James K. Galbraith

The debt deal is bad economics, dishonest government, and surrender to blackmail. The alternative is not default, but government under the Constitution.

On the economics: by slowly choking off public services, public investment and regulation, the deal sets the economy on a path to strangulation. Every dollar cut from the...

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.

News reports hold that President Obama scored a political victory by agreeing to put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block to achieve a "go-big" $4 trillion deficit reduction. Speaker Boehner had to concede that Republicans won't vote for any package that...

The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989 and of the USSR in 1991 have become walled off in Western minds as events from an alien time and place. But they should remind us that the architecture of human governments is not eternal. Communism was once a powerful threat to...

I recently delivered the opening address at the Economists for Peace and Security Symposium on the Crisis in the States and Cities, held in Washington, D.C. on April 12th, 2011. The following is a transcript of those remarks...

We meet today at a moment when the normally useful...

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.

Statement by James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government, The University of Texas at Austin, and Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute, before the Senate Finance Committee, March 8, 2011, hearing on Principles of Efficient Tax...

Economists for Peace and Security has issued the following statement on current budget debates, pointing out that the entire premise is false and that giving in to the demands to cut the deficit imperils fragile recovery. James K. Galbraith, along with Ken Arrow, Andrew Brimmer, Robert J. Gordon,...

The Fiscal Solutions Tour is the latest Peter G. Peterson Foundation effort to rouse the public against deficits and the national debt -- and in particular (though they manage to avoid saying so) to win support for measures that would impose drastic cuts on Social Security...

I want to raise a hard question -- a question on which Americans are divided. It seems to me, though, we will get nowhere unless we realize where we are, what has actually happened, and what the future most likely holds.

Recovery begins with realism and there is nothing to...

The report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, issued on December 1, 2010 by Chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, is entitled "The Moment of Truth." The words appear in block caps on the second page, weighty and portentous. They reappear in the first paragraph...

Bruce Bartlett says it was a failure to focus. Paul Krugman says it was a failure of nerve. Nancy Pelosi says it was the economy's failure. Barack Obama says it was his own failure -- to explain that he was, in fact, focused on the economy.

As Krugman rightly stipulates,...

On July 19, The Daily Beast published Harold Evans's letter "Stimulus Now", which calls for urgent action on unemployment. Signatories include Roosevelt Chief Economist and Senior Fellow Joseph Stiglitz as well as Roosevelt Braintruster Sean Wilentz. While agreeing with the letter's central idea, Davidson, Galbraith, and Skidelsky declined...

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.

President Obama and his economic team face a daunting challenge: how to deliver economic growth they know can only come from deficit spending, while deferring into the future the "fiscal consolidation" which is being pressed on them by practically everyone, from Peter G....

In 66 pages [pdf], Mr. Greenspan fails to use the word "responsibility" even once. The word "blame" does not appear. The word "mistake" occurs once; financial firms made them. The word "failure" appears 14 times. None of them are self-referential. To have expected the phrase "mea culpa" would...

As part of the Roosevelt Institute's 10-part series on the Jobs Crisis, running on the New Deal 2.0 blog from Nov. 12-25, I was asked to reflect on what can be done to get Americans working again. Here's my take.

I'm tempted to say that the United States is...

Five former NATO generals, including the former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashvili, have written a "radical manifesto" which states that "the West must be ready to resort to a preemptive nuclear attack to try to halt the 'imminent' spread of nuclear and other weapons of...

The Texas Observer has published my tribute to Molly Ivins. I won't repeat it here, except for a small part. The "final Fridays" were a monthly event, held for years at Molly's house until her health made it impossible to go on.

"I used to go to the final Fridays...

In December 1970, 36 years ago this month, I replied to a very small ad in the Harvard Crimson, and in that way became the very first student volunteer for the undeclared presidential campaign of Senator George S. McGovern.

On the basis of that thin and ancient credential, I now...

"It is told that the such are the aerodynamics and wing-loading of the bumble-bee that, in principle, it cannot fly. It does, and the knowledge that it defies the august authority of Isaac Newton and Orville Wright must keep the bee in constant fear of a crack-up. One can assume,...

When Bush pressures red-state Democrats to back a right-wing extremist for the Supreme Court, that's "GOP Reaches to Other Party on Supreme Court Pick." And when Harry Reid stands up and demands that the Senate intelligence committee keep its promise to investigate the abuses that led to war in...