The risk of another financial crisis is quite high because the government has not credibly committed to ending implicit bailout guarantees ('too big to fail').

There is little evidence that institutions and government have learned lessons from the 2008 crisis; the same conditions enabling imprudent credit extension are reasserting.

Real wages for blue-collar factory workers (production and non-supervisory workers) are at an all-time high.

US unemployment remained in double digits throughout the entire 1930s, demonstrating the depth and length of the Great Depression.

A rich society can afford the consumption good of studying impractical subjects (e.g., 17th century French sonnets), but students should understand such majors are consumption goods, not credentials for employment.

Boudreaux acknowledges his bias toward college education (as a college professor) and states this argument against overemphasis on college goes against his professional interest.

The decline in manufacturing employment as a share of total US workforce (from ~30% in 1954 to ~8% today) is not caused by trade but by mechanization and technological innovation; approximately 80% of this decline is due to innovation and only 20% can be directly related to trade.

Tariffs will unambiguously make Americans poorer and cause the US economy to grow more slowly than it would without tariffs, because resources diverted to higher-cost domestic production must come from somewhere else in the economy, causing prices to rise and living standards to fall.

The New Deal's policies probably extended the Great Depression rather than ending it, by creating uncertainty and pursuing protectionist policies like the Smoot-Hawley tariff, and the Great Depression did not truly end until after World War II when the New Deal policies were abandoned and business confidence returned.

Trade deficits are not an emergency and are actually a blessing for America because they represent an inflow of capital into the country, not a loss.

The government has not learned the lessons from 2008; it continues to display willingness to extend credit to those who haven't earned the right to have that amount extended, and its demonstrated eagerness to bail out financial institutions will only encourage them to make equally imprudent moves in the future.

The Trump administration's targeting of Harvard specifically on national security grounds appears to be a pretext for a vendetta against an institution it dislikes, rather than a genuine security concern applied consistently across universities.

Economic nationalism has been rising in the past 10 years, and this is dangerous because open global economies prevent hot shooting wars; when the global economy closes, the greatest risk is not that living standards decline but that hot shooting wars break out.

AI's commercial applications are only two or three years old, so it is too early to notice shifts in student interests or major selection at universities; Boudreaux has not observed changes at George Mason University yet.

The basic relationship between taxes and economic output is that the more you tax something, the less of it you get. Broad-based, low-rate taxes are superior to high-rate, discretionary taxes that target particular activities, because narrow targeting approaches government economic engineering, picking winners and losers, which creates uncertainty.

It is impossible to continue running up debt without assets backing it without expecting negative consequences in the future; no one can predict exactly when such a crisis would happen, but continuation of unconstrained deficit spending is unsustainable.

Economic growth will slow but unemployment will remain relatively low and there will still be jobs available; graduates should major in fields with reliable employment prospects, though there is nothing wrong with majoring in fields with limited employment if one views it as a consumption good.

The World Bank's projection that US GDP growth will slow from 2.88% in 2024 to 1.4% in 2025 due to tariffs is very credible, and the OECD made a similar downgrade in its forecast.

There is no empirical evidence that China stole jobs from Americans; US unemployment has averaged 4.2% for the past 10 years (excluding COVID), manufacturing output is near all-time high, real wages for production workers are at all-time high, and American exports are near all-time high.

Federal budget deficits will eventually burden future American taxpayers through higher explicit taxes, reduced government services, or monetization by the Federal Reserve printing money, and as the deficit rises, the risk of Fed monetization increases, creating inflation.