Check out Tuesday’s newsletter!
|
|
From The Reporter’s Notebook
Former Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post criticizing the Treasury Department’s decision to knock former President Andrew Jackson the back of the bill and put legendary abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the front, TPM’s Kristin Salaky wrote. He blamed politically correct culture for the change and called white privilege a myth. “Any white person whose ancestral relations trace to the American South now risks being characterized as having roots based on bigotry and undeserved privilege,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, race relations are at their worst point in decades.”
Agree or Disagree?
Josh Marshall: “Early this month, Cruz emerged as the only conceivable challenger to Trump. Indeed, the party machinery was betting almost everything on him. Yet antipathy to Cruz was so great that even as they were placing their future in his hands, virtually no leading Republicans (especially his Senate colleagues) were willing to do as little as to endorse him! Think about that. There’s no better measure of the degree to which the man is reviled. What does it all mean? Very little has actually changed since early March when Trump’s nomination seemed like something close to an inevitability. If Ted Cruz wasn’t widely hated by virtually everybody – and if he’d been able to get Kasich out of the race – there might have been some chance to shift the odds. But both of those obstacles were and remain immovable.”
BUZZING: Today in the Hive
From a TPM Prime member: “Everything about economics is “over the long term”. Therein lies the risk of meddling, as well. Something you do today to stimulate the economy doesn’t work immediately. Inject money into the economy by the Fed buying treasury notes, and it takes time for the banks to lend it, and then for those loan proceeds to be spent, and deposited and then those deposits (minus reserves) to be loaned out, etc. So they economy starts to heat up. But political people work on a two year election time frame and they can’t wait. Also, too, unemployed people are suffering because of the sluggishness. So pressure is to do it again, do it more, it didn’t work the first time. Then there is the very real risk of overshooting the goals. And the risk here of heating up the economy this way is inflation. Like you said early, when the economy is booming, there are more tax revenues collected. But if we are in an inflationary period, those tax revenues buy you less and less over time. This monetary theory is all well and good but they depend on this multiplier effect – money being loaned out. Two things can happen to hose that – banks don’t lend (financial crisis of 07-08) or business/people don’t borrow (after 9/11). The economy gets arteriosclerosis. It is THIS kind of environment that Keynes said “in the long run we are all dead”, and it is in THIS environment that government is urged to put money directly into the economy, via works projects or transfer payments.”
Related: Rick Perry said Obama killed Keynes.
Have something to add? Become a Prime member and join the discussion here.
|
|
