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Highly recommended article--


Economics: Which Way for Obama?
By John Cassidy, New York Review of Books, June 12 issue

A preview taste:

...Should Obama win the nomination, political considerations may well force upon him a more interventionist position, but his first inclination is to seek a path between big government and laissez-faire, a trait that reflects his age—he was born in 1961—and the intellectual milieu he emerged from. Before entering the Illinois state Senate, he spent ten years teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, where respect for the free market is a cherished tradition. His senior economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee...When I spoke to Goolsbee earlier this year, he said that one of the things that distinguished Obama from Clinton was his skepticism about standard Keynesian prescriptions...If Obama isn't an old-school Keynesian, what is he? One answer is that he is a behavioralist—the term economists use to describe those who subscribe to the tenets of behavioral economics...

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You might be curious about the article here.

I'm also curious about how Obama's personal finances reflect on his government proposals. I noticed he had basically no investments outside his condo until about 2004 - piddling interest and no capital gains. Is this a huge skepticism about the stock market? Is he optimistic about industry? What are his attitudes towards consumer credit? Will his focus be on spurring consumer spending because he doesn't trust incentives for investment, corporate research and exports to work?

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Could be simply no extra money to risk in stocks. Owning a condo is, after all, not so much investing as just living.

My answer could reflect my own skepticism about stocks, but I am mostly skeptical about the current admiration for wealth as opposed to income.

Moving back to an emphasis on production and income would restore our working classes, and our manufacturing sector. This would be achieved by restoring steeply progressive income taxes and higher capital gains taxes, along with import duties.

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Yes, I would like to know that, too, that would help fill the guessing game gaps. Myself I don't look at it from a partisan angle, not in the least. I look at it like this: this primary stage is always so maddeningly vague about what the future might hold, even the position papers are pandering. They all do vague pander crap which leaves you with nothing zip nada reality-wise, especially if they are a relatively new face. Unless you have an executive record for them, you don't have a clue what their cabinet and policy actions are going to look like, you are running on faith. I don't look at it like I am trying to figure out who to root for, I look at it as ok, I already cast my single vote of preference, but then it goes on and the majority wins, there's not much I can do about that, it's the rules in this here democratic republic. And then I have to figure out what the heck the winner is really going to try to be doing, because he/she hasn't really gotten to talking about that much yet, he/she has been busy selling his/her personality. And I don't get why more people don't want to do that, that they think figuring things out about the candidate while a campaign is still going on is bad thing to do. Maybe if more people did that, campaigns wouldn't be like they are, they'd actually deal with stuff that matters....

Did that whine make any sense? ;-)

Des -- that looks like a link to the same article artappraiser shared -- was it meant to be a link to another source?

Thanks for the link, artappraiser. Great article, and one that will need to sit in my brain for a couple days before I can manage to say anything sensible about it.

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