Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

The awesomely smart and industrious Chye-Ching Huang of the CBPP praises Greg Leiserson's must-read guide to understanding last December's tax bill. There was space for a growth-promoting corporate tax cut that did not widen income inequality that much. That space was occupied, instead, by something that manages to increase inequality sharply while reducing projected national income—three steps backward for equitable growth.

The Sisyphean work of getting to people to recognize that the Reagan "morning in America" boom was a standard Keynesian reaction to a larger federal deficit in a time of high unemployment—it continues: Menzie Chinn: The Reagan Tax Cuts and Defense Buildup: Supply-Side Miracle or Keynesian Stimulus?: "This set of outcomes does not deny the existence of some supply side effect—the dots in Figure 2 don’t line up exactly on a straight line—but the overall pattern seems to be more consistent with an AD shift from the tax cuts and spending increases (combined with monetary policy relaxation) as opposed to a supply-side scenario as laid out by Wanniski and Laffer.... Bruce Bartlett, who was there at the inception, reminds me of Barry Ritholtz’s review of Reaganomics. See also Bartlett’s piece on the subject..."

British governance appears at least as bad today as American governance even though they are not helmed by an unstable and corrupt kleptocrat: Simon Wren-Lewis: Delusions of National Power: "Inevitable that the UK would stay in the Customs Union (CU) and the Single Market (SM)...

The New York Times tried to suck up to the eminent and intelligent Alice Dreger the wrong way. Boy! Is she pissed! And she only gets pissed when getting pissed helps fix a significant problem: that the New York Times today is a central part of a "postapocalyptic, postmodern media landscape where thoughtfulness and nonpartisan inquiry go to die": Alice Dreger: Why I Escaped the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’: "I asked what this group supposedly had in common...

I can't help it. Every time I see a 60 plus male from the South or the Midwest, I cannot help but think: "There goes an easily grifted moron!" The strong that has to be rolled uphill to keep Trumpland from falling further behind the rest of the country is very large and heavy: Paul Krugman: What’s the Matter With Trumpland?: "Regional convergence in per-capita incomes has stopped dead. And the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems...

Time to go read The Federalist Papers, written when it was not a slam-dunk belief anywhere that a republic could be sustained, again: Barry Eichengreen: China and the Future of Democracy: "Growing geostrategic influence, rising soft power, and, above all, continued economic success suggest that other countries will see China as a model to emulate...

Gabrielle Coppola: Trump’s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Missouri Its Harley Factory: "Harley-Davidson Inc.’s chief executive officer said he may have kept a plant open in Missouri if the U.S. had stayed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from last year...

Kevin Drum: What Made Marxism So Deadly?: "[Noah] Smith has the causation backward here...

The Brexiters never had a plan for what they would do if they won the referendum. And they still do not have a plan. I do not see a road other than "transitional" arrangements that keep things as they are without the UK having any voice in Brussels—"transitional" arrangements that will keep getting indefinitely extended: Robert Hutton: Stuck In the Middle: These Are Theresa May's Four Brexit Options: "Her inner Brexit Cabinet has rejected her proposed customs relationship with the European Union...

If the U.S. wants to avoid a very damaging outcome to all this, the less immoderate Republicans and the Democrats need to be thinking hard about how to take power away from Donald Trump on trade matters—and national security matters—come January 5, 2019: Martin Wolf: Donald Trump declares trade war on China: "The Trump administration has presented China with an ultimatum on trade...

National Taxpayers Union: More Than 1,100 Economists Join NTU to Voice Opposition to Tariffs, Protectionism: "The lowering of trade barriers between nations has been one of the great achievements of the global economic system in the postwar era...

The White House press corps: working for their sources first, their bosses second, and themselves third. Do they view themselves as working for their readers at all?: Katha Pollitt: A Press Corps Full of Aunt Lydias: "The real reason... would call into question the underlying presumption of the dinner, which is that there is no price for 'access'...

Ashley Feinberg: Leak: The Atlantic Had A Meeting About Kevin Williamson. It Was A Liberal Self-Reckoning: "In a staff meeting, Jeffrey Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed the hiring and firing of a conservative writer. But it wound up being about a lot more than that...

The extremely sharp Joe Romm: Trump voters hurt most by Trump policies, new study finds: "Failure to stop business-as-usual global warming will deliver a severe economic blow to Southern states, a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds..." and he sends us to: Riccardo Colacito, Bridget Hoffman and Toan Phan: Temperature and Growth: A Panel Analysis of the United States: "Seasonal temperatures have significant and systematic effects on the U.S. economy...

Republicans purge every thinker who was correct. Republican economists who were right about 2007-2012 are now, as best as I can see, all ex-Republican economists. And the same dynamic has long been working in the national security space: Gene Healy (2015): Think Tanks and the Iraq War: "It would be even better if the GOP’s 2016 contenders weren’t still, 12 years later, so eager to seek foreign policy advice from people who got the Iraq War Question spectacularly wrong...

This phenomenon is truly deplorable, on many levels: Gillian Tett: True believers: why US evangelicals support Trump: "80 per cent of white evangelicals voted for him in the 2016 election...

I do think that this is the best thing on Paul Ryan's retirement: Alexandra Petri: Paul Ryan can’t possibly have made a deal with the Devil: "His piano-playing has not improved. He has not become any wiser. He has not been able to travel widely and see the great sights of the present and past...

Should not the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School bigtime rethink the support services it provides to potential donor admittees, and do so pronto? He does have what Wharton calls an economics degree: Justin Wolfers: "If OPEC were boosting oil prices,

Eight years of Governor Sam Brownback has seen Kansas lose 8% of its jobs relative to the national average. Now Kansas is Ground Zero for Trump's trade war. Joshua Green: Chinese Sorghum Tariffs Will Hit Hard in Trump-friendly Kansas: "Trump’s Trade War Hits Another Red State: What’s the matter with Kansas? It’ll be hardest hit by new Chinese tariffs...

Credulous business-friendly reporters willing to publish cries of "labor shortage" without evidence are annoying: Neel Kashkari: "The extreme emotions around the labor market 'historic, severe worker shortages'. Sounds like a real crisis. Is it?...

Alessandro Nicita, Marcelo Olarreaga, and Peri da Silva: [A trade war will increase average tariffs by 32 percentage points(https://voxeu.org/article/trade-war-will-increase-average-tariffs-32-percentage-points): "A trade war will increase average tariffs by 32 percentage points...

"If getting China to pay what it owes for technology were the goal, you’d expect the U.S.... to make specific demands... and... build a coalition", a Tran-Pacific Partnership, so to speak: Paul Krugman: The Art of the Flail: "Whenever investors suspect that Donald Trump will really go through with his threats of big tariff increases... stocks plunge...

The idea that the collapse of the aristocratic Roman Free State into the Roman Empire was due to wild dissipative partying—luxus, a vice caught from the Greeks and "Asiatics", giving rise to avaritia, which then leads to ambitio and cupido imperii—was originally a meme put forward by those I regard as the true villains—plutocrats and political norm breakers—to avoid responsibility: A.W. Lintott (1972): Imperial Expansion and Moral Decline in the Roman Republic: "Imperial expansion in general did of course have divisive economic and political effects...

Imposing tariffs on intermediate inputs is especially bad, especially destructive: Chad Brown: The Element of Surprise Is a Bad Strategy for a Trade War: "Trump’s decision to impose restrictions on intermediate inputs and capital equipment is a step backward...

@#$#@!*&%%!! Ana Swanson: Trump Proposes Rejoining Trans-Pacific Partnership to Shield Farmers From Trade War: "President Trump... [said] he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership...

Justin Fox: Paul Ryan's Roadmap Was an Epic Fiscal Failure: "Paul Ryan did not cause the financial crisis. He has nonetheless failed pretty spectacularly... his actions have made the situation much worse than it had to be...

Jonathan Chait: Trump Attacks Comey for Handing Him the Presidency: "Comey all but confirms the Democrats’ complaints.... He considered Clinton a lead-pipe cinch to win...

Robert Skidelsky: The Advanced Economies’ Lost Decade: "Policy interventions immediately following the 2008 crash did make a difference.... The 2008 collapse was as steep as that of 1929, but it lasted for a much shorter time...

Lisa Mascaro and Bill Barrow: Ryan Retirement Fuels House GOP Desperation To Maintain Control: “'It’s like Eisenhower resigning right before D-Day', said Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia...

Matthew Yglesias: House Speaker Paul Ryan’s retirement: good riddance: "The many lives of Paul Ryan: Ryan joined Congress in 1998 but first really made his mark during the Social Security privatization wars of 2004-’05...

Ezra Klein (2012): A not-very-truthful speech in a not-very-truthful campaign: "Honestly? I didn't want us to write this piece...

Steve M.: NEEDY, RAGE-FILLED TRUMP IS THE PERFECT CANDIDATE FOR CONSERVATIVES NOW: "Past presidents, most of whom were emotional adults, knew they'd be attacked and tried to appear above the fray...

Paul Krugman: Unicorns of the Intellectual Right: "Economics... a field with a relatively strong conservative presence.... [But] trying to find influential conservative economic intellectuals is basically a hopeless task...

Heidi Moore: "What is going on at the Atlantic?](https://twitter.com/moorehn/status/983049473386524672): 'Too far'?" It’s the genteel form of white ethnicism...

Mark Mazower: Opinion | Anti-Semitism and Britain’s Hall of Mirrors: "I am not sure that my grandfather would have seen much change in the Labour Party...

Justin Fox: Beware Economists Who Warn of an Entitlement Explosion: "A quintet of notable Republican economists... Michael J. Boskin, John H. Cochrane, John F. Cogan, George P. Shultz and John B. Taylor...

Henry Farrell: Who has any use for conservative intellectuals?: "The firing of Kevin Williamson has led, predictably, to outrage from other conservatives, and in particular from anti-Trumpers like Bill Kristol and Erick Erickson...

Noah Smith: "Yep. Restrictionists lie when they say that our current system is 'open borders'. Restrictionists lie when they say Democrats want open borders. Restrictionists lie, all the time, about everything.

Larry Summers: No, “Obamasclerosis” wasnt a real problem: "The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip... finds credible... claims that President Barack Obama’s policies... materially slowed economic growth...

Mark Antonio Wright: Oklahoma’s Teachers & Education Funding Issues: "No reasonable examination of the facts can avoid laying blame at the feet of Republican governor Mary Fallin...

Joe Pompeo: “Journalism Is Not About Creating Safe Spaces”: Inside the Woke Civil War at The New York Times: "For someone like Dean Baquet, the Times’s then 60-year-old executive editor, the dominant emotion was exhilaration about this new national epic...

Morgan Gstalter: McConnell: Midterms could be 'a Category 3, 4 or 5' storm for GOP: "'We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don’t know whether it’s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5'...

Paul Krugman: Trade Wars, Stranded Assets, and the Stock Market: "Even a trade war that drastically rolled back globalization wouldn’t impose costs on the economy comparable to the kinds of movement we’ve seen in stock prices...

Charles F. Manski (2011): Genes, Eyeglasses, and Social Policy: "Suppose that nearsightedness derives entirely from the presence of a particular allele of a specific gene...

Martin Wolf: How China can avoid a trade war with the US: "The objectives of these US actions are unclear... to halt alleged misbehaviour... or, as the labelling of China as a “strategic competitor” suggests, is it to halt China’s technological progress altogether—an aim that is unachievable and certainly non-negotiable...

Max Boot: Why I changed my mind about John Bolton: "To accommodate... Trump, the Republican Party has betrayed its principles on issues including Russia, immigration, free trade and fiscal austerity...

Ezra Klein: Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science : "This is not 'forbidden knowledge'. It is America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality...

Thomas Piketty: Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017): "Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US...

Kevin Drum: National Review Still Has a Race Problem: "The Atlantic recently hired... Kevin Williamson... [who] believes abortion is murder and... any woman who gets an abortion should be executed...

Paul Krugman: Globalization: What Did We Miss?: "Anyone who worked on the political economy of trade policy knew that fights over tariffs look very much as if they come out of a specific-factors world...

Quinn Slobodian: The World Economy and the Color Line: Wilhelm Röpke, Apartheid, and the White Atlantic: "The article takes 'white Atlantic' as a useful term to describe the worldview that Röpke and his collaborators cultivated in this period...

A Treasury Secretary None Worse than Whom Can Be Conceived: I give up. Steve Mnuchin is the worst Treasury Secretary that can be conceived—an ontological singularity of sorts a la Saint Anselm of Canterbury. Phenomenally underbriefed and uncurious: Manu Raju: "Told line-item veto was ruled unconstitutional, Mnuchin says: 'Congress can pass a rule that allows them to do it'...

Matthew Yglesias: "The highbrow intellectual leaders of the modern conservative movement explicitly conceptualized it as a white nationalist undertaking. Trump is true to this legacy and his intra-movement critics are the innovators...

Shawn Donnan: Trump is about to launch a trade war with no way out: "Business chiefs have pleaded for the Trump administration not to impose tariffs on electronics, shoes and other imports from China that go far beyond the steel and aluminium he has already targeted...

Ed Luce: Anti-Semitism in the age of Donald Trump: "Whether you are a Muslim, Hispanic, African-American or a globalist, America’s president has made it safe to disparage you...

David Zilbermann: What economics and cars can tell us about guns: "Willie Brown states it as a matter of fact that the NRA is “the political arm of a gun manufacturing industry intent on increasing sales..."

Simon Wren-Lewis: Beliefs about Brexit: "I want to... ask why public opinion seems oblivious to the failures of all those claims before the negotiations that ‘we hold all the cards’ compared to the reality that the UK has largely agreed to the terms set out by the EU...

Live from the Baboon Cage: Marcy Wheeler: "'What did the president do, and what the fuck was he thinking when he did it?' are questions not about the cover-up, but about the substantive crime. And that's the question Mueller's Watergate prosecutor has now posed to the president's lawyers..."

David Brady: We... would be delighted by... lift[ing] all single mothers out of poverty.... Making a substantial fraction of people not poor would reduce poverty. Duh: "In @washingtonpost, Robert Samuelson has written a 'critique' of our NY Times piece...f

Live from the Baboon Cage: Steve M.: TRUMP—NOT COMPLETELY OFF THE CHAIN?: '@Tara_Mckelvey: "Whisked" is right – members of the pool were told to rush - (i.e. run) - to the vans in the motorcade at the White House. We're here at the golf club now, waiting for developments...'

Paul Krugman: Trump and Trade and Zombies: "Until now, the most visible neo-goldbug in the administration has been David Malpass... the former chief economist of Bear Stearns...

Those beats won't sweeten themselves!: Zack Kanter: "Absolutely bizarre, fawning NYT piece [by Zach MacFarquhar]. I’m not sure I’ve read anything quite like it in recent memory..."

Martin Feldstein: The Real Reason for Trump’s Steel and Aluminum Tariffs: "The US tariffs will... increase the likelihood that China will accelerate the reduction in subsidized excess capacity...

Dan Shaviro: Another new publication!: "'Evaluating the New U.S. Pass-Through Rules'...

Brad DeLong (2012): Ahem! Niall Ferguson Fire-His-Ass-from-NewsBeast-Now Department: Niall Ferguson writes

FT: Thoughts for the weekend: "'To wit, Phil Gramm was right: We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession.' - 2008 comments from President Trump's new economic advisor [Larry Kudlow]..."

Paul Bedard: Larry Kudlow predicts 4%-5% growth, 'investment boom': "Larry Kudlow, picked to be President Trump’s new economic adviser...

Jonathan Chait: New Trump Economist Kudlow Has Been Wrong About Everything: "The Republican Party... supply-side economics... not merely a generalized preference for small government with low taxes...

Ed Kilgore: What the Christian Right Sowed, Trump Reaped: "Gerson is especially insightful [in saying]: Conservative Evangelicals didn’t back Trump despite his unsavory personality...

Dean Baker: Doesn't Anyone Care If the Trump Tax Cuts Are Working?: "Capital goods orders for January...

Josh Barro and Isaac Chotiner: Policy without politics, immigration, and Trump’s self-awareness: Isaac Chotiner: "Are you enjoying this moment? By 'this moment', I mean the last 14 to 15 months of being a political commentator?...

Dani Rodrik: Trump’s Trade Gimmickry: "The imbalances and inequities generated by the global economy cannot be tackled by protecting a few politically well-connected industries, using manifestly ridiculous national security considerations as an excuse...

Bill McBride: Larry Kudlow is usually wrong... "...and frequently absurd, as an example, in June 2005 Kudlow wrote...