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French president Francois Hollande wants to set the top tax rate in France at 75%, for those who make over €1,000,000 a year. As a result "Les Riches" Have Tax Indigestion and are looking to move outside France. “We’re getting a lot of calls from high earners who are asking whether they should get out of France,” said Mr. Grandil, a partner at Altexis, which specializes in tax matters for corporations and the wealthy. “Even young, dynamic people pulling in 200,000 euros are wondering whether to remain in a country where making money is not considered a good thing.” Because...

There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama’s mistakes but the scorched-earth opposition of Republicans, who have done everything they can to get in his way — and who now, having blocked the president’s policies, hope to win the White House by claiming that his policies have failed. Many economists believe that the overhang of excess household debt, a legacy of the bubble years, is the biggest factor holding back economic recovery. Loosely speaking, excess debt has created a situation in which...

Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, by Robert Zubrin (Encounter, 328 pp., $25.95) A ruling idea of the last two centuries has been materialism: the notion, as arch-materialist Daniel Dennett asserts, that “there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter—the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology—and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.” One consequence of this belief has been the rise of antihumanism—the stripping from people of their transcendent value and a reduction of them to mere things in the world to be studied, understood, reshaped—and ultimately...

In August of 2011, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman attached himself to a theory that earned him endless mockery from the right. “If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months,” he declared, arguing in favor of the president’s stimulus package. “And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better [off].” Now, a little less than 12 months...

Michael Tanner  As Greece, and now Spain and Italy, struggle with the crushing burden of debt brought on by the modern welfare state, perhaps we should shift our gaze some 1,200 miles north to see how austerity can actually work.Exhibit #1 is Estonia. This small Baltic nation recently had a spate of notoriety when its president, Toomas Ilves, got into a Twitter debate with Paul Krugman over the country's austerity policies. Krugman sneered at Estonia as the "poster child for austerity defenders," remarking of the nation’s recovery from recession, "this is what passes for economic triumph?" In return, President...

Forget turning Japanese, an anxious-looking Paul Krugman appeared on Stephen Colbert last night to hawk his book and suggested that "Ireland is Romney economics in practice". Noting that Obama "inherited a Depression" but has unfortunately not taken us out of it due to a "whole lot of opposition from 'the other guys'". The Kaped Keynesian Krusader went on to note that "a recession is when things are going down but a depression is when things are down" and suggests an Obama campaign slogan "It's Not As Bad As The Great Depression" to which Colbert retorts that electing Romney would seem...

In his June 08 column, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says a major part of the reason the recession under Reagan recovered more quickly than the current recession is because of government spending. From the column: Why was government spending much stronger under Reagan than in the current slump? “Weaponized Keynesianism” — Reagan’s big military buildup — played some role. But the big difference was real per capita spending at the state and local level, which continued to rise under Reagan but has fallen significantly this time around. There are a myriad of things with which to respond to...

Economist Paul Krugman had bad news for liberals Netroots Nation on Saturday. During his keynote speech the New York Times columnist admitted that the United States economy was suffering a depression. "We don't have a formal definition, I'd say that a Depression is when things are down, when things are terrible for an extended period of time," Krugman said, reminding them that were even "official" periods of recovery during the Great Depression. "So it is again today," he said. "It's not as bad as the Great Depression - there's a winning slogan," he added cynically.

Paul Krugman used to be an eminent economist, a Nobel Prize winner and Princeton professor. But something happened to him, and his role as a New York Times columnist seems to have captured his soul. He is in the thrall of Keynsianism, the faith that government spending will cure all ills, debt be damned. Accordingly, Krugman cannot abide a successful economic recovery driven by cutting government spending so the private sector can regain its footing, generate profits and jobs (the two are related). So it rankled Krugman to see Toomas Hendrik Ilves, president of Estonia and a successful advocate of...

There’s no question that America’s recovery from the financial crisis has been disappointing. In fact, I’ve been arguing that the era since 2007 is best viewed as a “depression,” an extended period of economic weakness and high unemployment that, like the Great Depression of the 1930s, persists despite episodes during which the economy grows. And Republicans are, of course, trying — with considerable success — to turn this dismal state of affairs to their political advantage. They love, in particular, to contrast President Obama’s record with that of Ronald Reagan, who, by this point in his presidency, was indeed presiding...

I have great fondness for Estonia, in part because it was the first post-communist nation to adopt the flat tax, but also because of the country’s remarkable scenery. Most recently, though, I’ve been bragging about Estonia (along with Latvia and Lithuania, the other two Baltic nations) for implementing genuine spending cuts. I’ve argued that Estonia is showing how a government can reignite growth by reducing the burden of government. Not surprisingly, some people disagree with my analysis. Paul Krugman of the New York Times criticized Estonia yesterday, writing that the Baltic nation suffered a “Depression-level slump” in 2008 and has...

When does respect for an economic theory become fanaticism? For an answer, check out Paul Krugman's increasingly desperate attempts to defend Keynesian economics against its obvious failures. The New York Times columnist doesn't claim publicly to be a religious man, but he sure acts like it when it comes to his beloved John Maynard Keynes. Any evidence that Keynesianism doesn't work must be wiped away, even if it means conjuring up mythical numbers to do so. Case in point is Krugman's latest campaign to argue that President Obama has been an austerity-driven tightwad. At the same time, Krugman says President...

Bye-Bye, Bush Boom By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: July 06, 2004 When does optimism -- the Bush campaign's favorite word these days -- become an inability to face facts? On Friday, President Bush insisted that a seriously disappointing jobs report, which fell far short of the pre-announcement hype, was good news: ''We're witnessing steady growth, steady growth. And that's important. We don't need boom-or-bust-type growth.'' But Mr. Bush has already presided over a bust. For the first time since 1932, employment is lower in the summer of a presidential election year than it was on the previous Inauguration Day. Americans badly...

Liberal economist and Obama apologist Paul Krugman appeared on ABC's "This Week"

Krugman, Fingleton, and Japan By James Fallows May 26 2012, 10:22 AM ET /snip This is a case I sympathize with, and have made various times -- for instance, in the Atlantic two years ago. I am sure that Fingleton has noticed that Paul Krugman, long a skeptic of the "Japan is stronger than it looks" view, now agrees. Or so a new interview with Martin Wolf in the FT suggests: The conversation turns to the Japanese crisis of the 1990s. In retrospect, I [Wolf] suggest, the Japanese seem to have managed the aftermath of their crisis quite well. He...

Harry Truman famously complained about his economic advisers, who wouldn't give him simple, straight answers. "All they say is 'On the one hand this, and on the other hand that,'" he was quoted. "I'm looking for a one-handed economist!" Well, ol' Harry could have found economists who were absolutely cocksure -- and wrong. Take Paul Krugman, the Jeremiah of the new New York Times Agit-Prop page. Dr K is absolshshtutely, posilutely sure that another trillion bucks of deficit spending will fix the US economy. Other economists may have their doubts, but Dr K knows the answer in his bones. Krugman...

The French are revolting. The Greeks, too. And it’s about time. Both countries held elections Sunday that were in effect referendums on the current European economic strategy, and in both countries voters turned two thumbs down. It’s far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity — and that’s a good thing. Needless to say, that’s not what you heard from the usual suspects in the run-up to the elections. It was actually kind of funny to see the apostles of orthodoxy...

In recent days, New York Times economist Paul Krugman has been doing a whole bunch of interviews in which he has declared that the solution to our economic problems is very easy. Krugman says that all we need to do to get the global economy going again is for the governments of the world to start spending a lot more money. Krugman believes that austerity is only going to cause the economies of the industrialized world to slow down even further and therefore he says that it is the wrong approach. And you know what? Krugman is partly right...

...Q: But isn’t the way it would actually go is the Republican Party would say that what we need is tax cuts? A: But that won’t work. Remember, they don’t like tax cuts for ordinary people. They like tax cuts for the rich. That will be very ineffectual. And they want to raise taxes on the undeserving poor. Q: Speaking of Keynes, are you surprised that Europe ended up so far on the other side of, so to speak, the Keynes curve? A: No. I know the Germans. They’ve never believed in any of this. They’re at a point that...

Sparks flew when Paul Krugman and Congressman Ron Paul faced off today on Bloomberg TV’s “Street Smart” with Trish Regan and Adam Johnson…. Watch below to hear Ron Paul’s ideas about staying in the Republican race…whether he would support Romney as nominee…how U.S. monetary policy is like the Roman Empire and why there should be legal competition to the U.S. dollar (yes, gold and silver). Hear NYT columnist Krugman fire back on the role U.S. government should play in regulating the market economy…what economist Milton Friedman really thought about government stimulus…and what is the right level for debt for U.S....