Amazing: an economist (and a Nobel Prize winner too!) who makes sense, much more sense than the present US or Australian governments… Do read his recent book The Roaring Nineties (2003):
By showing how corporations in the 1990s wasted billions of dollars through sheer mismanagement, accounting tricks and greed, Stiglitz debunks the myth that markets use money more efficiently than governments and proclaims that the role of government should be strenghtened in some respects (education, health, research and the environment) while it should be weakened in others (trade interventions and bailouts of banks and corporations). He sees it as the primary task of government to maintain the economy at full employment and to narrow the gap between the wealthy and the poor which only widened during the nineties.
Not surprisingly therefore, the final pages of The Roaring Nineties devoted to the Bush jr. administration are a scathing attack on the tax cuts introduced by George W. Bush which benefited the upper echelons of US society, changed the sizeable budget surplus left by Clinton into huge deficits and exacerbated the economic downturn of the end of the nineties. The globalization agenda of the Bush administration meant that agricultural subsidies were doubled and other protectionist measures increased. Multilateral efforts such as global warming and strategic arms treaties were abandoned making the prospects of a global community from which all countries profit seem even more distant.
