. has faced over the past several decades is the persistent lack of wage growth. Adjusting for inflation, most U.S. workers have not received a raise since the 1970s. Though this has been a long-term phenomenon, this trend is especially puzzling at this particular economic moment: whenever an economy has a low...
By James Dail (CMC ’20) When the great recession ended in June 2009, something unusual began to happen to the US economy. Both the unemployment rate and the inflation rate were simultaneously low, which is unusual, as they are never supposed to occur simultaneously. While having both a low unemployment rate and inflation rate is great news for Americans,this phenomena represent the break...
By James Dail (CMC ’20) One of President Trump’s main campaign promise was to revive the depleted US manufacturing sector and bring back lost jobs by implementing tariffs. Even today, this is one of the President’s main talking points whenever he goes to a campaign rally in an area that used to have strong employment in its manufacturing sector, such as Pittsburgh. This idea is very popular...
By James Dail (CMC ’20) One of the main issues at the heart of the Kavanaugh hearings is the prospect of overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that established that women have a right to an abortion. That Kavanaugh may provide the pivotal swing vote to overturn Roe, given that the vote takes place at all after recent sexual assault allegations, is arousing strong passions on both...
By James Dail (CMC ’20) On April 10th and 11th, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress over the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a British Data Analytics firm, compromised the data of more than 50 million Facebook users in order to try and influence the 2016 Presidential Election. The hearings were about Facebook’s ability to protect user privacy and monitor fake news...
By James Dail (CMC ’20) One of the most consequential macroeconomic phenomenon of the past half-century has been widespread wage stagnation. From 1979 to 2016, wages have barely grown at all (and in some cases have declined) for the lowest sixty percent of workers by income distribution. The average yearly rate of inflation from 1979 to 2016 was 3.52% above the average rate of wage growth...
By James Dail (CMC ’20) Should someone be compelled to pay a fee to an organization whose values they do not agree with? This is the key question in the Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME, although its effects will be more far-reaching than only answering a question about freedom of speech. If the Court rules in favor of Janus, then this could cause the permanent decline of public sector...
