After a two week hiatus, Paul Krugman is back, and while I still am posting on The Agitator (which takes most of my blogging time), nonetheless I will be here periodically. Unfortunately, even after receiving a bit of a rest, Krugman has decided that instead of being an economist, he is going back to being what he usually is: a political operative instead of an economist.
His latest work, an attack on Paul Ryan, is pretty typical of what one would expect from a member of the Obama re-election campaign, and given that Krugman seems to be coordinating his columns with the campaign's talking points, we can expect more (and more, and more) of this stuff into the election and most likely beyond. As one who will not be voting for either Romney or Obama (and that clown posing as Obama's vice president), I don't have a political dog in this fight, so I'm not going to waste time and space defending undefendable politicians.
While I have no problem not putting up a defense of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, I cannot imagine a serious economist defending Barack Obama and his program. We have a president who is trying to destroy an entire industry (coal-burning generators of electricity) and trying to force Americans to purchase less efficient and more expensive electric power in return, and Paul Krugman claims that this is a "stimulus" program because the government has shelled out billions of dollars in subsidies to politically-connected "green energy" firms.
Yes, an unserious economist would claim that destroying a healthy and profitable industry to prop up industries that literally consume more than they produce actually will help bring about economic recovery. Yes, an unserious economist would claim that a surefire way to bring economic recovery is to prepare for an imaginary invasion of "space aliens." Yes, an unserious economist would call for the Fed to come up with a clever plan to get around the law creating the Federal Reserve System that prohibits the Fed from directly purchasing short-term federal government bonds so that the Fed could have what essentially would be a money-printing scheme to fund government expenditures.
Yes, an unserious economist would insist that a story about a babysitting co-op that allegedly kept itself afloat by printing extra babysitting coupons somehow is a perfect analogy to the U.S. economy and "proves" that all it takes is for the government to print money to keep things well-oiled.
As I have stated many times, I am not supporting Romney and Ryan any more than I am supporting Obama and that clown Joe Biden. (Talk about unserious; here is a guy who doesn't even know what century we are in -- and people claimed Dan Quayle was an idiot.)
So, if Krugman wants to claim that subsidies, bailouts, printing money, and blankets of stifling regulations constitute a "serious" economic recovery program, he can be my guest. But these things are not just "unserious." No, they are a very sick joke.
I don't support either major party's budget either, but Krugman could at least mention :
ReplyDelete1) That Ryan's budget's actually *increase* each year. Cuts are, as he said "reductions from projections with current policies"
2) He mentions tax cuts (under Ryan) for the 1%, but in the "tax expenditures" details he cites, I'm fairly certain that they include increasing *everyones* taxes. not just the 1%.
3) He doesn't even mention Ryan's Pentagon budget *increases*. My theory is that Krugman does not even want to mention what he "might" cut, because that would open the door to a real discussion of other cuts that he might not like.
Certainly unserious, but typically dishonest is more appropriate.