Short, data-driven breakdowns of claims that dominate economic conversation but rarely survive the numbers. No slogans — just sources and tradeoffs.
It's a recurring promise: cut tax rates, growth speeds up, and the resulting bigger pie produces more revenue than the old higher rate. The story has political appeal in every country that's tried it. The data, four decades on, has a more sober verdict.
This claim depends entirely on what “fair” means — and the numbers rarely get cited. In the US, the top 1% of earners paid 42% of federal income tax in 2021 while earning 22% of total income. The real debate is rarely the one people think it is.
A trade deficit sounds like a loss. The US runs one, the UK runs one, and political narratives treat the gap as money lost to foreigners. But a trade deficit isn't a debt or a payment — it's an accounting identity, and understanding what it actually measures changes the conversation.
Raising the minimum wage is one of the most popular policies across the political spectrum — it sounds costless. Someone earning $10 an hour now earns $15, and the employer pays the difference. But that intuition assumes employers keep the same number of workers at the new price, which is rarely what the data shows.