In his Friday New York Times column, Paul Krugman argued that the decision to remove Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill instead of Alexander Hamilton from the $10 is sound because, by any economic measure, Hamilton ought to be celebrated.
The fact that Jackson was "very much a racist [and] arguably an advocate of what we would nowadays call white supremacy" is beside the point, he wrote, because "Hamilton was the true father of the American economy."
Krugman speculated as to how Hamilton's 1790 proposal "First Report on Public Credit" would be received on the left and the right today -- not well -- before arguing that
policy makers won’t do the right thing, largely because they keep listening to fiscal scolds — people who insist that public debt is a terrible thing even when borrowing costs almost nothing. The influence of these scolds, their virtual veto over fiscal policy, somehow persists even though their predictions of soaring interest rates and runaway inflation keep not coming true.
The point is that Alexander Hamilton knew better...
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