Friday Reading List – 2 August 2019

Support for minimum wage hikes, food stamps, passive indexing, and free trade. I’m kind of all over the place this week. Plus an engraving of Adam Smith wearing one of those cool wigs like a boss.

• Congress has never let the federal minimum wage erode for this long. Economic Policy Institute.
• Verdict Is In: Food Stamps Put Poor Kids on Path to Success. Bloomberg.
• Trump Says U.S. Will Hit China With More Tariffs. NY Times.
• Winner Takes All Applies to Stocks, Too. Barry Ritholtz. Barry interprets this data as providing encouragement to both active investors and passive indexers, but I see it as strongly supporting indexing, and no support for active investing.
• The progressive case for free trade. Vox. This is an interesting piece. I agree with all of it, but this is most definitely NOT a “progressive” case for free trade. It’s a concise outline of the basic economic, moral, and libertarian case for free trade. A+ on the article, F- on picking a title for the article.