Debt Ceiling Debate

Here is one of my favourite economists, Brad Delong, explaining the debt ceiling and the disaster in Washington that passes for "politics"...



If you take the time -- an hour -- to watch the full video, you will learn a great deal that isn't discussed in "the news" and doesn't show up in much of the "news analysis" that surrounds all the Washington hoopla.

Brink Lindsey is a conservative moderate Republican.

Brink Lindsey was the Cato Institute's vice president for research. He was also editor of Cato Unbound, a monthly web magazine. From 1998 to 2004, he was director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies, helping to make it a leading voice for free trade. An attorney with extensive experience in international trade regulation, Lindsey was formerly director of regulatory studies at Cato and senior editor of Regulation magazine.

He is a contributing editor at Reason magazine, where he was a leading voice in support of the Iraq war, and a frequent discussion guest on BloggingHeads.tv.

Brad DeLong is a liberal and progressive Democrat.

Brad DeLong, is a professor of Economics and chair of the Political Economy major at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the United States Department of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration under Lawrence Summers. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Along with Joseph Stiglitz and Aaron Edlin, DeLong is co-editor of The Economists' Voice, and has been co-editor of the widely read Journal of Economic Perspectives. He is also the author of a textbook, Macroeconomics, the second edition of which he coauthored with Martha Olney. He writes a monthly syndicated op-ed column for Project Syndicate.

As an official in the Treasury Department in the Clinton administration, he worked on the 1993 budget, on the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, on the North American Free Trade Agreement, on the unsuccessful health care reform effort, and on other policies.[citation needed]

DeLong is a prolific blogger. His main blog is Grasping Reality with Both Hands, which covers political, technical, and economic issues as well as criticism of their coverage in the media.

DeLong is both a liberal in the modern American political sense and a free trade neo-liberal. He has cited Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Lawrence Summers, Andrei Shleifer, and Milton Friedman as the economists who have had the greatest influence on his views. In fact, his dozen most important papers have been co-authored with Summers, and several of the best papers of Summers are those co-authored with DeLong.