Paul Krugman, Pet of Big Government (Solyndra)

The proponents of massive government subsidies to “green” energy have a huge problem on their hands. The Solyndra scandal is just so absurd, and the video footage of President Obama and Vice President Biden is just so hilarious, that only the most ideological can fail to smell a rat.

The reader will not be surprised, then, to learn that Paul Krugman, from his perch at the New York Times, thinks there’s nothing to see here. Krugman argues that hey, you win some, you lose some, and that the private sector makes bad investment decisions too—such as Pets.com.

In a quick blog post entitled “The Solyndra Scandal,” Krugman recently wrote:

“Haven’t written about this. But it is indeed a terrible scandal, because the private sector never ever puts money into ventures that end up failing:”

And then Krugman ended the post with a picture of the Pets.com sock puppet. His point, of course, is that there’s no scandal here, and groups like IER should drop the issue.

Although we shouldn’t read too much into a flippant blog post, Krugman isn’t some random guy off the street on these issues. He has repeatedly (e.g. here and here) called for massive government interventions into the energy sector, both for mitigating climate change and—more recently—because he thinks it will help the economy right now, to force businesses to spend money revamping their operations.

In case he genuinely doesn’t realize the issues, let’s walk through just why Solyndra is such a scandal. Krugman’s Pets.com analogy completely misses the point.

All Progressive “journalists” should have the title
“The Brilliant, Really Really Smart, Absolute Genius,
Mister, Ms. Or Madam”, placed before their name.

So, all Progressive ‘journalists”, no matter where they might be, should always be referred to as either “Your Royal Highness” or”The Brilliant, Really-Really Smart, Absolute Genius, Mister, Ms. or Madame so-and-so. (They really are all brilliant, you know. Their mommies told them so.)

/S/

IMHO

RE :”The proponents of massive government subsidies to “green” energy have a huge problem on their hands. The Solyndra scandal is just so absurd, and the video footage of President Obama and Vice President Biden is just so hilarious, that only the most ideological can fail to smell a rat. The reader will not be surprised, then, to learn that Paul Krugman, from his perch at the New York Times, thinks there’s nothing to see here. Krugman argues that hey, you win some, you lose some, and that the private sector makes bad investment decisions too—such as Pets.com........
No, the reason this issue affects the general public in the first place is that it was our tax dollars that were flushed down the toilet here, against our will. So yes, Dr. Krugman, there is definitely a higher bar you need to jump over, if you are going to be investing in projects with money taken from people coercively. If President Obama and Vice President Biden are going to decide how to invest $500 million of taxpayer money—money that by definition the private capital markets would not have allocated to Solyndra on the basis of their business model—then it’s pretty significant when it turns out Obama and Biden have no idea what they’re talking about.”

Surprise, $500M of taxpayer money lost in this risky gamble is just the ‘cost of doing business’ to Krugman. Something tells me that if GWB was POTUS and loaned our money to an oil company that went broke he would not have this attitude. Unlike that hypocrite I was critical of Bush and so I am not going to give his(Krugman's) liberal cronies a free pass for flushing our money down a rathole in public view yet.

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