Free Republic

As we watch the Eurozone struggle with its financial challenges Keynesians keep telling us the solution to our economic problems is to spend more money, to pile up bigger debts. A week and a half ago, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the debt of more than half of the Eurozone's countries, and the failure of those policies should be very obvious by now. Solving the Greek debt crisis hit yet another snag on Sunday afternoon. New aid for Greece from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank would have relied on private bondholders “voluntarily” agreeing to a 50...

How goes the state of the union? Well, the state of the economy remains terrible. Three years after President Obama’s inauguration and two and a half years since the official end of the recession, unemployment remains painfully high. But there are reasons to think that we’re finally on the (slow) road to better times. And we wouldn’t be on that road if Mr. Obama had given in to Republican demands that he slash spending, or the Federal Reserve had given in to Republican demands that it tighten money. Why am I letting a bit of optimism break through the clouds?...

Paul Krugman has told us that awful stories about government-run healthcare in Britain “are false.” I guess this means that the media must be dominated by conservative liars, since we keep getting reports about substandard care and needless deaths (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). And the Boston Globe and Associated Press must be part of this vast right-wing conspiracy, because the Globe just ran an AP report exposing more problems in England. Here is an excerpt. When David Evans needed a hernia operation, the 69-year-old farmer became so alarmed by the long wait that he used an ultrasound machine for pregnant sheep on...

At Power Line, Steve Hayward spots Paul Krugman phoning in his periodic “Keynes Was Right” column, and asks: I wonder if Krugman also credits Keynes’s views on Jews, which British blogger Damian Thompson of The Telegraph brings to our attention. From Keynes’s diary: [Jews] have in them deep-rooted instincts that are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to the European, and their presence among us is a living example of the insurmountable difficulties that exist in merging race characteristics, in making cats love dogs … It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning factcheck website PolitiFact has voted on the biggest lie of 2011, and the winner is - "Republicans voted to end Medicare." Specifically honing in on House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, Democrats and liberal media types spewed erroneous claims over House Republicans' budget plan, which essentially resulted in wacky leftist claims like, "Republicans want to leave frail old 90-year-old grandma to die on her kitchen floor." In reality, Ryan's plan would purportedly deflate the tumultuous debt mountain - that is, the feds' spendthrift hell hole - by dispersing government subsidies for, and privatizing, Medicare for those...

Benefiting from a hint from an article titled "Is Harry Potter Making You Poorer?", written by my colleague Dr. John Goodman, president of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, I've come up with an explanation and a way to end income inequality in America, possibly around the world.

This is the way the euro ends — not with a bang but with bunga bunga. Not long ago, European leaders were insisting that Greece could and should stay on the euro while paying its debts in full. Now, with Italy falling off a cliff, it’s hard to see how the euro can survive at all. But what’s the meaning of the eurodebacle? As always happens when disaster strikes, there’s a rush by ideologues to claim that the disaster vindicates their views. So it’s time to start debunking. First things first: The attempt to create a common European currency was...

Paul Krugman may be a Nobel Prize–winning economist, but his most recent column in the New York Times, which condemns hydraulic fracturing and praises solar energy, displays an astounding disinterest in numbers and woeful ignorance of the facts. Without providing any sources, Krugman writes, “We know that [fracturing] produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water; there is reason to suspect, despite industry denials, that it also contaminates groundwater.” Huh? Over the past 60 years, the process of hydraulic fracturing has been used more than 1 million times on oil and gas wells here in the U.S. If fracturing...

Late last month, as America was ignoring the 24th anniversary of the Senate's rejection of conservative jurist Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, something extraordinary happened: New York Times columnist Joe Nocera admitted the borking of Judge Bork spawned today's toxic political culture. "(R)arely has a failed nominee had the pedigree — and intellectual firepower — of Bork," Mr. Nocera wrote. Judge Bork held conservative opinions, but none could be "fairly characterized as extreme." That didn't deter then-Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., who denounced "'Robert Bork's America' as a place 'in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks...

In a recent post I wrote: The evidence for the Keynesian worldview is very mixed. Most economists come down in favor or against it because of their prior ideological beliefs. Krugman is a Keynesian because he wants bigger government. IÂ’m an anti-Keynesian because I want smaller government. Both of us can find evidence for our worldviews. Whose evidence is better? IÂ’m not sure itÂ’s a meaningful question. My empirical points about Keynesianism wonÂ’t convince Krugman. His point donÂ’t convince me. I am not saying that we will never get any kind of decisive evidence on the question. IÂ’m saying...

Krugman should probably just keep quiet on Solyndra from now on Paul Krugman, Pet of Big Government By Institute for Energy Research Friday, September 30, 2011 The proponents of massive government subsidies to “green” energy have a huge problem on their hands. The Solyndra scandal is just so absurd, and the video footage of President Obama and Vice President Biden is just so hilarious, that only the most ideological can fail to smell a rat. The reader will not be surprised, then, to learn that Paul Krugman, from his perch at the New York Times, thinks there’s nothing to see...

The good news: After spending a year and a half talking about deficits, deficits, deficits when we should have been talking about jobs, job, jobs we’re finally back to discussing the right issue. The bad news: Republicans, aided and abetted by many conservative policy intellectuals, are fixated on a view about what’s blocking job creation that fits their prejudices and serves the interests of their wealthy backers, but bears no relationship to reality. Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so?...

This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.” It was, of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war. As background, it helps to know what has been happening to incomes over the past three decades. Detailed estimates...

Doctors used to believe that by draining a patient’s blood they could purge the evil “humors” that were thought to cause disease. In reality, of course, all their bloodletting did was make the patient weaker, and more likely to succumb. Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn’t just inflicting vast pain; it’s starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects. Some background: For the past year and a half, policy discourse in both Europe and the United States has been dominated...

RUSH: George Bush yesterday, the 9/11 memorials. You know, a friend of mine observed this. What did Obama do? Obama went to a soup kitchen, 9/11, a day of service, as though we've got something to apologize for, for what happened on 9/11. A friend of mine observes Obama and Bloomberg both acted like it was a natural disaster. Bush, George W. Bush, who, by the way, stands tall in retrospect. Ten years, not one attack. Great statesmanship. If somebody told me today they wanted to put Bush's face on Mount Rushmore, I'd be in there supporting it. I saw...

Princeton Professor Paul Krugman's ugly New York Times blog on the post 9/11 environment stopped short of accusing Pres. Bush of masterminding the attacks, but it did accuse Bush and his associates of cashing in on the tragedy, of being "fake heroes." If nothing else, the timing was hateful – the very week when the former President was called on to emerge from relative obscurity to lend gravity to the memorial ceremonies. Krugman's hate cannot hold a candle to retired MIT professor, and radical anti-American, Noam Chomsky's article in Al Jazeera. Chomsky goes a step further to condemn the US...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman upset a lot of people with his Sunday blog post in which he claimed “the memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned” by the likes of George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressed his outrage by canceling his subscription to the publication. “The Five” co-host and “Red Eye” host Greg Gutfeld condemned Krugman’s article on Monday’s broadcast of “The Five.” “So, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman delivered the odious piece of drivel on the attack,” Gutfeld said. “The headline is ‘Years of...

On this solemn commemorative day, we at NewsBusters have made a point of holding our rhetorical fire against liberals as a gesture of respect to those who lost their lives that day and subsequently. There is much we could say and, starting tomorrow, will say. An exception has to be made though for one Paul Krugman, who seems, earlier life, to have been a decent and civilized person. Since he began writing a column for the New York Times, however, Krugman has experienced a veritable descent into madness, principally due to Bush Derangement Syndrome. Today, Krugman decided to proudly parade...

There are a lot of curse words coming to mind having read Paul Krugman's editorial in today's (Sept. 11) NY Times. For now I'll just call him a very despicable, partisan, hypocritical, and morally bankrupt excuse for a human being. Here is just a part of this atrocity of a piece -- for which he has deliberately disallowed comments from online readers: What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a...

Late this week, President Obama stunned the EPA and environmentalists by dropping plans to tighten Bush-era ozone standards. His logic? Tighter rules would increase the "regulatory burden" that Republicans blame for the crappy economy. Paul Krugman says this is yet another example of Obama wimping out in the hopes that Republicans will stop attacking him. He also argues that the move will actually hurt the economy. Why will not tightening ozone rules hurt the economy? Because tighter rules, Krugman argues, would have forced companies to spend money to improve their pollution control equipment. This spending would have boosted the revenue...