Free Republic

Paul Krugman, an outspoken liberal economist known for his support of the Obama administration, today said the United States has become an “authoritarian surveillance state.” Part of a panel on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Krugman offered his take on the bombshell NSA spying revelations: “…there are different kinds of surveillance states. You can have a democratic surveillance state which collects as little data as possible and tells you as much as possible about what it’s doing. Or you could have an authoritarian surveillance state which collects as much as possible and tells the public as little as possible. And...

OK, this is really shocking: a Heritage Foundation economist [Dr. Salim Furth] has been accused of presenting false, deliberately misleading data and analysis to the Senate Budget Committee.What’s so shocking? Not the false, misleading data and analysis — that’s SOP at Heritage. Remember the disappearing forecast of 2.8 percent unemployment under the Ryan plan, and various other Heritage escapades? What’s shocking is that they got called on it, in real time.The claim in particular, by the way, is widely popular on the right; it’s the claim that there isn’t any real austerity in Europe. Wonkbook goes through some of the...

"Stupidity combined with arrogance and a huge ego will get you a long way.”      - Chris LoweI will admit right up front, I am not a fan of the views of Paul Krugman.  If Paul Krugman was to be given his way - and by and large he is being given his way - my children and grandchildren will be burdened in the future with paying back untold amounts of public debt just so his life and the lives of countless other Boomers can remain comfortable and embarassment free today.  This is the essence of his grand plan for a...

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...

For the past five years, a fierce war of words and policies has been fought in America and other economically challenged countries around the world. On one side were economists and politicians who wanted to increase government spending to offset weakness in the private sector. This "stimulus" spending, economists like Paul Krugman argued, would help reduce unemployment and prop up economic growth until the private sector healed itself and began to spend again. On the other side were economists and politicians who wanted to cut spending to reduce deficits and "restore confidence." Government stimulus, these folks argued, would only increase...

Deep Thoughts by Thomas Friedman But don’t worry, the term “admits” is a bit strong. It’s more like the weatherman who predicted there wouldn’t be a flood for a month straight clinging to an antenna on the roof of his house and trying to find reasons why he was right all along even while the sharks are circling his chimney. The standard fallback position for Tahrir’s international cheerleaders is to argue that we were expecting positive results too quickly. The term “Arab Spring” has to be retired. There is nothing springlike going on,” Friedman says. “It’s best we now speak...

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...

The Project 21 black leadership network, New York Times liberal columnist Paul Krugman Obama Must Condemn NY Times Race-Baiting Tactics, Black Group Says Washington D.C. — The Project 21 black leadership network is condemning New York Times liberal columnist Paul Krugman for scurrilously pinning racist motives on critics of President Obama’s health care proposals. The group is calling upon President Obama to condemn all efforts to derail legitimate public debate, specifically including this effort to stifle debate with race-baiting tactics. “Paul Krugman is the one with race on the brain,” Project 21 Chairman Mychal Massie charged. “Specifically, he is using...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Sunday once again perfectly illustrated the intolerance of America's liberal media. Appearing on ABC's This Week, he said the National Rifle Association is - and I quote! - "an insane organization" (video follows with transcript and commentary): Krugman: NRA Is 'An Insane Organization' PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: But what really strikes me -- I don't know how this plays, you know, what will happen. What strikes me is we've actually gotten a glimpse into the mindset, though, of the pro-gun people and we've seen certainly Wayne LaPierre and some of these others....

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...

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...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said it is “frightening” that the Obama administration has never included progressive economists, who have “been right about everything so far.” “I think it’s frightening that at no point in this administration have there been any serious representation of what you might call the progressive economist wing, which is a pretty big part of Obama’s support,” Krugman said Sunday in an appearance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. … Krugman, a Keynesian economist, has long advocated for more stimulus spending, saying the $833-billion stimulus package of 2009 did not spend enough. …

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...

Well, the trillion-dollar-coin thing — deal with the debt ceiling by exploiting a legal loophole to have the Treasury mint one or more large-denomination coins, deposit them at the Fed, and use the cash in the new account to pay bills — has really taken off. Last month I spoke with a senior Fed official who had never heard of the idea; these days it’s all over. There seem to be two kinds of objections. One is that it would be undignified. Here’s how to think about that: we have a situation in which a terrorist may be about to...

Just a few days after Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the New York Times' Paul Krugman crowed triumphantly about the federal government's response to the disaster. "[A]fter Katrina the government seemed to have no idea what it was doing; this time it did. And that's no accident: the federal government's ability to respond effectively to disaster always collapses when antigovernment Republicans hold the White House, and always recovers when Democrats take it back." What a fairy tale. Mature adults understand that earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters are an unfortunate fact of life. They...

KRUGMAN: That kills charitable deductions. It hits the middle class hard. If you do it -- if you do it right -- we've done this, right... MATALIN: Are you an economist or a polemicist? (CROSSTALK) KRUGMAN: There's only -- there's only $450 billion that you can get by doing that. MATALIN: Do you want to talk about economy or do you want to talk about polemics? KRUGMAN: No, this is not true. MATALIN: We have two different ways of going forward. We will not have Medicare, we will not have Social Security. You have senior Democrat Dick Durbin saying Social...

Hurricane Sandy was an invader, one that splashed ashore with as much destructive power as any foreign (or perhaps interstellar) invader could hope to bring to bear against our coasts. Thus, in the opinion of economist Paul Krugman, the storm should help boost the American economy. “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,” the Nobel Prize winning economist declared on CNN in 2011....

Have you noticed that The New York Times editorial page is becoming increasingly strident, increasingly emotional and increasingly irrational? Here is Paul Krugman in last Monday's column: Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan…want to expose many Americans to financial insecurity, and let some of them die, so that a handful of already wealthy people can have a higher after-tax income. No, that's not a misprint. The Republicans actually want to let some people die so that they can reward their rich friends. It's not an isolated comment either. Under the heading "Death by Ideology," Krugman actually lists all of the ways...

In the roundtable discussion on This Week, Peggy Noonan’s analysis of last week’s debate lead to a heated exchange between Paul Krugman and Mary Matalin. “We will look back on it as a historic moment in this election,” Noonan said of the debate. “It upended things. This is what it it upended: Barack Obama was supposed to be the sort of moderate, centrist fellow who looked at Mitt Romney, this extreme strange fellow. By the time that debate was over, Mitt Romney seemed a completely moderate, centrist figure who showed up as mitt Romney the governor, not as Mitt Romney...

How is it possible that Barack Obama leads Mitt Romney on who can better handle the economy when it's been in decline all year? Economists on both sides say this is one of the weakest recoveries since the Great Depression. New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman, one of Obama's early supporters, said, "This is still a terrible economy." The overall economy barely grew by 1.7 percent in the second quarter, down from 2.0 percent in the first three months of 2012. Business economists have lowered their forecasts to 1.5 percent or lower for the year. The Federal Reserve Board...