Free Republic

Writing about Republicans in U.S. House of Representatives, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says Paul Ryan is “basically, the best con man they’ve got.” He goes on to characterize the modern Republican Party” as “a post-policy enterprise, which doesn’t do real solutions to real problems.” We think the reverse is true. It is Paul Krugman who is the con artist with no real solutions to our most important economic problems. Paul Ryan, by contrast, has put forth bold policy proposals that have been favorably scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and are actually closer to mainstream economic thinking...

Until we entered the Great Recession, most economists regarded Keynesian economics as a relic of the past. You could still find it discussed in some introductory textbooks. But, as University of Chicago economist John Cochrane points out, it wasn’t on the syllabus in any of the leading graduate schools. Then came the most serious downturn since the Great Depression and something living economists had never seen before: interest rates that were near zero and in some cases negative. Keynes himself speculated that the economy could become stuck in a liquidity trap – where monetary policy is ineffective and only fiscal...

Mark Levin's new book "Plunder and Deceit" has been number one on the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks in a row. Like with his other best-sellers, no liberal journalist will read it, no liberal newspaper will review it, and no liberal network would imagine calling up Levin for an interview. They are too busy advocating tolerance and diversity. Why doesn't Mark Levin deserve a turn on CBS's "60 Minutes"? Why can't the conservative taxpayers be granted a forum for Levin or "Charlie Rose" on PBS or on NPR's "All Things Considered"? In short, why not a slice...

A few days ago when asked about the couragous stand of Kim Davis, Trump essentially came out in support of gay marriage. "Its the law of the land," he said. “I hate to see her being put in jail." Well, isn't that swell Trumpy, but he added “I understand what they’re doing. It would be certainly nice if she didn’t do it." Lets get this straight, while bold leaders like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee are coming out in support of Kim Davis and her religious stand of conscious, Trump is busy kowtowing to the gay mafia, turning...

So Jeb Bush is finally going after Donald Trump. Over the past couple of weeks the man who was supposed to be the front-runner has made a series of attacks on the man who is. Strange to say, however, Mr. Bush hasn’t focused on what’s truly vicious and absurd — viciously absurd? — about Mr. Trump’s platform, his implicit racism and his insistence that he would somehow round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and remove them from our soil. Instead, Mr. Bush has chosen to attack Mr. Trump as a false conservative, a proposition that is supposedly demonstrated by his...

Economist Paul Krugman thinks Donald Trump's presidential campaign actually gets a few things right. Krugman previously derided the Republican real-estate mogul as a "belligerent, loudmouth racist with not an ounce of compassion." But in a Monday op-ed in The New York Times, the left-leaning writer praised Trump's "heresies" from Republican orthodoxy when it comes to economic policy. "So am I saying that Mr. Trump is better and more serious than he's given credit for being?" Krugman asked, making it clear that he is still not a Trump supporter. "Not at all — he is exactly the ignorant blowhard he seems...

Republican presidential candidates. who have had to seek contributions from a handful of wealthy contributors, want to cut Social Security. Average Americans love the program; the superwealthy don’t. Something strange is happening in the Republican primary — something strange, that is, besides the Trump phenomenon. For some reason, just about all the leading candidates other than The Donald have taken a deeply unpopular position, a known political loser, on a major domestic policy issue. And it’s interesting to ask why. The issue in question is the future of Social Security, which turned 80 last week. The retirement program is, of...

Source: Source information located at the bottom of column. First the good news. The federal governmentÂ’s tax receipts are coming in at a rate somewhat higher than what was expected a few months ago. That means a shut-down-the-government debt limit stalemate will be pushed back until November or December. It also means that the federal debt will actually decline a bit this year. Now for the bad news. We are experiencing the calm before the storm. The Congressional Budget Office reported Tuesday that although our fiscal situation is improving, by 2018 we will snap back to swelling deficits and unsustainable...

The deficit is estimated to more than double in 10 years, which is projected to push debt held by the public up to 77 percent as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates.Despite an anticipated rise in tax collection, the CBO predicts that the government will continue to spend outside of its means. The CBO warns that later in the coming decade, growth in government spending will “outstrip” growth in the economy.According to the CBO, by the end of this year, federal revenues are expected to climb to $3.3 trillion—or 18.2 percent of...

This was written by a Nobel prize winning economist without a trace or sarcasm, irony or humor. It is excerpted, and presented without commentary.From the New York Times:Debt Is Good... the point simply that public debt isn’t as bad as legend has it? Or can government debt actually be a good thing?Believe it or not, many economists argue that the economy needs a sufficient amount of public debt out there to function well. And how much is sufficient? Maybe more than we currently have. That is, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that part of what ails the...

In the view of The New York Times and other beacons of the liberal media, President Barack Obama’s policies are a resounding success and he rarely makes a misstep. The harmful effects of his policies, as well as his many scandals, must be ignored or covered up with misleading statistics and deceitful reporting that preserve his radical, left-wing legacy, and even make it sound mainstream. Members of the media often follow the lead of the Times in choosing the angles for their own reporting. And, as we noted last year, Paul Krugman’s columns for that paper, while opinion pieces, reflect...

It’s true, as Paul Krugman says, that Greece and Puerto Rico are not in exactly the same position. PR is bust to some extent, yes, but it’s not in the middle of a catastrophe, as Greece is. However, there is also a similarity in their situations, one that’s extremely instructive. They’re both suffering from being in a monetary policy zone, a currency zone, that isn’t really suitable for their circumstances. One of the two is in a fiscal policy union as well as that monetary union, the other is not. And it’s long been agreed that if you’re to have...

Rick PerryÂ’s entry into the presidential race draws natural attention to the Texas economy. While Perry was governor, Texas created more than three of every ten new jobs in the entire country. And even though a decline in energy prices has slowed things a bit, over the last four years Texas was the third among the 50 states in job creation. Perry and others credit low taxes and sensible regulation for TexasÂ’ economic success. The Wall Street Journal editorial board agrees. Last week they wrote: The Tax Foundation ranks TexasÂ’s business climate tenth best, and the stateÂ’s growth spurt vindicates...

A few years ago New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was frequently heralding the Veterans Health Administration as a model of medical improvement in America. It is, he wrote, "a huge policy success story," that has "achieved a remarkable combination of rising quality and successful cost control." One wonders if Krugman is aware of this story.

Health Reform: A year ago, we were told with great certainty that ObamaCare critics had it all wrong when they warned about coming premium rate shocks. Then came the eye-popping rate requests for next year.

Someone sent me an email Wednesday evening with some details on the Paul Krugman response to James Montier, which I discussed here. I had previously stated that the Krugman response was lacking meat. But it's actually worse than that. It's actually highly misleading and appears intentionally so. In the post, Dr. Krugman tries to show how much interest rates matter by comparing the Fed Funds Rate with Housing Starts. He shows a chart and declares that there appears to be a strong correlation. Except, as this emailer notes, he appears to have shifted the chart to make it appear as...

Paul Krugman: Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago. But many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on. Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who...

It was enough to make a blogger in mom's basement spit out his Cheetos in surprise. On today's Morning Joe income redistributionist and global climate kvetcher Prof. Jeffrey Sachs praised the UK Conservatives for creating jobs via an austerity budget. In a second surprise, Sachs criticized fellow lefty traveler Paul Krugman. Said Sachs of the Conservatives: "they governed well . . . they got the economy going again. They got it stabilized, they got the debt crisis Britain was facing under control and they created a lot of jobs and they got rewarded last night." And a bit later, the...

Ah: I see that there was a Twitter exchange among Brad DeLong, James Pethokoukis, and others over why Republicans don’t acknowledge that Ben Bernanke helped the economy, and claim credit. Pethokoukis — who presumably gets to talk to quite a few Republicans from his perch at AEI — offers a fairly amazing explanation: B/c many view BB as enabling Obama’s spending and artificially propping up debt-heavy economy in need of Mellon-esque liquidation Yep: that dastardly Bernanke was preventing us from having a financial crisis, curse him. Actually, there’s a lot of evidence that this was an important part of the...

Continuing my meditation on Brad DeLong’s meditation on the fiscal future. Brad doesn’t just argue that governments should be bigger in the future; he also argues that governments have historically not had enough debt, and should have more. Why? Because, he says, r-g—the difference between the real rate of interest on government debt and the rate of economic growth—has been consistently negative. Why is this significant? Well, we normally imagine that if a government engages in deficit spending now, it will have to engage in compensating austerity of some form later—even if it doesn’t plan to pay off the debt,...