Having read the column and the blog by a couple of real economists, Paul Krugman and Atrios, I feel newly empowered to make the case against a couple of democratic candidates for the presidential nomination. The main reasons being soft core racism and economic ignorance.
First, in Krugman's column, he demolishes the argument of a conservative who used his column in the NYT the other day to bleat out the discredited theory that the 2008 fiscal crisis was caused by banks making bad loans to low income (read black and brown) people who couldn't pay the carrying charges. Of course it has been amply proven that fancy fiscal instruments like derivatives and bundling bad debt and selling it as a supposed safe investment were the real causes, but racism trumps rational analysis any day on the conservative side of the spectrum. Now comes Michael Bloomberg declaring the blacks are responsible for our problems because liberals made the poor, naïve bankers lend them money via ruinous adjustable rate mortgages.
Atrios in his rather unsubtle way points out the economic ignorance, willful or otherwise of Pete Buttegieg. The up and coming candidate has pulled a page from the republican playbook and is trying to demonize the ballooning federal deficit to make him look like the paragon of economic sense. As both Atrios and Krugman have both said many times, the deficit in our country for the most part consists of money we owe to the federal government through the vehicle of treasury bills which we own. We cannot default to ourselves. Also, you cannot compare the debt of a sovereign nation which can print its own currency to a struggling family sitting at the kitchen table deciding which creditor to pay first.
As Krugman has famously put it, these are both zombie ideas which keep shambling along no matter how many times they are shot in the head. Any democratic candidate who embraces them should not represent the party in this election.
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