Sure, schooling Nobel Prize-winning Ph.D.s from the London Schol of Economics on the folly/hypocrisy of cherry-picking is an ugly job, but someone’s got to do it! And who better, really, than someone with a BA in English from Oberlin College? Yeah, ole Daron put his foot in it, all right, and I’m just the guy…
Tag: economic growth
OMG! I’m turning into Larry Summers! But not all the time!
The truth can be ugly, can’t it? Here are, courtesy of frequent good guy yet employed by the American Enterprise Institute James Pethokoukis, a number of cogent (I think) charts to illustrate a recent cogent (I think) talk by Larry at the Peterson Institute for International Economics titled “What Should the 2023 Washington Consensus Be?”,…
Yo, Fareed Zakaria! Biden administration national security advisor Jake Sullivan is not “fiercely intelligent”! Unless by “fiercely intelligent” you mean “totally stupid”!
The good news is that we have a “Biden Doctrine”, says the WashPost’s Fareed Zakaria. The bad news is, it’s a Biden doctrine. Innocently spelling out the bad news for us is Biden national security dude Jake Sullivan—“fiercely intelligent”, Fareed tells us, fiercely, as though a little afraid that Jake might punch him out at…
Banning TikTok pushes buttons right and left.
Why ban TikTok? Because China! Because Internet! Banning TikTok may or may not be the answer to a maiden’s prayer, but for many Democrats and Republicans, it is a much needed balm for all their wounds, or so they are so foolish to believe. Democrats and Republicans are unhappy because neither can command the support…
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. surprises the heck out of me
He sure the heck does. In his stunningly prescient 1997 essay, Has Democracy a Future? (Foreign Affairs—may be behind a paywall), bow-tied, martini-sippin’ Artie,1 whom I frequently dismissed as the jerkiest of knee-jerk liberals, essentially writes the future as us young folks have lived it in the 21st century. The Arthur Schlesinger I read always…
Great Dan Drezner, Terrible Dan Drezner
Why do I wax hot and cold on poor old Dan Drezner? Because Dan does so himself. Sometimes, Dan is so hot he’s boiling, or perhaps I should say “incandescent”! I mean, the light he sheds in his recent column, Is the United States capable of industrial policy in 2021?, is amazing. Because Dan’s answer,…
Good Dan Drezner, Bad Dan Drezner
What would life be without Dan Drezner? Dan is an ever-flowing cornucopia of ideas, most of them irritating, but not a few thoughtful and worthy of consideration. Let’s start with the good, a double surprise, really, because not only is Dan’s column from a few months back, Free Trade With Benefits a good one, for…
President Biden proposes a $2.3 trillion infrastructure package. What could go wrong? Well, I can think of a few things.
Sure I can. For example, suppose we spend that $2,300,000,000,000 and end up with 1,000,000+ $2,000,000 bike shelters, like the one at the East Falls Church, Va. Metro station. Since that shed, the time that I visited it, was only utilized to, you know, 2% capacity, a lot of people—mostly Republicans, of course—might think we…
Paul Krugman is smarter than I thought!
Okay, perhaps I should have said “Paul Krugman has a far more sophisticated grasp of the uniquely divided nature of the American working class than he had demonstrated in many of his previous public comments”, but heads like that don’t get the clicks, and I don’t have to tell you that “Literature R Us”, frequently…
O My Democratic Party, Where the F*ck Art Thou?
Well, good question. If Happy Days aren’t here again, and they aren’t, life is better, definitely. To have the House of Representatives back in Democratic hands after eight long years is definitely a pleasure if not a treasure. As one representative put it “Being in the majority is a thousand times better.” Furthermore, the party’s…