nobel economists on the bush economy
how’s the economy doing? some pretty serious people wrote an opinion…
An Open Letter to the American Public, August 25, 2004 [pdf from the kerry campaign site]The differences between President Bush and John Kerry with respect to leadership on the economy are wider than in any other Presidential election in our experience. President Bush believes that tax cuts benefiting the most-wealthy Americans are the answer to almost every economic problem. The Bush Administration’s tax cuts were poorly designed and therefore have given insufficient stimulus to job creation. The principal effect of the Bush administration’s fiscal policies has been to turn budget surpluses into enormous budget deficits. President Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility threatens the long-term economic security and prosperity of our nation. At a time when our nation should be saving for the future, to pay the Medicare and Social Security benefits for the baby boomers, our national debt is swelling; the social contract that binds one generation to another is being threatened with unraveling. Increased borrowing from abroad– now almost five percent of our GDP–leaves our country, our economy and global stability increasingly vulnerable to changes in sentiments of foreign, or even domestic, investors. At the same time, his policies have exacerbated income inequality, failed to address the real wage declines and rising health care costs beleaguering American families, and ignored the need for critical investments to spur long-term growth.
it sounds like political mumbo-jumbo inside-the-beltway elitist claptrap! signed by these people:
Paul A. Samuelson, Nobel Economics 1970 (for the scientific work through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science)
Kenneth J. Arrow, Nobel Economics 1972 (for pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory)
Lawrence R. Klein, Nobel Economics 1980 (for the creation of econometric models and the application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies)
Robert M. Solow, Nobel Economics 1987 (for contributions to the theory of economic growth)
William F. Sharpe, Nobel Economics 1990 (for pioneering work in the theory of financial economics)
Douglass C. North, Nobel Economics 1993 (for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change)
Daniel L. McFadden, Nobel Economics 2000 (for development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice)
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Economics 2001 (for analyses of markets with asymmetric information)
George A. Akerlof, Nobel Economics 2001 (for analyses of markets with asymmetric information)
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Economics 2002 (for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty)
so it’s 10 nobel economists… what do these people know about economies?