As John Maynard Keynes argued in January 1937, “The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” Unfortunately, in the early 2010s, those of us who recalled this lesson were consigned to the margins of debate.I like the Keynes quote. But I wanted to quote DeLong because he puts a date on "the Democratic Party’s broader surrender to neoliberalism": the Clinton years.
Yet, here, big-money influence was a secondary problem compared to the Democratic Party’s broader surrender to neoliberalism, which started under President Bill Clinton, but reached its apotheosis in the Obama era...
Thursday, August 15, 2019
Yeah. The Clinton years
From Brad DeLong in Is Plutocracy Really the Biggest Problem?: No Longer Fresh at Project Syndicate:
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3 comments:
It's kinda odd that the best arguments people have, people like Brad DeLong, are often only quotes from Keynes.
What is that? Argument from authority I s'pose.
What do you think "neoliberalism" is?
Jerry, I used to get copies of blog comments in my email, but that doesn't work anymore. (I probably have to reinstall something.) So I only just found your comment now!
I think neoliberalism is a general view of the way the economy works, and of the types of policies that work and don't work. Myself, I think in terms of debt and too much debt, rather than in terms of schools of thought. This relieves me of the problem of having to know a lot of economics. (Note that I distinguish between "economics" and "the economy" and I would never say it is a relief to not know things about the economy.)
What I had in mind with the Clinton thing in my post above was the idea that smaller government is a necessary part of the solution to our economic problems. Obama seems to have followed that approach, much as he could (given the financial crisis and all), but it didn't start in the Democratic party with Obama. I think it started with Bill Clinton, when he got together with Newt Gingrich to work toward balancing the budget.
Before Clinton (I think) Democrats were still clinging to the Keynesian concept that boosting aggregate demand boosts the economy, and that Federal deficits boost aggregate demand.
So come to think of it, I guess I think "neoliberalism" is the idea that big government is bad for the economy and small government is a cure for all ills.
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