Watching History Unfold
Jared Bernstein
Huffington Post
You hear that implosion reverberating through financial markets? It's the sound of decades of conservative ideology collapsing.
This raises many pressing questions, both short- and long-term. What's the deal with the Paulson deal? There's a lot of well-aimed skepticism about this plan, and myself and my EPI colleagues will be commenting on it all week (I'm not liking what I'm seeing--not enough safeguards to protect taxpayers from banks perfectly happy to dump toxic debt on the government; not enough quid pro quos for Main Street). But for now, I'd like to focus on an even more important question: what next?
The week that just ended revealed the myth of market fundamentalism: the notion associated with mainstream, Milton Freidman'esque economics, and amplified by anti-government conservatives that unfettered markets will provide society with the best outcomes. Such simplicity, such elegance...such nonsense.
For many of us, it didn't take a market failure of the magnitude we've witnessed in recent weeks to belie this myth. We've been documenting the slow bleed of much subtler market failures for decades. Most recently, we've stressed that despite years of growth before the recent downturn, the real income of middle-class working-age families fell $2,000. Poverty rose. The share of the population without health coverage went up. For the first time in years, the rate of homeownership declined.
(Continued here.)
Huffington Post
You hear that implosion reverberating through financial markets? It's the sound of decades of conservative ideology collapsing.
This raises many pressing questions, both short- and long-term. What's the deal with the Paulson deal? There's a lot of well-aimed skepticism about this plan, and myself and my EPI colleagues will be commenting on it all week (I'm not liking what I'm seeing--not enough safeguards to protect taxpayers from banks perfectly happy to dump toxic debt on the government; not enough quid pro quos for Main Street). But for now, I'd like to focus on an even more important question: what next?
The week that just ended revealed the myth of market fundamentalism: the notion associated with mainstream, Milton Freidman'esque economics, and amplified by anti-government conservatives that unfettered markets will provide society with the best outcomes. Such simplicity, such elegance...such nonsense.
For many of us, it didn't take a market failure of the magnitude we've witnessed in recent weeks to belie this myth. We've been documenting the slow bleed of much subtler market failures for decades. Most recently, we've stressed that despite years of growth before the recent downturn, the real income of middle-class working-age families fell $2,000. Poverty rose. The share of the population without health coverage went up. For the first time in years, the rate of homeownership declined.
(Continued here.)
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