Tag Archives: bernie sanders

By Thomas Palley (Guest blogger)2016 was supposed to have been the year of Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton: the year when the established Bush dynasty confronted the upstart rival Clinton Dynasty. But the year of the insider has turned into the year of the outsider. On both sides, voters have unexpectedly given vent to thirty years of accumulated anger with neoliberalism which has downsized their incomes and hopes.Though the Republican rebellion has been more clear-cut in its dismissal of...

By Thomas I. Palley (guest blogger)The Democratic Party establishment has recently found itself discomforted by Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign to return the party to its modern roots of New Deal social democracy. The establishment’s response has included a complex coupling of elite media and elite economics opinion aimed at promoting an image of Sanders as an unelectable extremist with unrealistic economic policies.The response provides a case study showing how the Party suffocates...

By John F. Henry Levy Economics Institute On January 6, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union Address to Congress. It was a perilous stage in world history, and Roosevelt used his annual address to urge U.S. entry into the war then raging. Against the isolationists in Congress (and in the general population), Roosevelt contended that the main objective of U.S. entry was to fight for the universal freedoms that all peoples of the world should possess....

There has been for quite a while now discussions on why younger voters prefer Bernie over Hillary in the Democratic contest (see this WAPO piece from last year, or this in the NYTimes, or this more recent by Nate Silver). Maybe someone already noted this before and I missed it, but it seems that the obvious answer is related to Bernie's proposals on health (Medicare for all) and education (tuition and debt free college). The other issues do not have an evident difference in their effects...

William K. Black February 23, 2016     Bloomington, MN In an unintentionally hilarious piece evincing exceptional moral blindness, Mr. Womack, a journalist, writes to Bernie. Senator, you are forming a mob of angry, misinformed people and then turning it on the likely Democratic nominee. That, Senator, is a dangerous and destructive game. Does your campaign honestly wonder why it has become synonymous with nasty online invective? Gosh, I would have thought that “nasty online invective”...

William K. Black February 21, 2006     Bloomington, MN Paul Krugman is plumbing new depths of moral obtuseness, arrogance, and intellectual dishonesty in what is now his third smear of the well-respected economist Gerald Friedman in two days.  My prior column discussed Krugman’s two columns on February 17, 2016.  Here is Krugman’s lead in his column dated February 19. On Wednesday four former Democratic chairmen and chairwomen of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — three...

Jamie Galbraith has written an excellent letter to the four former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers under Clinton and Obama regarding their letter to Professor Gerald Friedman and Senator Bernie Sanders. The full text is below. February 18, 2016 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....

So Kevin Drum at Mother Jones discovers the Kaldor-Verdoorn effect, and the fact that growing demand might be the main cause of rising productivity, and idea as old as Adam Smith in his vent for surplus model (chapter 3 of the Wealth of Nations says that the division of labor, that is, productivity, which is the basis for development, is limited by the extent of the market, that is, by demand). I posted extensively on that here (all post by date here), and produced, as far as I know, the...

So Krugman continues to argue that Friedman's calculations are implausible. Well sure. But that's the point to some extent as Galbraith discussed here. The Plan involves huge (read yuge; wink, wink, nudge, nudge) spending, and it should have almost by definition implausible results looking from the perspective of recent history. Imagine the implausible effect that Social Security had on old age poverty. Or the incredible reduction in inequality that the New Deal policies had.If you were in...

A priceless moment in a Sanders versus Clinton debate last year![embedded content]In reality of course, Bernie is just an honest New Dealer who wants a Western European social democracy.And as for the top US federal marginal tax rates under Eisenhower, we can see them in the graph below. This graph shows the top US federal marginal tax rates on (1) earned income (in red) and (2) (where it diverges from the latter) ordinary income (in blue), from the the data here. And yet even with rates...