I have made no secret of my dislike of patent monopolies. I consider them a very inefficient way to finance investment, which invites waste and fraud. I prefer alternative mechanisms, most importantly direct public funding, which can be parceled out to private companies in various manners. 

Nonetheless, in a country that relies on patents to finance much of its research and development, a sharp decline in patent applications is bad news.

That is what we saw in 2025 when patent applications fell by 9.0 percent. Interestingly, the top two companies filing for patents, Samsung and TSMC, are both foreign, headquartered in South Korea and Taiwan, respectively. Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, placed fourth, with Qualcomm being the only US company to break the top five. 

There are two important points to be made about these data, both having to do with the long-term impact of Trump’s policies. To date, most attention has been focused on the short-term impact. Tariffs raise the price of goods we import, meaning higher prices to manufacturers for foreign inputs and higher prices to consumers for a wide range of products that we currently import.

The deportation policies have caused labor shortages in many places and have slowed the rate of job creation to at best a trickle. It may actually be negative when we get benchmark revisions to jobs data in February.

The cuts to the federal budget have directly led to a reduction of federal employment of more than 200,000. More........

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