differences in priorities perceptions between the small wealthy minority and the population at large
when it comes to the more bigger macro issues, what we’ve learned thanks to some things I think we suspected but but are now much more confirmed is that they’re huge differences in priorities perceptions between the small wealthy minority and the population at large. I have now seen in the last four days, I think four different articles that used F. Scott Fitzgerald. So yes, the rich, the very rich are different from you and me. You see that very clearly on a couple of big issues. One of them is his taxes. The polling overwhelmingly overwhelimingly says that that people believe that the rich don’t pay enough in taxes and the taxes on top incomes in corporations should go up. And yet an enduring piece of the political agenda has been to cut top tax rates when when, when Bowles Simpson produced their initial draft powerpoint, cutting marginal tax rates was right at the top of the agenda. And what was that doing in a document that was allegedly about fiscal res possibility. The social safety net, the public wants to spend more on social security and on healthcare. But we know from these very difficult to conduct, but illuminating surveys, that the point of 1% is wants to cut taxes at the tops, not surprisingly, and wants to cut spending on entitlement programs, diametrically opposed to public opinion at large. The what what you see, of course is that to a remarkable extent, the policy agenda set in Washington reflects the preferences not of the general public, but of this very small wealthy minority. And sometimes that has extremely not just kind of unfair consequences, but extremely deleterious content. sequences for conduct of of economic policy. So the the case in point that were some of my thing interests come together with all of this is how did we deal with the aftermath of the great financial crisis? For the first few months, we had more or less response that was at least in the right direction, fiscal stimulus monetary easing, then a weird thing happened. Somehow, even though unemployment was still above 9%, everyone inside the beltway was talking about the great threat posed by budget deficits, and the urgency of entitlement reform. And this was not I’d like to say it was debate but it didn’t even feel like a debate. It felt can actually document this to a remarkable extent, both the political establishment and the media simply stated as facts. That this was what had to be done. So there was a, there was a great article by Ezra Klein at the time about the trouble with Alan Simpson, where he quoted various reporters who would ask, “So will President Obama do the right thing?” These were not opinion writers. These were supposedly reporters. And the right thing meantcutting social security and medicare. It simply became defined as this was the responsible the right thing to do. The what happened? What happened very clearly was that oh, I’m sorry. I should say that it was also very clear that this was not the right thing. If there was if there was one, I mean, the peculiar thing about the aftermath. You know, nobody really saw the financial crisis coming except for people who saw five other crises coming that didn’t happen, right. But once it happened, we all understood hadn’t quite realized just how much havoc the bursting housing bubble would wreak with hadn’t realized how much shadow banking had restored.