Mayor Pete makes the fundamental economist blunder

Traditionally, centrist fiscal hawks tend to argue that Washington needs to raise taxes and rein in entitlement spending just to make our current suite of federal programs sustainable. Buttigieg, in contrast, mostly just talks about raising taxes, primarily to pay for new spending. “In most developed countries, about a third of GDP goes in some way through the public sector,” he told that audience back in September. “In our country, it’s a quarter, and in that difference between a third and a quarter are so many of the ways in which our systems are falling behind other developed countries.”

For the record, Pete, government spending is about 40% of the economy.  The ratio mostly holds in the state of Indiana where Pete actually constructed the local government budget.

This error is common among statisticsians who compare government spending across nations, so common that I generally assume most comparisons make the error.

Why the error?  Because pundits want jobs in the center, like Mayor Pete.   This is the kind of error that causes national defaults.


JORDAN WEISSMANN, the author makes the other common mistake. He thinks the same group is still here making debt payments. Wrong. As of a few days ago about a half of us decided to quit making payments to government and instead collect it from government.  That deadbeat action, instigated mainly by progressive boomers, has left Slate readers, mostly young, with their payments to government going up by two percentage points of their income.  Yes, as of a few days ago, the Slate readers now pay 5% of their real income to federal debt service while the boomers it went from 2% to -2%. Mr. Weissmann might ant to consider that fact if he wants to kep young readers.

Slate has a real market problem, AOC is  pissed about Slate dinging her constituents with the debt bill. And when AOC gets back to her constituents about the scam, she will specifically name Slate as a scammer and tell her voters to dump the magazine. It is worse. It is becoming clearer and clearer to AOC that she has been duped by the progressive liberals, including Bernie.

How do I know this?

The boomer unions are out in force in California, running scared. The unions are older boomers trying to sell their homes and stick poor Hispanics with the pension bill, it is not going to work and AOC is onto the problem.