Let me think that through, one moment...
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Author’s note: this piece concerns the controversy over and content of the Sanders campaign economic manifesto. I am not a supporter of the Senator. I am however an advocate of a reality-based, data-driven and empiricist approach to politics and governance. This approach is as much a core value of any Progressive as is fairness, so while I’m sure there will be lapses owing to my partisan preference, I’ll do my best to avoid them. In fact, quoting Paul Krugman,
And you really, really don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of assessing all substantive arguments solely on their political convenience, and assuming that nobody who disagrees with you might honestly, you know, disagree with you. That’s what right-wing apparatchiks do, and you don’t want to emulate them.
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The New York Times notes, with characteristic understatement, that
Bernie Sanders has a problem with the liberal wonkosphere — or, more precisely, the liberal wonkosphere has a problem with Bernie Sanders.
With every upward tick in Mr. Sanders’s poll numbers in the last few months, there has been a corresponding rise in a very specific type of commentary: Left-of-center policy experts and former staffers for Democratic officials have questioned his plans as unwise, unrealistic or both.
On Wednesday, it took the form of a joint letter from four people who led the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton and Obama administrations. They criticized projections by Gerald Friedman, an economist who has advised Mr. Sanders, of what the candidate’s policy proposals would achieve.
At issue is a paper by UMass Amherst professor Gerald Friedman [.pdf] on the economic and societal effects he envisions following the enactment of Senator Sanders’ proposals. It’s certainly an interesting read, and I’d encourage folks to evaluate it for themselves.
The Sanders campaign is not the author of the paper in question; it has however consulted on and embraced it.
Titled simply What would Sanders do? Estimating the economic impact of Sanders programs, it’s a broad outline of the policies the Senator campaigns on, how they would interact with one another and affect the existing distributive and fiscal structures of the United States government.
The paper also paints a picture of what our society could look like under this plan. You might be surprised at the sheer reach of it; to say it has a broad footprint would be taking refuge in metaphor.
So let’s look at some details. Please note that I’m not going to discuss every aspect of it; I have however read the full paper. Several times in fact, with unexpected pleasure.
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The paper claims some rather dazzling outcomes from implementation of Bernienomics. The executive summary [bolding mine] lists putative effects:
- The growth rate of the real gross domestic product will rise from 2.1% per annum to 5.3% so that real GDP per capita will be over $20,000 higher in 2026 than is projected under the current policy
- Faster economic growth and redistributive taxation will raise the growth rate of median income from 0.8% per annum to 3.5%, adding nearly $22,000 to median household income in 2026
- Higher GDP comes with increased employment, specifically nearly 26 million additional jobs in 2026
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The unemployment rate will fall to 3.8% by the end of the first Sanders term in 2021, and remain at that full employment level through the end of his second term in 2025
- High employment will raise the growth rate in output per worker (labor productivity), which will double to over 3% per annum
- There will be sustained increases in real wages for the first time since the 1960s, with real wages growing at a rate of nearly 2.5% per annum.
- Medicare-for-all will lower the cost of health care and contain health care inflation even while saving thousands of lives by extending insurance coverage and access to health care to all Americans
- Rising employment, increases in the minimum wage, and enhancements to social security will lower the poverty rate to 6%, the lowest recorded rate, and the poverty rate for children will fall by nearly half, to below 11%
- The gap between rich and poor will narrow dramatically, with the ratio of the average income of the top 5% to that of the bottom 20% falling from 27.5 to 10.1.
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After increasing in the first years of the Sanders Administration, the Federal budget’s cash deficit will drop sharply and there will be a significant and growing surplus in a Sanders second term. Instead of a deficit of $1.3 trillion in 2026, there will be a large budget surplus.
Not quite the communist utopia some might envision or fear, though I would note that the rate of childhood poverty under this projection is roughly equivalent to the percentage of all Americans that today do not have coverage under Obamacare. That would be the same Obamacare the Sanders plan would replace in part because it is described as providing inadequate coverage.
One might conclude that perfection is beyond the reach of even the most noble of hearts.
So is this a roadmap to Eden or a bag of goods? I’d suggest that these are not the right questions to ask.
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As noted, the reception has been mixed; four former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), essentially the President’s brain trust on matters of the economy within EOP – the Executive Office of the President – took the unusual step of cautioning against the findings of the study in an open letter. They are Alan Krueger of Princeton, Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago, Christina Romer and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, both of Berkeley.
To put these names in perspective, Krueger is one of the authors of the seminal paper that disproved the toxic right wing lie that raising the minimum wage destroys jobs. Romer is one of the architects of the 2009 Recovery Act – which she coincidentally initially costed at $1.8 trillion, not the $800bn it eventually became.
Here is what they had to say in full.
Dear Senator Sanders and Professor Gerald Friedman,
We are former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers for Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. For many years, we have worked to make the Democratic Party the party of evidence-based economic policy. When Republicans have proposed large tax cuts for the wealthy and asserted that those tax cuts would pay for themselves, for example, we have shown that the economic facts do not support these fantastical claims. [...]
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.
Diarists who are not me would now add BOOM! KAPOW! BAM! FART! or something along those lines. Because that’s a pretty damning assessment of both the analysis itself and the use it is being put to in the political context.
An assessment likely causative of numerous Sanders supporters, in a new and exciting phenomenon not previously observed, ripping these authors along with critical journalists. One charge is that the Friedman paper is just that, the output of some random academic who coincidentally plans to vote for Secretary Clinton.
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Not so much: the campaign’s policy arm is hyping the Friedman paper in the media, normally a reasonably clear sign of buy-in.
On CNN, policy director Warren Gunnels:
Sanders' campaign also stood by the analysis. His policy director, Warren Gunnels, noted that the [ex-CEA noted above] letter-writers are among the same "establishment economists who said NAFTA and unfettered free trade with China would be good for the economy." Sanders feels these trade deals have harmed the nation.
"Given the 40-year decline of the middle class and skyrocketing wealth and income inequality, it's too late for establishment economics and establishment politics," Gunnels wrote in an email. "Instead of attacking a fellow economist for coming up with his own estimates on the benefits of Sen. Sanders' economic agenda, they should join us in fighting for a living wage, rebuilding our infrastructure, providing universal health care, and making college more affordable."
Gunnels neatly making use of the opportunity to demonstrate once again that establishment correlates quite closely with critic, just as an aside.
Or take the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; please, take it. Sorry, kidding.
Warren Gunnels, policy director for the Sanders campaign, hailed the report’s finding that the proposals are feasible and expressed hope that more people will look into them.
“It’s gotten a little bit of attention, but not nearly as much as we would like,” Mr. Gunnels said. “Senator Sanders has been fighting establishment politics, the establishment economics and the establishment media. And this is the last thing they want to take a look at.
“It shows that over a 10-year period, we would create 26 million new jobs, the poverty rate would plummet, that incomes would go up dramatically, and we would have strong economic growth. ... It’s a very bold plan, and we want to get this out there.”
More (from the Post-Gazette link above) about Professor Friedman:
Mr. Friedman, who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, admits that he is inclined to think along the same lines as Mr. Sanders. But he insists his research was purely professional.“I would have done [such an assessment] for anybody,” he said. “I have never been paid by the campaign. I do have a Sanders coffee mug, which I gave them $35 for. And we do have a Sanders bumper sticker on my wife’s car, and I donated $35 for that. Otherwise, I donate $10 a month to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Since Professor Friedman is likely not a household name – dismal science and all that – I’d encourage readers to check out his bio on the Amherst site.
Friedman is a serious academic with a Ph.D in Economics from Harvard as well as a B.A. in Economics and History from Columbia, neither of them known for lax academic standards.
So I’d like to avoid the all-too-common practice here (during the primary wars) to write off an author’s bona fides, conclusions, basic human worth or what have you if his or her arguments do not align with those the reader may already hold.
Confirmation bias isn’t uncommon on the other side of the aisle, I’d prefer if it not gain (more) currency on ours.
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Neoliberal establishment corporatist hate-orc Paul Krugman lashes out:
The point is not that all of this is impossible, but it’s very unlikely — and these are numbers we would describe as deep voodoo if they came from a tax-cutting Republican.
Sanders needs to disassociate himself from this kind of fantasy economics right now. If his campaign responds instead by lashing out — well, a campaign that treats Alan Krueger, Christy Romer, and Laura Tyson as right-wing enemies is well on its way to making Donald Trump president.
More:
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.
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Kevin Drum – toad-descended Prince of Darkness at corrupt capitalist filth-slime-pit Mother Jones – chimes in as well, in the poetically titled The Sanders Campaign Has Crossed Into Neverland:
WTF? Per-capita GDP will grow 4.5 percent? And not just in a single year: Friedman is projecting that it will grow by an average of 4.5 percent every year for the next decade.
Productivity growth will double compared to CBO [ed. note: Congressional Budget Office] projections—and in case you're curious, there has never been a 10-year period since World War II in which productivity grew 3.18 percent. Not one.
Illustration from source article.
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GDP growth 1947-1967
4.5% growth per capita is predicated on the annualized average GDP growth rate of 5.3% Friedman confidently forecasts for the first decade of Bernienomics.
Which, if you’ll take a look at the chart left – you can create your own here – is noticeably higher than the mean in the post-WWII boom. In other words, in the period of strongest economic growth in American history.
Still more Drum:
And miraculously, the employment-population ratio, which has been declining since since [sic] 2000 and has never reached 65 percent ever in history, will rise to 65 percent in a mere ten years.
And more:
Obviously you can't prove that a forecast of the future is wrong. But you can say that Friedman is forecasting a sustained level of economic growth that's literally never happened before in history. Not here, not in Denmark, not anywhere. Mature economies simply don't grow 5 percent a year for a decade. Labor productivity doesn't double just because you create a bunch of social welfare programs. The number of people in the labor force doesn't skyrocket to new records even in the face of increasing rates of boomer retirement.
These are the numbers that underlie the Sanders economic vision and his entire agenda. They are certainly imaginable. They are also – as presented – without known precedent.
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Friedman however defends his analysis, as quoted in the Washington Post.
Friedman said he is revising his estimates now with more pessimistic assumptions about that response, but that he still expects the new numbers to show broad growth and income gains as a result of Sanders’ plans.
Here’s why, according to Friedman's analysis: Sanders’ spending would ramp up faster than the new taxes that would pay for it, which means the plan would, under this model, run big deficits in early years, and then big surpluses to offset them in later years. That would amount to a classic short-term fiscal stimulus, one that Friedman says would be larger than the Recovery Act signed into law by President Obama in 2009. Also, the taxes in the plan would redistribute income from the very rich to the middle-class and the poor, who are more likely to spend the money and less likely to save it.
In Friedman’s model, both those effects would boost growth – particularly because data suggest the economy still has a lot of ground to regain from the Great Recession, including workers to bring back into the labor force who have stopped looking for jobs.
“The spending goes to working people, the taxes, a lot of them go to the very rich,” Friedman said. “We can have fast growth because we’ll be coming out of this deep recession, where there are a lot of underutilized or unutilized resources.”
He said those particular circumstances make the spending plans so potentially potent: “This program might not have been a good idea in 1998, when we were close to full employment,” he said. “It might not have been a good idea in 1968, when we were trying to slow the economy down.”
Additionally, there is a longer and direct interview in Fortune Magazine you can read here.
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Matt Yglesias over at Vox is skeptical on the matter, but this with some nuance worth considering. There is a distinct and noticeable shift in tonality from the earlier Sanders needs to take his own campaign seriously, in which he referred to the Sanders healthcare “plan” (asterisks by Yglesias), laughed at the Sanders education plan and for good measure derided Sanders’ ideas on Wall Street as a slogan.
The headline conclusion of Friedman's paper is that under Bernienomics, "the growth rate of the real gross domestic product will rise from 2.1% per annum to 5.3% so that real GDP per capita will be over $20,000 higher in 2026 than is projected under the current policy."
That is a very high rate of growth.
When Jeb Bush promised 4 percent growth, centrist-to-liberal economists were derisive, and even the most Jeb-friendly economists wouldn't quite endorse the claim. Friedman is promising even more than that, and the CEA letter reflects a similar level of skepticism.
I asked Dean Baker from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, one of the more left-wing and Sanders-friendly economists in the Washington policy world, what he thought of the 5.3 percent target. He, in the nicest possible way, suggested it is unrealistic:
Well, there is still plenty of slack in the economy, so having a year of 5.3 percent growth is not impossible (Fed willing), but if he said this was a sustainable rate, that seems pretty hard to imagine. (It's not clear to me from this piece, that he said 5.3% was sustainable.) My view is that we can probably have somewhat better productivity growth if we had a stronger economy (firms try to economize on labor), but getting much over 2.0 percent is hard to imagine. And once we get back to full employment, we should be looking at relatively modest labor force growth (@0.5%), which means that getting much over 2.5 percent growth on a sustained basis is pretty questionable.
Unrealistic is better than utterly dismaying; but don’t get your hopes up, partisans, you may not like the reason. Any partisans, because Matt Y. is annoyed at the food fight, I’d guess.
Somewhat ironically, this group of empirically minded wonks doesn't actually offer an empirical critique of the study they are worried about — relying simply on their authority as Democratic Party luminaries to bat it down.
Shorter: Ya’ll entitled geeks need to sit down before someone throws water in your martinis.
Point for Sanders.
This controversy is, on one level, almost totally meaningless. No president in any era operating under any set of circumstances has managed to pass a complete legislative agenda, and the combination of partisan polarization, an entrenched House GOP majority, and the extremely ambitious nature of Sanders's agenda makes it totally inconceivable that a Sanders administration would pass all of its policy proposals.
Ouch. What’s the fuss all about when it has no chance of meaning anything either way?
Point for Clinton.
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There is obviously some conceptual difficulty inherent in discussing the future impact of any proposal. The Friedman paper is not uniquely deficient in that respect. The methodology is solid as best I can tell, though others would have much deeper expertise on the subject matter.
Let me add that Gerald Friedman does not strike me as some moron defeated by anything polysyllabic or more complex than a ham sandwich. Complete imbeciles don’t usually matriculate at Harvard or teach at Amherst.
He’s not a publicity-hunting zealot either; you’re thinking of Cornel West, Ann Coulter or David Brooks. Friedman actually seems quite nice, the type you could imagine having a beer with.
His heart is in the right place, I would guess at least; The man has a really great affect about him. He cares for the downtrodden of this earth, in sum: I see no cause to question his good faith.
And now we get to the meat of the matter.
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Economic Growth
There are some reasonable doubts to raise about his paper.
Real GDP growth, 2014
★ It posits sustained economic growth at a level that seems a dubious expectation in an advanced, mature economy like ours.
Sanders growth projections versus CBO, Slate
More accurately, the baseline number of 5.3% growth – averaged out over a decade with some year-to-year variance, starting out at 9.68% then tapering off – hasn’t been reached in a single year for a generation [.pdf]. The last year U.S. GDP growth was at or higher than that projected under the Sanders plan was 1984. Over the last fifty years, GDP has grown at or over 5.3% in eight years, seven of them in the sixties and seventies.
This doesn’t mean an occasional year of growth in the 5% range isn’t possible; certainly with the kind of stimulus a president Sanders would demand of Congress. That these numbers seem implausible does not make them inconceivable. Sanders is talking about what amounts to a $14.5 trillion stimulus over a decade; total U.S. GDP in 2013 was $17.42 trillion (World Bank).
Strictly considered, this plan is Keynesian, not socialist as the latter term is commonly understood.
It’s worth pointing out that growth rates comparable to those sustaining this paper – and by extension the entire Sanders platform – are not usually seen in developed countries, and that the revolution-requiring, miserably-failed leadership of President Obama has produced outcomes as good or better than those achieved by our peers.
GDP growth rates 2014
| Country |
value in % |
| India |
7.3 |
| China |
6.5 |
| United States |
2.6 |
| United Kingdom |
2.5 |
| Hong Kong |
2.5 |
| Australia |
2.4 |
| E.U. |
1.8 |
| Germany |
1.5 |
| Source: CIA World Fact Book |
|
Where these outcomes – here and abroad – arguably fall short is in expectations. The discrepancy between what we would like to have – and arguably can achieve with the right policy mix – is one reason I personally welcome the Friedman paper as a counterpoint to a national conversation still fettered by noxious ideas of austerity.
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Labor productivity and income
★ Under Friedman’s scenario, growth in labor productivity and income is double CBO projections. This is worth taking a closer look at.
The Sanders program more than doubles the growth rate in real per capita income. This increase comes almost equally from increases in employment and increases in labor productivity or output per employed worker.
More Americans will have jobs. Instead of increasing by 0.6% a year, under the Sanders program employment rises by 1.4% a year, leading to the creation of over 23 million additional jobs in 2026. The average monthly employment gain rises from 77,000 in the CBO forecast to 293,000 with the Sanders program.
Higher demand for labor is also associated with an increase in labor productivity and this accounts for about half of the increase in economic growth under the Sanders program. Labor productivity increases by 3.1% per annum, twice as fast as in the CBO case, a return to the productivity growth rates of the full-employment years in the 1960s.
Friedman arrives at these numbers by applying a principle known in economic science as Verdoorn’s Law, which postulates
(1) the higher the growth rate of output in manufacturing, the higher the growth rate of gross domestic product (GDP); (2) the higher the growth rate of output in manufacturing, the higher the growth rate of labor productivity in manufacturing, as proposed by Verdoorn; and (3) the higher the growth rate of output in manufacturing, the higher the growth rate of labor productivity outside manufacturing.
I’d give you the formula, but full disclosure: math is the only subject I ever failed outright. Think of it in layman’s terms instead as this: the more and more often you make something, the better you get at making it.
Sectors of US Economy as Percent of GDP 1947-2009
While there is some controversy over the applicability/factor strength of Verdoorn’s Law to the U.S. economy – cf. here – an annual increase in productivity at or over 3% is conceivable; the average between 1947 and 1973 – historically, between the immediate post-WWII demobilization and the OPEC oil embargo – was 3.2%.
It is however debatable whether pre-1973 growth is a realistic expectation in a vastly changed economic landscape largely moved from manufacturing in 1973 to a service and knowledge economy in 2017.
Workforce participation
★ The paper sees a workforce participation rate of 65% of all adults without taking into account a not entirely unknown factor, America’s aging workforce, or for that matter the projected decrease in relative size of the cohorts entering the workforce over the timeframe in question. As Kevin Drum notes in Mother Jones, a 65% workforce participation rate (BLS numbers here) is unusual in American history. The highest rate ever recorded – in 2000 – is 67.3%. The rate between 1948 and 2016 averages out at 62.8%, and at this writing is 62.6%.
So you might aver that a return to 2000 numbers seems reasonable, certainly a scenario with some plausibility to it, less so when considering – as Krugman points out – that the ratio of retirement-age adults to all adults in 2000 was .209, as opposed to an estimated .337 in 2026 and .241 in 2015.
Put more simply, in 2000 there were five workers for every retired person, in 2026, there will be three of the former to one of the latter. Today, the relationship is four to one.
However, with U.S. U6 unemployment (defined by BLS as follows) ...
Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force
… standing at 9.9% of the total U.S. labor force in January 2016, I’m somewhat skeptical of the idea of insufficient labor supply obtaining in the period under study.
Economic impact of stimulus spending
As noted above, the Friedman paper stands or falls with a fiscal stimulus of $14.5 trillion over a decade. Total U.S. GDP in 2014 was $17.42 trillion. In technical terms, $14.5 trillion is a fuckton of money.
U.S. GDP forecast 2015-2026
Unless you consider that total GDP over that decade is forecast at $268.8 trillion. $14.5 trillion is roughly 5.4% of that number, though it should be noted that Friedman arrives at a GDP 37% larger than that currently forecast by CBO, which by my back of the envelope calculation would be $368.2 trillion.
It should also be noted that forecasts are just that, estimates based on current data extrapolated into the future. During the first Clinton presidency, if you’ll recall, there was heated debate as to how exactly the Federal budget surplus should be spent; didn’t quite hit the mark.
Foreseeable challenges
So what exactly is the problem with the Friedman/Sanders proposal? Some fiddling at the margins doesn’t quite make it the economic or policy equivalent of an LSD trip. You’ve probably already figured out that I personally view it with considerable sympathy. I’m still not going to vote for Senator Sanders in the primary.
The wild card in the Friedman/Sanders plan – one of them, actually – is economic impact per dollar of stimulus. In a depressed economy, it is larger, in a booming one, correspondingly smaller. The Sanders would become increasingly less effective under the conditions laid out in his own plan, limiting their efficacy to below the levels required to sustain this model.
The next wild card is inflation; Friedman estimates it at 3% under the conditions of his paper, which would historically cause the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. Remarkably, the Fed is almost entirely absent from this paper (one mention in the main text, two in footnotes), as are consequently Fed actions that might negatively impact the model.
Another problem is that the world of the Friedman paper contains only the United States. It is absent external factors, threats or crises, except one: a presumably booming U.S. economy would exacerbate the U.S. trade deficit due to increased imports.
Then there’s the issue of probability. The growth rates outlined here – even the ones I haven’t touched on of personal income, the presumed Sanders budget surplus and so on – are not, as noted, unprecedented. They are in this combination, duration and within current political parameters that notably include GOP control of the national legislature.
One could also consider that none of the Sanders proposals lie within the orbit of the Executive Branch. There are valuable ideas in the Friedman paper and in Senator Sanders’ platform in general, it still rather stretches credulity to imagine them implemented in toto, then functioning exactly as predicted in a world that by and large consists of the United States, with perhaps a vague suspicion of sentient life beyond our borders.
Can these flaws be addressed? Absolutely; we’re still talking policy here, not leprechauns. It mystifies me that the Sanders campaign hasn’t done so.
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But the controversy seen as a whole is of a different caliber than previous disputes over policy within the Progressive Movement. Language along the lines of “magic flying puppies with winning Lotto tickets tied to their collars”, in The New York Times no less, is probably the D.C. equivalent of slashing someone’s tires right after you pee in their mailbox and set their dog on fire.
That alone is rather rare and bears examination.
The Sanders campaign habitually, or so it seems, claims that any criticism is inevitably mere Beltway blather, the noise of a frightened neoliberal corporatist [insert your derogatory term of choice] swine-dog establishment. As noted above, that is precisely how it defended Professor Friedman’s paper: not on its merits – which are considerable and both worthy and capable of being defended – but by attacking its critics as corrupt, compromised, inherently dishonest or otherwise unfit.
A pattern not entirely dissimilar from that exhibited by some Clinton partisans, some of whom are rather too eager – for my taste at least – to detect sexism in seemingly unpromising environments.
And to be sure, there are cases when these respective character assessments are valid. I’d submit they are far less prevalent than the hyper-partisans would have you and me believe. As they say, don’t ascribe to malice what can be as easily explained by ignorance, given that the latter is far more prevalent in our species than the former, and far more amenable to remedy.
In terms of this paper, yes, there are serious issues with it as a policy document, serious enough to warrant pushback from political economists of Paul Krugman’s stature. Similar criticism has been made, for example, of the Sanders healthcare proposal.
Equally, it is a valid observation that the authors of the open letter neglected to provide any data whatsoever, perhaps relying on their status to give their arguments weight.
Nor should anyone be pleased with the Sanders campaign’s defense of its policy proposals in general. Of course people may attack in bad faith, certainly something not entirely unheard of in politics; but when that becomes the sole response to and rejoinder to critics, and it increasingly is becoming just that, an impression is created that Bernie Sanders’ ideas are a priori unfalsifiable without any bothersome considerations of external validity.
This cannot be and must not be, not for Sanders, not for anyone speaking as a Progressive or seeking office as one.
I’d hazard a guess: that’s exactly what Paul Krugman meant with, what was the phrasing again, “deep voodoo”. If Progressives are not firmly grounded in observable reality, we might as well join the republicans in whatever cotton candy castle in the sky they currently favor.
And if we abandon our critical instincts whenever our candidate is concerned, we’ve already checked our luggage to get there.
