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While economists generally agree that narrowing the government’s deficit and limiting the size of the debt are necessary in the long run, most argue that balancing the budget would not restore the nation’s still-weak economy to health in the near term. Indeed, rushing to do so with unemployment still elevated and the economy growing at only a sluggish pace could even set back the effort to reduce the deficit.

“The really important thing is to keep the debt from growing faster than the economy.”

Mr. Ryan, whose previous budget proposals did not bring spending below revenue for decades, vowed this time to do so by 2023, in part to satisfy the demands of the more conservative members of the Republican Caucus.

both optimists and pessimists share a belief more telling than Piketty’s success: the idea that the traditional Democratic economic agenda is dead.

Piketty’s book reinforces the idea that the domestic policies liberals advocate for are palliative, not curative — that, in essence, inequality is here to stay.

“for countries at the world technological frontier” — the United States, northern Europe and parts of Asia — and “ultimately for the planet as a whole – there is ample reason to believe that the growth rate will not exceed 1-1.5 percent in the long run, no matter what economic policies are adopted.”

EU proposals will force multinationals to disclose tax arrangements

The European commission is to table legislation in early April aimed at making the world’s largest multinational corporations open their tax arrangements with EU governments to full public scrutiny.

The commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, is said to be in favour of the initiative. A consensus has formed around making the rules apply to the world’s biggest conglomerates, including those from the US, the officials said.

Olsen sees this as an important but normal political moment, in which the policy views of populists and conservative intellectuals need to be reconciled on issues such as trade and immigration. An intellectual dialectic within the Republican coalition is straining to produce a new, more pro-worker synthesis — which Olsen himself has long advocated

But this raises the question: Is this a normal political moment?

If Trump were merely proposing a border wall and the more aggressive employment of tariffs, we would be engaged in a debate, not facing a schism.

Private lenders are pushing to break up the government’s near monopoly in the $100 billion-a-year student-loan market.

The banking industry’s main lobbying group, the Consumer Bankers Association, is pressing for the government to instate caps on how much individual graduate students and parents of undergraduates can borrow from the government to cover tuition. That would force many families to turn to private lenders to cover portions of their bills. While that could mean lower interest rates for some, it could constrain funding to households with blemished credit histories.

At stake is potentially billions of dollars in new business for private lenders, a group currently dominated by SLM Corp. , better known as Sallie Mae, Wells Fargo & Co., and Discover Financial Services .

Marine Le Pen has been re-elected leader of the Front National and immediately proposed changing the far-right party’s name to Rassemblement National (National Rally), saying it must serve as a rallying call to new voters.

For a political leader whose primary objective in recent years has been to soften FN’s image and shed its antisemitic, jack-boot image, the proposed name had unfortunate echoes of the Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP), an extreme-right collaborationist group set up by Marcel Déat, a “neo-Socialist, during the German occupation of France between 1941 and 1944.

Although Le Pen has partially sanitised the FN’s image, the clean-up operation has not been wholly successful. On Saturday a video released on the internet appeared to show one of the party’s parliamentary assistants, and a leading figure in the FN youth movement, shouting a racist insult at a security guard at a bar. FN said afterwards the assistant concerned had been suspended pending investigation.

China and the U.S. are firing warning shots in what could escalate to a full-on trade war.First, the U.S. announced tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, including from China. China then retaliated with levies on American products, including pork. The Trump administration then proposed $50 billion worth of measures against more than 1,000 Chinese-made items, including the components of consumer-electronic goods like flat-screen televisions. Hours later Beijing announced proposed tariffs worth an equal amount of money on more than 100 American products ranging from soybeans to cars and whiskey.

What this will mean in effect is still up for negotiation—the two sides are so far mainly at the threatening stage, and the latest rounds of proposed tariffs are just that: proposals, not yet reality.

if some Chinese-made products become more expensive for American consumers, it may seem like a blessing for U.S. manufacturers competing to sell the same types of products. But consumers, faced with a choice of two expensive goods—one made in China and the other in the U.S.—may simply buy neither.

In recent days, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists, as well as former top agency officials, have rushed to put out their own plans — by publishing preprint papers online and sharing ideas on Twitter and in op-eds

a consensus of sorts has begun to coalesce around several key ingredients for an American strategy to move forward while minimizing human and economic casualties. They include mounting a large-scale contact tracing effort, widespread testing, building up health care capacity before easing restrictions, making future quarantines more targeted, and allowing those who have recovered and have some immunity to go back to work.

While overall the peak of the epidemic may occur in late April or early May, the timing may be different in different states.

What must Biden do? In terms of substance, not too much—instead, he needs to do a much better job of spelling out what he already stands for. In truth, based on what he has already said, Biden would be the most progressive Democratic presidential nominee in recent history.

Take healthcare. Trump has labored to abolish Obamacare, including its protection for those with pre-existing conditions. By comparison, Biden offers a huge step forward, preserving private health insurance while offering public access to Medicare for all who want it. In the real world, such progress was unthinkable until today.

As a corollary, Biden offers what Vox calls the most detailed proposal to combat the opioid crisis: $125 billion over 10 years to scale up treatment and recovery programs—with the pharmaceutical industry to cover the costs through higher taxes. This plan has the benefit of being both fair and appealing to both Democrats and populist Trump voters

Over the past few days, I’ve been reading the major plans for what comes after social distancing. You can read them, too. There’s one from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer.

In different ways, all these plans say the same thing: Even if you can imagine the herculean political, social, and economic changes necessary to manage our way through this crisis effectively, there is no normal for the foreseeable future.

The AEI, CAP, and Harvard plans aren’t identical, but they’re similar. All of them feature a period of national lockdown — in which extreme social distancing is deployed to “flatten the curve” and health and testing capacity is surged to “raise the line.”

Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?

The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.

most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.