Home > Work > Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
21 " To put this in international perspective, Mississippi now is about as poor relative to the coastal states as Sicily is relative to northern Italy. "
― Paul Krugman , Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
22 " But what’s happening in the Senate right now really does deserve Trumpian superlatives. The bill Republican leaders are trying to ram through this week without hearings, without time for even a basic analysis of its likely economic impact, is the biggest tax scam in history. It’s such a big scam that it’s not even clear who’s being scammed—middle-class taxpayers, people who care about budget deficits, or both. One thing is clear, however: one way or another, the bill would hurt most Americans. The only big winners would be the wealthy—especially those who mainly collect income from their assets rather than working for a living—plus tax lawyers and accountants who would have a field day exploiting the many loopholes the legislation creates. "
23 " Any political analyst who didn’t see this coming should find a different profession. After all, “starve the beast”—cut taxes on the rich, then use the resulting deficits as an excuse to hack away at the safety net—has been G.O.P. strategy for decades. "
24 " Why is it so hard to say clearly that privatization would worsen, not improve, Social Security’s finances? "
25 " But let’s be clear: G.O.P. cynicism also involves a lot of contempt for the mainstream news media. Historically, media organizations have been remarkably unwilling to call out lies; the urge to play it safe with he-said-she-said reporting has very much worked to Republicans’ advantage, given the reality that the modern G.O.P. lies a lot more than Democrats do. Even the most blatant falsehood tends to be reported with headlines about how “Democrats say” it’s false, not that it’s actually false. "
26 " Political scientists studying the behavior of billionaires find that while many of them push for lower taxes, they do so more or less in secret, presumably because they realize just how unpopular their position really is. This “stealth politics” is, by the way, one reason billionaires can seem much more liberal than they actually are—only the handful of liberals among them speak out in public. "
27 " memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, "
28 " social democracy”—a market economy, but with a strong public social safety net and regulations that limit the range of actions businesses can take in pursuit of profit. "
29 " This book, then, tells a story of the fight for truth, justice, and the anti-zombie way. I don’t know if that fight can ever be fully won, although it can be lost. But it’s definitely a cause worth fighting for. "
30 " Above all, he took America to war on false pretenses, and hundreds of thousands died as a result. Seeing voters reward that vileness was not a happy thing. "
31 " So Bush won reelection, as I used to joke, by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists. "
32 " Tal vez no necesitaríamos la Seguridad Social si la gente corriente fuese de verdad tan perfectamente racional y tuviese tanta visión de futuro como a los economistas les gusta suponer en sus modelos (y a la gente de derechas en su propaganda). "
33 " O.K., Lerner: His argument was that countries that (a) rely on fiat money they control and (b) don’t borrow in someone else’s currency don’t face any debt constraints, because they can always print money to service their debt. What they face, instead, is an inflation constraint: too much fiscal stimulus will cause an overheating economy. So their budget policies should be entirely focused on getting the level of aggregate demand right: the budget deficit should be big enough to produce full employment, but not so big as to produce inflationary overheating. "
34 " And Milton Friedman was wrong: in the face of a really big shock, which pushes the economy into a liquidity trap, the central bank can’t prevent a depression. "
35 " news media are either propaganda organs or desperately afraid of declaring, in any straightforward way, that politicians are wrong, no matter how much what they say is at odds with the truth. "
36 " If reports about a candidate talk about how something “raises questions,” creates “shadows,” or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air. "
37 " It’s increasingly clear, for example, that monopsony power is depressing wages; but that’s not all it does. Concentration of hiring among a few firms, plus things like noncompete clauses and tacit collusion that reinforce their market power, don’t just reduce your wage if you’re hired. They also reduce or eliminate your options if you’re mistreated: quit because you have an abusive boss or have problems with company policy, and you may have real trouble getting a new job. "
38 " So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe—and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause. "
39 " In practice, you can’t be a modern Republican in good standing unless you deny the reality of global warming, assert that it has natural causes, or insist that nothing can be done about it without destroying the economy. You also have to either accept or acquiesce in wild claims that the overwhelming evidence for climate change is a hoax, that it has been fabricated by a vast global conspiracy of scientists. Why "
40 " we’re now ruled by people who are willing to endanger civilization for the sake of political expediency, not to mention increased profits for their fossil-fuel friends. About "