Free Republic

On Friday's PBS NewsHour, both "conservative" David Brooks and liberal Mark Shields thought this was a tough, tight election for Barack Obama. Shields said "it becomes a race about disqualifying, a campaign about disqualifying your opponent. And that's not attractive or appealing. It's not hope and change. It's blood and guts." But Brooks really felt Obama's pain: "So the president is obviously going to try. He is going to have. And to some extent, you have to feel sorry for him. This is in large degree not his fault. Things are happening way beyond his control. I don't believe a...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman got another much-needed education from syndicated columnist George Will on ABC's This Week Sunday. After Krugman impugned Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wisc.) for his so-called "fiscal irresponsibility," Will simply and quite accurately responded, "A more than $3 billion budget that he inherited, a deficit, has now become a surplus" (video follows with transcript and commentary): George Will Schools Krugman on Gov. Walker: $3 Billion Deficit 'He Inherited' Has 'Become a Surplus' GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, HOST: We have a couple minutes left before we have to take a break, and I just quickly want to go to...

Paul Krugman: 'It's Terribly Unfair Obama's Being Judged on the Failure of the Economy' By Noel Sheppard Created 06/03/2012 - 3:22pm Readers are strongly advised to remove food, fluids, and flammables from proximity to their computers prior to reading any further. You've been warned! New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said on ABC's This Week Sunday, "It's terribly unfair that [President Obama is] being judged on the failure of the economy to respond to policies that had been largely dictated by a hostile Congress" (video follows with transcript and commentary): PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: Can I just -- these...

Sometimes it’s hard to explain why we need strong financial regulation — especially in an era saturated with pro-business, pro-market propaganda. So we should always be grateful when someone makes the case for regulation more compelling and easier to understand. And this week, that means offering a special shout-out to two men: Jamie Dimon and Mitt Romney. I’ll come back shortly to the troubles at JPMorgan Chase, the bank Mr. Dimon runs. First, however, let me talk about Mr. Romney, whose remarks about those troubles were so off-point that they constitute a teachable moment. Here’s what the presumptive Republican presidential...

Paul Krugman is now so far into outer space with ridiculous economic proposals that even Helicopter Ben Bernanke recognizes Krugman's proposals as "reckless". Bloomberg reports Bernanke Takes On Krugman’s Criticism Ignoring Own Advice

Few prominent economists have a worse record predicting the impact of Obama’s economic policies than Paul Krugman. Writing for the New York Times and touting his close “genuine contact” with the “smart” economists and others in the Obama administration and the Democratic congressional leadership, Krugman has been, and remains, Obama’s most important champion. Not only has he been defending Obama’s Keynesian-type deficit-spending, but he has been advocating still more of these same failed policies. The economy just can’t gain ground. Thirty-four months since the "recovery" started in June 2009 and the actual number of jobs have increased by just 0.4%....

what’s interesting is the cult that has grown up around Mr. Ryan — and in particular the way self-proclaimed centrists elevated him into an icon of fiscal responsibility, and even now can’t seem to let go of their fantasy.

Their refutation makes for fascinating and sometimes humorous reading. Consider, for example, the prediction Krugman made the day Obama signed the original stimulus bill into law: “I am still guessing that we peak out at around 9% [unemployment] and that would be late this year [2009]." Furthermore, Krugman declared that double-digit unemployment was “not the most likely event.” As Norquist and Lott note, unemployment hit 10.1% and remained above 9% two years after Krugman predicted it would peak. Once it became clear that President Obama’s stimulus plan had failed to ignite the economic recovery he promised, Krugman and others began...

Energy: The economist at the newspaper of record defends the president's energy policy of Solyndra, Chevy Volts and algae while dismissing the oil boom on private lands as a small-town hiccup with no impact on price. New York Times columnist and Keynesian economist Paul Krugman asks in a recent column why gas prices are rising if we are in the middle of a domestic oil boom. Doesn't the "drill, baby, drill" crowd claim, he argues, that prices will drop "if only we would stop protecting the environment and let energy companies do whatever they want"? Without our domestic oil boom,...

As we watch the Eurozone struggle with its financial challenges Keynesians keep telling us the solution to our economic problems is to spend more money, to pile up bigger debts. A week and a half ago, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the debt of more than half of the Eurozone's countries, and the failure of those policies should be very obvious by now. Solving the Greek debt crisis hit yet another snag on Sunday afternoon. New aid for Greece from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank would have relied on private bondholders “voluntarily” agreeing to a 50...

How goes the state of the union? Well, the state of the economy remains terrible. Three years after President Obama’s inauguration and two and a half years since the official end of the recession, unemployment remains painfully high. But there are reasons to think that we’re finally on the (slow) road to better times. And we wouldn’t be on that road if Mr. Obama had given in to Republican demands that he slash spending, or the Federal Reserve had given in to Republican demands that it tighten money. Why am I letting a bit of optimism break through the clouds?...

Paul Krugman has told us that awful stories about government-run healthcare in Britain “are false.” I guess this means that the media must be dominated by conservative liars, since we keep getting reports about substandard care and needless deaths (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). And the Boston Globe and Associated Press must be part of this vast right-wing conspiracy, because the Globe just ran an AP report exposing more problems in England. Here is an excerpt. When David Evans needed a hernia operation, the 69-year-old farmer became so alarmed by the long wait that he used an ultrasound machine for pregnant sheep on...

At Power Line, Steve Hayward spots Paul Krugman phoning in his periodic “Keynes Was Right” column, and asks: I wonder if Krugman also credits Keynes’s views on Jews, which British blogger Damian Thompson of The Telegraph brings to our attention. From Keynes’s diary: [Jews] have in them deep-rooted instincts that are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to the European, and their presence among us is a living example of the insurmountable difficulties that exist in merging race characteristics, in making cats love dogs … It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning factcheck website PolitiFact has voted on the biggest lie of 2011, and the winner is - "Republicans voted to end Medicare." Specifically honing in on House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, Democrats and liberal media types spewed erroneous claims over House Republicans' budget plan, which essentially resulted in wacky leftist claims like, "Republicans want to leave frail old 90-year-old grandma to die on her kitchen floor." In reality, Ryan's plan would purportedly deflate the tumultuous debt mountain - that is, the feds' spendthrift hell hole - by dispersing government subsidies for, and privatizing, Medicare for those...

Benefiting from a hint from an article titled "Is Harry Potter Making You Poorer?", written by my colleague Dr. John Goodman, president of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, I've come up with an explanation and a way to end income inequality in America, possibly around the world.

This is the way the euro ends — not with a bang but with bunga bunga. Not long ago, European leaders were insisting that Greece could and should stay on the euro while paying its debts in full. Now, with Italy falling off a cliff, it’s hard to see how the euro can survive at all. But what’s the meaning of the eurodebacle? As always happens when disaster strikes, there’s a rush by ideologues to claim that the disaster vindicates their views. So it’s time to start debunking. First things first: The attempt to create a common European currency was...

Paul Krugman may be a Nobel Prize–winning economist, but his most recent column in the New York Times, which condemns hydraulic fracturing and praises solar energy, displays an astounding disinterest in numbers and woeful ignorance of the facts. Without providing any sources, Krugman writes, “We know that [fracturing] produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water; there is reason to suspect, despite industry denials, that it also contaminates groundwater.” Huh? Over the past 60 years, the process of hydraulic fracturing has been used more than 1 million times on oil and gas wells here in the U.S. If fracturing...

Late last month, as America was ignoring the 24th anniversary of the Senate's rejection of conservative jurist Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, something extraordinary happened: New York Times columnist Joe Nocera admitted the borking of Judge Bork spawned today's toxic political culture. "(R)arely has a failed nominee had the pedigree — and intellectual firepower — of Bork," Mr. Nocera wrote. Judge Bork held conservative opinions, but none could be "fairly characterized as extreme." That didn't deter then-Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., who denounced "'Robert Bork's America' as a place 'in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks...

In a recent post I wrote: The evidence for the Keynesian worldview is very mixed. Most economists come down in favor or against it because of their prior ideological beliefs. Krugman is a Keynesian because he wants bigger government. IÂ’m an anti-Keynesian because I want smaller government. Both of us can find evidence for our worldviews. Whose evidence is better? IÂ’m not sure itÂ’s a meaningful question. My empirical points about Keynesianism wonÂ’t convince Krugman. His point donÂ’t convince me. I am not saying that we will never get any kind of decisive evidence on the question. IÂ’m saying...

Krugman should probably just keep quiet on Solyndra from now on Paul Krugman, Pet of Big Government By Institute for Energy Research Friday, September 30, 2011 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...