Its my Friday lay day and brevity will triumph today. It might just be a case of a poorly edited title, but a current article in the Jacobin Magazine (September 17, 2015) – Why Leftists Should Be Deficit Hawks – shows that if one starts from a wrong premise the conclusions will lead one astray no matter how noble the intentions are. Progressives have to get the basics of macroeconomics correct before they launch into critiques of this and that. Otherwise they get stranded in this ‘neo-liberal’ space of government financial constraints without really realising it. And then the wheels fall off because they are reduced to arguments like “we have to tax the rich to pay for the services to the poor”, which of course, is nonsense and self-defeating. There are much smarter ways to proceed.