We Need to Hold the Line on Analytical Standards Here: Bernie Sanders Blogging
I have learned an immense amount for Gerald Friedman, and I will always be extremely grateful to him for being one of the two people who thought so highly of my undergraduate thesis to think it deserved a summa.
But.
Arguing that Bernie Sanders's policies are likely to produce a 5.3%/year real GDP growth rate is not just wrong--not just likely to read to false conclusions about the likely impacts of the policies--but further opens the gates of hell for the likes of Arthur Laffer and John Cochrane to dance around and get their garbage into the press.
We had held the line, with no economists of note and reputation except Hubbard, Mankiw, Cogan, Feldstein, and Cochrane daring to endorse JEB!!'s 4%/year growth forecast--and with the press overwhelmingly treating it as the joke that it is. This kind of thing puts that limited but real victory in danger.
So line me up with Paul--and with Laura, Austen, Christina and Alan here:
: Worried Wonks: "I’ve tweeted this out, but want to point out that this is a pretty big deal...
...Four former Democratic chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers have put out a letter warning that Bernie Sanders’s economic program contains a very worrisome amount of voodoo:
We are concerned to see the Sanders campaign citing extreme claims by Gerald Friedman about the effect of Senator Sanders’s economic plan—claims that cannot be supported by the economic evidence. Friedman asserts that your plan will have huge beneficial impacts on growth rates, income and employment that exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans about the impact of their tax cut proposals.
As much as we wish it were so, no credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes. Making such promises runs against our party’s best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic. These claims undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda and make it that much more difficult to challenge the unrealistic claims made by Republican candidates.
In Sanders’s case, I don’t think it’s ideology as much as being not ready for prime time — and also of not being willing to face up to the reality that the kind of drastic changes he’s proposing, no matter how desirable, would produce a lot of losers as well as winners.
And if your response to these concerns is that they’re all corrupt, all looking for jobs with Hillary, you are very much part of the problem.
: An Open Letter from Past CEA Chairs to Senator Sanders and Professor Gerald Friedman: "Dear Senator Sanders and Professor Gerald Friedman,
We are former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers for Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. For many years, we have worked to make the Democratic Party the party of evidence-based economic policy. When Republicans have proposed large tax cuts for the wealthy and asserted that those tax cuts would pay for themselves, for example, we have shown that the economic facts do not support these fantastical claims. We have applied the same rigor to proposals by Democrats, and worked to ensure that forecasts of the effects of proposed economic policies, from investment in infrastructure, to education and training, to health care reforms, are grounded in economic evidence. Largely as a result of efforts like these, the Democratic party has rightfully earned a reputation for responsibly estimating the effects of economic policies.
We are concerned to see the Sanders campaign citing extreme claims by Gerald Friedman about the effect of Senator Sanders’s economic plan—claims that cannot be supported by the economic evidence. Friedman asserts that your plan will have huge beneficial impacts on growth rates, income and employment that exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans about the impact of their tax cut proposals.
As much as we wish it were so, no credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes. Making such promises runs against our party’s best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic. These claims undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda and make it that much more difficult to challenge the unrealistic claims made by Republican candidates.
UPDATE: Amazing how little misinformation spread across my screen by egg avatars and others can start moving my needle from being broadly pro-Sanders to being anti-...
Think before you bullshit. Comments purged and shut down.
