Via Brad DeLong, Andrew Samwick on Peggy Noonan (yes, I know):
I think she is right in her main point about a ___________ leadership class in business and a _________ leadership class in government.
Noonan’s answers are “disheartened” and “mindless,” respectively. They’re not exactly my choices with the hard-right Republican base notionally out of power. Somehow I can’t imagine Wall Streeters of a certain pay grade saying, “I take this money more in sorrow than in greed.” I’m leaning towards “rapacious” and “corrupted.”
Good for Samwick for joining Bruce Bartlett in acknowledging that the Republican fiscal legacy of the Reagan-Bush era is a disaster. Then again, making the case for the ‘callous childhood’ view, we have Greg Mankiw writing “[t]he verdict on supply-side economics is mixed” in the NYT, and still getting to play Respectable Harvard Professor afterward.
