J. Bradford DeLong is Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was Deputy Assistant US Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration, where he was heavily involved in budget and trade negotiations. His role in designing the bailout of Mexico during the 1994 peso crisis placed him at the forefront of Latin America’s transformation into a region of open economies, and cemented his stature as a leading voice in economic-policy debates.
BERKELEY – The odds are now about 36% that the United States will be in a recession next year. The reason is entirely political: partisan polarization has reached levels never before seen, threatening to send the US economy tumbling over the “fiscal cliff” – the automatic tax increases and spending cuts that will take effect at the beginning of 2013 unless Democrats and Republicans agree otherwise.
More than a century ago, during the first Gilded Age, American politics was sharply polarized as well. In 1896, future President Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican attack dog. He denounced Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan as a mere puppet of the sinister governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld.
Bryan, Roosevelt said, “would be as clay in the hands of the potter under the astute control of the ambitious and unscrupulous Illinois communist.” The “free coinage of silver” would be “but a step towards the general socialism which is the fundamental doctrine of his political belief.” He and Altgeld “seek to overturn the...essential policies which have controlled the government since its foundation.”
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