The Sanders Campaign Thinks It Can Give Us 5 Percent Economic Growth. It’s Deluded.

[MrWendel]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/02/18/the_sanders_campaign_is_living_in_an_economic_fantasy_world.html


By Jordan Weissmann(Slate’s senior business and economics correspondent.)

Liberal policy wonks have generally been, shall we say, a bit cold on Bernie Sanders, especially when it comes to his plan for creating a single-payer health care system, which they've criticized as undercooked and unrealistic. But hostilities escalated this week when four former chief White House economic advisers issued a harsh open letter accusing the Vermont senator of embracing “extreme claims” about how his policy ideas would boost American growth and of sullying Democrats’ entire reputation for caring about “responsible arithmetic.” The spreadsheet-wielding wing of the party has basically declared that the Sanders campaign is deluded about economics.

Is it? Either deluded, or sloppy. Which is an especially bad sign if you care about policymaking.

Why are economists freaking out about Sanders’ math?
The latest kerfuffle is focused on an analysis by Gerald Friedman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which concludes that if Sanders passed his entire platform—including, among other bits, a $15 minimum wage, single-payer health care, a $1 trillion infrastructure spending bill, and new taxes to pay for it all—U.S. economic growth would rocket to an average of 5.3 percent per year over a decade. (Right now, we're hovering just above 2 percent.) On its face, that number is very, very hard to take seriously and would set off alarm bells among most economists. The last time we hit 5 percent growth in a single year was 1984. Liberals (myself included) widely mocked Jeb Bush for promising to unleash 4 percent annual growth, partly because he vowed to do it mostly with tax cuts but also because it's simply very, very unlikely that an advanced economy with an aging population can sustain that pace of economic expansion. Friedman's forecast makes Bush's look downright modest.
Sanders did not commission the Friedman report, but his campaign has embraced it. “Its gotten a little bit of attention, but not nearly as much as we would like,” Warren Gunnels, Sanders' policy director, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week. “Senator Sanders has been fighting establishment politics, the establishment economics and the establishment media. And this is the last thing they want to take a look at.” Gunnels also stood by the estimates in an interview with CNN, explaining, “We haven't had such an ambitious agenda to rebuild the middle class since Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson.” When I called about Friedman's paper on Wednesday, a Sanders spokeswoman said the campaign was sticking with its previous comments and didn't have anything extra to add.

(More in link)

[Skwmom]

1. That did not come from the Sanders campaign. It came from a Clinton Supporter. n/t

[tk2kewl]

2. right all we can have is our shit sandwich so eat up

more no we can't campaigning to inspire the masses

[Jester Messiah]

3. NO WE CAN'T! NO WE CAN'T! [nt]

[Gothmog]

4. The assumptions used by Sanders are not realistic

This looks like something that came from Jeb!