On November 3 the country votes, and the most probable outcome, on the current arithmetic, is that one chamber changes hands and the other does not. That is the forecast this site published when the midterms were ten weeks out, and if it holds, the next two years will be conducted under divided government. So the question worth asking now is not who wins. It is what divided government actually accomplishes. ...
The question arrives every election season, and it usually arrives as a taunt: which party is better for the economy? For seventy years the honest answer has been that the data seem to favor one side, and the argument has therefore been about whether the data mean anything. That argument deserves care, because the strongest evidence for the claim and the strongest reasons to doubt it come from the same study, and that study’s own conclusion is not the one either side quotes. ...
Public corruption is conventionally discussed in moral terms: integrity, trust, the character of public life. Those concerns are real, and an earlier essay, Corruption at the Summit, addressed them on constitutional grounds. Corruption is, however, also an economic event, with a price, a transmission mechanism, and a payer. The payer is neither the official who accepts the favor nor the magnate who purchases it. The payer is everyone else. The argument of this essay is that public corruption functions as a tax that no legislature ever enacted: it misallocates capital, raises the cost of borrowing, diminishes the revenue the state can collect, and erodes the voluntary trust on which every modern economy depends. None of these effects requires an assumption that anyone has committed a crime. Much of the corruption that matters most is perfectly legal, and that is precisely what makes it expensive. ...
This article examines the economic and geopolitical position of the United States as of mid-2026. It analyzes the recent deceleration in real output growth, the persistence of above-target inflation, and the trajectory of public indebtedness, and it relates these macroeconomic conditions to the country’s standing within the international system. The analysis concludes that the principal constraints on the American position are endogenous in origin: they derive from domestic fiscal decisions and from the attenuation of the legitimacy that underpins the country’s alliance relationships, rather than from the direct exercise of power by rival states. ...