Jonathan Chait

I suppose we should be grateful that TNR’s Jonathan Chait voluteered to write an apologia for President Obama as a way to explain to those he identifies with “the left” why Obama’s not such a bad President and to remind the “left” there were extenuating circumstances that explain the President’s failure, or refusal, to achieve what the left wanted and the country needed.

But one has to wonder: is Chait’s defense all the President’s supporters have left?  Because when Chait leaves out what really matters to Obama’s liberal critics, the piece comes off as an argument for Obama announcing “I shall not seek, and I will not accept . . .”

To assess the President’s performance, one must start with a more coherent story of what Obama and the country faced in January 2009 and what those conditions called for after eight disastrous years of the Bush presidency.  Some of us said both before and after the election that the devastation wrought by Bush on the Constitution, on the idea of government, on the rule of law and on the economy was so crippling and massive, it would likely take years to reverse it. But some things were clearly priorities and needed to be addressed immediately. Read the rest of this entry →

Ever since Jon Walker and I pointed out the real and superficial similarities between Paul Ryan’s proposed RyanCare for future seniors and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) structure for non-seniors, numerous pundits have been trying to deny either the similarities or the differences.

For example, Ryan’s supporters are in denial that RyanCare requires a mandate, even though he admitted — just as the logic suggested — that he’d require future seniors to purchase a private health insurance plan from a government-overseen exchange. And ObamaCare supporters are in denial that their ACA insurance exchanges rely on pretty much the same faith in the ability of a mostly free private insurance market to sufficiently control health care costs and hence insurance premiums.

We’ve tried to categorize and distinguish Medicare, RomneyCare, ObamaCare and RyanCare — see, e.g., here, here, here, and here — some have tried to grapple with the distinctions, and others have tried to fuzz it all up to serve whatever agenda they had.

The latest effort to make something out of the similarities is from the Washington Post’s Steve Pearlstein, who provokes Paul Krugman into describing Pearlstein as a Very Serious Person, — i.e., someone who gets it wrong.

Krugman and DeLong (responding to Mankiw) address the question, “are non-seniors better off under the ACA/ObamaCare’s subsidized exchanges than they would be without the ACA?” If those are the only choices, their answer is “yes,” though I don’t think they’ve confronted the numerous “affordability” arguments Marcy Wheeler made when ACA was being debated. But let’s assume they’re correct. That still leaves the large question about how well the exchanges can control costs unanswered.

The Administration, Democrats and ACA supporters insisted the exchanges would work to control health care costs because competition within the insurance market would control prices while maintaining quality care and service. But I understand Paul Ryan to be making the same argument for RyanCare: his private insurance market exchanges will make health care affordable, he claims, because future seniors exercising choice when shopping in the insurance exchange markets will benefit from private market competition. Both rely on a mostly free market theory.

Either this claim and its faith in markets are plausible or they’re not. My concern is that when Paul Krugman (or DeLong citing him) talks about the merits of Medicare versus RyanCare, there’s a reminder that ever since Ken Arrow, economists have known the competitive market argument doesn’t work in this industry.

Even ignoring the already huge concentration in the insurance industry, and increasingly so in the hospital and other provider sectors, none of the elements required to make an industry amendable to effective competition and efficient market pricing exist. Therefore, RyanCare can’t achieve the cost savings Ryan claims. But government-sponsored systems like Medicare, because they can reduce administrative costs, and because they can exercise single-buyer market power that individuals in the exchanges will not have, can do better — and have done better, here and in Europe.

If that’s true, then it’s not enough for economists and other ACA supporters to argue the ACA should be better than not having insurance at all; they need to explain why Arrow’s analysis and real-world experience do not apply to the market-based claims for the ACA exchanges, just as they do to RyanCare. And if this is a fatal flaw for RyanCare, isn’t it also a fatal flaw for the exchange structure of ACA?

The White House announced late this afternoon that Presidential economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, would leave his White House position to resume his tenured faculty position at the University of Chicago. From the New York Times Caucus:

Austan Goolsbee, a longtime adviser to President Obama and the only economist left on his core economic team, plans to leave as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers by September after a year in the job to return to the University of Chicago.

With the recovery flagging, the White House is eager to name a successor to Mr. Goolsbee this summer and is considering several academic economists, an administration official said on Monday. The job requires Senate confirmation.

This shouldn’t suprise anyone. The reason may be as simple as the need to retain a tenured position at one of the most discredited respected economics departments in the country. And like all academics, Goolsbee joined with the understanding he would return to Chicago. But a quick look at recent headlines offers other reasons.

In recent weeks, after a near stagnant first quarter, we’ve seen one forecaster after another lower their forecasts of economic growth from about 4 percent this year to under 3 and perhaps as low as 2.5 percent. This quarter is expected to grow at an annual 2.8 percent rate or less. Last week, we got confirmation of the slowdown via disappointing jobs numbers, with the unemployment rising to 9.1 percent. While that followed more hopeful March and April numbers, the trend level is clearly unlikely to make a significant dent in the overall unemployment rates before 2013. In fact, at that rate, it would take about ten years to get back to normal.

And yet there are no signs the President or the White House sees these numbers as a reason to refocus on economic growth and jobs creation. Instead, they remain publically fixated on cutting intermediate to long-run deficits and strking a foolish and economically damaging deal with faux deficit hysterics and anti-government crazies as ransom to allow an unavoidable rise in the debt ceiling. It’s hard to imagine a process so disconnected from reality and the economy’s needs.

With reputable economists starting to use the words “panic” and “depression” to describe the potential risks to the economy, it was left on Sunday to Austan Goolsbee to explain why the White House was stuck on stupid, unwilling to change course or even concede that the recovery was in serious danger. We were asked to ignore that the nation’s unemployment is back above 9 percent, extended unemployment insurance is running out, and states are continuing to slash their budgets and payrolls. The latter are offsetting what little stimulus might have come from last December’s tax cut deal. Even someone with straw for brains can see we’re going the wrong way.

Ignoring the crisis in unemployment, the central debate in Washington and many states remains over how drastic austerity measures ought to be. But every sensible person knows austerity can only make matters worse. The austerity record in Southern Europe confirms still sound economic theory: it’s hurting growth, throwing millions out of work, and not even reducing debts that much — people without jobs don’t pay taxes but do need public assistance — so tens of thousands of Spanish, Greek or Portugese citizens are in the streets tonight and today demanding a change in their governments. What more evidence do we need?

Faced with this insanity, even a Chicago economist should have the good sense to get out before the worst is blamed on him, when he’s likely just the apologist for Larry Summers. And following his, uh, strange performance on Sunday’s shows, he got a clear signal from those who might be inclined to be more charitable about motives and predicaments. When the former Democratic Administration economist Brad DeLong linked favorably to Mark Thoma questioning how the Administration could continue to have it’s head in the sand and not see the need to pivot towards job creation, Goolsbee may just have seen it as a sign it’s time to announce his departure.

The White House announcement tells us that the next poor sap to take that job will face exactly the same dilemma Goolsbee did. It ought to be a great job, it looks terrific on one’s resume, but why would anyone want to take the position of economic adviser when the man in the Oval Office and his political advisers have no intention of following any sound economic advice?

Why become the front for a team that remains committed to failed policies that may very likely take the economy down with them? And when a Nobel laureate has to tell the White House via the New York Times that he’s withdrawing his nomination to the Federal Reserve because Washington, including the White House, has become dysfunctional, it’s pretty clear the communication between the President and the economic team is not what it should be.

So it’s easy to see why Goolsbee might believe there was no point in staying.

In case you were wondering whether the current Tea-GOPer Congress’ nuttiness and rabid partisanship are an aberration, Brad DeLong reaches back 70 years to show that anti-liberal/democratic sentiment from the right is just par for the course.

DeLong has been featuring daily “live blogs” from World War II, in which he quotes from diaries, memos, speeches given by the political leaders each day, exactly 70 years ago. So he’s now citing from stuff written/said in early January 1941. The US had been struggling to emerge from the Great Depression, but Hitler had invaded much of Europe and had been terror bombing England every night. FDR had been providing a lifeline to the Brits and trying to get the US military and citizenry ready for the inevitable global war.

So first, a piece from Eleanor Roosevelt’s diary of January 7, 1941, in which she comments on Congressional reaction to FDR’s speech the day before:

It did not seem to me anything in this message was of more interest to the Democrats than to the Republicans. On the whole, while there might later be some difference of opinion as to the methods of carrying out the objectives, there seemed to be nothing that members of Congress of all parties could not accept as representing their stand in relation to the interests of their country.

Therefore, I was not only astonished but saddened, to notice that the applause came almost entirely from the Democrats and only a few noticeable exceptions on the Republican side raised a hand in approval at any point. It looked to me as though these members of Congress were saying to the country as a whole:

We are Republicans first. We represent you here in Congress, not as citizens of the United States in a period of great crisis, but as members of a political party which seeks primarily to promote its own partisan interests.

This is to me shocking and terrifying. There was running through my mind as I watched them, in what would have been an act of childish spite if it had not been such a serious moment in history, the lines of a song which was popular when I was young: “I don’t want to play in your yard. I don’t love you any more.” Sometimes I wonder if it will take the suffering of the peoples in conquered countries and those who are still fighting for their freedom today, to make us realize that there are times when it matters little whether you are a Republican or a Democrat. . . .

So what was the speech President Roosevelt gave to Congress on January 6? Well, it’s known as the “Four Freedom’s Speech” –you might read is as an interpretation of the Constitution’s Preamble and Bill of Rights all rolled into one — in which he discussed the need for America to prepare for what was to come and to explain what we would be sending young men to die for:

Franklin D. Roosevelt, The “Four Freedoms” Address to Congress: In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor– anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception — the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.

Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change — in a perpetual peaceful revolution — a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions — without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.

To that high concept there can be no end save victory.

And today? Our states and cities are in financial crisis, but Congress is refusing to help them. We have 15 million unemployed but no national plan to improve that substantially in the near future. We have record poverty and 50 million people without health insurance, but Congress is preoccupied with repealing the already insufficient bandaids we have and replacing them with . . . what? There’s a global climate change threat, a collapse in the rule of law, a rapidly deteriorating infrastructure, starving educational institutions, a financial industry run amok, a thoroughly corrupt Congress, partisan courts, and captured Executive. And no FDR.

Yet most of the Washington establishment is telling us that Presidential appointees who are largely indifferent to these problems and hostile to their solutions are just whom we need advising the President of the United States.

Pathetic.

John Chandley
and kudos to DeLong for reciting our history

David Brooks is worried. The leaders of his Republican Party and the shills who advise them on economic policy are being called out by the country’s best known Nobel economist, who called the Republicans and other deficit hysterics a "coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused" for, among other things, "punishing the jobless." Brooks is worried, I suspect, because it’s starting to stick.

So Brooks enters the wrong ring to throw a nasty punch at Paul Krugman, and he lands several blows . . . right on the kisser of his own credibility. Poor David is not just confused, he’s way out of his weight class.

Not long ago, Brad DeLong was wondering how is it we have lost the debate between stimulus to deal with a stalled economy and 15 million unemployed versus deficit hysteria and advocates of inflicting further pain on the jobless and budget strangled states. After all, the economic data and conditions show we have minimal inflation (including minimal expectations for future inflation) trending instead towards deflation. Long run Treasury rates are at or near record lows, with zero signs of a lack of investor confidence in the US government’s ability to pay its debts. Instead of fearsome bond vigilantes trying to sink the government, we have investors flocking to buy Treasuries and pushing rates down.

These are all clear signals for doing a lot more now to reboot the economy, making much needed investments at lower borrowing costs, reducing unemployment and rescuing drowning states. None of the economic data provides evidence to justify fears of inflation, higher interest rates, or alleged market jitters over deficits. There are no phantom bond vigilantes waiting (or able) to bring down the US government it if rescues its own economy.

Brooks apparently fears DeLong and Krugman might be getting somewhere by explaining this logic and reciting the evidence over and over. Since he doesn’t confront either the logic or the growing data that supports it, he’s left with insulting Krugman and friends while pretending not to:

These Demand Siders have very high I.Q.’s, but they seem to be strangers to doubt and modesty. They have total faith in their models. But all schools of economic thought have taken their lumps over the past few years.

Note Brook’s cowardice is not naming Krugman, DeLong, Baker, et al, or for that matter, traditional Republican economic advisers like Bruce Bartlett and Mark Zandi, who recently called for more stimulus now and strongly warned Congress against cutting spending before the economy has more fully recovered.

Brook’s intellectual sleight of hand is to say, "well, all economists have been wrong, so why pay attention to Krugman and friends?" That’s just dishonest, because not all economists have been wrong, and it’s important to know which have been right and which have been catastrophically wrong.

Over the last 30 years, a particular group of economists has been proved dead wrong, and their belief system nearly destroyed the economy. It’s the school of economists who claimed markets are self correcting, that financial markets don’t need much oversight, and the government shouldn’t use fiscal policy to help a depressed economy recover even when monetary policy (lowering Fed interest rates) becomes ineffective. When Alan Greenspan in a moment of candor admitted his surprise and shock that his entire economic philosophy had failed, he was speaking for that school, which Krugman et al have vilified for forgetting essential lessons from the Great Depression. It is Greenspan’s school, not Krugman and friends, that has been arrogant in rejecting well deserved criticism. But Brooks seems completely ignorant of this distinction.

The Demand Siders don’t have a good explanation for the past two years.

Either Brooks is unaware of the warning many economists gave about the inadequacy of the 2009 stimulus, or he’s being dishonest. Dean Baker demolishes Brooks here.

It was also easy to see that the stimulus approved by Congress was inadequate. Demand siders rely on something called "arithmetic" to reach this assessment. After pulling out the $80 billion fix to the alternative minimum tax, which had nothing to do with stimulus, and the $100 billion or so designated for later years, the stimulus provided for roughly $600 billion in spending and tax cuts over the years 2009 and 2010. This comes to $300 billion a year. Roughly half of the federal stimulus was offset by cutbacks and tax increases at the state and local level, leaving a net stimulus from the government sector of roughly $150 billion a year.

Demand siders did not believe that $150 billion in annual stimulus from the government could offset the contractionary impact of a reduction in annual spending by the private scctor of $1.2 trillion ($1.2 trillion > $150 billion). That is how demand siders explained the failure of the stimulus to have much impact in reducing the unemployment rate. Perhaps this explanation is too complicated for Mr. Brooks (he repeatedly complains about the high IQs of the demand siders), but it actually seems fairly straightforward. If he wants to be honest, he could at least say that he doesn’t understand the demand siders’ explanation, rather than asserting that demand siders do not have an explanation.

And Krugman responds on his blog with Arguments from Authority:

Funny, I thought we had a perfectly good explanation: severe downturn in demand from the financial crisis, and a stimulus which we warned from the beginning wasn’t nearly big enough. And as I’ve been trying to point out, events have strongly confirmed a demand-side view of the world.

Brooks continues:

Moreover, the Demand Siders write as if everybody who disagrees with them is immoral or a moron. But, in fact, many prize-festooned economists do not support another stimulus. Most European leaders and central bankers think it’s time to begin reducing debt, not increasing it — as do many economists at the international economic institutions. Are you sure your theorists are right and theirs are wrong?

And Krugman responds:

Yes, I am. It’s called looking at the evidence. I’ve looked hard at the arguments the Pain Caucus is making, the evidence that supposedly supports their case — and there’s no there there.

And you just have to wonder how it’s possible to have lived through the last ten years and still imagine that because a lot of Serious People believe something, you should believe it too. Iraq? Housing bubble? Inflation? (It’s worth remembering that Trichet actually raised rates in June 2008, because he believed that inflation — not the financial crisis — was the big threat facing Europe.)

Krugman is being too polite. He left out that Brooks is telling his Republican audience that they should pay no attention to America’s most respected economists who got it right, but instead listen to . . . wait for it . . . "European leaders and central bankers" who almost universally missed the housing bubbles, ignored the shadow banking system and mismanaged the crisis when both collapsed!

I think David went down for the count with that one. But he’s not done with making himself look silly. Here’s the next insult:

The theorists have high I.Q.’s but don’t seem to know much psychology.

This is Brooks’ way of repeating the Republican talking point that business is not investing because it fears spending now will mean much higher taxes and inflation later. But Krugman and friends have been knocking this one down for months — why would businesses invest when there’s excess capacity and no customers able to demand their products? — and there’s simply no evidence that any of these imagined fears are the reasons investors are sitting on their money (and see Yves Smith’s link to Keen below).

The Demand Siders are brilliant, but they write as if changing fiscal policy were as easy as adjusting the knob on your stove.

Uh, no, Mr. Brooks. Today’s issue is actually simpler than that. It’s about whether you run the pump forward to get the economy going or run it backwards and apply leeches to suck the lifeblood from the anemic patient, while claiming this will help them. The fact that more people are starting to get how medieval and wrong this is probably explains why Brooks is worried.

But here’s how you know David Brooks is worried that he too might be identified with the coalition of heartless, clueless and confused. After repeating the Republican mantras about why deficit reduction is so important, he winds up arguing for more spending:

Well, there’s a few short-term things you can do. First, extend unemployment insurance; that’s a foolish place to begin budget-balancing. Second, you need to mitigate the pain caused by the state governments that are slashing spending.

Ah, just the centrist trick for appealing to his favorite President. David Brooks: he may not be totally heartless or clueless; just dazed and confused.

John Chandley

More: David Brooks’ reading list for today:
Brad DeLong, citing Martin Wolf, How is it that we have lost the argument?
Brad DeLong, on why it’s nonsense to fear the US is on the verge of reaching its debt limit . . .
Brad DeLong believes the argument is lost, We are live at . . . A Keynesian voice crying in the wilderness

Dean Baker, The arrogant David Brooks tells readers stimulus will risk national insolvency

Yves Smith on Steve Keen’s Scary Minsky models

Paul Krugman, Memories of scare tactics past

Scarecrow on Krugman denying that leeches help sick people or recessions

Well, this is cheery news. Paul Krugman fears we’re headed towards another Long Depression. The European and other G-20 leaders are collectively herding themselves like lemmings towards the cliffs of insanity by promising to cut spending and reduce demand before their economies have recovered from a serious global recession. From today’s Krugman column, The Third Depression:

Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending. . . .

As far as rhetoric is concerned, the revival of the old-time religion is most evident in Europe, where officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence. As a practical matter, however, America isn’t doing much better. The Fed seems aware of the deflationary risks — but what it proposes to do about these risks is, well, nothing. The Obama administration understands the dangers of premature fiscal austerity — but because Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress won’t authorize additional aid to state governments, that austerity is coming anyway, in the form of budget cuts at the state and local levels.

I watched President Obama’s press conference last night after the G-20 meetings. His prepared statement emphasized the current Administration view, that while medium- to long-run deficits warrant corrections that kick in later, our immediate focus should be on assuring the recovery is sound enough to sustain solid growth and declining unemployment. He noted that different countries are at different stages and correctly warned that we "can’t have everyone head for the exits at the same time." Yet that’s exactly what the G-20 resolution seemed to endorse: everyone commits to curtail spending and cut their deficits in half by 2013, even though there’s no coherent theory under which they can all do that at the same time and come out well.

For some unexplained reason, the White House seemed to downplay their concerns over this lemming-like behavior. It’s not clear what harm there is in loudly proclaiming they’re making a horrendous mistake and they’ll regret it. Why coddle this folly?

The final press question asked Obama what assurances he could give that the US would meet the Administration’s own promise to cut US deficits in half by 2013 — that’s right, the 2013 target was originally their idea, a sop to the deficit hysteria mob. Here, the President missed an opportunity.

He knows the Bush tax cuts are expiring (at least for those making above $200-250,000), and he’d already noted that much of recent deficit explosion was driven by the recession and responses to it, but those causes should phase out.

But instead of reemphasizing these points that our media too often forgets, he recalled OMB Orszag’s trivial cuts on non-discretionary spending and gave a nod to the deficit reduction (cat food) commission, gratuitously adding that we have to solve "the entitlements problems" in Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. As Dean Baker and others have repeatedly shown, Social Security is in surplus and not a deficit issue, and lumping it in with the health cost issue is an egregious misstatement of whatever long-run deficit issues we face.

The President also missed an opportunity to hammer home again that the most important steps in reducing long-run deficits start with a fully recovered economy and putting people back to work. We’re not remotely close to that yet. That’s what the US had been telling the Europeans, and what the Administration’s economic advisers reportedly believe. But too often when it matters, they forget that’s the right answer even though today’s deficit hysteria public dialogues cry out for its repetition.

So instead of, or in addition to, merely challenging the Republicans to put up or shut up when the Deficit Reduction commission comes out with actual reduction proposals, Obama could have again blistered the Republicans before the media for blocking efforts to sustain the economy and prevent more people from being layed off. As Krugman and friends note, budget-strapped states are imposing austerity and crippling the US recovery exactly the same way Europe’s individual nations are proposing to do over the Administration’s objections.

But what do I know? Being merely an unknown, brainless straw man spared me the ridicule of an official from the Richmond Federal Reserve, who arrogantly chastised everyone from Matthew Yglesias to Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong, because these unworthy souls have no business opining on macroeconomics — read: they should not be arguing that more stimulus is needed and that austerity is both cruel and bad economic policy now — because, uh, economics is hard.

Writers who have not taken a year of Ph.D. coursework in a decent economics department (and passed their Ph.D. qualifying exams) cannot meaningfully advance the discussion on economic policy…

Brad DeLong is more patient than I:

I am speechless. Economics–like math–is not that hard. And just as one should ignore Malibu Barbie when she tells one not to try to do math so, I think, one should ignore Kartik Athreya.

I’m not worried about DeLong losing his voice. I suspect he and others who actually got it mostly right will eventually recover to remind those who are lecturing him and Krugman and friends that those economists who were in charge got it mostly wrong, probably because of their particular PhD training in economics.

The grownups in charge back then claimed they knew what they were doing, even though they couldn’t see an $8 trillion housing bubble, didn’t think it was a problem, didn’t think the Federal Reserve or anyone else should do anything about it, didn’t want states enforcing laws against lending fraud, didn’t think the shadow banking system and its fraudulent CDO/CDS trading were a systemic threat that required intervention, didn’t realize major banks/investment banks had become too big to fail/reform/control, and believed deep in their souls despite all evidence to the contrary that financial markets were self correcting . . . and then watched helplessly as the financial system collapsed and took the economy and millions of people, their homes, their jobs, their savings down with it.

Economics can seem hard to non-economists, but it doesn’t take a PhD economist to recognize the last 30 years of ruling economic advisers and their apologists should never be trusted again. So the fact too many of them are still influential tells us the problem is much deeper than "economics is hard."

John Chandley (not an economist, though some of my best friends . . .)

Economics made easier:

Dean Baker explains economics to Robert Samuelson and shows the US et al are not about to exceed their debt capacity
Brad DeLong, expanding on Krugman, also explains the US et al are not about to exceed their debt capacity.

Brad DeLong, Is Macroeconomics hard?

Dave Weigel has apparently been forced to resign from the Washington Post. So let’s put aside, for now, whatever disagreements Weigel and FDL have had and ask what this says about the Washington Post.

Weigel’s initial offense, if one can call it that, is that he wrote something negative about Matt Drudge on a private e-mail list, and some jerk violated the rules and published it to discredit Weigel. Weigel then apologized. It doesn’t matter that Drudge deserved it; it only mattered that someone the Post hired to cover the right would write something bad about one of the right’s wurlitzer propagandists.

Whatever you think of his political perspective, Weigel seemed to me a guy from a forgotten era, someone who, having made a mistake, would try to do the honorable thing, expecting that a world that respects honor will reciprocate. But the Washington Post is not an honorable newspaper, and the people who run it aren’t very bright.

Read the rest of this entry →

Video from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show.

Brad DeLong is right. What the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates said after Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s Confederate history declaration deserves to be read and republished, over and over.

Proud of Being Ignorant

A lot of you have e-mailed me to note that Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has decided to honor those who fought to preserve, and extend, white supremacy. I don’t really have much to say. The GOP is, effectively, the party of willfully unlettered Utopians. It is the party of choice for those who believe global warming is a hoax, that humans roamed the earth with dinosaurs, and that homosexuals should work harder at not being gay.

That the party of unadulterated quackery also believes that Birth Of A Nation is more true to the Civil War than Battle Cry Of Freedom, is to be expected. Ignorance does not respect boundaries. It is, at times, qualified and those who know more, often struggle to say more. But people who believe that the Census is actually a covert attempt to put Americans in concentration camps, are also likely to believe that slavery was incidental to the Civil War.

This is who they are–the proud and ignorant. If you believe that if we still had segregation we wouldn’t "have had all these problems," this is the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. If you flirt with secession, even now, then this movement is for you. If you are a "Real American" with no demonstrable interest in "Real America" then, by God, this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair tonic, is for you.

And for those in our media, the question you need to answer is why you continue to give these ignorant people repeated, unquestioning opportunities to facilitate their dumbing down of America’s political discourse. Surely you must know you’re part of the problem.

More:
B.T., Group that lobbied Republican Governor to honor Confederacy Tied to White Supremacist Group
More links/reactions from Amanda Terkel, Think Progress