"Biden’s economic program looks less like a deliberate attempt to move beyond neoliberalism and more like an ongoing commitment to political pragmatism over any particular economic ideology. That it worked is a testament not to Biden’s profound economic foresight, but to the limits of economic analysis. Economists often disagree with one another over important issues, which means that on any given question, a lot of them are just wrong. The Federal Reserve, for instance, spent the past two years trying to generate mass layoffs in order to cure inflation. Those layoffs never materialized—economists aren’t really sure why—and inflation came down anyway, because the Fed had misdiagnosed its cause. The country had been suffering not from an excess of household wealth, but from a pandemic-induced supply crunch."
Full-employment is Biden's True Legacy, by Zachary D. Carter, Slate
Go Joe! And Harris/Walz will be his legacy! Of note, however, the Fed's misdiagnosis is in fact pure neoliberalism. The market, or supply shocks, in this instance, which were obvious at the time to everyone paying attention, and historically expected after any global disruption in normal economic operations, were ignored by the Fed. Like the role of "seller's inflation," in the subsequent surge of inflation, is ignored to this day by the Fed and elite journalists and economic experts. According to these people, unfettered market and corporate behavior cannot be the problem; and should never be regulated or reformed, this is the neoliberal default position. And it's the position of the Fed and mainstream economics and so the mainstream media, coincidentally all owned and paid for by corporate oligarchs. Biden's genius, attributable probably to spending decades in the special interest scrum that is congress, is in calling out and going after the failings of the neoliberal order-- yeah, pragmatically-- while not getting tied up in soapboxing ideological battles with the chattering class, where he'd have to explain to the public via corporate owned media that so-called "free markets" are in fact not very free at all-- as he's already noted after all, "trickle-down economics don't work"-- but are actually costly for workers, the environment, and when you get down to it not even the most pro-growth or not the kind of economic growth that promotes sustainability and the shared general prosperity of all Americans, anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment