May 27, 2015
Washington Post economics writer Jim Tankersley took it upon himself to explain to Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination that “deodorant is not starving America’s children.” My guess is that Senator Sanders is aware of this fact.
The context for Sanders’ deodorant comment was a statement about the irrelevance of GDP growth as a measure of well-being when the bulk of the gains go to the wealthy. Tankersley was good enough to include the whole quote:
“If 99 percent of all the new income goes to the top 1 percent, you could triple it, it wouldn’t matter much to the average middle class person. The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn’t matter if people continue to work longer hours for low wages and you have 45 million people living in poverty. You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems. All right? You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”
The point appears to be one about income distribution not deodorant. In other words, when the rich have even more money they are likely to focus on relatively frivilous ways of spending it, like new types of deodorants and sneakers. The problem isn’t that the rich are spending their money on deodorants, the problem is that they are the only ones who have money to spend, as opposed to hungry people having money to spend on food.
Even if Tankersley didn’t get this one exactly right, it is encouraging to see economics writers trying to educate presidential candidates. Perhaps Tankersley or one of his colleagues will use their columns or blog posts to explain the basics of Keynesian economics, so that candidates will understand that in the current economic context plans to cut the deficit are in fact plans to reduce economic growth and throw people out of work. Or, maybe they could explain that our bloated financial sector is a drag on growth, so that measures that reduce the size of the financial sector (like the financial transactions tax proposed by Sanders) would actually be a boost to the overall economy.
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