Free Republic

I am outraged. The City University of New York recently announced that it is going to pay Paul Krugman $225,000 for part-time work studying income inequality. If you add in his sundry speaking fees, Professor Krugman is solidly ensconced among the hated 1 percent. I too write about inequality, yet I am not being paid nearly as much. Of course, Professor Krugman does have that Nobel Prize thing going for him, but that hardly seems to justify such blatant inequality. So I have been waiting patiently for Professor Krugman to mail me a check to correct this unfair situation. Or...

It is, in a way, too bad that Cliven Bundy — the rancher who became a right-wing hero after refusing to pay fees for grazing his animals on federal land, and bringing in armed men to support his defiance — has turned out to be a crude racist. Why? Because his ranting has given conservatives an easy out, a way to dissociate themselves from his actions without facing up to the terrible wrong turn their movement has taken. For at the heart of the standoff was a perversion of the concept of freedom, which for too much of the right...

An honest debate with a progressive is almost as rare as a verified sighting of Bigfoot. You’d have better luck getting a devout Scientologist to say L. Ron Hubbard was a horrible writer than you would to get a progressive to admit the “science” behind climate change is not all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, it is based on models of what could happen in 100 years, even though those models are mostly unreliable when you use them to map what happened in the last 30. That’s right, the vast majority of “climate models” predicting doom and...

When it comes to Krugman's views on any particular topic, he may be right and he may be wrong, but whatever his opinion he always has a much to say about it (even if the factual backing is of secondary importance or outright missing). Today, his chosen topic is inequality, and in an interview with Bloomberg's Tom Keene, shown and transcribed below, he certainly says much, encapsulated perhaps by the following gem: "There's zero evidence that the kind of extreme inequality that we have is good for economic growth. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that it is actually...

Paul Krugman is a distinguished economist, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, a NY Times columnist, and a Nobel Laureate. As a frequent commentator on cable news shows, he speaks passionately about income inequality and politics. From his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, he notes that, “Impersonal forces such as technological change and globalization caused America’s income distribution to become increasingly unequal, with an elite minority pulling away from the rest of the population.”How ironic that Dr. Krugman will provide a first hand as a member of this “elite minority” benefiting from income inequality. The City...

"If all you have is a hammer," the old saying goes, "everything looks like a nail." Left unsaid is the fact that the real problem isn't the possession of a hammer, but the certitude that all you need is the hammer. In other words, it's a failure of the imagination -- which is a kind of arrogance -- that's really to blame. "I've got my hammer, and that's all I need. Besides, have you ever seen a problem that didn't look like a nail?" This is a version of what academics call "confirmation bias" -- the tendency to accept only...

A New York Times columnist has expressed substantially more negative sentiments about FiveThirtyEight since it left The New York Times, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. The columnist, Paul Krugman, who writes about economics and politics for The Times, has referred to FiveThirtyEight or editor-in-chief Nate Silver 33 times on his blog. FiveThirtyEight classified each reference based on whether it expressed a favorable, unfavorable or neutral sentiment toward FiveThirtyEight. …

New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman is questioning Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn’s claim that Obamacare caused him to lose his cancer specialist. “It’s a garbage story, it really is,” said Krugman in a back-and-forth with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on CNN after the State of the Union on Tuesday. Coburn, who announced earlier this month that he’ll resign from office at the end of the year as he battles his fourth bout with cancer, told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that his oncologist was no longer covered under his health care plan.

<p>It’s sometimes difficult to make fun of Keynesian economics. But this isn’t because Keynesian theory is airtight.</p> <p>It’s easy, after all, to mock a school of thought that is predicated on the notion that you can make yourself richer by taking money from your right pocket and putting it in your left pocket.</p>

Conservatives appear to be really upset that liberals are actually taking on the facts in the anti-Obamacare ads they’ve been running. How dare you question whether the people in these ads are giving an accurate picture — they’re suffering! --SNIP-- So here’s what you need to understand. The Affordable Care Act isn’t magic — it produces losers as well as winners. But it’s not black magic either, turning everyone into a loser. What the Act does is in effect to increase the burden on fortunate people — the healthy and wealthy — to lift some burdens on the less fortunate:...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman will retire from Princeton University in June 2015 and move to New York, he announced on Friday. […] Krugman credited the move to location and to his increased focus on public policy, specifically income equality …

Looking forward to Obama’s State of the Union session, New York Times economic court jester Paul Krugman beats his usual drum about the importance of deficit spending (no, that’s not a joke, it’s what passes for liberal economic wisdom) and then tries to make a case for the left’s latest meme of “inequality” over jobs. The usual suspects on the right will, as always when questions of income distribution comes up, shriek “Class warfare!” But there will also be seemingly more sober voices arguing that he has picked the wrong target, that jobs, not inequality, should be at the top...

The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s real wages for the bottom half of the work force have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen even more). While we can and should have a serious debate about what to do about this situation, the simple fact — American capitalism as currently constituted is undermining the foundations of middle-class society — shouldn’t be up for argument. But it is, of course. Partly this reflects Upton Sinclair’s famous dictum: It...

On April 28, 2013 Paul Krugman clearly said that 2013 was a test of market monetarism:But as Mike Konczal points out, we are in effect getting a test of the market monetarist view right now, with the Fed having adopted more expansionary policies even as fiscal policy tightens.Yesterday (Jan 4, 2014) however, Paul Krugman, said:…I don’t take seriously the claims of market monetarists that the failure of growth to collapse in 2013 somehow showed that fiscal policy doesn’t matter. …

Jonsey wrote: John, Merry Christmas (God forbid, I should say Happy Holidays or Sarah P might have a heart attack). In your article, you forgot one thing: Paul Krugman won a Nobel prize for economics and you didn't. He is one smart gentleman. Do have a glorious Christmas and may your heart be softened may you speak of and about the President. Happy Christmas Eve. Maybe I'll say a prayer for you at Midnight Mass. – Who Made Krugman the Expert? Cronies Did Dear Comrade Jones, I don’t forget that Krugman has a Nobel prize. I discount the award to...

(CNSNews.com) - Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) told a gathering of Democrats, “The bottom line is we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money, it’s just the government doesn’t have it.” Ellison was discussing his ‘Inclusive Prosperity Act’ measure at the July 25th Progressive Democrats of America roundtable in Washington. “People like, George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sax, Dean Baker, Robert Poland, Larry Summers have said they all support a transaction tax,” Ellison said. “The bottom line is we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money, it’s just the government doesn’t have it,” Ellison continued, “The government...

Paul Krugman makes for an unparalleled intellectual foil.  If he didn’t exist we’d have to invent him.  Recently he has been vintage Krugman, slinging derp. “Derp” is new slang, or perhaps jargon, with which to ridicule opponents.  It is making its way among the left wing hipsters, blogsters, and twitsters. Krugman has rescued derp from Progressive Blogistan for our general edification.  What is derp, you (you hick!) might ask?  Krugman: “Josh Barro has made a very useful contribution to policy discussion by adapting the term “derp” for a certain kind of all-too-prevalent stance in economic debate, which Noah Smith somewhat euphemistically describes as...

Remember when President Obama was flying around the country this year, warning that the budget-cutting sequester would destroy life as we know it in America? The President was hyperbolic about it, preaching doom and gloom across the land if we didn't turn away from the disastrous path Congress put us on. And Obama, too. He signed the bill that would send us over the sequester cliff if a new budget wasn't approved. The Pentagon wouldn't be able to pay its bills, he said. Federal food assistance would be denied to 600,000 low income women and children. Teachers would be laid...

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...

I’ve repeatedly explained that Keynesian economics doesn’t work because any money the government spends must first be diverted from the productive sector of the economy, which means either higher taxes or more red ink. So unless one actually thinks that politicians spend money with high levels of effectiveness and efficiency, this certainly suggests that growth will be stronger when the burden of government spending is modest (and if spending is concentrated on “public goods,” which do have a positive “rate of return” for the economy). I’ve also complained (to the point of being a nuisance!) that there are too many...