J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 394
March 6, 2018
Should-Read: Back in the days when a Republican president...
Should-Read: Back in the days when a Republican president would blame an economic depression on his own biggest contributors: Teddy Roosevelt (1907): Address on the occasion of the laying of the corner stone of the Pilgrim memorial monument: "It may well be that the determination of the Government (in which, gentlemen, it will not waver), to punish certain malefactors of great wealth...
...has been responsible for something of the trouble ; at least to the extent of having caused these men to combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the Government...
Should-Read: Vachel Lindsay: The Congo: A Study of the Ne...
Should-Read: Vachel Lindsay: The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race "Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost...
...Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell,
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell...
March 5, 2018
Should-Read: Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: ���Gluts, boom...
Should-Read: Nick Bunker: Weekend reading: ���Gluts, booms, and crashes��� edition: "Michael Gee looks at troubling data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...
...Ben Bernanke interviews former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen.... The United States currently runs an investment income surplus.... Brad Setser writes about how this surplus is likely to decline soon.... Caitlin Dewey reports... the maximum pre-meal benefit available from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is lower than the average price of meals bought by low-income households in 99 percent of U.S. counties...
Should-Read: Cheri Jacobus: The Coming Monetization of Ho...
Should-Read: Cheri Jacobus: The Coming Monetization of Hope Hicks and Little White Lies: "Hope Hicks never really has been a communications director but rather... the 'comfort goat' placed in the stall of Secretariat to keep him calm...
...The analogy seems... apt. Her youth, messy and irresponsible romantic entanglements, and model good-looks have given her potential criminality, or blind support thereof, an aura of glamour, prompting a spate of gossipy reports and speculation that Hope Hicks is ripe for a $10 million book deal, a movie, and any and all of the accoutrements awarded celebrities, regardless of how that celebrity status was achieved.... Hope Hicks is on track to monetize shame, stupidity, possible obstruction of justice and even potentially conspiracy with Russia to undermine U.S. elections. Her almost comical, chronic, repeated instances of exercising extremely poor judgement on so very many levels is about to become her lottery ticket....
Robert Mueller���s December grilling of her seemed not to faze her. After all, Trump could protect her from him, right? Mueller was just on a politically-driven witch hunt, right? Trump was untouchable, and so were those who remained loyal to him���right? RIGHT??? But then came Congress.... Groomed and coiffed to the hilt for her own ���Fawn Hall��� moment, Trump���s millennial chief pants steamer apparently admitted to Congress to telling a number of Little White Lies on behalf of Trump, mostly to the press.... While Hicks... believed [Trump] would protect her... Trump���s reliance on her and confiding in her on matters relating to Mueller���s Russia investigation instead has placed her in possible severe legal jeopardy.... Trump reportedly berated her for telling even a few truths to Congress, asking how she ���could be that stupid��� despite the fact that lying to Congress is a crime....
Hicks has been present, involved in and privy to a number of matters that have become legal landmines and perhaps even crimes. From fielding press calls for Paul Manafort, helping craft statements that could be obstruction of justice regarding the Russians meeting with Trump staff and son in Trump Tower, to being with the President the day before he fired FBI Director James Comey, she���s up to her neck in this thing. (Corallo quit the Trump team as a result of that legally perilous call.) For some, this might translate into a prison sentence, or at least political and professional banishment. But Hope Hicks is being transformed into a Kardashian.
Should-Read: I never understand why people say things lik...
Should-Read: I never understand why people say things like "we���ve never managed to transform countries that thought of themselves as being monoethnic and monocultural into multiethnic ones". An awful lot of America's "white" people today look exactly like the people the Know-Nothings were trying to keep out. "White"���i.e., not Black���became the multiethnicity umbrella term (for everybody who wasn't Black): Yascha Mounk: Why so many Westerners feel like democracy has failed them: "People no longer feel that the political system is actually delivering for them...
...The stagnation of living standards for ordinary people. From 1935 to 1960, the living standard of the average American doubled.... But living standards haven���t gone up in decades, and now they���re just saying, ���Let���s throw some shit against the wall and see what sticks.��� A lot of this discontent is driven by economic concerns, but the form it takes is cultural or racial. We have to recognize that we���re in the middle of a unique historical experiment: We���ve never managed to transform countries that thought of themselves as being monoethnic and monocultural into multiethnic ones, which is what���s happening in Europe and, to a lesser degree, in the United States. Some of these countries were always multiethnic, but they also had a clear racial hierarchy in which some people had advantages over others. Overturning all that is desirable, but it���s also politically difficult. We���re in the middle of a giant fight. A lot of people are rightly saying, ���We need to live up our ideals,��� but a bunch of people feel they have something lose because of it...
Should-Read: Ann Marie Marciarille: What older people sho...
Should-Read: Ann Marie Marciarille: What older people should know about Medicare and Medicaid: "Not unlike both the 111th Congress that passed the Affordable Care Act and the 115th Congress that recently amended it with the new federal tax bill, we are often in the dark about our own health care and health insurance systems...
...Whether you think this is a matter of being in good company or a national embarrassment, I can think of no problem greater among our citizenry than health insurance illiteracy in general, and about Medicare and Medicaid, in particular. Many of us, for example, learn about the limits of our own individual health care coverage at the clinic check-in window or in the pharmacy check-out line. These are the wrong venues at which to ask questions and consider the implications of plan and coverage design.... The majority of Americans do not understand that Medicare offers only a limited long-term care benefit.... We generalize about health care and health insurance in ways that may be profoundly inaccurate as well as personally disadvantageous.... We bargain in the dark over both our own future and that of our fellow Americans. Older people are at a particular disadvantage in this ���understanding your health insurance��� game because older Medicare beneficiaries are often retired, remote from former employers��� human resource departments and they are often reluctant to burden adult children with the task of attempting to decipher coverage....
Traditional Medicare or Medicare Advantage? Medicare Part D coverage and, if so, what plan? Medicare Supplemental Insurance and, if so, at what level of coverage and cost? We have made Medicare and Medicaid so complex that the quality of our own understanding of the individual implications of enrollment, and also the debate over various reform proposals are degraded.... The UMKC Consortium for Aging in Community is hosting two public events on Medicare and Medicaid in March, in an effort to create a bridge between health care experts and the community���s need for information.... Ordinary intelligent people ought not be excluded from the current debates over the future of Medicare and Medicaid. Indeed, those very people ought to drive the debate...
Should-Read: Anupam B. Jena and Andrew R. Olenski: Reduct...
Should-Read: Anupam B. Jena and Andrew R. Olenski: Reduction in Firearm Injuries during NRA Annual Conventions: "We identified emergency department visits and hospitalizations for firearm injuries during NRA convention dates...
...and during identical days in the 3 weeks before and 3 weeks after NRA conventions in a national database of privately insured patients during 2007 through 2015.... Reductions in firearm injuries during convention dates were largest among men, in the South and West, in states in the highest third of gun-ownership rates, and among people who resided in the state hosting the convention. There was no difference in the proportion of crimes involving a firearm between convention and control dates. These findings are consistent with reductions in firearm injuries occurring as a result of lower rates of firearm use during the brief period when many firearm owners and owners of places where firearms are used may be attending an NRA convention. Our results suggest that firearm-safety concerns and risks of injury are relevant even among experienced gun owners...
March 4, 2018
Should-Read: Carmen M. Reinhart and M. Belen Sbrancia (20...
Should-Read: Carmen M. Reinhart and M. Belen Sbrancia (2011): The Liquidation of Government Debt: "High public debt often produces the drama of default and restructuring...
...But debt is also reduced through financial repression, a tax on bondholders and savers via negative or below- market real interest rates. After WWII, capital controls and regulatory restrictions created a captive audience for government debt, limiting tax-base erosion. Financial repression is most successful in liquidating debt when accompanied by inflation. For the advanced economies, real interest rates were negative 1���2 of the time during 1945���1980. Average annual interest expense savings for a 12���country sample range from about 1 to 5 percent of GDP for the full 1945���1980 period. We suggest that, once again, financial repression may be part of the toolkit deployed to cope with the most recent surge in public debt in advanced economies...
Vachel Lindsay: Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan: Weekend Reading
Vachel Lindsay: Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan: "In a nation of one hundred fine, mob-hearted, lynching, relenting, repenting millions,
There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging, gorgeous things to shout about,
And knock your old blue devils out...
...I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Candidate for president who sketched a silver Zion,
The one American Poet who could sing outdoors,
He brought in tides of wonder, of unprecedented splendor,
Wild roses from the plains, that made hearts tender,
All the funny circus silks
Of politics unfurled,
Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores,
And torchlights down the street, to the end of the world.
There were truths eternal in the gap and tittle-tattle.
There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle.
There were real lines drawn:
Not the silver and the gold,
But Nebraska's cry went eastward against the dour and old,
The mean and cold.
It was eighteen ninety-six, and I was just sixteen
And Altgeld ruled in Springfield, Illinois,
When there came from the sunset Nebraska's shout of joy:
In a coat like a deacon, in a black Stetson hat
He scourged the elephant plutocrats
With barbed wire from the Platte.
The scales dropped from their mighty eyes.
They saw that summer's noon
A tribe of wonders coming
To a marching tune.
Oh the longhorns from Texas,
The jay hawks from Kansas,
The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus,
The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,
The horn-toad, prairie-dog and ballyhoo,
From all the newborn states arow,
Bidding the eagles of the west fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the west fly on.
The fawn, prodactyl, and thing-a-ma-jig,
The rackaboor, the hellangone,
The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig,
The coyote, wild-cat and grizzly in a glow,
In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,
The leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West,
From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long:-
Against the towns of Tubal Cain,
Ah,-- sharp was their song.
Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young,
The longhorn calf, the buffalo and wampus gave tongue.
These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed:
The moods of airy childhood that in desert dews gleamed,
The gossamers and whimsies,
The monkeyshines and didoes
Rank and strange
Of the canyons and the range,
The ultimate fantastics
Of the far western slope,
And of prairie schooner children
Born beneath the stars,
Beneath falling snows,
Of the babies born at midnight
In the sod huts of lost hope,
With no physician there,
Except a Kansas prayer,
With the Indian raid a howling through the air.
And all these in their helpless days
By the dour East oppressed,
Mean paternalism
Making their mistakes for them,
Crucifying half the West,
Till the whole Atlantic coast
Seemed a giant spiders' nest.
And these children and their sons
At last rode through the cactus,
A cliff of mighty cowboys
On the lope,
With gun and rope.
And all the way to frightened Maine the old East heard them call,
And saw our Bryan by a mile lead the wall
Of men and whirling flowers and beasts,
The bard and prophet of them all.
Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West,
And just a hundred miles behind, tornadoes piled across the sky,
Blotting out sun and moon,
A sign on high.
Headlong, dazed and blinking in the weird green light,
The scalawags made moan,
Afraid to fight.
II
When Bryan came to Springfield , and Altgeld gave him greeting,
Rochester was deserted, Divernon was deserted,
Mechanicsburg, Riverton, Chickenbristle, Cotton Hill,
Empty: for all Sangamon drove to the meeting-
In silver-decked racing cart,
Buggy, buckboard, carryall,
Carriage, phaeton, whatever would haul,
And silver-decked farm wagons gritted, banged and rolled,
With the new tale of Bryan by the iron tires told.
The State House loomed afar,
A speck, a hive, a football, a captive balloon!
And the town was all one spreading wing of bunting, plumes, and sunshine,
Every rag and flag and Bryan picture sold,
When the rigs in many a dusty line
Jammed our streets at noon,
And joined the wild parade against the power of gold.
We roamed, we boys from High School,
With mankind, while Springfield gleamed, silk-lined.
Oh, Tom Dines, and Art Fitzgerald,
And the gangs that they could get!
I can hear them yelling yet.
Helping the incantation,
Defying aristocracy,
With every bridle gone,
Ridding the world of the low down mean,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
We were bully, wild and woolly,
Never yet curried below the knees.
We saw flowers in the air,
Fair as the Pleiades, bright as Orion,
-Hopes of all mankind,
Made rare, resistless, thrice refined.
Oh, we bucks from every Springfield ward!
Colts of democracy-
Yet time-winds out of Chaos from the star-fields of the Lord.
The long parade rolled on. I stood by my best girl.
She was a cool young citizen, with wise and laughing eyes.
With my necktie by my ear, I was stepping on my dear,
But she kept like a pattern without a shaken curl.
She wore in her hair a brave prairie rose.
Her gold chums cut her, for that was not the pose.
No Gibson Girl would wear it in that fresh way.
But we were fairy Democrats, and this was our day.
The earth rocked like the ocean, the sidewalk was a deck.
The houses for the moment were lost in the wide wreck.
And the bands played strange and stranger music as they trailed along.
Against the ways of Tubal Cain,
Ah, sharp was their song!
The demons in the bricks, the demons in the grass,
The demons in the bank-vaults peered out to see us pass,
And the angels in the trees, the angels in the grass,
The angels in the flags, peered out to see us pass.
And the sidewalk was our chariot, and the flowers bloomed higher,
And the street turned to silver and the grass turned to fire,
And then it was but grass, and the town was there again,
A place for women and men.
III
Then we stood where we could see
Every band,
And the speaker's stand.
And Bryan took the platform.
And he was introduced.
And he lifted his hand
And cast a new spell.
Progressive silence fell
In Springfield, in Illinois, around the world.
Then we heard these glacial boulders across the prairie rolled:
'The people have a right to make their own mistakes....
You shall not crucify mankind
Upon a cross of gold.'
And everybody heard him-
In the streets and State House yard.
And everybody heard him in Springfield, in Illinois,
Around and around and around the world,
That danced upon its axis
And like a darling broncho whirled.
IV
July, August, suspense,
Wall Street lost to sense.
August, September, October,
More suspense,
And the whole East down like a wind-smashed fence.
Then Hanna to the rescue, Hanna of Ohio,
Rallying the roller-tops,
Rallying the bucket-shops.
Threatening drouth and death,
Promising manna,
Rallying the trusts against the bawling flannelmouth;
Invading misers' cellars, tin-cans, socks,
Melting down the rocks,
Pouring out the long green to a million workers,
Spondulix by the mountain-load, to stop each new tornado,
And beat the cheapskate, blatherskite,
Populistic, anarchistic, deacon-desperado.
V
Election night at midnight:
Boy Brian's defeat.
Defeat of western silver.
Defeat of the wheat.
Victory of letterfiles
And plutocrats in miles
With dollar signs upon their coats,
Diamond watchchains on their vests and spats on their feet.
Victory of custodians, Plymouth Rock,
And all that inbred landlord stock.
Victory of the neat.
Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,
The blue bells of the Rockies,
And blue bonnets of old Texas, by the Pittsburg alleys.
Defeat of alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.
Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.
Defeat of the young by the old and the silly.
Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.
Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.
VI
Where is McKinley, that respectable McKinley,
The man without an angle or a tangle,
Who soothed down the city man and soothed down the farmer,
The German, the Irish, the Southerner, the Northerner,
Who climbed every greasy pole, and slipped through every crack;
Who soothed down the gambling hall, the bar-room, the church,
The devil-vote, the angel vote, the neutral vote,
The desperately wicked, and their victims on the rack,
The gold vote, the silver vote, the brass vote, the lead vote,
Every vote?...
Where is McKinley, Mark Hanna's McKinley,
His slave, his echo, his suit of clothes?
Gone to join the shadows, with the pomps of that time,
And the flames of that summer's prairie rose.
Where is Cleveland whom the Democratic platform
Read from the party in a glorious hour?
Gone to join the shadows with pitchfork Tillman,
And sledge-hammer Altgeld who wrecked his power.
Where is Hanna, bulldog Hanna,
Low-browed Hanna, who said: Stand pat'?
Gone to his place with old Pierpont Morgan.
Gone somewhere...with lean rat Platt.
Where is Roosevelt, the young dude cowboy,
Who hated Bryan, then aped his way?
Gone to join the shadows with might Cromwell
And tall King Saul, till the Judgement day.
Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth,
Whose name the few still say with tears?
Gone to join the ironies with Old John Brown,
Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.
Where is that boy, that Heaven-born Bryan,
That Homer Bryan, who sang from the West?
Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,
Where the kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest.
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