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It’s not quite on a par with 9/11 truthers or Obama birthers, but recently a number of liberal commentators have descended into the fever swamps of denialism by rejecting the most basic facts about our debt and deficit. Mind you, they are not arguing about the best policies to reduce the debt — taxe hikes vs. spending cuts — but actually denying that the problem exists at all. Paul Krugman, for example, pronounces the debt problem “mostly solved.” Matt Yglesias of Slate asks, “What sovereign debt crisis? There certainly isn’t one in the United States.” Bruce Bartlett, every liberal economist’s...

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has argued clearly and consistently over the past five years that U.S. government spending is critical to our economic recovery and that cutting spending now to reduce the deficit would be a disastrous mistake. For taking this position, Krugman has been castigated by those who blame the depression on fiscal irresponsibility and runaway government spending. The way to fix the economy, those folks argue, is to immediately slash government spending, reduce the deficit, and restore "confidence" among the country's business leaders. In the early years of the recovery, there was widespread support for the latter...

Prominent economists, politicians, and pundits throw around the term “austerity” as if policies by that name always take the same form. They usually use the term to criticize the concept and its effects by pointing to Europe’s stagnation at the hands of “savage” cuts in government spending. But this mindset ignores the question: Austerity for whom? The answer is especially important if the United States, which has continued to follow in Western Europe’s footsteps with this month’s fiscal-cliff deal, is to learn from the Old World’s mistakes. Raising taxes on the private sector while government continues to gorge itself on...

Alfred E. Newman, meet Paul Krugman. Less than a week after the Treasury reported that the US was on its way to a fifth straight trillion-dollar annual budget deficit, the New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner says we're worried about nothing. The deficit problem, Krugman assures us, has been "already, to a large degree, solved."Did I miss the space invaders? This is, however, a case in which what everyone knows just ainÂ’t so. The budget deficit isnÂ’t our biggest problem, by a long shot. Furthermore, itÂ’s a problem that is already, to a large degree, solved. The medium-term...

Paul Krugman, a liberal economist and New York Times columnist, said increased government spending is key to economic recovery. During an interview on Friday on “Moyers & Company,” on PBS, Bill Moyers asked, “And you argue that this could actually be solved in two years?” …

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a graph: The vertical axis measures the projected ratio of federal debt to GDP. The blue line at the top represents the projected path of that ratio as of early 2011 — that is, before recent agreements on spending cuts and tax increases. This projection showed a rising path for debt as far as the eye could see.And just about all budget discussion in Washington and the news media is laid out as if that were still the case. But a lot has happened since then. The orange line shows the effects...

Two effeminate progressive Mean Girls pull each other's Hair Plugs at the cafeteria Cool Table. (summary)

PAUL KRUGMAN: The Deficit Is Basically Solved Walter HickeyJan. 10, 2013, 4:00 PMMany people think that fixing the deficit is a painful process that involves deep cuts to crucial programs. Some think the process is too hard, and it's not worth trying yet. That's not correct, according to a chart from from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Richard Kogan showing just how far the United States has come in the past two years. We've talked before about how the painless and most effective solution to the deficit is additional growth in GDP. As the recovery progresses and GDP...

Ouch! Nothing hurts quite as much as kicking yourself in the shin. It looks like low information voters across America are waking up from the personality party they’ve been at for the past few years to discover that not only do their shiny Obama-bucks not go as far as they use to, butt now they’re taking fewer of those bucks home. Man, who could have seen that coming? I mean, shoot(am I still allowed to say that?), read Big Guy’s lips. He promised, remember?(snip)READ MY LIPS: NO MORE TAXES! And yet people across the country – not just wealthy Republicans –...

Well, it's bad news for Danny Glover and MoveOn, anyway. They started a grassroots movement to get the New York Times columnist an appointment to Barack Obama's Cabinet in replacement of the departing Tim Geithner. MoveOn even sent a petition request to its large e-mail list, demanding a Paul Krugman nomination: Hollywood actor and liberal activist Danny Glover is trying to send a message to President Barack Obama: “Nominate Paul Krugman for Treasury Secretary.”Obama has yet to tap anyone to fill the slot, soon to be left vacant by outgoing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. On Sunday the liberal advocacy group...

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER PAUL KRUGMAN: Obama Must Be Ready To Mint The Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin Joe WeisenthalJanuary 7, 2013 The movement to mint a trillion dollar platinum coin gets its biggest backer yet: Paul Krugman. In a new post up titled Be Ready To Mint The Coin he writes: It’s easy to make sententious remarks to the effect that we shouldn’t look for gimmicks, we should sit down like serious people and deal with our problems realistically. That may sound reasonable — if you’ve been living in a cave for the past four years.Given the realities of our political...

KRUGMAN: Erskine Bowles, Alan Greenspan, And The WSJ Editorial Board Are All Basically Members Of A Doomsday Cult Joe WeisenthalDec. 24, 2012, 5:55 AM We liked this note that was sent out by SocGen's Kit Juckes this morning: It wouldn't be Christmas without Paul Krugman telling the US government it's OK to spend money. Krugman thinks that anyone who worries about a disaster coming from the scale of US debt is a doom-mongerer. Especially the WSJ. That's snarky, but that is what Krugman's Christmas eve column is about. Essentially it's a reminder of one of his favorite topics: That the...

We are not having a debt crisis. It’s important to make this point, because I keep seeing articles about the “fiscal cliff” that do, in fact, describe it — often in the headline — as a debt crisis. But it isn’t. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its deficit. In fact, its borrowing costs are near historic lows. And even the confrontation over the debt ceiling that looms a few months from now if we do somehow manage to avoid going over the fiscal cliff isn’t really about debt. No, what we’re having is a political...

If there is one thing better than Marc Faber providing a free, must-watch (and listen) 50 minute lecture on virtually everything that has transpired in the end days of modern capitalism, starting with who caused it, adjustable rate mortgages, leverage, why did the Fed let Lehman fail, why was AIG bailed out, quantitative easing, Operation Twist, where the interest on the debt is going, which bubbles he is most concerned about, a discussion of gold and silver, and culminating with his views on a world reserve currency, is him saying the following: "The views of the Keynesians like Mr. Krugman...

The PBS NewsHour has yet to invite a strong conservative on the program to talk about the fiscal cliff. Tuesday night they had New York Times columnist, left-wing economist, and Obama cheerleader Paul Krugman to detail his view. Wednesday night they had moderately-conservative Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn), but last night was the most interesting. PBS invited the Norquist of the left, Max Richtman, of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, who insisted we shouldn’t be in a rush to reform our entitlement spending. After all, when the unfunded liability of both programs is around $100 trillion, what’s...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls out lots of folks for predicting that our fiscal and monetary policies would produce hyperinflation. Shouldn’t these people rethink their basic economic models, he asks? That’s a fair enough point. If your model was telling you that zero-interest rates or budget deficits at recent levels would produce very high price inflation, there’s probably something wrong with it. Yet the past couple of years have been truly extraordinary. Opportunities for revising the way you think about the economy have arisen over and over again. The only thing you needed to take advantage of these...

The Twinkie, it turns out, was introduced way back in 1930. In our memories, however, the iconic snack will forever be identified with the 1950s, when Hostess popularized the brand by sponsoring “The Howdy Doody Show.” And the demise of Hostess has unleashed a wave of baby boomer nostalgia for a seemingly more innocent time. Needless to say, it wasn’t really innocent. But the ’50s — the Twinkie Era — do offer lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century. Above all, the success of the postwar American economy demonstrates that, contrary to today’s conservative orthodoxy, you can have prosperity...

Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo may have been the first person to use the term “austerity bomb” for the expired tax cuts and automatic spending cuts to take effect at the beginning of next year. Paul Krugman adopts the term in his blog entry "The Austerity Bomb" in the New York Times. Beutler wrote: “A giant austerity bomb is timed to go off at the beginning of next year, and the threat of significantly higher taxes and lower spending has Republicans running around the Capitol sounding more like John Maynard Keynes than John Boehner.” The term "fiscal cliff" makes...

Budget Talks: If President Obama wants to get a deficit deal done to avoid the fiscal cliff, his biggest challenge won't be Republicans, but his own hard-core left-wing supporters. Two days after the election, Obama's favorite economist, Paul Krugman, set the tone for the intransigent left in a column titled: "Let's not make a deal." Boiled down, his advice to Obama was this: Don't give in to any Republican demands, even if doing so would "inflict damage on a still-shaky economy." After all, Obama would be better positioned to "weather any blowback from economic troubles." Krugman's advice may be disturbingly...

Krugman Tells Obama: DON'T MAKE A DEAL Joe WeisenthalNov. 9, 2012, 4:25 AM In his brand new op-ed at the NYT, Paul Krugman makes the loudest case yet that Obama shouldn't rush into any kind of big "deal" with the GOP on averting the fiscal cliff. Liberals have been going in this direction for awhile, arguing two things: Hitting the fiscal cliff would not be a huge catastrophe right away, and the GOP has lost a lot of leverage, so there's no reason to cave to their insistence on everything. So Krugman tells Obama not to reach his hand out...