Burnt Orange Report

Blowing It

By Jim Dallas

Brad DeLong's notes for a professorial meeting on the state of the business cycle concludes --

Implications

--If we could get demand growing fast enough, we could have a truly amazing economy right now.

--But we don’t.

--Federal Reserve out of levers.

--Executive and Congress focused on long-run tax cuts for the $200,000+ a year crowd, and not on policies to boost spending now.

--Hence an extraordinary waste of opportunity.

--Not that things are bad (unless you are one of the unemployed, or fear that you are about to become one, but 6.1% is less than the 9.8% of October 1982).

--But things could—on the production, on the income, and on the employment side—be much, much better.

That, in a nutshell, is everything you need to know about the economy right now.