This week, I have been mostly reading:

• .NORM Normal File Format — xkcd:
  
• Response to Doug Henwood’s Trolling in Jacobin — Randy Wray in New Economic Perspectives: For far too long left-leaning Democrats have had a close symbiotic relationship with the rich. They’ve needed the “good” rich folk, like George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Bob Rubin, to fund their think tanks and political campaigns. The centrist Clinton wing, has repaid the generosity of Wall Street’s neoliberals with deregulation that allowed the CEOs to shovel money to themselves, vastly increasing inequality and their own power. And they in turn rewarded Hillary—who by her own account accepted whatever money they would throw in her direction. Today’s progressives won’t fall into that trap. “How ya gonna pay for it?” Through a budget authorization. Uncle Sam can afford it without the help of the rich. And, by the way, they’re going to tax you anyway, because you’ve got too much—too much income, too much wealth, too much power. What will we do with the tax revenue? Burn it. Uncle Sam doesn’t need your money.
• AOC, Sanders, and Warren Are the Real Centrists Because They Speak for Most Americans — Mehdi Hasan at the Intercept: Take Ocasio-Cortez’s signature issue: the Green New Deal. Former George W. Bush speechwriter — and torture advocate — Marc Thiessen claims that the Green New Deal will “make the Democrats unelectable in 2020.” The Economist agrees: “The bold plan could make the party unelectable in conservative-leaning states.” The Green New Deal “will not pass the Senate, and you can take that back to whoever sent you here and tell them,” a testy Diane Feinstein, the senior and supposedly “moderate” Democratic senator from California, told a bunch of kids in a viral video. But here is the reality: The Green New Deal is extremely popular and has massive bipartisan support. A recent survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University found that a whopping 81 percent of voters said they either “strongly support” (40 percent) or “somewhat support” (41 percent) the Green New Deal, including 64 percent of Republicans (and even 57 percent of conservative Republicans).
• Matt Wuerker:
  
• The Reserve Bank Governor is completely wrong about the budget and it matters — Steven Hail: The Australian Commonwealth Government has no purely financial constraint on its spending and it is ridiculous to suppose it can somehow “save” its own money. It can create money by spending and it can destroy money by taxing. It cannot save its own currency. That is a nonsensical concept. It cannot even borrow its own currency, in the conventional sense of the word “borrowing”. Government issuance of debt securities simply gives those of us who hold Australian dollars the option to swap them for safe, interest-bearing transferable savings accounts at the Reserve Bank. That is all that government bonds are. The Government doesn’t even need to issue them at all to cover its deficits. It chooses to issue them and they play a useful role in our financial system. Their issuance does nothing to pay for government spending today and does nothing to limit the ability of the Government to spend in the future.
• Anti-social economics — Peter Radford at the Real-World Economics Review Blog: Just how anti-social is economics? I don’t think the question is difficult to answer: economics in its modern mainstream form is, at its heart, designed to undermine democratic government. It is, therefore, profoundly anti-social.