Free Republic

As I said in my previous post, that’s well into President Palin’s second term.

taylor s. nh October 26th, 2009 8:46 am I find this editorial incredible. The only people happy with the Massachusetts plan are the poor and the rich. All levels of the middle class are hurt by this plan. You know, I have voted Democrat all of my adult life; but I'm starting to believe what some conservatives say about the mission of the Democrat Party being to completely destroy the middle class. The bankers, industrialists, and corporate ceos all finnacially support the Democrat party, today, along with the great un-educated unwashed masses. Who is going to stand up for the...

The biggest question about the new Schumer-Carper health-care plan on Capitol Hill is the one nobody's asking. Why stop there? In case you missed it, Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, and Tom Carper, D.-Delaware, are considering a proposal that may, at long last, break the logjam over health-care reform. They would create a public health insurer, the so-called "public option," but allow individual states to opt out if they wanted. In other words: the blue states can have public health insurance, and the red states can go without. You may wonder why it took so long to get here. If...

One lesson from the Great Depression is that you should never underestimate the destructive power of bad ideas. And some of the bad ideas that helped cause the Depression have, alas, proved all too durable: in modified form, they continue to influence economic debate today. What ideas am I talking about? The economic historian Peter Temin has argued that a key cause of the Depression was what he calls the “gold-standard mentality.” By this he means not just belief in the sacred importance of maintaining the gold value of one’s currency, but a set of associated attitudes: obsessive fear of...

...So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old... ...The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern. Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut...

Investors are celebrating an incipient “recovery,” but the interventions that were responsible for it are sowing the seeds of a more violent contraction down the road. The problem, quite simply, is debt. We’ve accumulated record amounts, yet many economists tell us we need more. Leading the charge is Paul Krugman. He exhorts us to borrow our way back to prosperity, but he doesn’t acknowledge that his brand of Keynesian economics ignores the consequences of debt. If you look at a chart of America’s total debt burden, he’s leading us over a cliff. The problem begins with the flawed way Krugman...

Anyone who reads Paul Krugman, our latest "Nobel Prize-winning economist," knows that Krugman believes inflation is not a threat to the economy at all. He is a regular defender of large fiscal deficits and expansionary monetary policy, claiming that they are the road to salvation from our so-called deflationary spiral. (We'll ignore the fact that this "deflationary spiral" involves six straight months of price increases and regular complaints from Mr. Krugman himself about skyrocketing costs in health care.) In 2009, Krugman stated that "deficits saved the world." However, in 2003, when Alan Greenspan and the Bush administration were destroying this...

I got an email from a nice producer requesting I appear on CNN at 12:30pm EST to discuss Paul Krugman's latest op-ed, The Town Hall Mob. Unfortunately because of distance, it wasn't possible, but she'll keep me in mind for future rebuttals. But while we're on the topic, let's look at Krugman's latest take on the "town hall mob"... Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005,...

Picture a recovering alcoholic falling off the wagon. First he says he can handle a few drinks... But eventually he turns mean... As a drunk is to alcohol, the Bush administration is to budget deficits. During the 2000 campaign George W. Bush often pledged to maintain fiscal responsibility... [H]is people said they could cut taxes, pay for new programs... and still pay off most of the federal government's debt... Now the budget director, Mitch Daniels, has admitted the obvious: The federal government faces the prospect of large deficits as far as the eye can see. And sure enough, the drunk...

So new budget projections show a cumulative deficit of $9 trillion over the next decade. According to many commentators, that's a terrifying number, requiring drastic action — in particular, of course, canceling efforts to boost the economy and calling off health care reform. The truth is more complicated and less frightening. Right now deficits are actually helping the economy. In fact, deficits here and in other major economies saved the world from a much deeper slump. The longer-term outlook is worrying, but it's not catastrophic. The only real reason for concern is political. The United States can deal with its...

Medical Care: We took a lot of heat for using Stephen Hawking as an example of someone who'd suffer under a socialized health system. But a closer look at the treatment he got in the U.K. shows it wasn't all roses.As our Aug. 1 editorial put it: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." Now, Hawking is British and — though he suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as "Lou...

"The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance — which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer." Evidently, for Krugman, his own argument circa 2007 that it might lead inexorably...

Another dynamite find by Verum Serum, on an endless mission to expose liberal doublespeak about what the public option would mean in practice. First clip is from two years ago, the second clip — declaring the arguments against the public option to be “sheer nonsense” — from last weekend. My only quibble with VS is that they seem to think there’s some dissembling here by Krugman. But there’s no contradiction: He’d clearly love to see ObamaCare metastasize into socialized medicine, ergo any arguments against that happening are nonsense. Here he is in the Times just a few days ago:

Paul Krugman appears to be determined to try and rewrite the history of the Reagan years all on his own. He continues with this piece. Let’s talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over. First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the “magic of the marketplace” were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn’t happen.

The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program. Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good. Call me naïve,...

Paul Krugman calls for more public spending By Eric Uhlfelder Published: August 23 2009 13:57 | Last updated: August 23 2009 13:57 When asked where the most promising investments for the short term are, Paul Krugman, the most recent recipient of the Nobel prize for economics, candidly exclaims “damned if I know”. But the Princeton economist is certain the US economy would be far worse off without the government’s massive $787bn (£476bn, €553bn) stimulus package. “I can’t come up with any analysis that suggests a superior outcome without this level of deficit spending, both in the short and long run,”...

As per usual, Paul Krugman posts to his blog a comment that puts him in the mode of deceptive hustler, or seriously confused He starts with this chart: He then moves on to tell us: Net federal saving is, roughly, the budget surplus (so it’s negative if there’s a deficit.) It turns out that there’s a strong correlation between budget deficits and interest rates — namely, when deficits are high, interest rates are low. On reflection, it’s obvious why: a weak economy both drives up deficits and drives down the demand for funds, while a strong economy does the reverse....

From the 9/16/2008 debate on healthcare at Rockefeller Plaza in NYC. Paul decides to show everyone how great socialized medicine is by asking the Canadians in the room about it... From the 9/16/2008 debate on healthcare at Rockefeller Plaza in NYC. Paul decides to show everyone how great socialized medicine is by asking the Canadians in the room about it...

All in all, I vote for Paul Krugman losing his Noble Peace prize in Economic Science because he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about. Things are not fixed Paul! Since they aren’t fixed you can’t say we avoided a second great depression! Perhaps you can explain to me what will happen when the Fed, the Treasury, US banks, or anyone else for that matter with trillions of dollars in bad positions has to unwind those trades? Will we just stimulate our way through that too? You know what, on second thought, perhaps Krugman is right, maybe we should...

The world economy needs a second stimulus if it is to avoid the fate of Japan in the 1990s when the country was stuck with years of sluggish growth, Nobel laureate and professor of economics Paul Krugman told CNBC Monday. "The good news is that it does not look like the 2nd great depression. For a few months it did," Krugman said. All indicators now point to the fact that the plunge has stopped, as jobs in the US are lost at a smaller pace and manufacturing and services seem to be stabilizing worldwide, he added. But the sources of...

...is you just don't know. I strongly suspect Paul Krugman is right: For the most part, the protesters appear to be genuinely angry. The question is, what are they angry about? There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they "oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care." Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands. Now, people who don't know that Medicare is a government program probably aren't reacting...

The Project 21 black leadership network, New York Times liberal columnist Paul Krugman Obama Must Condemn NY Times Race-Baiting Tactics, Black Group Says Washington D.C. — The Project 21 black leadership network is condemning New York Times liberal columnist Paul Krugman for scurrilously pinning racist motives on critics of President Obama’s health care proposals. The group is calling upon President Obama to condemn all efforts to derail legitimate public debate, specifically including this effort to stifle debate with race-baiting tactics. “Paul Krugman is the one with race on the brain,” Project 21 Chairman Mychal Massie charged. “Specifically, he is using...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is not pleased with some of his fellow racist mobs -- er, U.S. citizens -- as he demonstrated in his column on Friday, "The Town Hall Mob," on loud protests that have met some Democratic congressmen who support Obama's costly health care ideas.

In a blog posting yesterday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman raises questions about a recent Rasmussen Reports poll of Massachusetts voters. The poll shows that Bay State voters are less than enthusiastic about the state’s experiment in health care reform. Krugman states that “last year polling seemed to show very strong support for the Massachusetts plan.” He then asks, "So has support plunged since then? Or is the wording of the Rasmussen poll calculated to give a negative result?" Krugman must have an interesting definition of “very strong support.” The poll he cited found that just 14% want to...

Americans are angry at Wall Street, and rightly so. First the financial industry plunged us into economic crisis, then it was bailed out at taxpayer expense. And now, with the economy still deeply depressed, the industry is paying itself gigantic bonuses. If you aren’t outraged, you haven’t been paying attention. But crashing the economy and fleecing the taxpayer aren’t Wall Street’s only sins. Even before the crisis and the bailouts, many financial-industry high-fliers made fortunes through activities that were worthless if not destructive from a social point of view. And they’re still at it. Consider two recent news stories. One...

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.” It’s a funny story — but it illustrates the extent to which health reform must climb a wall of misinformation. It’s not just that many Americans don’t understand what President Obama is proposing; many people don’t understand the way American health care works right now. They don’t understand,...

Paul Krugman is an eminent economist, but he here reveals a woefully inadequate understanding of Austrian business-cycle theory. The rudiments of the theory are easy; one might have thought that even a Keynesian could grasp them. According to Mises and Hayek, an expansion in bank credit pushes the money rate of interest below the "natural" rate. People prefer goods in the present to the same goods in the future, a matter obvious to anyone except for a few philosophers. The rate at which people favor the present, in the Austrian view, chiefly determines the rate of interest.

Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist, Nobel Prize winner, and Obamaphile extraordinaire, has been pushing HARD for Obamacare, which he sees as a big step towards instituting his preferred Canada-style single payer system. At a symposium on the issue, Krugman conducts an informal poll here of Canadians on their satisfaction, with instant and decisive results.

Not the outcome he expected.

Right now the fate of health care reform seems to rest in the hands of relatively conservative Democrats — mainly members of the Blue Dog Coalition, created in 1995. And you might be tempted to say that President Obama needs to give those Democrats what they want. But he can’t — because the Blue Dogs aren’t making sense. To grasp the problem, you need to understand the outline of the proposed reform (all of the Democratic plans on the table agree on the essentials.) Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition. By...

I found Obama’s health care presentation so impressive — so much command of the issues — that it had me worried. Seriously, it’s really good to see how much he gets it. Update: So Howard Fineman was unimpressed. And Fineman knows presidential greatness when he sees it: He’s the Texas Ranger of the world, and wants everyone to know it. He’s the guy with the silver badge, issuing warnings to the cattle rustlers.

Will the destructive center kill health care reform? It looks all too possible. What’s especially galling is the hypocrisy of their claimed reason for delaying progress — concern about the fiscal burden. After all, in the past most of them have shown no concern at all for the nation’s long-term fiscal outlook.

The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us? First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America. Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away. Third, it shows that by rescuing...

O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that? Let’s do the math. Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole. And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The...

Paul Krugman used the occasion of the latest jobs numbers to continue peddling his idea that one stimulus isn't enough. Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman said the nation is on course for a "prolonged jobless" economic recovery unless the Obama administration steps in with a second round of government stimulus money.

What is the ultimate end of growing control? There have been several forms of government oppression throughout history: absolute monarchy, Communism, fascism, Nazism, and Islamofascism (such as the Taliban), to name some of the more infamous examples. So an accurate view of the modern positions of Right and Left would place anarchy at the extreme right, totalitarianism at the extreme left. In the years following the American Revolution, the Founders of this nation desired to create a system of government that was a perfect balance between these two extremes. Their desire was to create a federalist republic that would protect...

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement. But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases. And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.... The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid...

Last Monday evening, Lew Rockwell, from a tip by someone named "Travis," posted this damning quote of Paul Krugman's from a 2002 New York Times editorial: "To fight this recession the Fed needs…soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble." Krugman. 2002. Calling for a housing bubble. What's more, by explicitly calling for a new bubble to replace the recently burst one, he anticipated by 6 years the Onion's hilarious "report" that "demand for a new investment bubble began months ago, when the subprime mortgage bubble...

The New American recently warned that Americans who oppose policies emanating from Washington are being tarred as right-wing extremists and even potential terrorists by the Obama administration's Department of Homeland Security as well as by the New York Times and other liberal media organs. This push to demonize and even criminalize political dissent appears to be accelerating. Earlier this month, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Paul Krugman wrote pieces laying the blame for the murder of an abortionist and a U.S. Holocaust Museum security guard at the foot of President Barack Obama's critics. Both have received figurative high-fives...

.... .... Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has written that "first-rate economists keep making truly boneheaded arguments against [stimulus]." Others, like Robert H. Frank of Cornell, have also come out punching for stimulus. So what are the sources of these strong differences of opinion? The arguments in favor of government spending stimulus, including the majority of those discussed in media, come from the traditional Keynesian view that government spending increases aggregate demand--the sum of consumer, business, government and net foreign expenditure--and that increasing aggregate demand increases real output and income. Now whether this actually works or not depends largely on the...

Paul Krugman's outrage is selective and aimed, as usual, at conservatives. I was surprised to see the New York Times columnist take a swipe at me and the paper that has long been my home. Since Frank Rich, another New York Times columnist, and numerous bloggers have all written essentially the same thing as Mr. Krugman, it is obvious that a new line of attack against conservatives is emerging. It needs to be stopped in its tracks. In a column called "The Big Hate," Mr. Krugman seized upon two unrelated shootings in different cities — of a Kansas abortionist and...

Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment. Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last...

The seeds of today's crisis were planted before the Gipper even took office. First of all, let me say that I almost never read Paul Krugman's New York Times column, as I noticed several years ago that he has an uncanny ability to understand a problem but totally misdiagnose the cause. During the "W." years, Krugman would frequently outline an economic problem, then go out of his way to blame the president. A lot of poor decisions did flow from George W. Bush, as he was basically in over his head. But this Nobel Prize-winning economist was a Johnny-one-note when...

How could Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and author of generally excellent columns in the New York Times, get it so wrong? His column last Sunday--"Reagan Did It"--which stated that "the prime villains behind the mess we're in were Reagan and his circle of advisers," is perverse in shifting blame from the obvious villains closer at hand. It is disingenuous to ignore the fact that the derivatives scams at the heart of the economic meltdown didn't exist in President Reagan's time. The huge expansion in collateralized mortgage and other debt, the bubble that burst, was the...

... [L]ong-term rates have risen by 167 basis points in the space of five months. In relative terms, that represents an 81 per cent jump. Most commentators were unnerved by this development, coinciding as it did with warnings about the fiscal health of the US. For me, however, it was good news. For it settled a rather public argument between me and the Princeton economist Paul Krugman. It is a brave or foolhardy man who picks a fight with Mr Krugman, the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics. Yet a cat may look at a king, and...

British Econ-god Niall Ferguson goes after US econ-god Paul Krugman, who made the mistake of being condescending to him on a panel last week. The fate of the world hangs in the balance. From the FT: On Wednesday last week, yields on 10-year US Treasuries – generally seen as the benchmark for long-term interest rates – rose above 3.73 per cent. Once upon a time that would have been considered rather low. But the financial crisis has changed all that: at the end of last year, the yield on the 10-year fell to 2.06 per cent. In other words, long-term...

[Liberal econonomists now assume] that a huge fiscal stimulus, created out of the illusory elements of massive public borrowing and boundless money creation, will provide the ladder that allows us to climb out of today’s economic crisis. To listen to some prominent liberal economists who believe in Keynesian-style “demand management,” the only thing wrong with this confabulated ladder is that it should be even taller. And truly, if money is no object, why not build it right up to the sky? Why stop where we are now—with a federal deficit expected to reach 13.5 percent of GDP under the current...

...There’s plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers — men who forgot the lessons of America’s last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it... -------------- ...But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down. These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had...

"The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose. The result was a tax system that is both inequitable and unstable. It’s inequitable because older homeowners often pay far less property tax than their younger neighbors. It’s unstable because limits on property taxation have forced California to rely more heavily than other states on income taxes,...

That didn’t take long. Less than two weeks have passed since much of the medical-industrial complex made a big show of working with President Obama on health care reform — and the double-crossing is already well under way. Indeed, it’s now clear that even as they met with the president, pretending to be cooperative, insurers were gearing up to play the same destructive role they did the last time health reform was on the agenda. So here’s the question: Will Mr. Obama gloss over the reality of what’s happening, and try to preserve the appearance of cooperation? Or will he...