Bill Mitchell – The lame progressive obsession with meaningless aggregates

Maybe the British Labour Party could get Nancy Pelosi to do some stupid tweets for them as well. She is an expert at it – see my blog – When neoliberals masquerade as progressives. She thinks it is smart progressive politics to post tweets criticising her political opponents for a policy that “explodes the deficit … dumping … debt on every man, woman & child in America”. A fallacious argument. But moreover, a very stupid strategic argument because it fails to educate the public on what deficits and public debt are and what the capacities of a currency-issuing government and locks the progressive side of politics into no-win dilemmas. When it is their turn to govern they quickly find that they have no room to move on government spending because their own taunts when in opposition are thrown back at them. Same the world over. The progressive side of politics seems to have a lame obsession with meaningless aggregates – like the size of the fiscal deficit or public debt to GDP ratio. Pathetic is not the word.

I don't believe that Nancy Pelosi would be regarded as a "progressive" in the US. She is a limousine liberal (rich) and a latté liberal (upper class Californian) that has been a Clinton New Democrat as long as I can remember. She dd not switch to supporting Bernie Sanders in the general, which is a pretty good criterion of being progressive in US politics at the moment. I think most American who are paying attention would recognize that Pelosi and the other New Democrats are neoliberals whose political strategy has been representing the Democratic Party as GOP Lite.

Nancy Pelosi et al are increasing being recognized as old school people that should just step out of the way and make room for new blood take over. The real problem in US politics is that the "new blood" is pretty much the same as the old blood on the issue of fiscal deficits and public debt. TINA (there is no alternative) means that no one is presenting any other alternative than a variant of neoliberalism in economic policy.

The real problem is that most actual progressives in US politics that are actively challenging the Clinton New Democrats for party control are under the same neoliberal illusion or at least have very strong neoliberal tendencies they have absorbed from the ongoing propaganda in US corporate media.

This problem is now endemic in the US and there is no voice of reason present in the establishment, including the corporate media. Polls indicate that it is political folly to espouse views that contract the public perception of deficit hysteria and debt phobia that have been created by organizations such as the Peterson Institute. It may take a deep depression to turn this around.

The bright spot is that Stephanie Kelton got a lot of cred and publicity as Bernie's economic adviser and now she is being featured more in the corporate media. Pavlina Tchernova also got some good exposure regarding the job guarantee that made a wave, too. So some good things are happening, but slowly.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The lame progressive obsession with meaningless aggregates
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia