Pew Research Center

Thursday

Rand Paul & Marian L. Tupy

Tariffs will make America poorer

Is life worse today than it was 50 years ago? According to a Pew Research survey, 58 percent of respondents believe it is. Perhaps watching the doom and gloom of the nightly news gives the impression that times have never been worse. But the facts show otherwise.The world has never been richer, food has never been more abundant, and extreme poverty is at historic lows. We are fortunate to live in a country where the people have a strong work ethic and control a vast, resource-rich territory. Yet, even with those advantages, we rely on trade to access goods that America simply does not produce in abundance, like coffee and bananas. Perhaps we should ask a more nuanced question: is international trade good or bad?

Rand Paul

Monday

Damian Thompson

Godforsaken: religion is vanishing from American politics

The United States has always been the world’s leading religious marketplace. Even before independence, the American colonies were more fervently Protestant than any country in Europe. The Pilgrim Fathers turned Massachusetts into a witch-hunting Calvinist theocracy, and no sooner had Puritan power begun to wane than New England was seized by a ‘Great Awakening’ in which vast crowds declared their faith in Jesus with hysterical enthusiasm. But it was the Founding Fathers’ decision to deregulate religion completely that really set America apart from the Old World. In successive ‘awakenings’ lasting well into the 20th century, thousands of sects sprang up, some barely Christian but all of them 100 percent American.

religion

Friday

Patrick Hauf

Are the polls worth your attention?

The polls are predicting Donald Trump will lose in November — again. Is it worth paying them attention? Pollsters have adjusted their models to try to avoid the mistakes of 2016, but the COVID-19 pandemic leaves little room for certainty. The problem in 2016 was an overall lack of polling in battleground states — especially polls with more rigid, proven methods. Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at Pew Research Center, told The Spectator she’s noticed a significant increase in battleground state polling from reputable organizations. ‘This doesn’t mean that the state polling in 2020 is infallible or that the small leads in some states are sure sign of victory,’ she said.

polls

Thursday

Roger Kimball

America’s allies don’t like Trump. So what?

So, the Pew Research Center polled more than a dozen allies and, guess what, the allies — from the UK and France to Germany, Japan and Australia — don’t like Donald Trump. I know, you are as astonished as I am. The Pew Research Center is reporting that people abroad — and not only people abroad, Americans, too: really everybody — dislikes Donald Trump. ‘The United States’ image has soured within the international community, hitting all-time lows among key allies,’ Business Insider reports in its précis of Pew’s findings. Other key points: ‘The results showed that people have less confidence in Trump as a leader than Russia's Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping’ — sounds bad, what?

allies