Feb
17
2025

Should You Be Frightened or Amused?

Arnaud Bertrand can't seem to make up his mind, but I will go with "amused". See what you think.

Background: this is from last May, when (indeed) Jared Bernstein chaired the Council of Economic Advisers, a position he held for approximately the last year and a half of the Biden Administration. (Before that, he was a member of the council under chair Cecilia Rouse.) His Senate confirmation as chair was kind of a squeaker: 50-49 on a straight party-line vote.

According to Wikipedia, Jared's undergrad degree was a Bachelor of Music from the Manhattan School of Music. His graduate degrees were a Master of Social Work from Hunter College, followed by a Doctor of Social Work in social welfare from Columbia.

The clip, by the way, is from the 2023 movie Finding the Money, which is unabashed advocacy for Modern Monetary Theory. Its IMDB blurb:

An underdog group of economists is on a mission to instigate a paradigm shift by flipping our understanding of the national debt, and the nature of money, upside down.

But from the Wikipedia blurb (links and footnotes elided):

Modern monetary theory or modern money theory (MMT) is a heterodox macroeconomic theory that describes currency as a public monopoly and unemployment as evidence that a currency monopolist is overly restricting the supply of the financial assets needed to pay taxes and satisfy savings desires. According to MMT, governments do not need to worry about accumulating debt since they can pay interest by printing money. MMT argues that the primary risk once the economy reaches full employment is inflation, which acts as the only constraint on spending. MMT also argues that inflation can be controlled by increasing taxes on everyone, to reduce the spending capacity of the private sector.

MMT is opposed to the mainstream understanding of macroeconomic theory and has been criticized heavily by many mainstream economists. MMT is also strongly opposed by members of the Austrian school of economics.

For even more pointed MMT criticism, see the Foundation for Economic Education: Modern Monetary Theory Isn't Modern. It's Antiquated.

I believe MMT also fails the simple "Show me one country where your daffy theory has been successfully implemented" test.

So, yeah, these people are nuts. Which explains a lot about Biden Administration economic policy.

Also of note:

  • One in a series, I'm sure. Mark Antonio Wright writes on Trump’s Indefensible Proclamation. Specifically, this one:

    No — it’s sobering enough that the Chief Magistrate of our Republic would favorably repeat the words of Napoleon Bonaparte (the quote is perhaps apocryphal) on this subject and his excuses for the reality that he deformed his own republic into an empire, with himself as its monarch. Indeed, it should be sobering enough that such a statement from this president is no shocking event in our politics.

    Napoleon, of course, was a genius in several respects. He was a Great Man, in the sense that he changed history and left his enduring mark on it. He was a general of unrivaled brilliance. He could display physical courage. His charisma and personal magnetism had the power to draw men unto himself, to inspire them. And that he did some “good things,” there is no doubt: He reformed France’s system of education, he built canals, he arguably contributed to the founding of the discipline of Egyptology, among other things. But Napoleon was no republican — his 25-year career was one that almost continually served to warp France, and its laws, for the singular purpose of making himself more powerful.

    In certain similar ways to the French emperor, Donald Trump is a Great Man too. He has changed history, and he may very well leave an enduring mark on it. And, I’m sure, he may do some good things while in office. But after everything we have seen of Trump these last ten years, no American ought be surprised by the fact that our duly elected president cares nothing at all for our Constitution, its Madisonian vision of separation of powers and check and balances, or his oath to protect it and defend it.

    It's telling when the most charitable interpretation of Trump's tweet is "Well, he probably said that only to yank peoples' chains."

    He's the Yanker-in-Chief!

  • And smug about it, too. Erick-Woods Erickson argues, convincingly, that Margaret Brennan Is Ignorant.

    Every once in a while, a prominent and highly paid member of the elite American press corps says something so ignorant and foolish that one must marvel at the combination of arrogance and stupidity and wonder how anyone can take this person seriously on any topic.

    Margaret Brennan is the host of CBS News’s “Face the Nation” and, for all the problems you or I may have with her, today she exceeded those problems and showed herself incapable of covering any issue, including but not limited to the Trump Administration, fairly, capably, and competently.

    Brennan asserted that Nazi Germany not only had free speech but weaponized free speech against Jews to commit the Holocaust.

    Video at the link. As is Erick's easy rebuttal. As we did with Trump above, we'll try to find a charitable interpretation…

    OK, how about: "Margaret Brennan is a mole planted by … um … Karl Rove into CBS News to further destroy its credibility."

  • No. Next question? Ah, well, you should probably read beyond Damon Root's headline anyway: Google Is Big. Does That Make It a Monopoly?

    "This victory against Google is an historic win for the American people." So declared U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in response to District Judge Amit Mehta's August 5, 2024, ruling in United States v. Google, which found the tech giant guilty of amassing and wielding illegal monopoly power over the online search market.

    What Garland left unsaid was that the ruling was also a win for his boss, President Joe Biden, and for his boss's predecessor, former President Donald Trump. That's because the federal case against Google did not originate with the Biden Justice Department; it originated with the Trump Justice Department. "Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy startup with an innovative way to search the emerging internet," the Trump administration argued in its original 2020 lawsuit. "That Google is long gone. The Google of today is a monopoly gatekeeper for the internet." In an increasingly polarized political climate, the Google ruling was hailed as a rare triumph for bipartisanship. At last, the thinking went, the two parties can finally agree on something.

    Yet the ruling was not uniformly celebrated among legal and policy experts. Mehta's judgment "may not hold up on appeal," argued Alden Abbott, former general counsel at the Federal Trade Commission. Instead of harming consumers, Abbott wrote, Google's search engine "likely raised consumer welfare, which the Supreme Court has deemed the overarching goal of antitrust enforcement."

    Nor did the ruling give much weight to consumer choice, effectively ignoring the actions of the many consumers who have opted to use Google search precisely because they view it as the best product around.

    As I've said before, and will undoubtedly say again: there's nothing wrong with Google that Uncle Stupid can't make worse.

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