McCain's economic and tax proposals generally have three characteristics:
1. He advocates, and sometimes claims credit for previous advocacy of, positions that in fact he has voted against, criticized, ignored, or simply ignored. If he's a maverick, he's breaking ranks with himself.
2. He tends to favor reduced or lower tax burdens on high-income individuals and big corporations; roughly, where Obama favors progressive taxation, McCain favors regressive or at least far less progressive approaches. This may or may not be a bias in favor of the donor base in the Republican Party; for some on the right there is a moral cast to this attitude.
3. He believes, or at least accepts the point of view, that large corporations should shape the direction of the economy. For that reason, he supports mergers toward consolidation, tax breaks for big firms, big tax breaks for the biggest firms, few or no social obligations on big firms, rights for employers as opposed to employees, and high barriers to entry for entrepreneurs and other rivals of big firms. This is a statist approach to economic management; it is not Schumpeterian competition but rather old style European managed capitalism.

This at least is how I decode McCain's policies. In this sense, they are very true to the central nexus of the Republican Party's structure, and they explain, among other things, McCain's ability to raise a great deal of money in a top-down, hierarchical manner.

A couple of months ago--before I began blogging here--I considered on my own blog, www.bernardavishai.com, the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear installations. More recently, the Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote a remarkable (and for many of us, remarkably irresponsible) op-ed in the New York Times, justifying an attack, even a preemptive nuclear strike. I tried to answer Morris's article right away, but knew a more serious response would be necessary, since so much of what Morris was saying presumed a deep knowledge of the Mullah-regime, and seemed to imply that any Iranian nuclear bomb should be considered a kind of jihadist's exploding belt. So my friend Reza Aslan, the Iranian-American author of No God But God, and I published a fuller rejoinder in the Washington Post. The fraught reactions to that piece have been playing out on my own blog, and are work a look.

By the way, you can also find an archive of nine months of posts on my blog, and I'd be please to hear from you about any of them at b1@bernardavishai.info. In future, I'll be posting simultaneously here and there.

Colbert King has an excellent piece on Mark Penn in today's Washington Post.

He points out what should be obvious: that Mark Penn is what we, in the old days, would have simply called a racist but who is now excused as simply a guy who plays the game.

Nowadays we are not allowed to call people racists. It's as if racism died when LBJ passed Voting Rights. So we can't call Penn a racist for urging the Clinton campaign to paint Obama as foreign. We can't call Mary Matalin a racist for publishing a book full of racist libels. And we can't, God forbid, say that the McCain campaign's ads -- and its ads are the campaign -- are racist ("the uppity Negro who doesn't know his place").

Imagine if in 2000, the Republicans ran ads suggesting that Joe Lieberman would make a good accountant but not a commander-in-chief. Or played off the foreignness of a Second Lady named Hadassah? Or said that he's fine but she's a little pushy? Can you imagine the uproar?

But somehow it's different with African Americans. It always has been.

The question for the next 90 days is this. What do we do about it? The elephant is in the room big time (elephant! nice). Are we just going to ignore it? After all, the Obama campaign knows that nothing stirs up racists even more than talking about racism! What to do?

We've been sketching out some new features for the site and we need your feedback.

Over the last six months we've listened very closely to your constructive criticism of the site, even if we haven't always been able to address problems as quickly. So the following changes, which we'd like your feedback on, are meant to address what have been the two most persistent complaints -- that the blogging interface is too buggy and that there's little way to follow the discussions you're participating in.

So, the changes are relatively simple. The first is a new approach to reader blogging: a consolidated profile and blogging page and a much improved backend interface for putting up your posts. The second is an interface to allow you to keep track of the discussions you participate in here at TPM and the people you think are making interesting contributions.

Pictures and further explanation after the break.

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The collapse of conservative economics leaves in place the Keynesian alternative as a practical matter. This much is clear. Consider how, in a moment of deep worry late last fall, the entire government - president and Congress - coalesced around a "stimulus" package. What could be more Keynesian than that?

Meanwhile, as I have argued over at Mother Jones, the Keynesian tools are in use at the moment, Nixon-style. It is an election year. In addition to tax cuts, we saw increased military spending in the second quarter, and sharply lower interest rates since last August, which have pushed the dollar down and exports up. These steps may or may not be enough to keep growth positive through the election - but without them, things would have been much worse. Without them next year, things may deteriorate very fast.

Lower interest rates are linked to the financial crisis. But whether cutting rates was essential to keeping that crisis at bay is doubtful. (Opening the discount window clearly was.) The point is interesting because there is a clear pattern of the Fed cutting rates in the year before an election when Republicans are in power. When the Democrats are in power, they raise interest rates. Does this sound, to you, like there might be a problem of political bias over there?

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Jamie Galbraith is an optimist, or maybe I'm just a pessimist. According to his latest book conservative economics is exhausted, burnt out, finito, kaput. All that is needed is for liberals to recognize this, abandon their lily-livered kowtowing to conservative economics, and start pushing on an open door by advocating a return for grand progressive policy action - i.e. long range policy planning and economic standards with government at the wheel.

That is an audacious strategy, but I beg to differ. I do not disagree with his policy recommendations (the chapters on planning and standards are two of the best), only his premise. Not only is conservative economics alive and well, but progressives have not even begun the job of convincing the world that they have a better understanding of the economy.

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I was an early member of the Post-Autistic movement, the first in Texas, I like to say. A history of it can be found here.

My first appearance in the review was a reply to Bob Solow, who had written a subtle non-defense of economic orthodoxy. That was in 2001.

A year later, I found myself pleading with the PAE crowd, "Can we please move on?" I think we know what the sins of the economists have been. Our task is to do something about it. Endless critique is an exercise in futility, and readers of The Predator State will discover that I don't do more of that than necessary. The early chapters deal, as harshly as possible, with the notion that the "market is freedom," with monetarism, with tax-cut economics, with budget-balancing and with the strange notion that there exists, or could exist, something called free trade.

After that, I move on.

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Yesterday was the 73rd anniversary of President Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act into law. Eric Rauchway has a great post highlighting how important the program has been, and how prescient FDR was about its importance.

My favorite bit:

After Roosevelt's own statement, the best early comment on the act's significance is probably Benjamin Cardozo's explanation in Helvering v. Davis, as the Court upheld the law:

But the ill is all one, or at least not greatly different, whether men are thrown out of work because there is no longer work to do or because the disabilities of age make them incapable of doing it. Rescue becomes necessary irrespective of the cause. The hope behind this statute is to save men and women from the rigors of the poor house, as well as from the haunting fear that such a lot awaits them when journey's end is near.

Social Security deserved that poetry. Along with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, it assuredly rates among the single acts of Congress that have done the most good most effectively for the most Americans.

(via Matthew Yglesias)

I'm a pessimist. I admit it.

I always assume that the Republicans have the advantage because they will stop at nothing to win. And because the media (pretty much all Democratic except for Fox) has the desperate need to show balance by screwing our candidate and sucking up to theirs.

So....all things being equal, the GOP wins.

That should not work this year but it looks like it might. As I have written before, I do not believe the polls which show Obama a few points ahead. With a candidate like Obama (black) or Clinton (woman) -- running against a standard white male -- we better be ten points ahead. And we're not. We are not winning.

For Obama, August has been utterly flat.

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Don't miss James Fallows' characteristically penetrating piece in the current Atlantic about the seven thousand primary debates and what they reveal about Barack Obama's forthcoming faceoffs with John McCain and even the kind of president he might be, insh'allah. It will likely prove one of very few journalistic exercises worth reconsulting as we try to take the measure of the Obama phenomenon in the years to come.

One of his clear takeaways--but this is almost by-the-by--is that the presumption of TV's so-called moderators is a disgrace, and that the worst offender by far was the late, grandstanding Tim Russert. Fallows is too polite to say so, but a world in which Chris Matthews sounds like the sage of television commentary is--well, it's the world we live in, ain't it the truth.

But I digress. On Obama, Fallows emphasizes that the man's debating style among the Dems put on display Man Thinking, and that, when he was more relaxed, with less to prove, against Alan Keyes in the farcical Illinois Senate race, he was wittier, more commanding. I agree that Obama is Man Thinking, and that this is one of the most attractive things about him. But if we are thinking about Obama in the entirety of the campaign I would emphasize rather more that, when he pulls out the stops, Obama is also Man Orating--conveying rhetoric that carries beyond the occasion. What distinguishes Obama is that he can not only reason but inspire.

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I find myself nodding in agreement with Tom Palley when he writes "Jamie ... is especially light on the economics profession." Economists enable the predators. Some years ago disaffected graduate students at the Sorbonne coined the term "Post-Autistic Economics." Psychiatrists define autism as "a pervasive developmental disorder of children, characterized by impaired communication, excessive rigidity, and emotional detachment." Sounds like economics to me.

Each year over a million undergraduates enroll in introductory courses in micro and macro economics. The price of a passing grade is submission to a semester's worth of infomercials touting the "free market." College economics instructors are every bit as clever as Madison Avenue. Today the bulk of instruction in economics takes place in the nation's business schools where professors enjoy the inflated salaries accorded those entrusted with the important task of instructing the young in the finer points of predation.

Introductory economics textbooks are dedicated to the proposition that all markets are created equal. No distinctions need be made between worker's labor, lobster, football players, or private jets. How convenient.

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It was slipped into public domain today. Little was made of it by the McCain campaign, but I reviewed it. Seems to me that there are three issues:

• McCain asserts that there should be a tax credit of 10 percent of wages for each r and d employee, but this proposal means that there would be a hand-out of cash (approximately $8 billion per year by my calculation) to existing firms even if they added no new employees in r and d and made no new investment. Moreover, if they built a solar farm or a new manufacturing facility, they would NOT get the r and d credit. Can he possibly mean that? This appears to be a hand out to support the status quo and would not do anything to encourage new investment or new job creation. Do I misread this?
• McCain suggests that firms providing broadband access to rural and low income users would get tax breaks that apparently would equal their costs. In other words, the big communications companies would have the government cover (in whole?) their costs for providing service. What kind of service? How much money? How many people? I can't figure any of that out with precision, but given that we have about 45 million households without broadband, I could imagine that the tax break for the handful of firms that provide internet access would amount to as much as 45 million households times $500/year (rough estimate of cost per household) or $22.5 billion a year. If market shares now extant hold constant, that would be a tax break of about $8 billion a year for the two Bell companies alone. Can this be what McCain really wants? If not that, what is he proposing?

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Check out this editorial from Ha'aretz today.

It concludes; "Israel must allow diplomatic efforts to move ahead, lower the tone of the military threat and understand that dialogue with Iran is essential to an attempt to reduce its military motivation."

Of course, that is in Israel. In the New York Times of Israel, in fact. But it's not the kind of thing one sees here, where the usual suspects -- the guys who brought us the last war -- are lusting over the next one.

Meanwhile here in the land of the free, Congress is still planning to move The Ackerman/Bayh resolutions to the floor after the recess. The House resolution would blockade Iran, an act of war. The Senate resolution (offered by Evan Bayh) is not nearly as bad but it also eschews diplomacy in favor of belligerence.

Check out this update on the bills (from July but still topical). This issue is not going away.

Here are the two bills, and their co-sponsors.

House Bill
House cosponsors
Senate bill
Senate cosponsors

After my post the other day, I felt the need to write something
that puts the war in Georgia in a bit more of a context. With the
situation changing by the hour, it makes more sense for me to
look at the roots of the conflict than try to beat the news media
to the punch on breaking information.

Perhaps the most ironic statement yet in the war of words over Russia's military intervention in Georgia was John McCain's assertion that "I'm interested in good relations between the United States and Russia, but in the 21st century, nations don't invade other nations." Too bad no one told the Bush administration that before it went into Iraq.

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My wife's extraordinary daughter-in-law, Christina Ezrahi, has been a student of Russia and the Caucasus for many years. Born in Munich to a Pan-European industrial family, she recently completed her doctorate in Russian history at the University of London, writing about Communism's political uses of classical ballet. A few years back, she worked for the United Nations in Moscow, and traveled often to war-torn Chechnya.

Christina sent us this email this morning, in despair about Western coverage of the Russian conflict with Georgia:

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James Galbraith's brilliant critique of Thomas Sowell's bad mouthing of his father is well timed. JKG's "The Affluent Society" should be manadatory reading for anyone trying to plumb the confusion of our current economic slump.Galbraith pointed out that there would come a time when, "It can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-around higher level of production than at a lower one. The higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction."

Galbraith's assertion that the perfection of modern advertising in creating desire for products we didn't know we needed puts the modern American member of the middle class in the position of the gerbil on the tread wheel: running faster and faster, but making no progress in relation to his neighbors. The end result of this mall driven culture has been an average negative personal savings rate (two years running) for the first time in the history of the United States. Because Americans have relied on the equity extraction from their homes to pay for their lifestyles, the arrival of the housing market crash comes at a particularly inappropriate time. The millions of foreclosures taking place across our land are mute testimony to the end of a cycle. An end that Galbraith feared would collapse the whole house of cards built on "want creation", throwing the modern American off the treadmill.

The irony is that George Bush, in his zeal to extend the U.S. imperial reach, has actually crippled it for the foreseeable future. McCain's determination to double down on Bush's foolishness will lose him the support of elites committed to the rational pursuit of U.S. global supremacy. In this sense, Osama Bin Ladin has won -- he hasn't come close to bringing down the U.S., but he has broken the back of American Empire. The provocation of 9-11 has bogged down the U.S. in the big muddy of Iraq, which misadventure has failed to resolve the ongoing distraction of Al Qaeda's machinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

From this standpoint, one can actually appreciate the realpolitik of types like Henry Kissinger, dedicated more to balance of power calculations made possible by incremental maneuvers. Here's a sober review of the situation from a realist, ex-supporter of Bushist foreign policy. And here's another from a right-wing national security think tank.

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Obama's new ad is very good and takes McCain's record and uses it against him, unlike McCain's cavalcade of lies.
Recent articles in the New Yorker and the New York Times have made it clear that Barack and his team are adept at Chicago style street fighting politics. In terms of organizers on the ground Obama beats McCain 3:1. All the old politics blabocrats on cable TV are still measuring this race in terms of old time memes. But the Republicans are clearly worried about the millions of new registered voters. As the Wall Street Journal bravely reported this morning, the Republicans are up to their old tricks--Scrubbing the Voter roles.

Most of the time I find myself positioned in the complicated center where the logic is radical but excitement is tempered. Jamie Galbraith usually occupies a space too my left that seems way more fun. That makes it a pleasant opportunity to outflank him regarding the intellectual perpetrators of the corporate predator state.

In my view, Jamie is far too light in his assessment of the intellectuals who fashioned conservative economics, and he is especially light on the economics profession. He writes of these intellectuals becoming his friends, pities them for their current forlorn abandonment, and essentially invokes the nice guy defense to shield them from more trenchant criticism. For a while George W. Bush benefitted from this line, and I have even heard Dick Cheney defended on similar grounds (apparently Cheney has personal charm).

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Let me begin this second round by noting an event in a parallel universe: Thomas Sowell's attack yesterday on Obama in National Review Online. The column is entitled "The Galbraith Effect" and it's not, alas, about my book. Here's how it begins:

"Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, Professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation. Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But, instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures. Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real substance. Senator Barack Obama's campaign this year reminds me very much of that course from Professor Galbraith."

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Check out today's NY Times article about how people are increasingly making decisions to marry and divorce based on their need for health care insurance.

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Let's take the wayback machine to 1992. The Democratic candidate proposes to Put People First (on sale now for 55 cents). Some of the jewels in this crown of commitment are a pledge to increase non-defense "investment" by $50 billion each year of his first term and to "Eliminate 100,000 unnecessary positions in the bureaucracy." Regarding trade, he would:

"- Seek more open markets for American products by negotiating a free trade agreement with Mexico that ensures a more level playing field and protects basic worker rights and environmental standards."

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Like many of you, I've been wracking my brain about what can be done about Russia's intervention in Georgia (and Georgia's prior intervention in South Ossetia), with no great answers. Perhaps a little humility is in order. Bearing this in mind, I was particularly struck by Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate, which begins by asserting that "It is impossible to think about the Russian assault on Georgia without feeling like a heartless bastard or a romantic fool." Even as it appears that Russia may be withdrawing (not confirmed as of this writing), Kaplan's analysis is worth reading for thinking about next steps.

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Like his father who coined the term "conventional wisdom", Jamie Galbraith's notion of the predator state may also become part of the common lexicon. But if it does, I hope it will be talked of as the "American corporate" predator state. That is because it is quintessentially linked to corporations, and it is also a uniquely American phenomenon.

Kleptocratic predator states, like Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Mobutu's Zaire in Africa, are fundamentally different. There is no equivalent in Europe, and none in East Asia where ruling elites have a sense of obligation to the nation even as they often enrich themselves illicitly. Nor too is there an equivalent in Latin America because government there never reached an economic size proportional to that of government in the US.

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This is the first opportunity we have to see the new 2005 Chapter 11 provisions in action for big retailers--and they don't work. This week, Businessweek takes a look at the dysfunctionality of the 2005 amendments. The article explains that under (1) the new 210 day cap on the amount of time bankrupt companies have to decide whether to keep a lease and (2) the requirement that bankrupt companies pay cash to utility companies and other suppliers, many retailers are simply liquidating, instead of engaging in the longer and often value-preserving process that the old law facilitated.

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The Predator State, like The New Industrial State before it, dislodges a great many economic fairy tales. Galbraith senior outraged the economics profession when he declared the consumer subordinate to the corporation. I wish I'd been a fly on the wall when the political ideologues of the day confronted the argument that "planning" as per the former Soviet Union is different only in degree from the planning of the large, technologically driven transnational corporation. On this reading "the market" is the rhetorical smokescreen behind which powerful economic organizations do their damnedest to get more powerful.

To the millions of thinking people not schooled in academic economics the Galbraithian argument makes perfect sense. The gospel of the market, in contrast, rationalizes letting the rich have their way. In his new book James Galbraith does a wonderful job demolishing the policies that follow from economists' belief that "markets work." The chapters on tax cuts, balanced budgets, and free trade demonstrate the extent to which their advocates rely on faith-based readings of evidence, misleading arguments, and twisted logic. You might think these chapters are aimed at conservatives. But they are not. The economic truisms of an earlier age hamstring the thinking of liberal economists and democratic politicians. Keynes once remarked, "The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones."

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These days, there are few who still agree with Sir Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, and those others who treat all Muslims as if they were of one violent sect; who treat Islam as an inherently intolerant belief system. As Huntington once put it, "Some Westerners...have argued that the West does not have a problem with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise..." The question, however, still stands: what is the way to characterize Muslim beliefs and those who hold them? At issue is finding the best way for the West to approach Islam.

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James K. Galbraith's The Predator State brings to mind an illustration I saw as a child of a small mammal eating the giant egg of a dinosaur. The viewer knew that the tiny mammals who were condemned to hide from the saurians would one day succeed their colossal rivals and, in the dramatic language of paleontology primers, "rule the earth." In exactly the same way, inasmuch as the comet of reality eventually collides with every lunatic ideology, we know that the dinosaurs of free-market fundamentalism are headed for extinction and will be replaced, later if not sooner, by the mammals of economic commonsense.

What remains to be explained is why the mammals were sidelined by the dinosaurs in the first place. From the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, few economic thinkers took early nineteenth century ideas of the self-regulating free market seriously. And yet, from the 1970s until recently, we have lived through a renaissance of anachronistic early Victorian economic thought that would have brought joy to the heart of Ebeneezer Scrooge. This nostalgic, fundamentalist counter-revolution in economic thought is often attributed to the machinations of CEOs and well-funded right-wing propaganda machines. But this doesn't explain why many in the business elite itself had abandoned the rhetoric of free markets in earlier generations, in the days when Andrew Carnegie dismissed competition as anachronistic and schemes like associationalism entranced corporate executives and tycoons. Why is the economic thought of today more like that of 1840 than that of 1940?

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What is delightful about James Galbraith's The Predator State is that he says things that are, at once, outrageous-- and completely true. Because he shows so little concern for what one "can" and one "cannot" say in a polite capitalist society, one might call him an idealist. But Galbraith is not tilting at windmills; he is simply toppling the conventional wisdom of the past 28 years.

Begin with "the market." When you come down to it, Galbraith explains, "the market" is a fiction. In theory, "it is the broker, the means of detached and dispassionate interaction between parties with opposed interests. . . . Buyers want a low price, sellers wants a high price. The market works out the price that exactly balances these desires, a price that is fair because it is the market price." Even liberals believe in this mythy "market"--a higher intelligence that hovers over transactions ensuring that, as long as you let "the market" work its magic, everything will work out for the best

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James K. Galbraith's The Predator State is in the great tradition of institutional economics stretching from Thorstein Velen to John Kenneth Galbraith. In his latest book, James Galbraith describes the distorted political economy that has recently emerged to displace what his father earlier analyzed in "The New Industrial State." Seeing through the fog of myth, the elder Galbraith demonstrated how the modern corporation planned markets through careful internal organization. Now, the younger Galbraith has shown how that system has metastasized under the George W. Bush administration into a nightmare where much corporate organization has been thrown into chaos. The "countervailing power" of government and labor, described by elder Galbraith in his "American Capitalism," is long dissolved into the mist. Instead, the corporations have increasingly lost their ability to direct and control markets through their own mechanisms. An ascendant predator financial class that can only wring higher profit margins out of the corporations at the expense of long-term planning and market stability has subverted their capacity for economic rationalization. Under Bush, the government has not only allied with key corporations but also merged with them. In order to subvert and suppress markets, of course in the ideologically perverse name of the free market, these corporations rely on government to act as their agent. Reaganism has indeed proved to be "transformational," carried to its logical conclusion by the Bush administration.

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For those who are interested in reviews, The Predator State has so far garnered three: Pedro da Costa in Reuters, Roger Gathman in the Austin American-Statesman, and Randall Wray in the Journal of Economic Issues. Kevin Horrigan of the St Louis Post-Dispatch also devoted a column to it, and Tom Frank gave it a mention in the Wall Street Journal. Last Friday and Saturday, it was the top seller on Amazon under "Economic Policy". All of this is not too bad, for a book published less than a week ago.

Gathman takes note of something important. The book originated, in part, as a challenge from my father, delivered in our last conversation, on Wednesday, April 26, 2006 in his room at Mount Auburn hospital. Dad seemed, at the time, to be recovering (slightly) from a bout of pneumonia, and had the energy to ask what I was working on. I told him of some recent lectures on predation. "You should write a short book on corporate predation," he said. "It will make you the leading economic voice of your generation." And then he added his typically modest, typically paternal touch, "If I could do it, I would put you in the shade."

But of course the ideas for the book had been germinating a long time. I came of age, politically, during the Reagan wars of the early 1980s. I was, then as now, a liberal Keynesian, educated at Kaldor's Cambridge and Tobin's Yale, but not yet thirty and very much on the losing side. By the late 90s, very few people even knew about the economics I was brought up on. I felt a bit like the last survivor of a Papuan tribe.

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Professor James K. Galbraith of the University of Texas at Austin will be joining us to discuss his new book The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.

Writes Galbraith:

The judicial coup of December 2000 that installed Bush and Cheney brought back some of Reagan's men and his most extreme policies - tax cuts for the wealthy, big increases in military spending, aggressive deregulation. But it didn't bring back the ideas. Instead, it became clear that Bush and Cheney had no real ideas, no larger public justification. They cut taxes to enrich their supporters. For the same reason, they outsourced to Blackwater and Halliburton and pursued military pipe dreams like Missile Defense..... Under Bush and Cheney, oil and gas, drug companies and defense contractors, insurers and usurers control the government of the United States, and it does what they want. This is the predator state.

Having chills yet?

Joining him will be Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, economist Thomas Palley, Susan Feiner, Professor of Economics and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine, journalist and former aide to President Clinton Sidney Blumenthal, economist Max Sawicky and Maggie Mahar, author of Bull! A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982-2004. Discuss with us!

This is tedious, but somebody should drive a stake through the heart of this newspaper's coverage of economics, especially the Federal budget. We are provoked by Lori Montgomery's latest breathless hysteria about budget deficits, which leads to a headline attacking Obama. In fact, one of the candidate's limited number (ahem) of redeeming qualities has been a disinclination to give over to deficit delirium.

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