Live from the BernieBro Asylum: Today's exhibit on why we need a better press corps: Adam Davidson. He says that it's "useful" to bullshit your voters by promising them that your policies will have effects that they will not:
: Bernienomics Might Not Be Feasible — But It’s Useful: "On this most fundamental question--about the potential [of Bernie's policies] to transform the economy, to blow past trade-offs and constraints...
...the economics profession can’t follow him to the promised land. Gunnels told me to consult... Gerald Friedman.... Friedman wrote a highly criticized paper that argued that Sanders’s policies would lead to an unprecedented 5.3 percent growth rate in the American gross domestic product. Friedman himself acknowledges it is a fringe view that, he guesses, fewer than 4 percent of economists would share. And incidentally, Friedman says he’s voting for Hillary Clinton. Of course, for many people who support Sanders, the fact that his ideas run counter to decades of established economics is exactly the point. Some economists, like Dean Baker and Robert Reich, told me they like Sanders not because of his take on any technical debate but because he has forced the profession--and everybody else--to take his issues seriously.... Sanders’s idealism has sent a clear message to traditional economists on the left: They are taking too long to develop answers to the problems of inequality and the corrosive effects of concentrated wealth.
A press that approves of bullshit is really not what we need in America today.
