Astounding Ignorance

[Twansmitted surreptitiously from his rubber room.]

Brad DeLong exposes yet another example of the astounding ignorance of a professor at the most prestigious economics school in the country. Luigi Zingales tries to pass off Bush's spending as Keynesian:

With zero personal saving and a large budget deficit the Bush administration has run one of the most aggressive Keynesian policies in history. Not only has adherence to Keynes's principles not averted the current economic disaster, it has greatly contributed to causing it. The Keynesian desire to manage aggregate demand, ignoring the long-run costs, pushed Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke to keep interest rates extremely low in 2002, fuelling excessive consumption by the household sector and excessive risk-taking by the financial sector. Most importantly, it has been the Keynesian training of our policy-makers that has led them to ignore the role that incentives play in economic decisions.

You only need to know the smallest bit of Keynes to know that this is total BS. Keynes did not advocate constant deficits, he advocated countercyclical government policy - deficit in recession, surplus in prosperity. Reagan, Bush, and Bush carried out completely different policies, running huge deficits in good times and bad. We would be much rich today if they hadn't. DeLong points out that he gets a lot else wrong too.

Can Zingales really be this ignorant? Or is he just lying for politcal purposes.

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