...The financial crisis remains the most influential event of the 21st century. It left millions of people — many of whom were already anxious about the economy — feeling much more anxious, if not downright angry. Their frustration has helped create a threat to Western liberal democracy that would have been hard to imagine a decade ago. Far-right political parties are on the rise across Europe, and Britain is leaving the European Union. The United States elected a racist reality-television star who has thrown the presidency into chaos.
Look around, and you can see the lingering effects of the financial crisis just about everywhere — everywhere, that is, except in the most commonly cited economic statistics. So who are you going to believe: Those statistics, or your own eyes?
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Leonhardt argues numbers that look at the stock market, GDP and unemployment, etc. are important, but they do not tell us all we need to know about the economy we have today. He suggests we need new official measures.
The main reason is inequality. A small, affluent segment of the population receives a large and growing share of the economy’s bounty. It was true before Lehman Brothers collapsed on Sept. 15, 2008, and it has become even more so since. As a result, statistics that sound as if they describe the broad American economy — like G.D.P. and the Dow Jones industrial average — end up mostly describing the experiences of the affluent.
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He has some specific remedies — and cautions. To do what he is calling for is not hard — it’s already information that is available. The problem is getting it through politics into policy. He has some graphics to illustrate what these measures can show us.
Leonhardt notes in passing that there’s a Democratic bill in the Senate that addresses this. It really should be bigger news — it would be a game-changer. You have to ask why this is not getting more attention, until you look at the way Democrats fail to message effectively and the media fails to pay them any heed.
If the government started reporting on inequality on a regular basis, it would be official recognition that it is a bad thing. The GOP would attack it as inciting “class warfare” — much in the same way as they paint talking about racism is the ‘real’ racism.
But then, Paul Krugman reminds us about what the GOP did and continues to do.
He goes back in time to show us why we are still struggling with the after effects of the Great Recession — and who is to blame.
So how does the crisis response look 10 years later? Well, it could have been worse. But it could and should have been much better.
And the question is, do we understand that? To which the answer is, what do you mean “we,” white man? Some of us understand the inadequacy of crisis response — but we pretty much always did. Meanwhile, those who stood in the way of doing what should have been done have, with notably rare exceptions, failed to face up to their errors and the consequences.
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Krugman pulls no punches. Although Democrats failed to push as hard as they should have on recovery measures, (Thanks Geithner), Krugman points at the elephant still in the room.
...Republicans blocked attempts to rescue the economy and tried to strangle government spending every step of the way. They claimed that this was because they cared about fiscal responsibility — but it was obvious to anyone paying attention (which unfortunately didn’t include almost anyone in the news media) that this was an insincere, bad-faith argument. As we’ve now seen, they don’t care at all about deficits as long as a Republican is in the White House and the deficits are the counterpart of tax cuts for the rich.
The end result was that policy moved quickly and fairly effectively to rescue banks, then turned its back on mass unemployment. It’s a story that’s both sad and nasty. And there’s every reason to believe that if we have another crisis, it will happen all over again.
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Go read. It goes without saying that what Leonhardt and Krugman are talking about is a big part of what this November’s elections are about. We need to get rid of the people who put party over country every single time, and we need government policy based on information that is meaningful.
Make it so.