Sure sounds like it: “One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans.”
Alas, but no, that line has little to do with the content of the post. He lambasts Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin for his detailed plan to cut spending and taxes — and thus deal with two of Americans’ biggest concerns, the ever-growing national debt and the lately-stagnant employment rate.
So, Krugman goes after a man with a plan while having being dewy-eyed for a man with a few slogans. Paul Krugman was one among many in the media establishment who showed himself quite susceptible to the manifest charms and empty rhetoric of a certain Senator from Illinois. And now he has the cheek to call a serious and thoughtful Republican Congressman a charlatan?
Hey, Paul (Krugman), it wasn’t conservatives who bought a bill of goods from a man who promised to heal the nation and fix the economy and ended up taking rhetorical stances which divided us even further while enacting economic policies which kept us in the economic doldrums.
The People’s Economist is an idiot. Why anybody reads his drivel is beyond me.
What the ire inspiring professor Krugman ignores or fails to realize when he comments, is that government doesn’t create any real wealth…. so it only flys in the face of better judgement for anyone to buy in to Obama’s notion which says, ” government outlays will revive the economy.” The truth is, the only way the feds can pay their debts, is by taxing other entities who are still generating real wealth. And the end result of that is always the same…. because excessive government spending always weakens the real wealth generators and further undermines the prospects of an economic recovery.
Now to my mind, the only way further fiscal and monetary stimulus can work is if the flow of real funding from savings is large enough to support government spending that’s tightly coupled with a loose money policy and still allows real wealth generators to keep on growing money….. but when the flow of real savings is falling, I don’t care how much cash the feds pump in to the system, a real economic surge can’t be ignited. Government can’t continue to spend and pump out money and at at the same time keep taking money from the rich and expect them to grow jobs.
Knowingly or not……. most liberals, especially Krugman, are fond of citing Krugman-isms. I on the other hand espouse to the words of Ludwig von Mises, and he says, ” There is need to emphasize the truism that a government can spend or invest only what it takes away from its citizens and that its additional spending and investment curtails the citizens’ spending and investment to the full extent of its quantity.”
Nobody should be Republican. But gay people ESPECIALLY shouldn’t be Republican…
What got the US in the economic problems we have, is 30 years of right and center-right policies, that gave an ever increasing percentage of income and wealth to the top 1%. To Blame Obama, for not being able to turn around 8 years of total mismanagement, in 18 months is rediculous, and is simply playing politics.
Any economist will tell you that you need stimulous in economic downturns. The rights fixation on the deficit is a straw man. They do not worry about the deficit when it comes to fighting wars with no plan, or covering the losses of large multinational corporations. Only when it comes to helping the average person, does the right cry about the deficit.
Finally Krugman is the one of the few reality based economists that get a national platform. The non-reality based supply-side folk, and the like, are living in a dream world, where the few get richer and the majority get poorer, and this is somehow sustainable.. Dream on right wingers.
My, stolen, how broad-minded we are.
So. reality, then, if stimuli work so well, how come employment growth remains so anemic, given the size of this stimulus.
Oh come on, are you really going to pretend like you’ve been reading Krugman for the past 18 months? He’s been one of his biggest critics on the left, and that’s going back to the campaign. What do you think of this for ‘going dewy-eyed for a man with a few slogans?’
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/opinion/11krugman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
Above, the words of Krugman during the Democratic primary season. He’s also been critical of Obama’s economic policy and staffing decisions, and his general tentativeness in implementing liberal policies in the face of hysteric and irrational Republican opposition, and he’s been doing this since the early months of Obama’s presidency.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/obama-liquidates-himself/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYOHGR-32R8
There’s just no possible way that you’ve been exposed to Krugman’s writing over the past year and a half based on your description, which is more wishful thinking about liberalism than anything. I can tell you first hand that liberals are extremely disappointed with Obama and feared even before his election that he wasn’t going to be very good at this, and Krugman has been a part of that discussion since the beginning.
You clearly haven’t been following him or you’d know this.
Levi,
I don’t read Krugman because he is a loud partisan and economics, the dismal science, is not primarily a partisan activity. (The chairman of the FED is not known for his party affiliation as a condition of appointment.) Krugman may or may not be a great economist. I really don’t know. But he is a full blown spin machine for liberalism and Democrat politics. That is the only way his name ever comes to my attention. People who do read Krugman link to his jaundiced statements.
I love your selected Krugman statement which opens with the mea culpa
OK, so maybe, just maybe, he made a run at being an “objective” leftist, agenda driven Democrat.
Well, if you don’t read him, how can you speak with so much authority on who he spins for? He’s a committed liberal, to be sure, but that means that he is mostly at odds with this administration, not reflexively defending it. Again, he’s one of Obama’s biggest critics on the left – I don’t expect you to know this if you don’t read him, but you’re being completely dishonest if you’re accusing him of being a hyper-partisan Democrat defender.
Come on. You don’t need to clip the quote and pretend like he goes on to trash Republicans. He’s talking about the divide between Clinton and Obama during the primary race, Republicans aren’t even mentioned in that article.
Poor Levi, your synapses are really challenged.
I don’t read Krugman because he is a committed leftist. Leftists don’t have the Communist Party or the Socialist Party so they push the Democrat Party which is well beyond moderate leftist. Reread your own words. You said as much.
“I won’t try to fake evenhandedness here…” is a mea culpa for all Krugman stuff since he is not evenhanded. He is a shill for extreme leftist ideology. It doesn’t matter what polemic he attached these words to ……. any evenhandedness that sneaks into Krugman’s stuff is either a complete surprise to Krugman (unintentional) or faked.
You’re talking about something that you’re admitting you know nothing about. Krugman doesn’t push the Democratic Party, he pushes liberal economic policies that the Democrats only pretend to support. He’s hardly a reflexive partisan and once again, has been criticizing the Obama administration since the earliest days of the campaign. If you’d like to call him an ideologue, that would be another matter – but asserting that he is some reflexive, unwavering defender of all things Obama and Democrat is to reveal your complete ignorance of his positions.
“I won’t try to fake evenhandedness here…” is a mea culpa for all Krugman stuff since he is not evenhanded. He is a shill for extreme leftist ideology. It doesn’t matter what polemic he attached these words to ……. any evenhandedness that sneaks into Krugman’s stuff is either a complete surprise to Krugman (unintentional) or faked.
Are you six years old?
I realize that any post I make is likely to fall on deaf ears. From the tone of the posts here, it is quite obvious that any reasoned, fact-based response will not change your mistaking utopia for real life.
About the jobs–The stimulus, watered-down, but the usual corporate-back Republicans stanched the bleeding. That is all. Yes, you are right, it did not correct the 30 years of mismanagement by far-right and center-right governments (meaning Clinton, and now Obama). I think it is unreasonable to expect a turn around in 18 months after such a long period of putrification.
You see the world in the most stark partisan manner, and feel that everyone else is the same as you, especially when you disagree. But some people are not about partisanship, they are about reality, truth, science, and helping people. Luckily there is one voice on the national stage (Krugman) that gets to discuss economics from a reality perspective, not the wishful thinking of supply siders, or other loony fantasy types, espousing war with no taxes, thinking that accrued economic power will not accrue unbalanced political power, etc.
Um, reality, of course, no your post is not falling on deaf ears. It’s just that you fail to offer any facts to back up your argument.
We’re not the ones who see the work in a the most stark partisan manner nor do we make the kind of assumptions you make in your concluding paragraph.
You may call yourself reality based, but you are anything but. Anything.
No, I’m fairly sure he’s free and able to run around demanding the further destruction of this country. Of course he should be in a padded cell.
Me:
Levi:
I guess everyone but me can see that I said Krugman is a reflexive, unwavering defender of all things Obama and Democrat….. Why, oh why, can’t I?
Oh, yeah, then I wrote:
Levi tells me:
Does anyone else get dumber after they finish reading Levi?
#6: “I can tell you first hand that liberals are extremely disappointed with Obama and feared even before his election that he wasn’t going to be very good at this, and Krugman has been a part of that discussion since the beginning.”
Oh, I see. When conservatives said that Obama was unqualified to be President, and the Left responded by calling all of us racists, that was their way of agreeing with us. We’ll keep that in mind the next time we are accused of racism. It’s just the Left’s eccentric, playful little way of telling us that we’re right. Thanks for clearing that up, Levi.
Paul Krugman is a Leftist who promotes Marxism. Any criticism in his articles is based upon his opinion that Øbama has not gone far enough. For example Krugman would be one to promote the idea of a single-payer health insurance system (so much for competition).
The Republicans are not to blame for the state of the economy. It is not even fair to blame GWB because in his last 2 years he was a lame duck President. The fact remains that the economy started getting out of hand after 2006 when the Dummycrats took control of the Congress. Their budgets were about pork, pork and more pork….
Now, the point that some people here are missing, is that what we are seeing now is a virtual repeat of the 1970s stagflation. The one factor that is different is the interest rate that remains low… perhaps when reviewing stagflation it might be necessary to reconsider whether or not interest rates should be included in the defintion.
What I am saying here is that the economy is in stagflation (high unemployment and high inflation at the same time). The real inflation rate is being hidden by changes to the basket of goods, thus the real high rate is being masked, and it will be masked in the future unless sanity returns.
The last time that there was stagflation on a world-wide scale was in the 1970s. It was preceded by a period of high growth in government spending (in USA the Carter years, in Australia the Whitlam years). What was obvious in the 1970s when stagflation hit for the first time happened to be that application of Keynesian style economics was not appropriate… it did not work.
What Keynes observed in the 1920s was quite different from what we have been observing. Upon reflection I see the difference as the impact of Government. During the period that Keynes observed Government was not as big, and this was especially true in the UK. However, once Government started implementing the kind of solutioins recommended by Keynes, there was a need to measure the impact of Government spending in the economy.
In simple terms, what this means is that we have a pie that is finite. It means that if Government increases its share of the pie via taxation, and spending, then the private sector misses out, thus Savings and Investment is reduced. The long term impact of a reduction in private sector savings and investment is in fact higher unemployment. There is nowhere in the world where Government has been able to take on the role that is fulfilled in the private sector, especially when Government tends to be inefficient.
As usual, Dick Krugman is wrong in his analysis, and in fact it is Krugman himself who is the charlatan.
Fortunately there are many other good economists in the USA. Krugman himself is nothing more than a party hack.