The Red White and Blue Pill
Paul Krugman correctly summarizes why the Republican party can not solve the problems they promise to solve.
“they have systematically deprived themselves of the ability to analyze policies and learn from evidence, because hard thinking might lead someone to question received doctrine.”
From: nytimes.com
Noticeably lacking in argumentum ad Venezuela, any reason why Venezuela is a better analogue than Canada or Western Europe.
Source: Opinion | The Venezuela Calumny – The New York Times
the philosophy of the party’s base is, in essence, big government for me but not for thee. Stick it to the bums on welfare, but don’t touch those farm subsidies. Tellingly, the centerpiece of the long G.O.P. jihad against Obamacare was the false claim that it would hurt Medicare. …
if you have libertarian leanings yourself, you should ask whether you’re happy with what’s happening with government partially out of the picture. Knowing that the food you’re eating is now more likely than before to be contaminated, does that potential contamination smell to you like freedom?
Source: Opinion | Trump’s Big Libertarian Experiment – The New York Times
if we look across America there is a correlation between violent crime and the prevalence of undocumented immigrants — a negative correlation. That is, places with a lot of immigrants, legal and undocumented, tend to have exceptionally low crime rates. The poster child for this tale of un-carnage is the biggest city of them all: New York, where more than a third of the population is foreign-born, probably including around half a million undocumented immigrants — and crime has fallen to levels not seen since the 1950s.
There is no immigration crime wave.
The story itself, although ugly, isn’t that important. But it offers a window into a reality few people, certainly in the news media, are willing to acknowledge: the bad faith that pervades conservative discourse. And yes, I do mean “conservative.” There are dishonest individuals of every political persuasion, but if you’re looking for systematic gaslighting, insistence that up is down and black is white, you’ll find it disproportionately on one side of the political spectrum.
via Intellectuals, Politics and Bad Faith
Worth a read.
while there are many conservative economists with appointments at top universities, publications in top journals, and so on, they have no influence on conservative policymaking. What the right wants are charlatans and cranks, in (conservative) Greg Mankiw’s famous phrase. If they use actual economists, they use them the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.
via Unicorns of the Intellectual Right
They don’t want to govern. They don’t want to debate policy.
Chinese Wages Are Showing Paul Krugman Is Right Once Again
Turns out that Krugman knows something about economics after all.
According to press reports, the Trump administration is basing its budget projections on the assumption that the U.S. economy will grow very rapidly over the next decade — in fact, almost twice as fast as independent institutions like the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve expect. There is, as far as we can tell, no serious analysis behind this optimism; instead, the number was plugged in to make the fiscal outlook appear better.
I guess this was only to be expected from a man who keeps insisting that crime, which is actually near record lows, is at a record high, that millions of illegal ballots were responsible for his popular vote loss, and so on: In Trumpworld, numbers are what you want them to be, and anything else is fake news. But the truth is that unwarranted arrogance about economics isn’t Trump-specific. On the contrary, it’s the modern Republican norm. And the question is why.
(via On Economic Arrogance – The New York Times)
Math has a liberal bias.
Reagan, Trump, and Manufacturing
What produces manufacturing decline is not “trade deals” but stupid industrial and macroeconomic policies–like those of Reagan, and now Trump.
This is a must read.
