A little off-topic I suppose, but so-called "free trade" between high- and low-wage countries diminishes the employment opportunities and wages in the high-wage country. This is standard text-book economics. Moreover, experience over the past twenty years shows that the so-called gains of trade (which show up in GDP figures) are swamped by a wholesale redistribution of income from labor to capital, which is to say, from the have-nots and have-littles to the have-mores and have-most." What's good or fair about that?



If the policy makers in Washington were honest about this they would admit that without redistributive taxation free-trade in our lopsided world is bad for the American people. Trump, and before him Ross Perot were essentially right about this. Paul Samuelson and Paul Krugman were not so much wrong as disingenuous when they implied otherwise. They cared more about the welfare of the Third World poor than working people here at home, including the least-skilled and most vulnerable segments of our population. This is what you get when cosmopolitan elites make policy.



It would have been better not only for American working men and women but for the future of free trade if these two gentlemen and many others had been honest about this. Then they would have given more attention to the difficult and as yet unsolved question of how to tax capital to subsidize wages while maintaining market efficiency.



Though I am a mere amateur, many welfare economists would probably agree that in theory at least part of the answer is likely to include some form of a graduated expenditure tax which progressively taxes the consumption of the biggest spenders in society.



The revolution in information technology makes it possible to actually implement such a tax, though it would still require the cooperation of all our major allies and trading partners overseas. That being the case allow me to draw professional economists' attention to the existence of what I believe may be the simplest, fairest, most transparent, as well as the least arbitrary possible version of a graduated expenditure tax, one based on a single parameter that can be adjusted to raise the amount of revenue required: https://goo.gl/Pe5YW6



