Are The Defections Beginning?
Most everyone in high positions of business have subscribed to the federal budget-slashing, anti-tax rhetoric. Loudly. It seems, though, that someone has (to use a silly teabagger phrase) flip-flopped:
Bill Gross is the manager director of PIMCO, which makes him one of the most important bond traders in the world, if not the most important. . . .
But in an unusual mid-month note to his investors, Gross hammered the “anti-Keynesians” in both parties who believe “that fiscal conservatism equates to job growth.” The truth, he says, is just the opposite. “Fiscal balance alone will not likely produce 20 million jobs over the next decade. The move towards it, in fact, if implemented too quickly, could stultify economic growth.”
Gross goes on to spend some time mocking the “ivory tower theorem” that deficit reduction will convince consumers to spend more now because they’ll worry less about taxes and service cuts later.
I especially like, though don't necessarily agree with, this assertion Gross makes. He states that the supply-side economics currently in vogue belongs “in the trash bin of theses and research aimed more towards academics than a practical remedy to America’s job crisis.”
Such theories weren't always the sole purview of academics, though. Karl Marx questioned the right for people to own things, and wrote a pretty fat stack of books to back his supposition. Only then did the super-rich start funding the backlash to Marx, endowing business schools and backing economics textbooks. It was only until the Bank of Sweden started endowing a Nobel knock-off prize in 1968 that economics was considered even vaguely academic, let alone scientific.
Moneyed interests may have forced non-empirical theories into the general discussion, but guys like Gross, more interested in having a sound future for the country than simply a rich future for himself, might stop the silliness.
Bill Gross is the manager director of PIMCO, which makes him one of the most important bond traders in the world, if not the most important. . . .
But in an unusual mid-month note to his investors, Gross hammered the “anti-Keynesians” in both parties who believe “that fiscal conservatism equates to job growth.” The truth, he says, is just the opposite. “Fiscal balance alone will not likely produce 20 million jobs over the next decade. The move towards it, in fact, if implemented too quickly, could stultify economic growth.”
Gross goes on to spend some time mocking the “ivory tower theorem” that deficit reduction will convince consumers to spend more now because they’ll worry less about taxes and service cuts later.
I especially like, though don't necessarily agree with, this assertion Gross makes. He states that the supply-side economics currently in vogue belongs “in the trash bin of theses and research aimed more towards academics than a practical remedy to America’s job crisis.”
Such theories weren't always the sole purview of academics, though. Karl Marx questioned the right for people to own things, and wrote a pretty fat stack of books to back his supposition. Only then did the super-rich start funding the backlash to Marx, endowing business schools and backing economics textbooks. It was only until the Bank of Sweden started endowing a Nobel knock-off prize in 1968 that economics was considered even vaguely academic, let alone scientific.
Moneyed interests may have forced non-empirical theories into the general discussion, but guys like Gross, more interested in having a sound future for the country than simply a rich future for himself, might stop the silliness.