This is a common theme in Republican administrations dating back to presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. What you do is you break the government, make it very hard for the government to function, and then you loudly announce that the government can’t do anything.
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The Case for Free Trade
CHART 1
U.S. Real GDP per Capita
REAL GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT PER CAPITA, IN CHAINED 2012 DOLLARS, SEASONALLY ADJUSTED ANNUAL RATE
$70,000 $60,000 $50,000 $40,000 $30,000 $20,000 $10,000
$0 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020
SOURCE: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Real Gross Domestic Product per Capita,” httos://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ A939RXOQO48SBEA (accessed March 2, 2023). & heritage.org
economy continued to grow. Factories were not the only beneficiaries of agriculture’s productivity boom and the labor it freed; services also grew. In fact, service-sector employment surpassed manufacturing employment around 1890— far earlier than most people realize.”
Pessimistic bias is one of the most important cultural problems that conservative policymakers need to address. In trade, as in most other areas, few people ever zoom out to see the big picture, which is one reason why so many people mistakenly believe that U.S. manufacturing and the U.S. economy are in decline.
The data do not show American economic carnage. They show more than two centuries of intensive growth, made possible by a growing internal market throughout the 19th century and a growing international market in the post-World War II era. The transition from farm to factory did not shrink the labor force or farm output. Later, the transition from factories to services did not shrink the labor