Posted by Neil H. Buchanan
Wednesday's New York Times included a very good article by David Leonhardt about President-Elect Obama's selection of Lawrence Summers to be the Director of the National Economic Council. For those who (like me) find Summers endlessly fascinating, frustrating, and impossible to categorize, it is a must-read. Although Leonhardt takes a (very slightly) more optimistic view of Summers' potential impact than I would take, he certainly lays out the enigma that is Larry Summers. Do you like provocation? Try this:
his career tweaking fellow liberals with arguments he considers
unpleasant truths — on the dangers of budget deficits, the benefits of
capitalism and other subjects. But he seems to have decided that
conservative orthodoxies have become a vastly bigger threat to good
economic policy than liberal ones. His favorite argument today is one
that instead drives some conservatives nuts
It goes like this: To undo the rise in income inequality
since the late ’70s, every household in the top 1 percent of the
distribution, which makes $1.7 million on average, would need to write
a check for $800,000. This money could then be pooled and used to send
out a $10,000 check to every household in the bottom 80 percent of the
distribution, those making less than $120,000. Only then would the
country be as economically equal as it was three decades ago.
