Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Brooks Upset By How Wrong He is, Blames Krugman

As if. You won't want to read the excruciating full-length version of David Schoolboy Brooks complaining about how the pro-stimulus prog economists are wrong even though they are turning out to be right as the recovery dies on the vine.  So cut to the commentary and various retorts. 

The only interesting thing about this is the development of the term "demand-siders" to describe Krugman, Dean Baker, and other neo-Keynesians who think that people's incomes are an important part of economies and that they should be higher rather than lower.  (This is in contrast to the "supply-siders" who came to power with Ronald Reagan, and who used the needs of suppliers, i.e. company owners and investors, as a reason to cut taxes for the high brackets.)  It suggests that the Right is no longer able to pretend that the center-left in the US has no coherent economic strategy.  This was the core of their "one church" approach to capitalism -they pretended there were no actual arguments against small government, no taxes, no public investment, etc. that needed a fair hearing. They taught a couple of generations of conservatives that all the "liberal" arguments had already been refuted, and they could be safely ignored.

That defense line has crumbled, and the next round of arguments is going to be quite different.

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