Anyone Who Thinks That The

America's Political Landscape Is Infested With Many Zombie Ideas - Beliefs About Policy That Have Been Repeatedly Refuted With Evidence And Analysis But Refuse To Die. The Most Prominent Zombie Is The Insistence That Low Taxes On Rich People Are The Key To Prosperity.

[i]n America, At Least, We Have A Pretty Good Record For Behaving In A Fiscally Responsible Fashion, With One Exception - Namely, The Fiscal Irresponsibility That Prevails When, And Only When, Hard-line Conservatives Are In Power.

Europe Is Often Held Up As A Cautionary Tale, A Demonstration That If You Try To Make The Economy Less Brutal, To Take Better Care Of Your Fellow Citizens When They're Down On Their Luck, You End Up Killing Economic Progress. But What European Experience Actually Demonstrates Is The Opposite: Social Justice And Progress Can Go Hand In Hand.

Yes, Over The Centuries Economic Progress Has Reduced Some Gross Disparities - Modern Americans Are Relatively Unlikely To Simply Starve To Death (though It Can Happen), So In That Sense The Gap Between Rich And Poor Has Narrowed. But The Question Isn't Whether Society Is, In Some Sense, More Equal Than It Was In 1900. It's Whether It Is Radically More Unequal Than It Was In 1970. And Of Course It Is.

Unsustainable Situations Usually Go On Longer Than Most Economists Think Possible. But They Always End, And When They Do, It's Often Painful.