Tuesday, September 29, 2020

The Crazy Economic Lefties On Biden's Advisory Board Transition Team

Clockwise from top left: Felicia Wong, Teresa Romero, Stephanie Kelton, Sara Nelson, Julie Siegel

The Financial Times is out with a new report that informs us about "the influential leftists"  surrounding Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

This group will scare anybody to the right of Lenin. 

The Times informs:

Felicia Wong is president of the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think-tank and a fierce critic of “neoliberalism”. She has joined Mr Biden’s transition advisory board. 

Teresa Romero is the president of the United Farm Workers union, a Mexican immigrant and is on Mr Biden’s transition advisory board. 

Stephanie Kelton is the leading proponent of Modern Monetary Theory — which argues that the US can deploy far more fiscal stimulus without risking a debt crisis. She was part of the unity task force that sought to find common ground between Bernie Sanders and Joe Bidens’ economic plans. 

Sara Nelson is the president of the leading US flight attendant’s union. She rose to prominence during the pandemic because of the lay-offs in the sector, and was a member of the “unity task force”.

Julie Siegel is the former top economic policy adviser to Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, and has joined Mr Biden’s transition staff.

If any of these four, never mind the entire group, end up playing a key policy role in a Biden administration the march toward socialism will advance by leaps and bounds.

As I make clear in Problems With Modern Monetary Theory: A Comment on Stephanie Kelton’s "The Deficit Myth", Kelton is not only a let's print money all the time advocate, she is a major league central planner in favor of high taxes on the rich to shrink inequality and in favor of an astronomically high universal basic income. So she fits in quite well with the other super lefties on this list.

The Times reports that Biden is still seeking plenty of moderate and more traditional left-of-centre opinions on the economy, from the likes of Janet Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair, to Gene Sperling, a veteran of the Obama and Clinton administrations, and Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary. Let's hope. Though I consider all those named as terrible economists, they are still better than the Kelton et al. lefty group. 

-RW

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