Entry from January 2, 2014
What a comfortable world of easy simplicities you must live in if you write editorials for The New York Times. Today, for instance, the editorialists tell us that, after careful study, “most economists” have concluded that the progressive view, the New York Times’s view of the minimum wage was the right one all along and that, therefore, increasing it has nothing but upside. Right again, Barack Obama! In rather the same way, the Times reporter David Kirkpatrick the other day re-opened
You can’t argue with the evidence. Both conclusions — that of John Schmitt
We know, that is, that the world as we experience it yields few easy certainties. It is not too much to say that in our own lives we can seldom aspire to any good thing which does not come with trade-offs. More time at work may mean more money but it also means less time with the family, or doing the things we like to spend our money on. And the more money we earn the more, too, we become targets for Mr Obama’s redistributionist schemes. We may borrow to buy the things we want, but then we have to pay the money back. Yet in the happy-land of the New York Times editorialist and his kind there are no such trade-offs. If you believe these people and their guru, Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman, we don’t even have to worry about paying back the trillions of dollars that the administration has borrowed over the past five years to cover current expenses it is unwilling to cut back on. The quasi-magical Keynesian “multiplier” — ratified by “science” of course — will produce more than enough to repay such trifling sums.
Likewise, should the urge strike us to improve the lot of the poor, how fortunate we are to discover that all we need to do is pass a law requiring those who employ the poor to raise their pay. Done and done. Not only is there, as usual, no downside — as extensive research now reliably informs us there is not — but the higher payroll costs turn out to be good for the employers and the economy and thus everybody else as well! That’s the beauty of counter-intuitive research for you. It’s all as innocent and uncomplicated as a child’s belief in Santa Claus — or in the perfect competence and veracity of Hillary Clinton over Benghazi. Yet the fact that progressives believed it all along is allowed to cast no shadow backwards, in the progressive’s own view, over his trusted researchers’ endlessly flattering results.
Even the case of Edward Snowden proves to be unproblematical at the Times, though such liberals as Ruth Marcus
Discover more from James Bowman
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