I recently did a post trying to figure out whether there are any non-quantity theoretic models of the price level.  It led to one of the most intense debates I’ve ever seen in my comment section, and even other bloggers chimed in with posts.  But no one came forth with a non-quantity theoretic model of the price level.  It is very important that any monetary theory be able to explain why prices aren’t 100 times higher, or 100 times lower.  Thus I’m more inclined than ever to think the QTM is the best starting point for monetary theory (although obviously it’s not literally true that M and NGDP grow at the same percentage rates.)

I wasn’t able to fully grasp how MMTers (“modern monetary theorists”) think about monetary economics (despite a good-faith attempt), but a few things I read shed a bit of light on the subject.  My theory is that they focus too much on the visible, the concrete, the accounting, the institutions, and not enough on the core of monetary economics, which I see as the “hot potato phenomenon.”  This is the idea that the central bank controls the total quantity of money, but each individual controls their own personal “money supply.”  So if the Fed injects more money into the economy, something has to give to equate money supply and demand.  Initially there is too much money in circulation, and people pass the excess balances to one another like a hot potato.  This process drives up NGDP, until the public is willing to hold the new quantity of money.

Importantly, it’s very hard for individual people to see how this process works, as the Fed injection of cash doesn’t make anyone richer.  They swap cash for bonds, at fair market value.  But if no one is richer, why should AD go up?

The easiest way to see the process work is to imagine an economy without banks, where the new money goes right into circulation as currency.  Most people can instinctively grasp that more currency, without any increase in real goods being produced, will lead to inflation.  But when you add a banking system it’s much harder to see the hot potato effect, because now the new money can show up as either cash or bank reserves.  It looks like individuals who didn’t want to hold excess cash, could simply put it in the bank.  But of course the bank usually doesn’t want to hold a lot of excess cash (reserves) either, and so you can still have the hot potato effect.

Now let’s look at an example, first from my perspective, then theirs:

The Fed wants to raise the price level by 10%.  So they decide to suddenly increase the monetary base by 10%, and then continue on with the same money supply growth rate as before.  This should cause a 10% one-time rise in P, and in NGDP, compared to the no-action alternative.  But if they actually did this in a modern economy, it would create a big mess.  NGDP doesn’t change immediately, so it’s be hard to generate demand for that extra cash.  Even so, the Fed can literally force base money into the economy, by selling [I meant buying] bonds.  I believe the MMTers, argue that trying to do this would drive rates to zero.  That may or may not be true; they tend to overlook that the interest rate isn’t just the price of money, it’s also the price of credit.  So a highly expansionary policy can increase interest rates under certain conditions, for certain maturities.  But let’s assume rates did go to zero.  Then AD would rise, and eventually NGDP would increase 10%.  At that point the public is willing to hold the larger cash balances, and the nominal interest rate returns to its original level.

Because this process would be messy, real world central banks would use a much more subtle process, involving signaling.  They will signal the desire for 10% higher NGDP though various mechanisms–a higher inflation target, a lower exchange rate, or most commonly, a lower fed funds target rate.  If credible, this signal will boost AD.  To some that seems like handwaving (the inflation target more so than the interest rate.)  It’s actually an implied commitment to provide 10% more base money at that future date when NGDP is 10% higher.  But in that case the cause of the higher NGDP (more cash in the long run) seems to occur after the effect (higher NGDP growth.)  To many people, that is deeply disturbing.  An observant reader will have noticed that cause doesn’t actually follow effect in this case, the true cause of everything is a sudden expectation that future levels of currency will rise by 10%.  So cause actually does precede effect.

My hunch is that the MMTers are fooled by this process.  They probably have a better understanding of modern central banking than most non-MMTers, certainly better than mine.  They see the central bank targeting rates, and when the target changes, there is often almost no immediate change in the monetary base.  Instead, things like loans may pick up.  To prevent the interest rate from deviating from the target, the central bank is virtually forced to respond to those bank actions by adding more reserves.  This makes the monetary base seem endogenous, and in the extremely short run it is, at least under modern central bank practices.  In the future, the advent of IOR may make central banking resemble the MMTers model even more closely.

Nevertheless, even though money seems endogenous, it actually isn’t.  A permanent peg of the interest rate would leave prices unanchored, or indeterminate.  Thus the central bank moves rates around in a fashion that will eventually move the monetary base around in a fashion that will tend to keep P and NGDP on the target growth path.  So the base is actually doing all the heavy lifting, even though the specific procedure used by central banks makes it seem like the tail of the dog.

That’s why it’s so important to do thought experiments with monetary regimes lacking a banking system.  This allows us to first work out the basic principles of what determines the price level, i.e. what determines the value of money.  Once we’ve done that we can ask whether adding banking actually changes anything fundamental.  I say it doesn’t, but obviously the MMTers disagree.

Still it seems to me that anyone attacking my position first needs to develop a model of the price level (not inflation, but the level of prices.)  I’m convinced that only the QTM can do this, and still explain why Australia and Canada have similar price levels but Canada has more than 5 times as large government liabilities.  My answer is that both countries have similar currency stocks (per capita.)  And it’s the currency stock that matters; not total government liabilities.

The best way to understand modern sophisticated central banking is to study the most primitive monetary system possible–a medieval king debasing his money in a country lacking banks.  The causal chain between debasement and inflation is no different from the causal chain between OMPs of T-securities and inflation, at least in the long run when nominal rates rise above zero.

Here’s Paul Krugman:

What Davies doesn’t say is that there’s a good reason Lucas won’t even consider the obvious explanation in terms of a shortfall in demand. More than 30 years ago, in a burst of radically premature triumphalism, Lucas and his colleagues declared the “Death of Keynesian economics”. As cited by Greg Mankiw(pdf), Lucas wrote that Keynesian theorizing was so passe that people would giggle and whisper if it came up in seminars.

Since then, as is obvious to everyone but the hermetic inhabitants of the freshwater world, the attempt to explain business cycles in terms of rational expectations and frictionless markets has failed; and Keynesian economics continues to be very useful. But to concede that, to even consider the possibility that we’re in a demand-shortfall slump of the kind Keynes diagnosed, would be an incredible comedown for Lucas.

This creates the impression that Lucas believes demand shocks don’t matter.  Let’s take a look at a few of the Lucas PowerPoint slides that Krugman is commenting on:

Why did the decline in deposits precipitate a depression?

* People, business firms like to hold certain ratio of cash to spending
flows

* Bank failures, decrease in deposits, meant sudden decrease in liquidity-
cash and cash substitutes-held by public.

* To rebuild balances, businesses, households cut back on spending,
trying to restore comfortable ratio of cash/bank deposits to spending
flows

* 48% deposit decline resulted in 58% spending decrease

So Lucas claims that the Great Contraction of 1929-33 occurred because bank failures led to money hoarding and a big fall in “spending.”  Hmmm, that sounds suspiciously like a demand-side problem to me.  Yet Krugman seems to think Lucas is some sort of doctrinaire RBC economist.  And then there is this slide:

What could have been done?
– Get more reserves-more cash-into the system
– Fed could have offset deposit decreases due to bank runs by increasing
bank reserves, permitting/encouraging sound banks to expand deposits
– Instead, Fed stood by and watched
– Milton Friedman, Anna Schwartz argue that this Fed failure was the
crucial policy mistake of the U.S. Great Depression.
– I agree.

I guess Milton Friedman is also a real business cycle economist, who denies demand shocks matter.  Now it’s true that Lucas goes on to argue that some of the New Deal programs delayed the recovery.  Perhaps that view puts Lucas beyond the pale in Krugman’s eyes.  Here’s that fanatical RBC economist, James Hamilton:

I openly confess to believing that government policies that were explicitly designed to limit manufacturing, agricultural, and mining output may indeed have had the effect of limiting manufacturing, agricultural, and mining output.

Then Lucas goes on to make the same argument about the current recession; a severe demand shock in 2008-09, followed by a slow recovery due to government policies that reduced aggregate supply:

– The effects of the credit freeze were also similar to the effects of the
bank runs of the 1930s
– A part of the effective supply of liquidity supply had vanished, other
money-substitutes now became suspect, everyone wanted to get into
government-issued or government-insured assets: reserves, currency,
and insured deposits
– Could see this in the widening spreads between treasury bills and commercial
paper, between government and corporate bonds, etc.
– A flight to currency? Not exactly. But a flight to government promises
of currency, current or future
– All of this similar to earliest stages of the Great Depression

And skipping ahead a few slides:

– Financial panic was over by end of 2008
– Too late to prevent deep spending declines in GDP in 2008-4 and
2009-1
– But there is world of difference between two quarters of production
declines and four years!

Again, a demand-side explanation.  Although I’m 100% with Lucas on the demand shock/supply shock explanation for the Great Depression, I am somewhat skeptical of his supply-side argument that big government policies have greatly slowed this recovery.  Yes, there are policies that are reducing AS.  This is the first time in American history when we’ve adopted European-style extended UI (now a maximum of 99 weeks, roughly the same as Denmark.)  So the natural rate of unemployment may have risen a bit.  But there’s also lots of evidence that more demand would be helpful.  Stocks are still strongly correlated with TIPS spreads, a pattern you don’t see during normal times when there’s no demand shortfall.

Still, it’s a bit silly to suggest that Lucas is some wild-eyed radical.  After all, you can argue that he’s simply applying the (Keynesian) model that’s now standard in all the textbooks—AS/AD.  Think about the following:

1.  We have a severe AD shock, just like in 1981-82

2.  Inflation levels off at a lower level, just like in 1982-84

3.  But unlike 1983-84, the self-correcting mechanism doesn’t bring a fast recovery.  Why not?

4.  France never recovered from the 1974 and 1981 slumps.  Yet the Keynesians back then thought all France need was more AD.  They were wrong.

Again, I do think we need more monetary stimulus.  But Lucas is working within a standard macro framework.  The vast majority of economists agree with Lucas on the stimulus issue.  A recent poll showed 36 out of 38 oppose more monetary stimulus.  Krugman and I are now in the tiny minority, not Lucas.

In my view 20th century macro made a tragic error in focusing on explaining and controlling inflation, rather than explaining and controlling NGDP growth, which would have clearly shown that we had a severe AD shortfall.  But that’s not the standard model.  The standard NK model says an adverse demand shock causes high unemployment and lower inflation.  Then wages and prices adjust and rapidly bring down the unemployment rate.  It worked in 1983-84.  It didn’t work this time, despite a far smaller reduction in the rate of inflation.  Why not?

In this recovery my views are closer to Krugman.  My views of the 1933-40 recovery are closer to those of Lucas.   But none of this has to do with mythical disputes over “frictionless markets.”   Lucas is one of the best known macroeconomists of the past 50 years.  I’d think an economist who has a column at the New York Times would want to know something about his actual beliefs, before dismissing him with a crude and misleading caricature.  But then we’ve seen what happened to Fama and Cochrane, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Et tu, Matt Yglesias:

I’d been dimly aware of Robert Lucas’ argument (PDF) that the Great Recession can be explained without reference to such petty concepts as aggregate demand

Yeah, “dimly aware” sounds about right.

Update; I was trying to be funny, but that probably came off as sarcastic.  Sorry Matt.

PS.  For some strange reason the comments are really piling up.  It will take days to get through the backlog.

Robert Lucas was my advisor at Chicago, so now it’s personal.

In a reply to my recent post on miscommunication among the macro elite, Brad DeLong misinterprets my argument, confusing nominal and real changes in GDP.

In claiming that Cochrane and Fama were really only making the tautological claim that “if we assume nominal GDP is fixed, fiscal policy doesn’t affect nominal GDP”, Scott is retconing.

That was not my claim.  I claimed (and indeed showed) that both conceded that there might be a case where more nominal spending would boost real output, but in that case you just print money.  But if printing money doesn’t solve the problem, neither does fiscal stimulus.  Alternatively, if we assume NGDP is fixed by monetary policy, then there is no mechanism by which fiscal stimulus can raise real GDP.  And unless I’m seriously mistaken, that happens to be true, even within the Keynesian model.  Indeed especially within the Keynesian model (as supply-siders don’t always agree.)

I’m not sure Brad DeLong really understands how Chicago-types think.  They compartmentalize.  Roughly 99% of the time they look at the world with “real” models, where sticky prices and nominal shocks play no role.  And then once and awhile they acknowledge, as a sort of aside, “well yes, deflation can have real effects, at least if wages and prices are slow to adjust.”  If you grab a comment at random, they are going to be operating with a real model, without any output shortfall due to sticky prices.

DeLong makes things worse by implying that Robert Lucas also doesn’t understand the basics of demand-side macro, by including a Lucas quotation mocking fiscal stimulus right after the Fama and Cochrane quotations.  Here’s what DeLong needs to think about.  As of 10 years ago fiscal stimulus had basically been removed from elite macroeconomics.  I’m not just talking about freshwater economics; I mean elite New Keynesian economics as well.  Lucas knows this and so does DeLong.  They also both know the reason, if you have an inflation targeting central bank, there really isn’t anything for the fiscal authorities to do (again, on the demand side.)  The “Treasury view” holds in an inflation targeting world.

Now for a short period in late 2008 and 2009 the entire economic profession lost its head, and forgot everything they knew, or were supposed to know.   The Keynesians forgot that the zero bound doesn’t stop central banks from inflating, and the right forgot that markets are efficient, and therefore that it’s a really, really, bad thing to let TIPS spreads plunge into negative territory.  Brad DeLong published an article in early 2009 called “Four Ways Out” where he denied that monetary stimulus works in a liquidity trap.  Fiscal stimulus was the only way out.  To his credit, he did eventually rediscover the merits of monetary stimulus at the zero bound, and joined my crusade to have the Fed pump up NGDP.  Indeed by earlier this year he was fighting off left wing skeptics of QE2, by pointing out that rumors of QE2 had boosted inflation expectations.  So right now I’m much closer to DeLong than I am to Lucas.

What DeLong forgets is that among economists on the right there was much less belief in the liquidity trap bogeyman.  Friedman taught at Chicago, and greatly influenced Lucas’ views on monetary policy.  And we all know what Friedman thought of so-called “liquidity traps.”  So when people suddenly started talking about fiscal stimulus in 2008-09, the right wing Chicago school reacted something like modern physicians would to a suggestion that leeches be brought back into medicine.  The Fed determines NGDP, where’s the model that provides a role for fiscal stimulus?  It’s right there in the Barro and Cochrane quotations I provide, in case anyone thinks I’m making this up.  Their view is basically;  “Nominal shortfall?  Well in that case just print money; don’t build pyramids in the desert.  But I don’t see a nominal shortfall.”  Once the brief period of deflation was over, they (wrongly) assumed we didn’t even need more monetary stimulus.

I don’t want to let the right off the hook entirely.  I see two big problems.  They need to better understand that most economists see nominal shocks as having fairly long lasting effects, and also better understand the motivation of Keynesians.  Yes, fiscal stimulus is just a backdoor way of boosting V, of making monetary policy effectively more expansionary.  But the more sophisticated modern Keynesians know that.  They correctly saw that the Fed was likely to fall behind the curve in terms of keeping NGDP on track.  (Their mistake was in thinking that the Fed wouldn’t neutralize fiscal stimulus.)   I also think the right underestimates how costly demand shortfalls really are.  Lucas recently pointed out that NGDP just fell for a few quarters.  But as Krugman showed in a recent post on wages, the distribution of nominal wage increases strongly suggests money illusion, and is inconsistent with any plausible model that assumes rationality.  Furthermore, some of the structural problems the right points to, like extended UI benefits and higher real minimum wages, are themselves aggravated by the demand shortfall.  Why do they think Congress suddenly raised maximum UI from 26 weeks to 99 weeks?

Another common misconception is that Lucas doesn’t believe demand shocks matter, a slur that DeLong thankfully avoided.  But Krugman and Yglesias recently did make this charge, and I’ll take them to task in my next post.

HT:  RGV

No, that’s not a typo.  In October 1929 the discount rate was 6%, and by October 1930 the discount rate was 2.5%.  So how can I say the Fed raised rates?  Because interest rates are the price of credit, determined in the market for credit.  And free market forces depressed the interest rate even more sharply than the 3.5% drop that actually occurred.  Thus in a sense the Fed had to raise rates with a tight money policy, in order to prevent them from being much lower than 2.5% in October 1930.

Of course the discount rate is actually a non-market rate set by the Fed.  But market rates such as T-bill yields fell by a similar amount in 1930.

A commenter of the Austrian persuasion recently argued that the Fed made a mistake by driving rates so low during the Great Contraction, and that if they hadn’t done so, market forces would have weeded out the weaker and less efficient firms, laying the groundwork for a more sustainable recovery (I hope I got that right John.)

But his entire argument is based on a misconception, that the Fed adopted an easy money policy in 1930.  In fact, the Fed did just the opposite.  In October 1929 the monetary base was $7.345 billion, and by October 1930 it was $6.817 billion.  That’s a drop of over 7%, one of the largest declines in the 20th century.  And the monetary base is the type of money directly controlled by the Fed.  When people talk about the government “printing money” they are generally referring to the monetary base.  So by that definition money was very tight.  If money was not tight in October 1930, then the low credit demand of the Great Depression would have meant even lower interest rates; perhaps the 1% we saw in 2003, which prevented another Great Depression.

Now for a curve ball.  So far I’ve assumed the Great Depression just happened for mysterious reasons, and that the Fed responded with tight money, thus preventing interest rates from falling as far as market forces would have taken them (assuming a stable monetary base.)

But why did the Depression happen in the first place?  It’s very likely that the Fed’s decision to reduce the monetary base by 7% was a major cause of the sharp contraction of 1929-30 (after October 1930 the base rose, as the Fed partially accommodated higher currency demand during the bank panics.)  So if tight money caused the Depression, why did rates fall?  First we need to recall that monetary policy affects rates in various ways:

1.  Liquidity effect; tight money raises rates

2.  Income effect; tight money reduces RGDP, investment, credit demand, and real interest rates

3.  Inflation effect; tight money reduces expected inflation and thus nominal interest rates

Note that the effect everyone focuses on (the liquidity effect) is actually the outlier, and is also a very short term effect.  Indeed I’ve seen the “long run” effects overwhelm the short run liquidity effect in a period less than three months!  Thus most of the movements in interest rates that we observe are not the Fed moving rates around via easy and tight money (as most people assume) but rather the market forces moving rates around.

Indeed 1929 is a great example.  The Fed only had raised rates to 6% for about three months in 1929, after which the economy started plunging so fast that the interest rates began falling sharply, even without any “easing,” without any increase in the monetary base.

Obviously all this has important implications for how 90% of our profession (and I’m being generous) badly misinterpreted the stance of monetary policy in 2008.

One final point.  I used the monetary base as the benchmark of policy, of the Fed “doing nothing.”  But of course a modern inflation targeting or dual mandate central bank is not instructed to target the monetary base or interest rates; they are instructed to produce stable macroeconomic conditions.  Under this regime, the only sensible way of thinking about whether money is easy or tight is relative to the goals of the central banks.  But that standard, monetary policy was disastrously tight in 2008-09.

I’m not sure whether I should be amused or frustrated by watching a Nobel Prize winner (and two people who didn’t win, but deserved to) talk past each other for two years.  Their misunderstanding is blindingly obvious, but I don’t ever see any acknowledgement.  As you know, two years ago Paul Krugman accused Eugene Fama and John Cochrane of not understanding the most basic principles of macroeconomics, the fact that fiscal stimulus can boost AD, and thus boost the level of output when there is economic slack.

And Paul Krugman keeps making this charge over and over again, despite the fact that it is clearly false (at least for Cochrane and Barro, and probably Fama as well.)  It’s true that you can cherry pick quotations that make it seem like the three deny the possible that fiscal stimulus can work, almost as a matter of logic.  If that was their entire argument, then it would be shockingly uninformed.  But both Cochrane and Barro clearly indicate that they are holding nominal aggregates constant, i.e. any shortfall in NGDP would presumably be fixed by printing money, leaving no role for fiscal stimulus.  Of course that’s also my argument, yet I do believe fiscal stimulus might be able to boost NGDP, because I don’t believe (as a matter of logic) that the Fed would necessarily create the right amount of money.  (I’m skeptical of fiscal stimulus for “likely Fed response” reasons, not as a matter of logic.)

It’s actually really simple to prove my point, as Krugman criticized a Fama and Cochrane article, and Eugene Fama links to the same Cochrane article, and also a Barro article for support.  So what do Barro and Cochrane say in their articles that Fama cites with approval?  Here’s Robert Barro:

John Maynard Keynes thought that the problem lay with wages and prices that were stuck at excessive levels. But this problem could be readily fixed by expansionary monetary policy, enough of which will mean that wages and prices do not have to fall. So, something deeper must be involved — but economists have not come up with explanations, such as incomplete information, for multipliers above one.

And here’s John Cochrane:

My first fallacy was “where does the money come from?” Well, suppose the Government could borrow money from people or banks who are pathologically sitting on cash, but are willing to take Treasury debt instead.  Suppose the government could direct that money to people who are willing to keep spending it on consumption or lend it to companies who will spend it on investment goods. Then overall demand for goods and services could increase, as overall demand for money decreases.  This is the argument for fiscal stimulus because “the banks are sitting on reserves and won’t lend them out” or “liquidity trap.”

In this analysis, fiscal stimulus is a roundabout way of avoiding monetary policy. If money demand increases dramatically but money supply does not, we get a recession and deflation. If we want to hold two months of purchases as money rather than one months’s worth, and if the government does not increase the money supply, then the price of goods and services must fall until the money we do have covers two months of expenditure. People try to get more money by spending less on goods and services, so until prices fall, we get a recession. This is a common and sensible analysis of the early stages of the great depression. Demand for money skyrocketed, but the Fed was unwilling or, under the Gold standard, unable, to increase supply.

This is not a convincing analysis of the present situation however. We may have the high money demand, but we do not face any constraints on supply. Yes, money holdings have jumped spectacularly. Bank excess reserves in particular (essentially checking accounts that banks hold at the Federal Reserve) have increased from $2 billion in August to $847 billion in January. However, our Federal Reserve can create as much more money as anyone might desire and more. There is about $10 trillion of Treasury debt still outstanding. The Fed can buy it. There are trillions more of high quality agency, private debt, and foreign debt outstanding. The Fed can buy that too. We do not need to send a blank check to, say, Illinois’ beloved Governor Blagojevich to spend on “shovel-ready” projects, in an attempt to reduce overall money demand. If money demand-induced deflation is the problem, money supply is the answer.

Some people say “you can’t run monetary policy with interest rates near zero.” This is false. The fact of low interest rates does not stop the Fed from simply buying trillions of debt and thereby introducing trillions of cash dollars into the economy. Our Federal Reserve understands this fact with crystal clarity. It calls this step “quantitative easing.” If Fed ignorance of this possibility was the problem in 1932, that problem does not face us now.

So they are both basically saying; “Of course if the problem is nominal, then monetary policy can fix it much more easily.  But I don’t think it’s nominal.  And if we hold nominal spending constant, fiscal policy can’t fix it.”  And that’s true, even within the Keynesian model. Fiscal stimulus can do nothing if the Fed has got NGDP where it wants it.

[BTW, Barro’s claim that Keynes assumed prices were sticky is a side issue.  I think Barro is right, but even if wrong it doesn’t invalidate his argument at all.  Keynes certainly assumed higher NGDP was a necessary condition for fiscal stimulus to work.]

Needless to say I think Barro and Cochrane are wrong about the need for monetary stimulus, but it’s really rather sad when people like Krugman and Brad DeLong keep insisting that these guys don’t understand basic macro principles.  Krugman and DeLong are both very bright, and they have access to the same information I just presented to you.  Why do they ignore it?

Of course I don’t know for sure that Fama was using the same implicit assumption as Cochrane and Barro.  But earlier in the article Cochrane made the fiscal policy can’t work argument without the stable NGDP qualifier, so I think it quite likely that Fama was also cutting corners.

Lots of brilliant people talking past each other.  Lacking a common language for communication.  Welcome to elite macroeconomics, circa 2011.

The right doesn’t think we need more NGDP and the left doesn’t understand that the Fed is our only realistic hope for more NGDP.  Welcome to elite macroeconomics, circa 2011.

If I was going to assign blame I’d single out Krugman/DeLong for rudeness and Fama/Cochrane for poor communication skills.  But of course I have no business attacking such distinguished economists.

PS.  I’ve avoided talking about the debt ceiling thus far, partly because I don’t know much about it, partly because these things always seem to get resolved at the last minute, but mostly because the whole idea of a debt ceiling seems incredibly stupid.  This morning when I woke up up the first thing I heard was that the Gang of Six had agreed to massive spending cuts, abolition of the hated AMT, and reduction of the top rate to between 23-29%.  Oh, and a slash in the corporate top rate too.  I thought I was dreaming.  Surely this is too good to be true!  And then I heard that Obama endorsed the plan.  Now I knew I was dreaming.  Then I heard that it wouldn’t pass because of GOP opposition in the House.  Ouch, I was brutally shaken out of my reverie.  If only life could be like our dreams.  Unfortunately, there’s always the House GOP to keep it real.