Dean Baker Gives a Lesson: How to Talk about Economic Recovery

These last few weeks, here at Campaign for America's Future, we've been laying out the argument for how a stimulus program based in investment in vital infrastructure can not only pull the American economy out of its current doldrums, it can repair the rot brought on by eight years of conservative rule—and will guarantee we never go back to the bad old ways of organizing our economy that brought us to this pass in the first place.

Yesterday the incomparable Dean Baker was featured on Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" on NPR and made that argument with unmatched eloquence. Listen to it here [1]. Dean gives us all a lesson in how to communicate a progressive vision for the economy—listen and learn.

Greg Mankiw, the mountebank Harvard economics professor and former chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors—he all but admits that he served as a mouthpiece for economic policies he knew were faulty—followed Baker [2], and provided another sort of lesson: a lesson in false equivalence, bad intellectual faith, and the threadbare nature of any imaginable conservative response to the crisis.

Kudos to Fresh Air for asking Mankiw the tough questions—and putting this stark contrast on display for our edification.