Asymptosis

Years of >5% Growth:

Pre-Reagan? 15

Post-Reagan? 5

Post-80s-recession-recovery? 2

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

The idea of democracy is to give the people what they want, right?

Ezra Klein points us to a great study by Ray LaRaja and Brian Schnaffer examining policy preferences by political donors (5% of the population) vs. non-donors (95%).

Here’s my rendition of the results:

Whose preferences would you say are embodied in our current government?

Non-donors as a group are pretty coherent, and seem to give a good representation of what Americans want.

Donors, perceived as an entity, not so much — the group is downright schizophrenic, in particular due to that anomalous bulge at the right. And that 5% or .5% determines what we get — not the 95%. (Money? Pernicious? Feh.)

Now: ask yourself where the self-professed liberals and conservatives that you know land on the left-hand graph.

Just sayin’.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

A a year or so back I highlighted David Beckworth’s great post on Helicopter Drops. And the world’s best econoblogger, Steve Randy Waldman, did as well. (A “fantastic post,” he said.)

I’ve been pinging ever since to see a response to that post from Market Monetarist opinion-leader Scott Sumner. (AS SRW said, what we’d gotten from him was largely “quibbles.”)

I won’t rehash it all here but rather point you to Nick Rowe’s wonderfully successful effort to bring it all to conclusion, synthesizing Market Monetarist and New Keynesian thinking into support for a policy proposal that I think Post-Keynesians and MMTers would also jump on with gusto. (Also read the comments to Nick’s post, including one from Scott Sumner.)

I feel quite sure that Democrats/Liberals would embrace the policy wholeheartedly. Republicans/Conservatives, unfortunately, would consider it to be heresy and apostasy (often-sensible but utterly toothless Reformocons nothwithstanding).

Which pretty much clarifies where the problem lies…

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.