Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Today's @bopinion post is about why liberals, and the left, should not surrender the mantle of economic growth to the right.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

2/Right now, if you hear a U.S. politician promising faster growth, that politician is probably a Republican.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

3/Think tanks and pseudo-economists on the right have created the notion that the policies that promote growth are tax cuts, spending cuts, and deregulation.

alec.org/publication/ri…

4/They just keep repeating the standard formula.

johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/03/auster…

5/Sad to say, many economists - even many who lean to the left - have accepted this framing. Economics is rife with the notion of the "efficiency-equity tradeoff".

amazon.com/gp/product/081…

6/Free-marketers, and the economists who enable them, claim that we are presented with a tradeoff -- faster growth and more inequality, or slower growth and a more equal society.

The thing is, this tradeoff might not actually exist.

oecd.org/newsroom/inequ…

7/Plenty of research finds that in rich countries (like the U.S.), inequality is negatively correlated with growth!

voxeu.org/article/effect…

8/Here are a couple more:

voxeu.org/article/inequa…

voxeu.org/article/trade-…

9/Meanwhile, how is the free-market growth strategy doing?

Not well.

Bush's tax cuts, for example, didn't seem to have much of any effect on growth.
cbsnews.com/news/did-the-b…

10/Here's some more research about Bush's tax cuts and the growth that didn't follow.

eml.berkeley.edu/~yagan/Dividen…

brookings.edu/wp-content/upl…

11/Deregulation is more complicated, since there are so many types of regulation. But safe to say that financial deregulation didn't do our growth any favors in 2008.

12/Meanwhile, Trump's tax cuts don't seem to be a big growth engine either.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

13/And Democratic presidents certainly have a lot to brag about when it comes to their growth record.

14/How does big government lead to growth?

1. Better education

2. Better infrastructure

3. More spending on things like research

4. Possibly other ways, like spurring mass consumption by putting more money in the hands of lower-income people, who consume more of their income

15/There's also some evidence that a more equitable distribution of power and input within corporations makes them more efficient and makes them invest more for the future.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

16/So liberals, and the left in general, should NOT accept the framing of "equality vs. growth".

And they should NOT surrender the mantle of growth to the free-market right. The last 20 years show that the free-market right does not deserve this mantle.

17/Time to use government as an engine of growth, and discard the idea that faster growth requires higher inequality.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

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