Reading the populist tea leaves

Michiko Kakutani reviews Joseph Stieglitz's new jeremiad about the Obama adminstration's fiscal policy and makes an inference that has me genuinely confused.

In a November 2008 Op-Ed article for The New York Times, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote that a huge stimulus package — as much as $1 trillion over two years — was needed to turn the Great Recession into a robust recovery and that new regulations were needed to change the destructive behavior of Wall Street that had brought about the fiscal calamities in the first place.

Some four months later, he wrote another Op-Ed piece for The Times in which he assailed the Obama administration’s plans for dealing with ailing banks, arguing that it was “a win-win-lose proposal: the banks win, investors win — and taxpayers lose.” He went on to characterize the administration’s approach as “ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses.”

Mr. Stiglitz’s new book, “Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy,” expands these populist arguments further. He deconstructs the causes of the Great Recession of 2008, assesses the responses to the crisis by the Bush and Obama administrations and lays out suggestions for how America might use this “near-death experience” to address flaws in its economic system and reconfigure itself for the 21st century — a century in which it faces daunting problems like a ballooning deficit and trade imbalance, mounting job losses in the manufacturing sector and challenges from China and other countries.

If I'm to believe the reports coming out of Massachusets and the various tea parties, the "populist arguments" are about a health care bill that is "moving too quickly," a stimulus bill that "spends too much money," and a hatred for Wall Street tempered by an even greater hatred for "big government" and "socialism." I'm baffled.