What a moron > The Biden administration's abandonment of Afghanistan is a kind of signal that they probably won't fight over anything. I'm not saying it was a

What a moron > The Biden administration's abandonment of Afghanistan is a kind of signal that they probably won't fight over anything. I'm not saying it was a pretty pullout, the whole time that administration was saying we have to do this to change focus to China. Absent lots of mind games, the simple message is "we shouldn't waste our time defending Afghanistan and Taiwan at the same time." > I'm tempted to call it "Keynes' revenge." John Maynard Keynes had a period of retreat, and Milton Friedman had a period of ascendancy, and you could date that from around 1979. Monetarism became dominant, markets were preferred to the state, and what emerged as "the Washington consensus" was much more a Friedmanite view of the world. > Keynes' revenge began in 2008, when, in the face of the financial crisis, a really large part of the economics profession, led by Paul Krugman, essentially said Keynes was right and we need to do Keynes now, or it will be the Great Depression. This part is true. Though I might put Joseph Stiglitz on equal par for existing big names beating the drum. > Some Friedmanite ideas have survived. Universal basic income was an idea of the right, once upon a time... It has an older history that that, but true. > And the answer is because, in the 1970s, Keynesian policies led to inflation. I feel like that's all just going to replay itself and we're going to have to relive the 1970s in order to remember why we did the 1980s. There was inflation before the 1970s that was tamed without a return to stupidity (and class warfare from above). See https://employamerica.medium.com/expecting-inflation-the-case-of-the-1950s-b197c7a926e6 https://employamerica.medium.com/expecting-inflation-the-cas... > No, it won't, because the multiplier just will be nonexistent. The U.S. is completely incapable of turning a large fiscal stimulus into the kind of investment that would have a significant multiplier. We already know what the outcome will be. There won't really be a significant macroeconomic benefit. The "multipliers" are not so dire. I do agree stimulus should be decoupled from infrastructure -- infrastructure simply doesn't mass-emply people the way it used to, especially if projects are completed in a timely matter, but that is a a separate point. > That's partly because the administration cannot resist mixing up other things with the word "infrastructure." Infrastructure now means everything. If you want to do environmental, "green" policy, that's infrastructure. Exactly wrong. Bipartisan road spending just promotes more wasteful, terrible exhurbs. It's useless and environmentally counterproductive. Things like universal Pre-K would actually be useful and certainly raise private sector efficiency. > If you're serious, you're going to walk away from natural gas, walk away from shale gas, and increase the costs of your energy mix. That's just the reality. The point is costs relative growth. If the prices go up but incomes go up faster, there's no problem. "Carbon dividend"-type proposals that make the poor not face the brunt of fuel prices (but still incentive them to ditch the car and pocket the difference!) are a good example to think about.