CART MEETS HORSE: Did Inflation Save Us From ‘New Progressive Economics?’
The Biden era’s high inflation has been terrible for the economy and the country generally. But did it save us from a more permanent progressive takeover of federal government policy?
That’s the tantalizing question hanging over a recent piece published by Vox Senior Politics Correspondent Andrew Prokop that chronicles the rise, and pending fall, of “New Progressive Economics.”
President Joe Biden obviously was not the left’s preferred candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary.
But, as Prokop tells it, he staffed his administration with lots of ultra-progressive wonks and political operatives who wanted to overthrow the Democratic Party’s perceived “neoliberal” consensus on trade and regulation in favor of aggressive anti-trust enforcement, proactive industrial policy, protectionism, and a massive increase in social spending.
They basically got most of what they wanted, starting with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP)—a law pitched as a pandemic recovery bill that was stuffed full of progressive spending items.
Now, however, depression is setting among the New Progressives. There’s a good chance that no matter what happens in November, they’ll see their influence and policy legacy crumble.
That’s obviously true if former President Donald Trump wins and Republicans get a shot at staffing the executive branch.
But Vice President Kamala Harris also appears a lot less enamored with “post-neoliberal” ideas than her boss. Her campaign trail overtures to big business, friendly relations with select billionaires, and a general instinct to run away from every progressive position she’s ever taken (save on abortion) all have them sweating.
Should she get elected, the New Progressive agenda might still be a dead letter.
If that’s true, they have only themselves to blame.
What did they think would happen? While Biden promised his DNC operatives with bylines in the run-up to the 2020 election that “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” Friedman had long ago accurately predicted the trajectory of Biden’s governing efforts, when he warned in 1970 (back when the inflation caused by LBJ’s massive Great Society spending was just beginning to make itself known) that “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”
In any case, mister, we could use a man like Paul Volcker again.