I finally agree with (much of) a Krugman criticism of the Sanders campaign. (And why I’m glad he made the criticism in the way he did.) [Clarification added 2/20 at 11:05 a.m.; update added 2/21 at 9:40 a.m.]
Bernie Sanders hates the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which held that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited sums advocating for their preferred candidate. Who doesn’t? Citizens United was a deeply misguided decision that vastly underestimated the state’s compelling interest in preventing the appearance of corruption that massive corporate electioneering inevitably creates. An overwhelming supermajority of Americans despise the decision and wish to see it overturned. That includes most Democrats—which is probably why Sanders recently tweeted a guarantee that his Supreme Court nominees “will make overturning Citizens United one of their first decisions.”
— Bernie Sanders Has No Idea How the Supreme Court Works, Mark Joseph Stern, Slate, Jan. 22
Okay. As an obsessive Bernie Sanders supporter, and as someone who knows that Supreme Court justices cannot make overturning Citizens United one of their first decisions simply because they want to, I cringed. To understate it. There are certain prerequisites to overturning Citizens United: specifically, an existing state or federal campaign-finance law that conflicts with the holding in Citizens United, and a legal challenge to the statute’s constitutionality that has been decided by a federal trial court and then by a federal appeals court, and then then a filed “cert.” petition asking the Supreme Court to agree to hear the case.
Granted, something not all that different than what that tweet proposed did happen in none other than Citizens United, but at least there was an actual statute in existence—McCain-Feingold—which they could, and most of which they did, pronounce unconstitutional.* (In a follow-up case, they pronounced most of the rest of it unconstitutional.)
But I also knew that Bernie Sanders himself knows this, and that he was not the one who published that tweet. Some 20-something member of his communications staff did. I gritted my teeth and said to myself something like: “Okay, Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, has a law degree from Georgetown. Sanders should order that no tweets or other communications on technical legal issues—or on legal-related things that involve legal technicalities, even his 20-something communications staff doesn’t recognize that it does–ever again be published without approval from Weaver. Or someone else who has some actual knowledge of actual legal procedure and such.
There are, in other words, certain subjects that plainly require expertise—sometimes extensive expertise—before a statement about them is made. Supreme Court jurisdiction is one of them. And obviously, macroeconomics is another.
Okay, well, by now y’all know about the controversy concerning a report by UMass-Amherst economist Gerald Friedman, commissioned by the Sanders campaign, that apparently is so of a mirror image of the macroeconomic claims of Arthur Laffer to Ronald Reagan, and Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Jeb! Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, etc., to the public. In this case the claim is that Sanders’ economic-policy proposals will produce something along the lines of 5.3% annual GDP growth, an unemployment rate of less than 4%, and a significant increase in the labor-participation rate (notwithstanding the aging of this country’s population). You’ve read Krugman’s blog posts about it and you’ve read his column today. Or many one of the other excoriating commentaries about it as well. Or maybe Krugman’s and some others’.
The growth and unemployment rates apparently are theoretically possible, so it is not quite the mirror image of Laffer economics. But also apparently, historically it is extremely unlikely.
No one has ever accused me of being an economist, man, but I’ve read enough Paul Krugman blog posts and columns, and AB posts, over the years—including Krugman’s repeated mockery of Jeb!’s promise of 4% GDP growth annually within the last year—for Friedman’s conclusions to raise series questions of accuracy, even to this novice. Yet Sanders’ campaign began trumpeting the report.
This creates three huge problems, perhaps the most important of which Krugman flags: that if Democrats start pushing voodoo economic theories, they give away a fundamental part of their raison d’être. The Republicans push voodoo (or highly implausible) economic theories; the Democrats do not.
I’ve argued that a big, big reason why I think Sanders would be a stronger general-election candidate than Clinton is that there is so very much that the Dem candidate should argue against, say, Rubio or Bush or Cruz that would as a practical matter be unavailable to Hillary Clinton to actually argue, but that are at the very center of Sanders’ campaign and Sanders’ appeal. And now suddenly, there is this wrench that’s been thrown into this.
Another huge problem is how extremely easy it is to conflate this issue with the incessant claims—by Clinton, by Krugman, by the Washington Post editorial board, by the Washington Post centrist-left and centrist-right columnists, etc., etc.—that Sanders’ high-profile substantive policy proposals (e.g., Medicare-for-all; tuition-free public colleges and universities) are financially unworkable. These are entirely distinct issues. Yet just the headlines on some of these stories, which is all that many people will read, makes this conflation very easy. Some mainstream-media political journalists (inexplicably) are doing it in their articles or blog posts about it.
But counterintuitively, I think Krugman’s column, which identifies and explains the actual issue, will help make clear the distinction.
And then there is this: If Sanders does, as I dearly hope, become the next president, his administration’s economic success will be judged against this. A 3.5% annual growth in GDP, for example, will be called a broken promise.
But I disagree with Krugman’s political assessment that this indicates that the Sanders campaign and maybe the candidate himself are not ready for primetime.
If not nipped in the bud—repudiated very soon by Sanders himself—his campaign success could begin unraveling; that is true enough. But every modern presidential campaign makes mistakes, some of them major ones, and the Sanders campaign, unlike the Clinton campaign, is not well stocked with presidential-campaign veterans. Weaver himself is a novice.
And Sanders and Weaver are navigating a 20-ring circus right now, with several campaign appearances of one sort or another every single day. They both must be exhausted.
What Sanders needs to do—seriously needs to do—is to determine the types of published things ostensibly by Sanders himself (tweets, for example) and by his communications staff are fine for them to publish on their own, and the types of things that are not. Law things, not. Macroeconomics things, not.
For law things, there needs to be a designated person with actual knowledge of law things. For macroeconomic things, there needs to more than one. Nothing—nothing—should be published about macroeconomics without prior review by more than one macroeconomist.
I absolutely get the Sanders campaign’s frustration with the incessant torrent of uses of the word “SOCIALIST” to misrepresent Sanders’ actual policy positions. I share the frustration. But the way to handle it is to do what Sanders had been doing: Pointing out the capitalist, entrepreneurial success of countries such a Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and … Australia (which has universal healthcare coverage!).
And pointing out that this country’s most entrepreneurial period was the post-WWII period, with tax rates higher than anything Sanders is proposing. A period of organized-labor strength. Of Glass-Steagall separation of traditional banking and investment banking. And of aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws and securities laws. And, in 1967, the start of Medicare.
An addition to this torrent came earlier this week from another high-profile Friedman, New York Times columnist and aggressive-centrist Thomas Friedman, who wrote:
Bernie Sanders shows zero interest in entrepreneurship and says the Wall Street banks that provide capital to risk-takers are involved in “fraud.” …
I’d take Sanders more seriously if he would stop bleating about breaking up the big banks and instead breathed life into what really matters for jobs: nurturing more entrepreneurs and starter-uppers. I never hear Sanders talk about where employees come from. They come from employers — risk-takers, people ready to take a second mortgage to start a business. If you want more employees, you need more employers, not just government stimulus.
Apparently he’s been reading too many Washington Post centrist-right and centrist-left columnist columns. Or else he concluded on his own that such things as breaking up the big banks, or for that matter government stimulus, has nothing at all to do with what really matters for jobs: nurturing more entrepreneurs and starter-uppers.
He is, though, certainly right that these days, if you want more employees, you need more employers. The large, current employers plow most of their profits into stock dividends and stock buybacks, not into hiring more employees and not into upgrades of such things as manufacturing plants. The ones here in the States, anyway.
But about the risk-takers whom I’m betting he really has in mind—his wife’s father and uncle, who during the postwar period began one of the first shopping-mall development companies and grew it into the very largest, turning their relatively small family collectively into multibillionaires before the collapse of the shopping-mall real estate business because of online shopping (the family still is extremely wealthy, but not nearly to the extent that it was).
Sanders is in fact the most pro-entrepreneurial of the presidential candidates in either party. He combines Theodore Roosevelt’s antitrust vigor with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal regulation of the financial services and securities industries, and FDR’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s massive building programs, mainly in major infrastructure projects.
What the centrist crowd doesn’t understand, or pretends not to, is that just as in Teddy Roosevelt’s day, there are critical conflicts between the interests of entrepreneurs (current and would-be) and ongoing small-businesses, on the one hand, and large corporations (especially certain types of large corporations), on the other. One of my favorite examples is what is known as the Durbin Amendment, which pitted the interests of Visa and Mastercard against small retail businesses. The Democratic Congress pushed it through. The nature of the charges at issue made it especially difficult for small retailers to compete with large ones. Walmart lost on that one; Mom and Pop won.
As for business loans and home mortgages, Friedman, who neither has a home mortgage nor a small business, may not be aware that the very size of the megabanks makes it ever harder for small local banks of the type that surely funded his in-laws’ startup in Marshall, Iowa back in the ‘50s, to remain in business. The megabanks, like Walmart, set market prices. And pretty much everything else.
And the collapse of antitrust enforcement has had an enormous effect not merely on direct competition but also on small manufactures in the supply chain of large ones. The fewer the buyers of the type of part manufactured by the small manufacturer, the less bargaining power the small manufacturer has in order simply to stay in business.
Sanders and his campaign need to bring the conversation back to where it was before this Gerald Friedman debacle.
And I need to end this very long post.
____
*Sentence edited slightly for clarity and precision. 2/19 at 8:57 p.m.
____
CLARIFICATION: Reader EMichael and I exchanged these comments this morning in the Comments thread:
EMichael
February 20, 2016 9:25 am
Bev,
It is the unforced errors of the Sanders’ campaign that scares me. Perhaps it is simply, as you state, that there are not enough knowledgeable people working for the campaign and that those who are capable are simply exhausted. Kind of scary when there are still nine months before the election. If Sanders wins the nomination, how can the campaign pick up capable people to stop these kind of errors?
Me
February 20, 2016 10:08 am
EMichael, every major presidential campaign makes unforced errors, and the Sanders campaign is chock full of competent people. Clinton’s campaign has made a slew of them.
It’s just that there are some policy areas that require some real expertise in before a statement that has the potential to get a key thing wrong (e.g., the Citizens United tweet) or that requires expertise to evaluate (e.g., macroeconomics projections).
I plan to post a follow-up to this post clarifying some things and making the point that it now appears that Krugman way overblew what the Sanders campaign actually did, which was that its policy director mentioned the Friedman study and praised it as outstanding work. That was all.
But this key point I was trying to make is still valid: that while it is necessary for the Sanders campaign to refute the Sanders-will-kill-entrepreneurship-in-this-country-and-destroy-the-banking-system-and-kill-all-the-apple-trees-in-order-to-keep-Americans-from-making-apple-pie slurs, he should keep the focus of his campaign on his policy proposals and their benefits for their own sake. This macroeconomics controversy has been a big distraction, and–as I said in the post–is one that is far too easy for my comfort to conflate with the issue of the cost of his policy proposals.
The link I included in my comment is to an article on Salon by Elias Isquith, detailing what prompted the controversy and rebutting Krugman’s political argument.
Several other readers in the Comments thread supplied important links, among them: to James Galbraith’s two-page letter to Krueger, Goolsbee, Romer and Tyson deconstructing their high-profile letter that has played such a large role in the controversy; and to an article by David Dayen in the New Republic rebutting Krugman’s political argument.
On second thought I think I’ll just let this Clarification suffice rather than post a separate follow-up post. I’m tired of this subject.
Added 2/10 at 11:05 a.m.
____
UPDATE: An exchange between reader Urban Legend and me in the Comments thread this morning:
Urban Legend
February 21, 2016 2:49 am
I am strongly pro-Clinton in the primaries, but Galbraith’s letter seems absolutely unassailable. Nothing justified this assault by Krugman and the others except their feeling that their credibility is undermined because of their giggling at the Bush et al projections. Somehow, the difference between massive stimulus and increasing regressive tax policies — differences they themselves have emphasized for years — escaped them.
Me
February 21, 2016 9:29 am
Urban, that struck me, too, when I read the Galbraith article: Somehow, the difference between massive stimulus and increasing regressive tax policies — differences they themselves have emphasized for years — escaped them.
There is still the (I would think) obvious problem that apparently Friedman didn’t take into account: the ageing of this country’s population in considering projected increase in labor participation. And there probably are other things that he didn’t consider that should have been considered.
And the main point of my point–or at least the intended main point–holds and is important: on subjects that require some technical expertise or special knowledge, it is really important that Sanders have someone with the expertise or special knowledge screen what his campaign is about to say about it.
But Krugman and the others themselves mislead in this.
This is it for me on this subject.
Added 2/21 at 9:40 a.m.
“if Democrats start pushing voodoo economic theories, they give away a fundamental part of their raison d’être.”
I, for one, would welcome seeing the Democrats give away their raison bran d’être. The reason the Republicans can get away with their voodoo economics is grounded in the fundamental bi-partisan voodoo of growthmanship. As Simon Kuznets pointed out long, long ago growth is an inapt analogy. Do I find Friedman’s projections convincing? No. Do I find Krugman’s and the former CEA chairs critique of Friedman/Sanders compelling? Absolutely not.
It is the pot calling the kettle black. The GDP numbers game is three-card monte, regardless of whether it is played with playing cards or tarot cards. The fact that the Sanders campaign plays the game reflects how COMPULSORY the swindle is in American politics. I am not going to loss sleep over whether unicorns are pink or a unique shade of fuschia. Economic growth is a bulllshit analogy.
Sandwichman:
One-ups-mans-ship certainly appears to be the mode of the electioneering advertising campaign.
Let me transport y’all back to 1950 and NSC-68, in which the tripling of expenditures on armaments was hailed — by Council of Economic Advisers chair, Leon Keyserling — as stimulating so much “economic growth” that enough could be “siphoned off” in tax revenues to pay for the expanded armaments spending without having any effect on standards of living.
“…if a dynamic expansion of the economy were achieved, the necessary build-up could be accomplished without a decrease in the national standard of living because the required resources could be obtained by siphoning off a part of the annual increment in the gross national product.”
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2015/01/siphoning-off-increment-to-pay-for-more.html
Too long ago? Keyserling’s siphoning-off voodoo was implemented 30 years before Arthur Laffer’s tax-cut voodoo of 30 years ago.
I’m getting pretty tired of Paul Krugman’s appeals to authority to shoot down Bernie Sanders. And I really love Krugman! Both Dean Baker and, yesterday, Naranya Kocherlakota (former head of the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis), have said that it is more important to be setting the goals like Bernie is doing than that having a specific plan to get there right now. sites.google.com/… Now Jamie Galbraith weighs in: http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/ResponsetoCEA.pdf
Drilling down on what is little more than a position paper, presenting all these what-ifs about whether Bernie can get all or some or none of it done, demanding complex modeling —
First, that’s not happening to Hillary’s plans for a variety of reasons (her plans are less ambitious, and even less specific than Sanders’, among others)
Second, Bernie’s basically proposing a multi-trillion dollar investment in the country, the likes of which we haven’t seen since about 1950, which could hugely stimulate the economy, and I say it’s about time that someone should do that — deficit be damned. It appears Mr. Galbraith may agree that the results could be a tad beneficial.
Third, if you read the Kocherlakota link, he says that the kind of growth rate Friedman claims for Sanders’ plans is always possible — the questions are whether that is desirable and, if so, how to get there. And, under current economic conditions, we get there by investing a boatload into infrastructure of all sorts.
None of what Bernie is saying strikes me as outlandish unless your mindset is confined or limited to the smallness of what has so far happened since about 1968, and the smallness of what our politics have become.
So sad to see Krugman feel the need to preemptively reject Bernie and his ideas (which are not inconsistent with Krugman’s calls for fiscal policy). So he’s arguing by appeals to authority and the use of straw men – two things he has expressly discredited. I actually think he thinks this is a replay of 1972. I think the country is in a much different place now than then.
I will of course vote for HRC if the need arises. But if this is a change election, which it feels like to me, then the best bet against the republicans will be a change-agent like Bernie.
Sorry, here’s the Kocherlakota link: https://sites.google.com/site/kocherlakota009/home/policy/thoughts-on-policy/2-18-16
I think in this case he was misspeaking off the cuff. Previously Sanders was quoted as saying Citizens United would be a litmus test for any nominees by him.
I don’t particularly care for that phrasing either, but I can appreciate the sentiment.
J.Goodwin, Sanders’ campaign issues a steady stream of tweets, usually several a day, from Sanders’ twitter account. It is highly unlikely that Sanders himself is issuing all, or most, of them, and I did read a month or two ago that Sanders, like the other campaigns (the exception is Trump), does have aides that have the authority to tweet on the account, although in Sanders’ case the number of aides who do is very small.
The tweet was a garbled attempt at repeating Sanders’ standard statement that his Supreme Court nominees will promise to overrule Citizens United. Tired ans rushed as he may be at times, Sanders would not make so obvious a misstatement. He has, after all, been a member of Congress for for a quarter-century.
This is by no stretch a debate that Sanders needed to have, Sandwichman. He doesn’t need to show dramatic growth from his proposals. He just needs to point out that this country did fine when it had high marginal tax rates, high capital gains taxes, and high estate taxes–all of them higher, I believe, than what Sanders is proposing. And that countries such as Canada, Germany, the Denmark, Sweden and Australia all have an entrepreneurial economy and a high standard of living, and universal healthcare insurance.
I love Krugman, too, TA Hartman—although he’s tested my love slightly with some of his anti-Sanders posts, especially what I think are some misleading statements he’s made about Sanders’ single-payer healthcare proposal, particularly his claim (as I understand it) that the plan would prohibit supplemental healthcare insurance paid by employers for their employees as a benefit. (That’s the only way that Krugman’s incessant claim that there would be a lot of losers from Sanders’ plan, people who now have terrific healthcare insurance as an employment benefit, makes any sense best as I can tell.)
And I couldn’t agree more that it is more important to be setting the goals like Bernie is doing than having a specific plan to get there right now. But I don’t think the Gerald Friedman growth/unemployment-rate/labor-participation-rate issue is the type of goal that Sanders has been setting. Of course, he hopes that the economy will be terrific under his policies, and certainly huge expenditures on badly needed and darn-good-idea infrastructure projects would be expected to be terrific for the economy.
But Sanders should not be turning the essence of his campaign from the goals he has campaigned on for so many months into a goal of 5.3% annual growth in GDP, and such. Because there’s no way to actually assure that. Which makes it different in nature from his assurance, for example, that under a Medicare-for-all system everyone would have access to excellent healthcare and no one would ever again have to fear bankruptcy because of medical bills.
There really is a difference there, which I intended to be the point of my post.
well, i dont agree with (much of) Krugman’s criticism of Sanders economics, because i think i know where it comes from…without getting into the details of the proposals (which i havent read), the trouble is that Krugman, Krueger, Goolsbee, Romer, and Tyson are all from the old schools of economics, which they base their thinking on, and which they have to support because their whole life hinges on it, so they can never allow themselves to understand the MMT thinking that’s behind Sanders proposals…they are reacting to Sander’s economics like you might react if someone had thrown out the constitution and started judging cases on some batch of new laws you’d never heard of…you’d likely object based on what you already know about constitutional law, and not try to figure out whether the new laws might make more sense than the old or not…at any rate, that’s what Krugman is doing right now…
What’s the MMT thinking?
Why don’t you go help Jack handle Mike Hansbury on 2nd amendment
modern monetary theory…Stephanie Kelton, Sanders chief economic advisor, is a leading proponent of MMT…as is Angry Bear’s own Rebecca Wilder, who converted me years ago…
Cuz I don’t wanna, run. I hate debating the Second Amendment. Hate, hate, hate it.
Why? No one has ever interpreted it. Not even Heller.
I just gave in and posted something in that thread, run. Ooock.
No, wimp
Sheeesh, rjs. I just read part of the Wikipedia page on MMT–enough to know that there’s no way in hell that I could understand what I was reading, no matter how much of it I read.
If Krugman doesn’t understand it, I can sympathize.
grasping the entirety of it isnt easy, but simplifying it’s that as a sovereign we can issue money for what our needs are, deficits dont matter, and as a practical matter here, Sanders spending proposals dont imply tax increases to “pay for them”….it is folly to leave resources unused and people unemployed because you think that you dont have enough imaginary currency to put them to use…
Krugman had a long multi-post blog debate against Jamie Galbraith on the deficits dont matter aspect of MMT circa 2008 to 2010, which shows up under search…i almost think one of my few guest posts here at AB was covering that debate, but i have no idea how i’d find it…
I just ordered my “Bernie for President” tee shirt!
Krugman’s and the other mainstream Democrats’ problem with [cost of] Sanders’ supposed economic agenda is it takes tax funds from the 38% of US government spending that benefits the 1% and the war machine. It is the old argument from Heritage that if war profiteers don’t get 5% of GDP the free world collapses no matter that every year the nationless goatherds the US bomb get more scary.
I have been following Krugman’s embarrassing assault on Sanders for the better part of a week or maybe two years it seems.
The democrat mainstream reason (not doing voodoo, and not doing any thing for the 90%) to exist is malarkey. The Clinton reason to exist is pandering to Wall St.
Otherwise Krugman has engaged in red herring, strawmen, ad hominem, (oh yeah) appeal to authority (as above) and false analogies to rip on Sanders.
I am done with the economics arguments over Clinton.
As Sandwichman points out NSC 68 started pentagon trough filling to the tune of $28T, compared to the near estimated US debt of $18T. Which is a good part fraud, waste and abuse and the department could not pass an audit if anyone (could find and) look at specifications that were presented for payment for things like Littoral Combat Ships, etc. That was my business for nearly 40 years.
The wind machine has debated the cost of helping people, and they cannot let that cut the discretionary side that would make their sponsors lose money.
While as Sandwichman points out no one argues outside of fear mongering why US spends trillion of bucks and loses thousands of lives.
Clinton being PNAC, more of the same, and going after Iran is why I will not support her nor any one on the ticket if she is nominated.
I am mad!
Worse no criticizer of Sander goes into value for the cost.
That makes Krugman and the 4 ex CEA’s [appealed to authorities] bean counters, not economists.
“UMass-Amherst economist Gerald Friedman, commissioned by the Sanders campaign”
Did that happen? The commissioning? So far what I have read says it was an independent analysis, which the campaign then endorsed.
BTW a random US healthcare horror story. I just received a $6500 bill for an ambulance ride 8 miles from an ER to another hospital for a kid who had had a bad allergic reaction, but was fine for the trip. I have insurance, and both hospitals are in network, but the ambulance they called isn’t. The actual charge was $6970, with insurance paying much of the $800 that is typical for such service.
So, I’ll see what can be done next week (Apparently I have a better shot at it due to some aca regulations.), but, yea. This is why we really eventually need a clean sweep on healthcare. I’m paid enough to probably be one of those upper middle income people Krugman is so suddenly and uncharacteristically worried might have to pay more for single payer, but I’ll do it in an instant to know stuff like this (and far worse) isn’t happening every hour to people for whom it will be a much bigger problem than me.
Jeff:
Appeal to the PPACA as you are correct. In cases of emergency where you do not get a choice, this is supposed to be covered. Insurance companies used to have clauses within them to cover the use of out of network doctors and services when the primary was in network.
Besides England and Canada, what other country is single payer? Furthermore, with single payer how does this protect you from the rising cost of healthcare?
What I read is that Friedman had been consulting for the Sanders campaign, so I assumed that the campaign had commissioned the study. But maybe not.
Geeez, Jeff. Yeah, I know a young married couple, late 20s, homeowners, both with middle-class jobs, that opted this past year to not get healthcare insurance because the husband’s job doesn’t offer it and the wife’s job offers lousy insurance for $500/mo. just for her. She got a promotion last summer and with the promotion comes a $100 contribution to the premium, so she signed up for it but couldn’t join midyear. She was hospitalized in November for 24 hours and since then has been inundated with bills, totaling nearly $8,000. She said they didn’t even do anything while she was there.
Lovely.
And what makes you believe you can join mid year under a different plan? You railed against the make believe stories in Michigan and now this? Furthermore and for younger people, there is “still” catastrophic coverage. And there is still a maximum.
Through the tedium at economists’ view one commenter said Friedman and the CEA’s are Clinton supporters.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/18/the-economist-who-validated-bernie-sanders-big-liberal-plans-is-voting-for-hillary-clinton/
WashPost says “in consultation” with the Sanders campaign.
While Goolsbee don’t want democrats “to be like Laffer!!”
Goolsbee watches too many Direct TV commercials……
fwiw, contra-krugman:
https://newrepublic.com/article/130157/pious-attacks-bernie-sanderss-fuzzy-economics?utm_content=bufferd7f6a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
supporting Friedman:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-18/more-americans-should-be-working
I’d like to point out that this post and the subsequent comments are a good example of why too many progressive ideals get lost in the Democratic Party. It’s akin to ideological cannibalism. Maybe the projections regarding Sander’s economic thrust are overly optimistic. Maybe they are not. Why the devil are professionals who otherwise support Democratic candidates and platforms offering up serious critiques of one of their own candidates? Ideological cannibalism with a bit of professional envy thrown in to boot. Let the Republican rabble do the tearing down. Nothing either Sanders nor Clinton have said or are likely to say comes even close to the bullshit and hyperbole of the Clown Circus that is touring the Republican debates and primaries. Why lend any support by being critical of one of our own?
Maybe the Sander’s campaign has learned to take a page from the Republican playbook. A little exaggeration can go a long way and when the topic isn’t rocket science who’s to say who has the best plan of attack? Does anyone really think that the average voter gives a rat’s ass about the accuracy of the details during an election campaign? Does anyone really believe that voters under the age of 40 give a crap about what a learned economist of any ilk has to say on an issue? Democratic political campaigning has to get real, and by real I mean it has to attack its enemies not its allies.
If the dems start using magic asterisks as freely as the repubs, or at all imo, then the an informed electorate ceases to exist and with it the foundations of any form of democracy. Bernie’s creating a dangerous precedent for dems and with it also for democracy. Of course the repubs started it but that doesn’t mean the dems have to follow in lock step.
Integrity matters.
If the dems start using magic asterisks as freely as the repubs, or at all imo, then the an informed electorate ceases to exist and with it the foundations of any form of democracy. Bernie’s creating a dangerous precedent for dems and with it also for democracy. Of course the repubs started it but that doesn’t mean the dems have to follow in lock step.
Integrity matters.
I’m a strong and very liberal progressive democrat … probably on the fringe of the left even. I like Bernie’s rhetoric… it warms me to know a political candidate for pres with experience in congress and politics speaks the things I want to hear.
But I’m also a diehard analytic and when I hear implausible in not downright fantasy from any candidate. right or left I ignore them from further consideration as being just another b.s. propaganda artist, lying used car salesmen seeking to pull the wool over voters (potential voters) to get elected.
There are little white lies and slight exaggerations — we all use them. But there are also whoppers of lies and exaggerations beyond the pale. I don’t think the average voter has the mean to tell one from the other and thus elections then become those of ill informed and uninformed electorates having little or nothing to do with realities or rational probabilities. And then what? Do you still think democracy exists if voters don’t know the difference between whoppers and sight exaggerations?
If you subscribe to the “anything’s possible” camp, then your a hopeless fantasizer Bernie is appealing with gross exaggeration or outright lies to the fantasizer’s who haven’t the means of making a rational distinction.
PK (for one) at least offers and provides a form of reality to assess, rationally without fantasy, what’s probable and likely and what’s pure b.s.
FWIW, I use FRED and other sound sources frequently … 5x a week? or more, and download the data to Excel for my own comparisons and analysis with other data. I’m reasonably up to speed on a continual basis with historic fact and present conditions and data.. .with at least some ability to project what has to change to change trends or directions.
4.5% real per Capita GDP growth for more than a quarter or two is pure bunk for the next 10 years or more (at least). Do you think for a moment that a 50 year continually declining rate of real GDP growth occurred because of some one administration or one congress?
I’m actually quite interested in how Angry Bear commenters can be so naïve.
Longtooth:
Having such growth would certainly resolve the lack of inflation or low inflation or no inflation, etc. (you pick the term) dilemma. Since 2001, much of America has been in a downward spiral. We have been swirling around the periphery of the toilet bowl waiting for the exiting flush. One could go back farther and almost pinpoint when the actual flush started for much of America; but, we do not need to be specific at this point.
To my point though, I believe people are looking for relief and a chance to surge forward and are willing to accept as concrete fact anything being said. “Professor Marvel never guesses, he knows!” Our Professor appears to be Bernie and he is offering up for sale elixir for the last 15 years. People will buy into it even if the reality of Congress and SCOTUS will deny it. It doe not matter who is president on the Dem side as these two realities will stymie them.
And no, we are not all naive. Sandwichman, EMichael, Jack, etc. offer up many good comments. Mike Kimel has an interesting post up if you are interested.
NAUSEABILITY
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/plausibility/
Krugman uses one of the favorite tricks of the right-wing hacks , cherry-picking the data :
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2016/02/19/opinion/021916krugman2/021916krugman2-tmagArticle.png
There is no period since 1957 that corresponds to the situation we face today , a situation that only Sanders has a plan to address. The most recent truly analogous period was the FDR post-Depression era. The extremes in income and wealth inequality , fraudulent banksters , debt-based demand regimes , etc. that we’re dealing with today are what greeted FDR when he took office. Though the immediate collapse in the economy was more severe in the Depression , you can make the case that the long-term loss in economic potential that we’ve experienced over the last several decades is of similar magnitude.
Compare this graph of real per capita gdp to cherry-picker Krugman’s :
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=3wlj
The red dashed line is a “plausible” estimate of the long-term trend in real per capita gdp growth. The dashed black lines show what extended periods of 4.5% per cap growth would look like.
With hindsight it’s easy to imagine that , even without WWII , growth along the steady 4.5% black-dashed growth line could have occurred from 1935 to the early 1950s , bringing the economy back to what was subsequently established as its true “potential”.
And , given the similar situation today with respect to the possibly damaging impact of inequality on growth , it’s not unreasonable to project a rapid return to the trend line as that impact is reversed, along the 10-yr black-dashed 2015-2025 line , as projected by the Friedman analysis. But….;.
“No way” , says the Hillary Ho.
Because TINA.
Long tooth,
Idolize the analyses! Ignore values.
Quibbling about rhetoric is not values.
Bernie represents value.
I am a naïve, true believing Bernie Bro.
From James Galbraith:
I was highly interested to see your letter of yesterday’s date to Senator Sanders and Professor Gerald Friedman. I respond here as a former Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee – the
congressional counterpart to the CEA.
You write that you have applied rigor to your analyses of economic proposals by Democrats and Republicans. On reading this sentence I looked to the bottom of the page, to find a reference or link to your rigorous review of Professor Friedman’s study. I found nothing there.
You go on to state that Professor Friedman makes “extreme claims” that “cannot be supported by the economic evidence.” You object to the projection of “huge beneficial impacts on growth rates, income and employment that exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans about the impact of their tax cut proposals.”
Matthew Yglesias makes an important point about your letter:
“It’s noteworthy that the former CEA chairs criticizing Friedman didn’t bother to run through a detailed explanation of their problems with the paper. To them, the 5.3 percent figure was simply absurd on its face, and it was good enough for them to say so, relying on their authority to generate media coverage.”
So, let’s first ask whether an economic growth rate, as projected, of 5.3 percent per year is, as you claim, “grandiose.” There are not many ambitious experiments in economic policy with which to compare it, so let’s go back to the Reagan years. What was the actual average real growth rate in 1983, 1984, and 1985, following the enactment of the Reagan tax cuts in 1981? Just under 5.4 percent. That’s a point of history, like it or not.
You write that “no credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes.” But how did Professor Friedman make his estimates? The answer is in his paper. What Professor Friedman
did, was to use the standard impact assumptions and forecasting methods of the mainstream economists and institutions. For example, Professor Friedman starts with a fiscal multiplier of 1.25, and shades it
down to the range of 0.8 by the mid 2020s. Is this “not credible”? If that’s your claim, it’s an indictment of the methods of (for instance) the CBO, the OMB, and the CEA.”
http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/ResponsetoCEA.pdf
Bev,
It is the unforced errors of the Sanders’ campaign that scares me. Perhaps it is simply, as you state, that there are not enough knowledgeable people working for the campaign and that those who are capable are simply exhausted. Kind of scary when there are still nine months before the election. If Sanders wins the nomination, how can the campaign pick up capable people to stop these kind of errors?
EMichael, every major presidential campaign makes unforced errors, and the Sanders campaign is chock full of competent people. Clinton’s campaign has made a slew of them.
It’s just that there are some policy areas that require some real expertise in before a statement that has the potential to get a key thing wrong (e.g., the Citizens United tweet) or that requires expertise to evaluate (e.g., macroeconomics projections).
I plan to post a follow-up to this post clarifying some things and making the point that it now appears that Krugman way overblew what the Sanders campaign actually did, which was that its policy director mentioned the Friedman study and praised it as outstanding work. That was all.
But this key point I was trying to make is still valid: that while it is necessary for the Sanders campaign to refute the Sanders-will-kill-entrepreneurship-in-this-country-and-destroy-the-banking-system-and-kill-all-the-apple-trees-in-order-to-keep-Americans-from-making-apple-pie slurs, he should keep the focus of his campaign on his policy proposals and their benefits for their own sake. This macroeconomics controversy has been a big distraction, and–as I said in the post–is one that is far too easy for my comfort to conflate with the issue of the cost of his policy proposals.
Bev,
Yep.
K.I.S.S.
“But I’m also a die hard analytic and when I hear implausible in not downright fantasy” Longtooth
Then you are one of the minute number of voters in America that know shit from Shinola about such issues. However, in the field of economic prognostications there is no hard science. The leap from hard data to predictive conclusions is like a leap across the Grand Canyon from side to side. As Beverly says, “..every major presidential campaign makes unforced errors….” Though I would go one step a bit further and add that in politics and unforced error is any point one does not fully agree with.
“….that while it is necessary for the Sanders campaign to refute the Sanders-will-kill-entrepreneurship-in-this-country-and-destroy-the-banking-system….” Stop there. One does not refute bullshit which isa addressed to the public at large with detailed analysis of the issue that the bullshit addresses. Simple facts, as much as same can be measured, are enough for simple minds. And that’s all the voting constituency wants to know about. Economists and political experts may enjoy trading the porous facts of their topics, but voters simply want to know who is most likely to protect their self interests and who loves them the most.
Unforced angst is the problem.
Fox News is not talking economists’ misplaced wonkery.
They are talking Benghazi, e-mails and who lies all the time.
The opposition ain’t that into economics.
I get it: the establishment (both parties) must have Clinton
Yet.
K.I.S.S. right back, EMichael. Check out the Clarification that I just posted to the post.
Longtooth, integrity does matter, and it appears to me now that Kreuger’s, Goolsbee’s, Romer’s, and Tyson’s are now a bit at issue.
Please check out the Clarification to my post that I just posted.
Jack, the simple facts that rebut the Sanders-will-kill-entrepreneurship-in-this-country-and-destroy-the-banking-system slur are exactly what I said in my post: This country’s entrepreneurship was highest during the high-tax decades, and Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Australia all have both universal healthcare insurance AND thriving entrepreneurial economies. All at once!
Thomas Friedman: “I’d take Sanders more seriously if he would stop bleating about breaking up the big banks and instead breathed life into what really matters for jobs: nurturing more entrepreneurs and starter-uppers.”
This is hilarious. As if what matters is who the Friedman Unit takes seriously. I’d take Friedman more seriously if he peddled my pet bromides instead of his.
In the next six months we’re going to find out whether a decent outcome to the war in Iraq is possible.
Ah. NOW the Clarification is up, EMichael and Longtooth. Not sure why it didn’t update earlier, but it’s there now.
Run, as I pointed out in the Clarification I just added to my post, Sanders is not actually making these claims. I linked to this article in Salon, published yesterday, that details this:
http://www.salon.com/2016/02/19/paul_krugman_is_wrong_how_the_hillary_supporters_attacks_on_bernie_sanders_completely_miss_the_point/
I am strongly pro-Clinton in the primaries, but Galbraith’s letter seems absolutely unassailable. Nothing justified this assault by Krugman and the others except their feeling that their credibility is undermined because of their giggling at the Bush et al projections. Somehow, the difference between massive stimulus and increasing regressive tax policies — differences they themselves have emphasized for years — escaped them.
This is not good for Clinton. She will need Bernie supporters if she wins the nomination, and her supporters pissing them off is preternatrurally stupid behavior. If anyone needs to do some disavowing, it’s Clinton from the piling-on behavior of well-known economists who did not do their homework on how Friedman’s analysis actually worked.
UL,
Clinton has too many negatives she won’t get much traction with Bernie Bros, nor independents which the DLC has driven me.
I am less opposed to her neo lib than I am to her neo CON.
Urban, that struck me, too, when I read the Galbraith article: Somehow, the difference between massive stimulus and increasing regressive tax policies — differences they themselves have emphasized for years — escaped them.
There is still the (I would think) obvious problem that apparently Friedman didn’t take into account: the ageing of this country’s population in considering projected increase in labor participation. And there probably are other things that he didn’t consider that should have been considered.
And the main point of my point–or at least the intended main point–holds and is important: on subjects that require some technical expertise or special knowledge, it is really important that Sanders have someone with the expertise or special knowledge screen what his campaign is about to say about it.
But Krugman and the others themselves mislead in this.
It should be mentioned that Friedman’s analysis assumes no recessions or other unforseeable frictions over the ten-year period forecast; this is standard as such things are impossible to predict either in frequency or magnitude and it is almost a certainty that Friedman’s projections will not be met.
Strange though for economists in their responses to behave as though they are unaware of such practices, behaving as if they believe Friedman’s work is literally what the man expects to happen rather than a friction-free assessment of Sanders’ economic plans in isolation.
Bill Black says Krugman and the Gang of 4 Need to Apologize for Smearing Gerald Friedman
it’s a pretty devastating takedown a Krugman’s bulllying and arrogance…
You are incorrect regarding Citizens United. It was primarily an interpretation of law, not of the Constitution. The law is clear:
U.S.C. Title 52, Chapter 301, Subchapter 1:
§ 30101. Definitions
When used in this Act:
“(11) The term ‘person’ includes an individual, partnership,
committee, association, corporation, labor organization, or any other
organization or group of persons, but such term does not include the
Federal Government or any authority of the Federal Government.”
http://www.fec.gov/law/feca/feca.pdf
The LAW says that a corporation is a person, and the Court ruled that the law means what it says. (Too bad they didn’t use that as a precedent for the King v. Burwell decision.)
Every presidential candidate makes promises to change the law. Sen. Sanders (with Congress, of course) can overturn Citizens United, just as they overturned Ledbetter v. Goodyear with the Fair Pay Act of 2009.
Thought y’all should see this video:
http://cakeshopcam.socialchive.com/complaining-customer-returns-a-box-of-stale-cupcakes-now-watch-how-she-responds-to-the-customer/