Opponents of Abe-economics — a policy whose defining characteristic these days is ever more radical monetary experimentation and a creeping but serious deterioration in the public finances — are in despair. Yet again, as in March 2015, the Japanese PM Abe has called a snap election (one year short of a full term with a campaign limited to 3 weeks), this time with the intention of crushing a potential leadership challenge within his party (the LDP) which incidentally could have brought a change in economic policy direction.

Gross Domestic Product has numerous issues, especially as a measure of national-level standard of living. It is supposed to be a measure of total production and therefore the general health of an economy, but it falls short of this in many ways. In the US, the Bureau of Economic Analysis is responsible for estimating GDP, and their preferred estimation technique is to add up all consumption, investment, government, and net export spending (export spending minus import spending).

Once an avid reader of Paul Krugman’s New York Times twice-weekly columns, I admit to rarely even glancing at his work now, since I know that anything he writes is going to have the theme of “Trump evil, Democrats good” each time, and it doesn’t take long to get one’s fill of that, even if one disagrees with Donald Trump’s policies or cringes at some of his public statements. The real problem, however, is that Krugman also manages to endorse unsound and inflationary economic policies as a “solution” to what he calls “Trumpism.”

[This article has been translated from Piombini’s Italian original by Bernardo Ferrero.] 

Once upon a time, some conservatives used to call for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education. Lamentably, conservatives today celebrate when a “free-market advocate” like multimillionaire Betsy DeVos is appointed U.S. Secretary of Education, and they get terribly excited when she speaks at conservative conferences.

On October 4 2017, the former governor of the Federal Reserve Daniel Tarullo in a speech at the Brookings think-tank in Washington said Fed policy makers do not have a reliable theory of what drives inflation. According to Tarullo, central bankers should pay less attention to theoretical models and more to actual data. However, how is it possible to make any sense of the data without having a reliable theory?

As soon as it was revealed, the Trump administration’s framework for tax reform was instantly attacked by Charles Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and friends, trying to bludgeon it to death with assertions that it was just “tax cuts for the rich.” A letter from Senate Democrats said “Tax reform cannot be a cover story for delivering tax cuts to the wealthiest. We will not support any tax reform plan that includes tax cuts for the top one percent.”