.. If anything, we should be using this time of relatively full employment to pay down debt, or at least reduce it relative to G.D.P.
.. They are providing more stimulus to an economy with 4 percent unemployment than they were willing to allow an economy with 8 percent unemployment.
.. But let’s be serious: Their views haven’t changed at all. They never really cared about debt and deficits; it was a fraud all along. All that has changed is the fact that a Republican now sits in the White House.
.. How do we know Republicans were never sincere about the deficit? It was obvious, even at the time, to anyone who looked at their fiscal proposals. These proposals always involved giant tax cuts for the wealthy — funny how that worked — offset by savage cuts in social benefits.
.. even at the peak of their deficit-hawk posturing, all Republicans really had to offer was redistribution from the poor to the rich.
.. pretending to care about the deficit served several useful political purposes. It was a way to push for cuts in social programs. It was also a way to hobble Obama’s presidency.
.. Republicans weren’t just vehemently opposed to fiscal stimulus; they were also vehemently opposed to monetary stimulus. Basically, they were against anything that might help the economy on President Obama’s watch.
.. imposing austerity in a depressed economy, then running up the deficit when we’re already near full employment
About washing machines: The legal basis of the new tariff is a finding by the United States International Trade Commission that the industry has been injured by rising imports. The definition of “injury” is a bit peculiar: The commission admitted that the domestic industry “did not suffer a significant idling of productive facilities,” and that “there has been no significant unemployment or underemployment.” Nonetheless, the commission argued that production and employment should have expanded more than it did given the economy’s growth between 2012 and 2016 (you know, the Obama-era boom Trump insisted was fake).
.. Everything we know about the Trump administration suggests that hurting renewables is actually a good thing from its point of view. As I said, this is an administration of dirty old men.
.. Over all, there are around five times as many people working, in one way or another, for the solar energy sector as there are coal miners.
.. Last fall, Rick Perry, the energy secretary, tried to impose a rule that would in effect have forced electricity grids to subsidize coal and nuclear plants. The rule was shot down, but it showed what these guys want. From their point of view, destroying solar jobs is probably a good thing.
.. what’s good for the Koch brothers may not be good for America (or the world), but it’s good for G.O.P. campaign finance. Partly it’s about blue-collar voters, who still imagine that Trump can bring back coal jobs. (In 2017 the coal industry added 500, that’s right, 500 jobs. That’s 0.0003 percent of total U.S. employment.)
.. It’s also partly about cultural nostalgia: Trump and others recall the heyday of fossil fuels as a golden age
.. But I suspect that it’s also about a kind of machismo, a sense that real men don’t soak up solar energy; they burn stuff instead.
.. You shouldn’t even call it protectionism, since its direct effect will be to destroy far more jobs than it creates. Plus it’s bad for the environment. So much winning!
OK, so some economists got it wrong. That happens to everyone, unless you’re too cowardly to make any testable predictions at all. But what you’re supposed to do when things don’t play out as you predicted is (a) acknowledge the mistake (b) try to understand what went wrong (c) revise your framework in an attempt to avoid making the same mistake again. I think I can fairly claim to have followed these rules.
What’s striking about the economists who predicted runaway inflation in 2009-2011 is that as far as I can tell none of them has even gotten to step (a), acknowledging their mistake
.. And so today we have Marvin Goodfriend, nominated to the Fed board, simply refusing to answer questions about why he thought inflation was about to explode and reducing unemployment was impossible: