Simon Wren-Lewis over at his site Mainly Macro:
In June 2017 a member of the hard left of the Labour party, reviled by the right and centre for his association with left wing leaders and movements around the world and for his anti-nuclear views, in a few short weeks went from one of the most unpopular party leaders ever to achieving the highest vote share for his party since Tony Blair was leader. While this unexpected turn of events was in part the result of mistakes by, and inadequacies of, the Conservative Prime Minister, there is no doubt that many Labour voters were attracted by a programme that unashamedly increased the size of the state.
Contrast this with the United States. A Republican congress seems intent on passing into law a bill that combines taking away health insurance from a large number of citizens with tax cuts for the very rich. Let me quote a series of tweets from Paul Krugman:
“The thing I keep returning to on the Senate bill is the contrast between the intense hardship it imposes and the triviality of the gains. Losing health insurance — especially if you're older, low-income, and unhealthy, which are precisely the people hit — is a nightmare. And more than 20 million would face that nightmare. Meanwhile, the top 1% gets a tax cut. That cut is a lot of money, but because the 1% are already rich, it raises their after-tax income only 2 percent — hardly life-changing. So vast suffering imposed to hand the rich a favor they'll barely even notice. How do we make sense of this, politically or morally?”
Or to put it another way, 200,000 more deaths over the next ten years for a marginal increase in the after tax income of the 1%. This is no anachronism created by a Trump presidency, but an inevitable consequence of Republican control of Congress and the White House.
Although these two events appear to be in complete contrast, I think they are part of (in the US) and a consequence of (in the UK) a common process, which I will call neoliberal overreach. Why neoliberal? Why overreach?
More here.