Free Republic

The good news: After spending a year and a half talking about deficits, deficits, deficits when we should have been talking about jobs, job, jobs we’re finally back to discussing the right issue. The bad news: Republicans, aided and abetted by many conservative policy intellectuals, are fixated on a view about what’s blocking job creation that fits their prejudices and serves the interests of their wealthy backers, but bears no relationship to reality. Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so?...

This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.” It was, of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war. As background, it helps to know what has been happening to incomes over the past three decades. Detailed estimates...

Doctors used to believe that by draining a patient’s blood they could purge the evil “humors” that were thought to cause disease. In reality, of course, all their bloodletting did was make the patient weaker, and more likely to succumb. Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn’t just inflicting vast pain; it’s starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects. Some background: For the past year and a half, policy discourse in both Europe and the United States has been dominated...

RUSH: George Bush yesterday, the 9/11 memorials. You know, a friend of mine observed this. What did Obama do? Obama went to a soup kitchen, 9/11, a day of service, as though we've got something to apologize for, for what happened on 9/11. A friend of mine observes Obama and Bloomberg both acted like it was a natural disaster. Bush, George W. Bush, who, by the way, stands tall in retrospect. Ten years, not one attack. Great statesmanship. If somebody told me today they wanted to put Bush's face on Mount Rushmore, I'd be in there supporting it. I saw...

Princeton Professor Paul Krugman's ugly New York Times blog on the post 9/11 environment stopped short of accusing Pres. Bush of masterminding the attacks, but it did accuse Bush and his associates of cashing in on the tragedy, of being "fake heroes." If nothing else, the timing was hateful – the very week when the former President was called on to emerge from relative obscurity to lend gravity to the memorial ceremonies. Krugman's hate cannot hold a candle to retired MIT professor, and radical anti-American, Noam Chomsky's article in Al Jazeera. Chomsky goes a step further to condemn the US...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman upset a lot of people with his Sunday blog post in which he claimed “the memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned” by the likes of George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressed his outrage by canceling his subscription to the publication. “The Five” co-host and “Red Eye” host Greg Gutfeld condemned Krugman’s article on Monday’s broadcast of “The Five.” “So, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman delivered the odious piece of drivel on the attack,” Gutfeld said. “The headline is ‘Years of...

On this solemn commemorative day, we at NewsBusters have made a point of holding our rhetorical fire against liberals as a gesture of respect to those who lost their lives that day and subsequently. There is much we could say and, starting tomorrow, will say. An exception has to be made though for one Paul Krugman, who seems, earlier life, to have been a decent and civilized person. Since he began writing a column for the New York Times, however, Krugman has experienced a veritable descent into madness, principally due to Bush Derangement Syndrome. Today, Krugman decided to proudly parade...

There are a lot of curse words coming to mind having read Paul Krugman's editorial in today's (Sept. 11) NY Times. For now I'll just call him a very despicable, partisan, hypocritical, and morally bankrupt excuse for a human being. Here is just a part of this atrocity of a piece -- for which he has deliberately disallowed comments from online readers: What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a...

Late this week, President Obama stunned the EPA and environmentalists by dropping plans to tighten Bush-era ozone standards. His logic? Tighter rules would increase the "regulatory burden" that Republicans blame for the crappy economy. Paul Krugman says this is yet another example of Obama wimping out in the hopes that Republicans will stop attacking him. He also argues that the move will actually hurt the economy. Why will not tightening ozone rules hurt the economy? Because tighter rules, Krugman argues, would have forced companies to spend money to improve their pollution control equipment. This spending would have boosted the revenue...

It’s a recurring fantasy for left wing academics fascinated by central planning that in cyclical downturns government should act decisively on a scale equivalent to war. Nobel Prize recipient Paul Krugman exemplifies this intellectual longing to steer our lives. Krugman effortlessly slides into a war footing espousing intervention comparable to America’s crusade against Hitler, who, take note, centrally planned an economy himself: “World War II is the great natural experiment in the effects of large increases in government spending, and as such has always served as an important positive example for those of us who favor an activist approach to...

Oh those whacky liberals. On Sunday's "Fareed Zakaria GPS," New York Times columnist - and, ahem, Nobel laureate - Paul Krugman actually advocated space aliens attack earth thereby requiring a massive defense buildup by the United States that would stimulate the economy (video follows with transcript and commentary): KENNETH ROGOFF, PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Infrastructure spending, if it were well-spent, that's great. I'm all for that. I'd borrow for that, assuming we're not paying Boston Big Dig kind of prices for the infrastructure. FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST: But even if you were, wouldn't John Maynard Keynes say that if you...

Paul Krugman's latest NYT column, "The President Surrenders", already has an FR thread, but I want to call attention to the last paragraph: "What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t." Paul Krugman and the NYT believe our political system, with its checks and balances, should be gutted when it produces results they disfavor. Who are the "extremists"?

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system. And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are. No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure...

The EU summit hammered out yet another temporary fix today, albeit a complicated one. The proposal involves the creation of a "European Monetary Fund" and it will require changes to the Maastricht Treaty. Paul Krugman does not like the austerity measures and ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet had to eat his words regarding defaults and acceptance of defaulted bonds as collateral. German taxpayers may potentially be screwed big time on this bailout. Can this agreement hold together? Before deciding let's look at some details. "European Monetary Fund" Created In what French President Nicolas Sarkozy likens to a "European Monetary Fund", EU...

Earlier this week, New York Times columnist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman argued that folks on the Left were better able to accurately reiterate competing (ie conservative or libertarian) economic and political positions than, say, the Right could outline the liberal position. We will leave aside issues we might have with a Nobel Prize winning economist making such sweeping statements based on absolutely no facts. To a large extent, KrugmanÂ’s conceit is just part and parcel of the liberal hubris that they are smarter, better educated, and more empathetic than their political opponents (a conceit that is actually philosophically necessary...

Health Reform: The left's favorite economist, who condemned others for saying ObamaCare would require death panels, now admits they are real and necessary. The way to control costs, he says, is death and taxes. Paul Krugman has long extolled the virtues of Britain's National Health Service and its National Institute for Clinical Excellence with the Orwellian acronym of NICE. Krugman has been anything but nice to NHS critics and those who've said that what have been called its "death panels" would be brought to America via ObamaCare. In a roundtable discussion on ABC's "This Week," the New York Times columnist...

Christiane Amanpour’s eyes darted back and forth in fear, and her mouth twisted in disgust, because she could see where this was going. A guest on her Sunday-morning political talk show, ABC’s This Week, was getting dangerously overexcited, and something very regrettable was about to happen. She could see that he was winding himself up as he talked about how a recent deficit-reduction panel hadn’t been “brave enough” — because it failed to endorse the idea of expert panels that would determine what medical services government-funded care wouldn’t pay for. When Obamacare was still being debated in Congress, Sarah Palin...

In times when there are no good alternatives, tradeoffs can become an acceptance of an increase in one bad thing in order to affect a decrease in another bad thing seen as being the greater evil.  Progressives think the central tradeoff right now is between the federal deficit and unemployment, and they believe we must accept an increase in the deficit in order to bring down unemployment.New York Times columnist Paul Krugman thinks the deficit is the lesser of our two evils.  In column after column he has urged that unemployment be tackled first and the deficit later.  On...

In bemoaning the pain of fiscal responsibility, says Newsweek’s Niall Ferguson, the Democrats show they still haven't learned the lessons of Europe. To judge by media coverage, President Obama's whistle-stop European tour was largely recreational. In Dublin he reenacted the time-honored tradition of discovering his Irish roots. In London he took part in what felt like Royal Wedding: The Sequel. Meanwhile, in Washington, business went on as usual. The government continued borrowing money despite having breached its legal debt ceiling. Senate Democrats voted down Paul Ryan's plan to reduce the cost of Medicare, despite having no credible plan of their...

I’ve been getting questions about what happens when the Fed wraps up QE2 — related especially to Bill Gross’s public view that interest rates will shoot up. This is related to the question of the extent to which QE2 has kept interest rates low. So a quick exposition of my theoretical position, which also happens to be more or less standard economics.So: I basically think of asset prices in a Tobin-type stock equilibrium framework (pdf). People make portfolio choices, allocating their wealth among bonds, stocks, etc.. Asset prices – including the famous “q” – rise and fall to match...