What is wrong with this guy?

On a day of remebrance, reflection and unity, here is what the New York Time's Paul Krugman decided to put down on his blog yesterday:

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

In Krugman's alternate universe, the solemnity of yesterday's commemorations had less to do with the loss of life and the shock and horror of an attack on our nation's soil, the likes of which have never been seen, and more to do with what Krugman perceives as a tacit acknowledgement of bad behavior in the wake of 9-11. Uhh, yeah.

"Fake heroes"? Who was calling these men heroes to begin with? Regardless of what you think of these convenient-to-be-Republicans, it was generally agreed that those men provided a healthy degree of much-needed and steady-handed leadership in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 to where even a wing-nut like Rosie O'Donnell was singing President Bush's praises before reverting to default Truther wing-nut form.

But "heroes" is a grossly misleading straw man since most everyone agrees that showing strong leadership in a crisis situation does not qualify for "hero" status rather knowingly putting yourself in harm's way even at the risk of death in order to come to the aid of another.

We imagine Krugman knows this all too well, which makes his attempts to air partisan grievances on 9-11 all that more pathetic.

How sad. On a weekend where most of the nation was enjoying late summer/early fall weather and reveling in the first full weekend of college and professional football and yet also taking in very somber and moving 9-11 commemorations, Krugman decides to set finger to keyboard to generate that blog post. Contrast that with the grace and dignity that both President Bush and President Obama (who visited all 3 attack sites yesterday: Shanksville, PA, Washington D.C. and Ground Zero in New York City) handled the ceremonies yesterday. What a sad, bitter, little man Krugman is.

Paul Krugman: we need a cold war with space aliens or something

Yesterday, when we were musing about what sort of re-branding Team O was going to apply to their tired old bag of Keynesian stunts, little did we know that Paul Krugman was way out ahead of the curve with his messaging. How far out there? Like, way out there, man... way the freak out there.


Gird thyselves, people, against the gnarly Martians...

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better–

Good grief. How bad are things when you are coming up with Twilight Zone episodes to justify horrible economic policies? So bad, we almost ignored Fareed Zakaria's patently ridiculous dig-a-hole/fill-a-hole multiplier effect theory.

And to what Krugman is saying, doesn't this administration manage by crisis as it is, space alien threat or not?

Yep. Don't expect anything different economic policy-wise from Team O, however, how it is that it will be justified should prove to be highly amusing.

Won't get fooled again: Redux

Consider this a companion piece to yesterday's post regarding the amnesia suffered by the New York Times editorial board regarding what it will take to recover from the Great Recession which was essentially a call for more Keynesian tomfoolery. It would appear that Times columnist Paul Krugman was the ghost writer for that piece as the following is the money paragraph from his latest column:

For example, we could have W.P.A.-type programs putting the unemployed to work doing useful things like repairing roads — which would also, by raising incomes, make it easier for households to pay down debt. We could have a serious program of mortgage modification, reducing the debts of troubled homeowners. We could try to get inflation back up to the 4 percent rate that prevailed during Ronald Reagan’s second term, which would help to reduce the real burden of debt.

Always cracks us up that progressives look back to the Great Depression as the good ol' days. Stands to reason, though, as dependency upon government programs was at an all-time high and is looked upon today as the panacea for all that ails us. Funny... we thought that $800 billion stimulus package passed in the initial stages of this administration and that is now conveniently slipping down the memory hole was supposed to kick-start the economy and keep unemployment under 8 percent.

And still with the mortgage modification programs. Taking your money to prop up bad risks hasn't been working out so hot lately as front page headlines in papers across the country will attest.

And who isn't up for paying more to put food on the table? What might be for economists like Krugman isn't going to cut it for working families dealing with real world issues and isn't going to make the reality of the debt burden magically disappear.


Again, it's as if the past 2 or 3 years never happened such is the manner of reasoning and logic currently being applied to this slump which is only entrenching us further and prolonging the agony.

What some would have us forget, others still have been paying attention.

Here's some more of that new civility everyone is talking about

A tea party rally in Madison, Wisconsin over the weekend and pro-union counter-protesters booing during the national anthem?





To be all fair and balanced, here's Ann Althouse who has been doing great work covering all that has been happening on the ground in Madison over the past couple of months:

I'm seeing some assertions about this on blogs and in YouTube videos, and it's wrong if not unfair and deceptive. I don't have my own video, because I mishandled the button on my camera, but I was right behind the Tea Party crowd amid anti-Tea Party protesters who were making a lot of noise trying to drown out whatever was coming from the podium. They were, in fact, succeeding in their purpose so well that they could not hear when the national anthem began.

I started walking forward and it took a while for me to recognize the anthem. My observation was that those who could hear it were not booing. The "rockets red glare" line seemed louder, and there was a noticeable hushing that extended back into the anti-Tea Party areas of the crowd.

Perhaps. In the video, however, we're hearing plenty of the national anthem, loud and clear, as well as plenty of booing and cat calls until the towards the end of the anthem when the pro-union types seem to get a clue.




Oh, and check this out (via Lee Stranahan):





That's not "I strongly object to your political values and principles" - that shrieking, caterwauling, that ululating... that's just pure hatred.


But it's all good because Paul Krugman has now come out and said that being uncivil is like patriotic or something. Good to know because whatever thin veneer of post-partisanship still claimed by the back-bencher currently residing in the White House, the same post-partisanship he campaigned upon, has officially been laid to rest by the grand poobah of statist punditry.

We're glad it's over. All that new civility balderdash was really crimping our style.

Unheeded warning

Current budget trends are what?

"(A cancer) that will destroy the country from within"

Your inner Paul Krugman is thinking that is just some sort of tea-baggy fear-mongering, right?

Unfortunately, that quote was from the two leaders of the President's own debt commission.

Secular Apostate has more, here.

Summer time reading

Continuing with our series of excerpts from Walter Russel Mead's essay, "The Top Ten Lesson of the Global Economic Meltdown"

7. The Battle of Financial Markets is over; the Battle of State Finance has begun.

“The Battle of France is over,” Winston Churchill said in 1940. “The Battle of Britain is about to begin.” We are at a similar juncture right now in the global economy. The financial markets failed to withstand a series of speculative assaults. The world’s governments rushed into the breach with large guarantees and bailouts. Now the markets are testing the governments: will the Europeans really be able to bail out Club Med? Beyond that, can the world’s governments armed with fiat currencies and facing enormous budget deficits provide enough credible stimulus to restart the world economy before fears of debt and default cause investors to lose faith in the ability of governments to manage the economic cycle?

The bad guys lost the Battle of Britain and we can hope that governments will survive the present downturn with their financial credibility intact. However, it is now clear that governments do not have an unlimited power to bail out private firms or to stimulate the economy through deficit spending. This is not only true of smaller governments like that of Greece; it may be true even of the United States.

This means that we have passed into a new economic environment, unlike anything we have seen since World War Two. For the last sixty years, we have operated under the assumption that the world’s leading governments were ultimately sovereign when it came to the economy: that they could do whatever it took to fix economic problems. In the future, we will be living in a world where this is no longer so obvious. New, large and unpredictable risks now hang over the global economy.

(itlalics, ours)

Unfortunately, we here in the states seem to be fixated on the prospect that somehow the federal government will be able to "stimulate" our way out of this recession. What has happened in Europe and the pending double-dip recession here has not factored into the logic of taste-makers like Paul Krugman and the Obama economics team who are pushing for even more spending and Keynesian gimmickry.

By the numbers:

110.9% debt to GDP ratio is a threat to government solvency.

79.88% debt to GDP ratio (and growing) will lead to a stronger economy.

Such incoherent theorizing can only be found in one place. Our blog buddy, Harrison, has the details here at Just Politics?

The obligatory when you lose Paul Krugman post

Maybe House Democrats can pull this (healthcare reform) out, even with a gaping hole in White House leadership. Barney Frank seems to have thought better of his initial defeatism. But I have to say, I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.

But enough about Krugman…

We were reading the comments to this piece and a general theme was a lamenting a lack of strength or resolve by Obama himself to see through his agenda. We didn’t expect anyone to really criticize the content of the legislation on Obama’s slate but what had us mildly surprised is that no one seemed objectionable to the tawdry, unseemly and outright corrupt manner in which Obamacare was fashioned.

Sure, there is always going to be a degree of “the end justifies the means” among acolytes of any political figure but Obama who fashioned himself as a pragmatic centrist made the “means” the focal point of his campaign. Hope and Change weren’t end states but rather the road or journey that would expose “the process” of Washington to the sanitizing effects of sunlight.

Maybe we need to get out more but the fact that growing criticisms of Obama from his left lock on to his lack of resolve and political experience (we knew all this already) rather than his complete and total abrogation of his campaign meme’ is, well, disappointing.

Great moments in the history of statism Pt. IV

For this is the moment of truth. The political environment is as favorable for reform as it’s likely to get. The legislation on the table isn’t perfect, but it’s as good as anyone could reasonably have expected. History is about to be made — and everyone has to decide which side they’re on.

That from NYT op-edder Paul Krugman who is giddy as a school girl over something of which we guarantee you he has scant actual knowledge.


O.K., Krugman. What’s in this bill that is going to make history? Tell us precisely what will be in the final form of this bill of which we are supposed to just drop our objections and dutifully allow passage. The final form, as in the one that will actually be signed into law by the President after a raft of last minute amendments are slipped in behind closed doors adding heft to this 1,900 page monstrosity.

Will there be a public option? Will there be a public option with a trigger? Will it fund abortions? Will it force people to buy health insurance? Will it cover illegal aliens? Does it include tort reform? Well, we know for absolute certain some aspects of this bill.

It blows our mind that someone as allegedly smart as Krugman can be so passionate over a piece of legislation that represents an effective federal take-over of 1/6th of our economy that will cost the taxpayers at least $1 trillion dollars adding again to our run-away debt and which will be funded by middle-class tax hikes and which no one really, we mean, really knows what’s in it.

Actually, we do know why Krugman would be for this: It’s a statist’s wet dream. Anything this expansive and this expensive and which is so chock full of legalese and last minute amendments will transmogrify and bend like the living document that it is to the whim of whatever powers that be in the federal government.

In the mind of a statist, how is having an authoritarian tool of this breadth and depth not a bad thing?

Paul Krugman has little use for a show of hands

Greetings, Healthers. For those of you convinced those unruly mobs showing up at Congressional home district town halls to express their displeasure in full throat are mere pawns of Big Medical and the vast right-wing conspiracy, we give you one of your leaders, Paul Krugman. Because when Canadians can't even stand their own health care, it must be manufactured outrage.

Krugman, an NYT columnist, didn’t think porkulus was large enough. In fact, Krugman thinks we need another stimulus package because the first 3/4ths of trillion dollars ain’t getting the job done. It’s logic like this that would help explain the clip below and Krugman’s, a proponent of government-managed single-payer systems, grasp of facts-on-the-ground.



Notice how he phrased that question? Not, “how many of you are satisfied with your health care?”, which leaves some degree of wiggle room but “how many of you (Canadians) think you have a terrible health care system?” Even with that extreme black-and-white line of questioning, all the Canadians still raised their hands.

Yet, all that probably doesn’t matter to Krugman. Afterall, he’s Paul Krugman and those people that raised their hands just don’t know what’s good for them.

Quote of the Day

Before you can declare free markets a failure, you have to establish that they exist.
- Paul Kasriel, chief economist at Northern Trust Co. in Chicago

A combination of “chosen people” who fix interest rates, an army of regulators (particularly in the banking sector) and compromised overseers (see: Fannie and Freddie campaign contributions to members of Congress) belie the reality of a truly free market.

Free market capitalism has its flaws and chief among those and one that will never be solved, cured or “regulated” is that at the epicenter of all free market enterprise is the inherently flawed human being. His judgement, his ambitions and his desires all for better or worse determine his economic fate and taken collectively with all the other players determines the fate of the larger economy.

And for all these flaws, capitalism has been the only economic system to lift millions out of poverty as a “direct consequence of government stepping out of the way.”

But now, people like Arianna Huffington are cheering the death of laissez-faire capitalism (quick side note: she, of course, sites that New York Times article which laid primary blame for the financial crisis at the feet of the Bush administration. Fair enough. That’s their prerogative but any serious piece that investigates the cause(s) of the crisis and fails to note Congressional ineptitude and malfeasance is guilty of negligence and disingenuousness and thus any person who would cite this article to back-up any of their own contentions lacks a seriousness of their own).

… and Paul Krugman is gleefully rubbing his hands together as the impending expansion of government under Obama is a perfect opportunity for “good government” as if good government was some sort of end-state rather than a utilitarian means to protecting property and the coasts. And how the growth of federal government is an opportunity for it to become more transparent, more efficient and less susceptible to graft and corruption is lost on us.

Allowing bad business models to survive and bad judgement to go unpunished via the bail outs and a $1 trillion stimulus plan which will most certainly be riddled with pork and which because of its centralized nature will certainly entail a massive misallocation of resources, will not improve our economy but certainly hinder it all in the name of avoiding (short term) pain.

It defies logic but demands an explanation.