Jon Hartley
Economist specializing in macroeconomics, finance, and labor economics; he hosts the Hoover Institution’s Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century podcast and is a Policy Fellow at Hoover.
Monetary Policy Moved From Monetarism to Inflation Targeting
Mickey Levy argues that the Federal Reserve should treat money growth as an important warning signal, not as a mechanical target. Drawing on his work with the Shadow Open Market Committee, founded in 1973, he says the group was right to link excess money growth to inflation in the 1970s but later overreached as the relationship between money and spending became less reliable. In conversation with Jon Hartley, Levy applies that distinction to the pandemic-era surge in inflation and the Fed’s balance sheet, while Hartley highlights how inflation targeting has helped anchor expectations.
DOGE’s Legacy Is Spending Controls That Persist Inside Federal Agencies
In his account of DOGE, former team member Tyler Hassen argues that its significance lies less in the spending it cut than in showing how much government money could go unexamined. At the Department of the Interior, he says, his team built a clearer picture of contracts and grants, required review of new commitments and reorganized support functions, though court challenges disrupted plans to reduce staffing. Hassen acknowledges that DOGE did not solve the deficit; he argues its controls and practices should continue inside agencies and beyond them.
Tax Pledges Aim to Prevent Deficit Deals From Raising Revenue
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, argues that federal deficits are a spending problem, not a case for higher taxes. He says tax-and-spending bargains repeatedly deliver permanent revenue increases while promised cuts disappear, making written anti-tax pledges a necessary constraint on lawmakers. His program pairs resistance to new federal revenue with lower taxes on investment, while relying on state spending caps and phased tax cuts to limit government growth.
Chile’s Market Reforms Succeeded, but Success Did Not Defend Itself
Sebastian Edwards, the UCLA economist and author of The Chile Project, argues that Chile’s market reforms were a radical dismantling of state control, not a marginal liberalization, and that their success was later obscured by slower growth and political complacency. In a Hoover Institution conversation with Jon Hartley, Edwards makes the case that Latin America’s growth failures are rooted in institutions, policy choices, and recurring hostility to economic freedom, while pointing to deregulation and renewed market reform in countries such as Argentina and Chile as the region’s clearest path back to faster growth.
Economic Freedom, Not Managed Equality, Drives Growth
Former US senator Phil Gramm, in a Hoover Institution conversation with economist Jon Hartley, argues that America’s debates over inequality, poverty, deficits and financial crises are distorted by measures and narratives that leave out central facts. Drawing on his books and legislative career, Gramm makes the case that economic freedom, not directed investment or redistribution, has been the main source of US growth and mobility. He contends that official inequality statistics undercount transfers and taxes, that the 2008 crisis stemmed from housing policy rather than Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and that efforts to substitute government judgment for markets reliably fail.