Lawrence Summers: This Law Made Me Ashamed of My Country

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Last week, Robert Rubin and I warned of the many macroeconomic risks created by the domestic policy bill President Trump signed into law on Friday. I stand by our judgment that it will most likely slow growth, risk a financial crisis, exacerbate trade deficits and undermine national security by exhausting the government’s borrowing capacity. This is more than ample reason to regret its passage.

I want to return to the topic after conversations with health professionals, including my daughters, who practice medicine and social work in rural New Hampshire. They made me realize that a focus on macroeconomics, while valid, misses the human brutality that I now see as the most problematic aspect of the legislation. I don’t remember on any past Fourth of July being so ashamed of an action my country had just taken.  READ MORE

We Both Served as Treasury Secretary. We Know This Bill Is Dangerous

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Donald Trump as a candidate promised his policies wouldn’t add to the debt. Before taking office, he vowed “to restore fiscal sanity to our nation.” His “big, beautiful bill” does the opposite.

We served under a president who made that same vow — and who took it seriously.

We were members of Bill Clinton’s economic team when the federal budget was balanced, the only time that has happened in more than half a century. In nearly every respect, the Trump administration’s approach is the opposite of what worked in the 1990s — and it poses huge risks to our economy.

There are important parallels between the two moments. Mr. Clinton then and Mr. Trump now entered office facing serious fiscal problems and an economy being rapidly changed by new technology; then it was the internet, now it’s artificial intelligence.

In that earlier era, we followed a strategy of hoping for the best, while planning conservatively. We paired policies that reduced the deficit with others that stimulated investment. That set off a virtuous economic cycle of growth, deficit reduction, lower interest rates and thus more investment and growth. Fiscal responsibility helped contain inflation because it was accompanied by respect for the independence of the Federal Reserve and recognition of the importance of a strong dollar.  READ MORE

If Powerful Places Like Harvard Don’t Stand Up to Trump, Who Can?

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The New York Times, April 3, 2025 – The U.S. government is trying to bludgeon America’s elite universities into submission. At stake is the future of institutions that graduated most of our recent American presidents and a vast majority of Supreme Court justices and that serve as drivers of our prosperity and shapers of our social values.

The Trump administration’s threats to withdraw billions of dollars in funding are little more than extortion. They must be resisted using all available legal means. Columbia University’s recent capitulation, in which it agreed to a raft of changes in an attempt to avoid losing hundreds of millions in funding, must not be emulated. Each act of capitulation makes the next one more likely. Each act of rectitude reverberates.

As in most confrontations, the merits in this one are far from one-sided. Critics of elite universities, including Harvard, where I am a professor, are right that they continue to tolerate antisemitism in their midst in a way that would be inconceivable with any other form of prejudice, that they have elevated identity over excellence in the selection of students and faculty, that they lack diversity of perspective and that they have repeatedly failed to impose discipline and maintain order.

And universities’ insistence that they be entirely left alone by their federal funders rings hollow in light of the enthusiasm with which they greeted micromanagement when they approved of the outcome, such as threats from Washington to withhold funds unless men’s and women’s athletic budgets were equalized. READ MORE