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William Gropper, Construction of the Dam, 1938 To many on the left, it's always 1933. Building "roads and bridges" will "create jobs," soaking up the mass army of unemployed desperate for work that they seem to see.  Driving around though, I notice that we build roads with big machines, not lots of people. And construction jobs are high-skill jobs, not people with shovels. "Shovel-ready" itself is a misnomer. Nobody uses shovels on a construction site anymore, they use a backhoe. Neither you, reading this, nor I, nor an unemployed Wal-Mart greeter or bartender could do much of anything useful on a road construction site.  On a lark, I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics to see just how many people are employed on roads and bridge construction.  Latest Feb-Mar change Total nonfarm 144,120.0 916 Construction of buildings 1,689.3 17.8 Heavy and civil engineering construction 1,062.9 27.3 Water and sewer system construction 183.8 Oil and gas pipeline c...

Greg Ip has a great column in the WSJ on Bidenomics.   It's not long, it's so well written that it's hard to condense the good parts, and you should really read it all.  There is an intellectual framework to Bidenomics, and with that a scarily more durable move on economic policy.  There used to be  "certain rules about how the world worked: governments should avoid deficits, liberalize trade and trust in markets. Taxes and social programs shouldn’t discourage work." By contrast President Biden's (really his team's) "embrace of bigger government" is founded on different economic ideas. To wit, abridged:  Growth Old view: Scarcity is the default condition of economies: the demand for goods, services, labor and capital is limitless, their supply is limited. ...faster growth requires raising potential by increasing incentives to work and invest. Macroeconomic tools—monetary and fiscal policy—are only occasionally needed to deal with recessions and i...

In one of their series of excellent WSJ essays, Phil Gramm and John Early notice  that conventional income inequality numbers report the distribution of income before taxes and transfers.  After taxes and transfers, income inequality is flat or decreasing, depending on your starting point.  Source: Phil Gramm and John Early in the Wall Street Journal If your game is to argue for more taxes and transfers to fix income inequality, that is a dandy subterfuge as no amount of taxing and transferring can ever improve the measured problem!  Now facts are facts, and this one has a good progressive interpretation: But for our sharply progressive tax system and  benefits, untrammeled capitalism would have led to sharply increased inequality. The numbers don't argue for more redistribution, but they are consistent with a narrative that only our current large redistribution saved us from the top two lines.  Gramm and Early offer a sentence on this worth pausing to th...