Replies to post #244942 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Worried Wonks

February 17, 2016 10:44 am 315 comments

I’ve tweeted this out, but want to point out that this is a pretty big deal: Four former Democratic chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers have put out a letter warning that Bernie Sanders’s economic program contains a very worrisome amount of voodoo: [ https://lettertosanders.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/open-letter-to-senator-sanders-and-professor-gerald-friedman-from-past-cea-chairs/ ]

We are concerned to see the Sanders campaign citing extreme claims by Gerald Friedman about the effect of Senator Sanders’s economic plan—claims that cannot be supported by the economic evidence. Friedman asserts that your plan will have huge beneficial impacts on growth rates, income and employment that exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans about the impact of their tax cut proposals.

As much as we wish it were so, no credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes. Making such promises runs against our party’s best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic. These claims undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda and make it that much more difficult to challenge the unrealistic claims made by Republican candidates.

In Sanders’s case, I don’t think it’s ideology as much as being not ready for prime time — and also of not being willing to face up to the reality that the kind of drastic changes he’s proposing, no matter how desirable, would produce a lot of losers as well as winners.

And if your response to these concerns is that they’re all corrupt, all looking for jobs with Hillary, you are very much part of the problem.


http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/17/worried-wonks/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs®ion=Body

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I was going to post next article, but instead I think I need to post the letter written to
'Senator Sanders and Professor Gerald Friedman'..It will stand on it's own.