A very good article. Many liberals are in denial about this; they've been conditioned by experience to see the US falling short, which we often do. But not this time, on this issue 1/ vox.com/22348364/unite…
You may wonder how we managed to do so much big spending on people in need while Trump was in office. My take is that we were helped by the GOP's haplessness when it came to substance 2/
When disaster struck, Rs literally had no idea what to do — if it doesn't involve tax cuts or punishing people, their minds are empty. Yet this was bad enough that even they realized that something had to happen. So they basically signed on to plans devised by Ds 3/
Those enhanced UI benefits, in particular — probably the single most important misery-reducer — were Ron Wyden's idea. Remember, also, that Trump officials kept floating useless proposals for corporate tax cuts 4/
So it was a weird moment in which a panicked GOP accepted a center-left agenda. And Biden is now building on that 5/
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This Onion classic was about mass shootings, but it also applies to things like universal healthcare and now universal childcare 1/ theonion.com/no-way-to-prev…
I'm being bombarded by claims that a national child care program is impossible — that there would be no way to police the use of the funds, that the administrative burden would be immense, etc. But many other rich countries already have such programs! 2/
In fact, child care would in important ways be easier than health care reform. The big problem Obamacare had to confront was the existing crazy quilt of private insurance, which it tried to disturb as little as possible; this added a lot of complexity 3/
The GOP response to Biden's speech decried "the biggest job-killing tax hikes in a generation," presumably a ref to the 1993 Clinton tax hike, after which we ... added 23 million jobs 1/ nytimes.com/2021/04/29/us/…
Obama also substantially increased taxes in 2013, after which we ... gained 10 million more jobs 2/
Fwiw, this may represent genuine ignorance. Many GOP figures seem unaware that anything good happened between Reagan and Trump. After all, who that they listen to will tell them? 3/
This gets at a broader thing I've been noticing since Bush: the demand that hacks and thugs be granted an unearned presumption of dignity because of the office they hold 1/
Once upon a time it was "how dare you suggest that THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES" is leading us to war on false pretenses 2/
Under Trump it was "how dare you suggest that THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES" is betraying the nation to Putin, and lining his own pocket at taxpayer expense 3/
The Census confirms what we already basically knew: stalling population growth. Especially striking if you look at prime working years 1/
But isn't less population pressure on the environment a good thing? Yes, in some ways. But given how we run our economy, two big problems. First, fewer workers to take care of seniors 2/
Second, reduced investment demand, which pushes interest rates down, which in turn makes it hard to fight recessions (10-year rate minus 3-year average core inflation) 3/
Tempted to say "Hey, I never ignored it." But when I published The Age of Diminished Expectations in 1990, the editors wanted me to remove the chapter on soaring inequality, saying that nobody cared 1/
That said, international trade economists were very aware of inequality as an issue in the 90s, because we had a model — Stolper-Samuelson — that told us to worry, and a fact — rising imports of manufactures from developing countries — that played right into that model 2/
In retrospect, too much focus on college-noncollege gap and not on wider issues, but some of us were well aware of those too. I talked about the 1% in that 1990 book 3/