Free Republic

KRUGMAN: The Fed May Have Just Made A Historic Mistake, And Done More Damage Than It Realizes Joe WeisenthalJune 22,2013REUTERS/Jason ReedThe most important story in the world is the change of direction in US interest rates, which coincides with the change in tone out of the Federal Reserve, which on Wednesday indicated that so long as its economic projections come to pass, it plans to slowdown on Quantitative Easing later on this year, with an eye towards totally ceasing bond purchases sometime in 2014. The markets puked on the news, and interest rates shot up, a move that was exacerbated...

Paul Krugman has never been shy about proclaiming that he is right and everyone else is wrong — and not just wrong, but “knaves and fools.” Lately, however, one begins to worry that he might actually hurt himself, so vigorously has he been patting himself on the back for his opposition to “austerity” (defined as any cut in government spending, anytime, anywhere). On his latest victory lap, Krugman is celebrating two things. First, a group of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst discovered a small error in a widely cited paper by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff that showed...

He sees a renaissance attributable to the decline of the state’s Republican party. It is rare, even in the case of Paul Krugman, to read a column in which almost everything that is stated is either wrong or deliberately misleading. But his recent take on California’s renaissance is pure fantasy. I wish it weren’t. Krugman starts with the premise that California conservatives, the most prominent being Ronald Reagan, helped to turn the formerly moderate Republican party into the “radical right-wing organization we see today”; California, he believes, did more than the South to spawn the Religious Right. How absurd! Reagan...

As a result, the reign of the Governator aside, California has been solidly Democratic since the late 1990s. And ever since the political balance shifted, conservatives have declared the state doomed. Their specifics keep changing, but the moral is always the same: liberal do-gooders are bringing California to its knees. A dozen years ago, the state was supposedly doomed by all its environmentalists. You see, the eco-freaks were blocking power plants, and the result was crippling blackouts and soaring power prices. “The country’s showcase state,” gloated The Wall Street Journal, “has come to look like a hapless banana republic.” But...

Economist and columnist Paul Krugman declared personal bankruptcy today following a failed attempt to spend his way out of debt. In a Chapter 13 filing to the United States Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York, lawyers for Krugman listed $7,346,000 in debts versus $33,000 in assets. The majority of his debts are related to mortgage financing on a $8.7 million apartment in lower Manhattan, but the list also includes $621,537 in credit card debt and $33,642 in store financing at famed jeweler Tiffanys and Co. The filing says that Krugman got into credit card trouble in 2004...

Paul Krugman Reminds Me Of A Perverted Little Elf that has a horrible little secret that he thinks you know he has, but he is never called on his horrible little secret so he sits there with this evil little guilty smirk on his face, that horrible pregnant little smirk like he knows that a bucket of water is about to be dumped on you...continued...

Big Government: We almost never agree with President Obama's favorite economist Paul Krugman, but he recently spoke the truth about where Obama's policies are taking the country. It should scare anyone with a pulse. Krugman, after speaking at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., was asked about the debt crisis. After arguing it's no big deal in the near term, Krugman admitted that "Eventually we do have a problem. The population is getting older, health care costs are rising ... . Something is going to have to give." What's that something?

Nobel Prize winning “economist” Paul Krugman spoke at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C. last week. During the Q&A session following the lecture, an audience member asked him about the rising national debt. Earlier in the evening, Krugman had already vocalized his satisfaction at President Obama’s apparent lack of concern over the exploding cumulative deficit. However, in a moment of brutal honesty, the esteemed Princeton professor revealed his long term prognosis. According to the professor: Eventually we do have a problem. That the population is getting older, health care costs are rising…there is this question of how we’re...

Nobel Prize winning “economist” Paul Krugman spoke at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C. last week. During the Q&A session following the lecture, an audience member asked him about the rising national debt. Earlier in the evening, Krugman had already vocalized his satisfaction at President Obama’s apparent lack of concern over the exploding cumulative deficit. However, in a moment of brutal honesty, the esteemed Princeton professor revealed his long term prognosis. According to the professor, "Eventually we do have a problem. That the population is getting older, health care costs are rising…there is this question of how we’re...

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...