No, Sanders is not just full of hype on economics! (A brief spike in growth to ~5% is possible.)

[Measure_for_Measure]

Sorry I missed this thread. I quote myself:

@Measure_for_Measure

James K. Galbraith’s letter is rather disappointing. Sure, you can get a burst of growth following a deep downturn if you apply sufficient fiscal stimulus. But Friedman posited a 5.3% real growth rates over 10 years. That’s ludicrous: at some point stimulus feeds into prices after you hit short term capacity limits. Galbraith’s treatment of the subject is misleading and embarrassing.

There’s nothing standard about Friedman’s methodology.
I repeat that the 5.3% figure was Gerald Friedman’s creation and has not been explicitly showcased by the Sanders campaign to my knowledge. The policy director of the Sanders campaign has however correctly portrayed Friedman as supporting their plan.

The Friedman model was cooked. Galbraith misleads his readers. This isn’t a case of dreaming big. Passing single payer is dreaming big. Claiming that passage will have one consequence or another is something else.

In a blog post Kevin Drum dug a little deeper. It’s not just one number. [INDENT]Productivity growth will double compared with Congressional Budget Office projections [according to Friedman’s analysis]—and in case you’re curious, there has never been a 10-year period since World War II in which productivity grew 3.18 percent. Not one. And miraculously, the employment-population ratio, which has been declining since 2000 and has never reached 65 percent ever in history, will rise to 65 percent in a mere 10 years.[/INDENT] And it will be much harder to drive the emp/pop ratio ever higher given the aging of the population.

The Sanders campaign has crossed into Neverland