2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Blaming Sanders: Why Democratic Party Unity is Officially Impossible [View all]GRhodes
(162 posts)along with everything else. It didn't cause the crash, other structural problems caused the crash and none of them have been resolved. Your comment on the tax cuts is not really inaccurate. Obama could have done nothing and the tax cuts would have expired entirely. He could have then made the case to cut taxes on the lower income brackets, good luck to the Republicans on that debate, even with their own damn base. The excuse for what he did was that he got an additional year of unemployment benefits. The IMF report I was referencing attacked a lot of its own sacred cows, but it did the same thing a few years ago in regards to austerity. Its staff economists showed how stupid austerity was, something that Malthus identified two centuries ago, the IMF turned around and continued to push for austerity thereafter. The IMF has, in the last few days, walked back that report and it likely won't change much. Reality never meant much to economists, but that report was great to read. The report did strongly critique Chile's neoliberal policies, which is huge, cause when the right comically pushes for the privatization of Social Security, they bring up Chile as a model to follow. It has been a disaster in Chile, something conservative Chileans even acknowledge now (such as the recent right wing president of Chile, Pinera), as have lots of other stuff they implemented under Pinochet. I don't see the point, personally, in talking about full employment, since we are miles away from that. In this economic context, without radical changes, we'll get to full employment by massively driving down wages and environmental regulations, the Milton Friedman path to full employment.
I'm done with all this though. Have a good night.