July 25, 2016
Samuelson told readers that we “can’t borrow ourselves to prosperity.” We can only assume that this is something that his parents told him because it surely has no basis in evidence. If the argument is that excessive borrowing has somehow caused us problems then Samuelson would have some serious work to make that case. The interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is 1.6 percent. The inflation rate remains well under the Fed’s 2.0 percent target.
It’s hard to imagine what on earth Samuelson can be thinking of, these are the pieces of evidence that economists would look to as harm from excessive borrowing. Of course, in the Washington Post they don’t give a damn about evidence if the point of the argument is to keep ordinary workers from having jobs and keeping wages down. For this reason, Samuelson will probably be able to get a paycheck for as long as he likes for repeating things that his parents told him.
Samuelson also suffers from a serious lack of historical knowledge. He claims:
“Americans are now said to be “angry” and to demand “change.” This is misleading. In the past two decades, Americans have had more change than they’ve wanted. What they’d really like is to repeal the changes — the economic uncertainties, the physical threats, the geopolitical challenges — and revert to the romanticized world of the late 1990s, when the outlook seemed more tranquil.”
Actually, what is more likely than romanticizing the 1990s is that people think that they should be able to share in the gains of productivity growth rather than living in an economy which is rigged to give all the money to Wall Street types, CEOs, and other elite characters. The normal state of affairs until this rigging was that wages rose roughly in step with productivity. However since 2000, real wages have barely risen for the vast majority of the population. A columnist with a bit more historical knowledge would know that it is highly unusual for wages to stagnate for long periods of time and all income gains to go to those at the top.
Comments