My Home About Me

Economist Joseph Stiglitz writes for the New York Times this morning "How to Fix the Global Economy."  What's wrong with it in the first place? He really doesn't say much about the global economy -- his gripe is entirely with the United States. According to Stiglitz, "the United States borrows close to $3 billion a day." But that's a substantial exaggeration. According to the US Treasury, the US government's net borrowing for the month of August, 2006 was $64 billion, or just about $2 billion a day (see page 20). You think even $2 billion is a big number? Maybe. But why didn't Stiglitz think it was big enough to cite it accurately? How are we to trust anything Stiglitz subsequently says when the first paragraph of his column gets a critical figure like that wrong by a factor of 50%?

And you don't even need to read the column to know his prescription. It's utterly predictable: "...expenditure cuts combined with an increase in taxes on upper-income Americans and a reduction in taxes on lower-income Americans." Oh, yeah. That will help. Force rich people to sell their Treasury bonds so that those Treasury bonds can be redeemed, confiscate the proceeds, and give it to poor people so they can buy more potato chips at Wal-Mart.

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